Blacwin peered through his spyglass from the steep back of an ancient cataract where once a great waterfall raged. He and his Team 3 comrades observed the hobgoblin camp through the purgatorial gloom of the far hinterlands as the wasters recovered from the previous night's raid. The sandmen gathered their corpses and increased their patrols but by then their efforts were in vain for skilled Reapers needed to strike once and only once. Blacwin observed the enemy as they returned to their routines with their black eyes cast over their shoulders in fear and anticipation. The gobs soon went back to their digging. It seemed the zealots were not seeking some sort of religious artifacts or sorcerous secrets or toothfaced idol below the sands. They were extracting gigantic bones, the fossils and remains of sea beasts. Midwives to the rebirthing of ancient terrible dead. The Reapers watched the hobgoblin caravans that transported the great bones pull onto another of their great roadways, but this one had seemingly been built more for utility and transport than whatever witchery those other runed channels had been part of. To Blacwin's knowledge the Nation had yet to comprehend the meaning of those massive sigils carved into the sandscape. Why had this capable team been sent to retrieve captured troops in the Hinterlands while a threat of such unknown magnitude loomed in the Outer wastes? He understood that the Reapers left no men behind, but wasn't their greater charge to protect society from the calamitous forces always hammering and sniffing and clawing at its door? It seemed the leadership was either incompetent or uncaring, and Blacwin knew not which was the more damning.

The commandos kept to the hills and that was proven wise for soon they saw more hobgoblin soldiers and support units traversing the dusty road's length escorting great covered wagons of ominous intent. The members of Team 3 took great care in staying hidden and silent. To be discovered would be to die, or worse. The wasters and their vessels all bristled with bone and tusk. Together they were a quilled serpent that urged through the open wild.

In time the Reapers rose over another hill and saw in broad display the bizarre explanation for the heightened activity in this remote zone and the destination for the great ancient carcasses: Gargantuan nightmarish structures were being erected by cord and muscle into the ruddy sky by the sandmen. The skeletal constructs were held aloft by lengths of taut rope and rickety scaffolds upon which slaves and laborers and engineers braved their deadly trades. Floating globes of light illuminated the dusty air, brought forth by weird song that issued from great hollowed horns held to the pierced lips of sorcerers. The colossal skeletons of sea leviathans dug from the earth were reassembled upon the scaffolds in nonsense fashion, beaks and fins and stingers and tails arranged into new and mystifying forms. As an experienced animalist Vulture could see in a glance these were not the proper configurations of these bones. Perhaps the constructs were being built as religious effigies to their lesser gods, those of the earth instead of the sun. Great morbid idols to kneel under as worshippers broke their bodies at their calcified feet.

That theory was laid to waste when, with a sick kneading of his gut, Blacwin saw one of the abominations move its skull. He watched in horror as the great krakenoid took one awkward and imperfect lurch and startled up more dust. Two sorcerous controllers sat in the cavity of a monstrous beak at the front of the construct's weaponized head. The hobgoblins had created these mammoth amalgamations that walked on long and spindly legs of runed krakenbone for obvious dreadful aim, the purpose of war. The things had been roused and lashed together and given animation with sorcery not unlike that which had been used by Skelen to power his rotting dead but brought here to heinous and awful proportion. An arachnoid war machine snorted a breath of fire. Blacwin's instincts bade him turn away his eyes and flee. He could not. He was transfixed by the scale of the mad pageantry he witnessed in this unholy factory of hell-machines as his mind played unstoppable visions of entire Nation townships laid to waste in the shadows of those towering deathwalkers.

— • —

By the end of the wicked sandstone labyrinth Halo's slow-risen corpse was butchered, a thing of Marrow's abattoirs. He'd shrugged off the darts, numb to their piercings or poisons, and the poisonous gases were nothing to his dead skin and lungs and eyes—but cones of fire and pendulous axes conspired to murder him and murder him they would have if he were not already dead. Still, neither Halo nor his puppetmaster wanted a compromised vessel or a break of the runes. They did not carelessly wade in. Though Rattanak controlled the body he still drew from the Reaper's proficiencies for navigating such threats. Other Reapers unwittingly lent their aid, fitfully drained of their minds by the imperial leech.

The final door was bound by a runed puzzle that was beyond even the skill of the best locksolver slain by the sword, a Reaper scout who had died in that roadside ambush by Yanhamu and his mankillers. This particular soul was known as Falvei in life. Had been a brand new recruit when suddenly scrambled into a wagon with Instructors Barda and Jasha and Adamore and Falvei's fellow 'minnows.' He had studied runery and roguery and Rattanak brought his knowledge forth and put it to use on the complex mechanism between him and his prey but found it was not knowledge alone that made Falvei so successful at his blackcraft. There were also the matters of creativity and intuition and resourcefulness and experience. Rattanak learned this with harsh force when he drove the wrong rune into place on the stone nest of etched rings and was hit by a searing blast of soulfire. Halo's dry face went up in flames. Runes were burned away, lessening Rattanak's command of his host.

Halo tried to regain control of his own strings but still the August One was the master. "I have seen the faces of those you love," Rattanak whispered without voice in Halo's inner ear. "Mulia and Astrid and Amelie and even your father Leofrick however undeserving of your honor." Was there an unexpected hint of jealousy in the emperor's voice? Out of envy for knowing love at all, or at possessiveness of his chief companion in this odd journey? "I can force you to return to Camshire. Visit your wife and daughters in the night, dead and runed. I leave the rest to your imagination." Rattanak drove home his point: "Submit and obey."

Though Halo still had fight, he understood the threat to be real. Better to let his master carry out his mad ambitions here far from humanity than give him reason to rain horror on Halo's loved ones. He withdrew any resistance and let go his psychic grasp. Floated in that void which held no pain nor pleasure. Rattanak pondered the puzzle. Was this the end? After all the floor plates and spiked pits (into one of which they had fallen and been forced to carefully extract Halo's body from), it would come to an unsolvable puzzle? If only the Justicar had stolen Risper's soul, Halo coldly considered—his humanity further stained by the day—and they might have a shot at this thing.

But there was no need. A grinding sound issued from the door and the slab groaned to life. The plates within unlatched themselves and decoupled and the doorway split, revealing a tunnel ahead that fanned outward and into a chamber lit by flickering torches along its perimeter. The room was crowded with oddities and peculiarities. Amulets and weaponry and scrolls and figurines.

Rattanak scanned the room with the sensory runes carved into Halo's flesh. Found her. Went to a jumble of relics, many of which contained stones of deep reds and purples not unlike that which housed the consciousnesses of Rattanak and Halo and Mouth and Narder and Falvei and all the others in this very sword at their collective hip. There among the trinkets was a solitary skull with a pitch black gem in one eye.

"Maxith," Halo said with his true tongue. The word itself was mummified, dry and rustly. As if he had cords of aged parchment in his throat. The skull returned its eternal grin.

"Kill me," the gemmed skull said. Her words carved themselves into Halo's cranium, spoken with entropic force. "Free me."

"I cannot," said Rattanak. "I can only change your prison's walls."

Mummified cats came from the darkness. Great ones, of the desert, long dead by flesh but centenarians by rune, wrapped in cloth and patched with stitchery. Halo and Rattanak sliced through them and spoke words and conjoined their runed fingers to douse the feline mummies with fire—a thing they avoided for such brazen uses of sorcery had their cost in corruptive energies. Once these last sentries, the Heraspex's beloved familiars Orto and Haleb and Thoo and the rest, were reduced to rags and embers and dust, Rattanak put Halo's runed palm to the skull's stony eye. Carved in his flesh were the vectors needed to mate with the phylactery and drain it of its ethereal contents, put there by his own possessed hand.

"I go willingly," said Maxith as she was sucked into her new planar cell. "I will enjoy watching you suffer the same lot as I."

— • —

Scratch hissed at the night. Dimia woke and sensed it—someone was at her bedroom window. A pale young man, dressed in fine clothes soaked by the rain and smeared with mud and grime. Yet another of the corpses come to haunt her. The boy was armed with a bouquet of flowers, perhaps stolen from some grave. He did not blink, just stared in the rain. Lightning flashed and thunder boomed like the gods gone to fists.

— • —

Mulia heard a scream from above and knew it to be Dimia. She leaped from her chair by the fire and raced up the stairwell. Astrid and Amelie were at their doors in the upper hall, awakened by the sound. First that hellish blast and now this. It was a city of nightmares, even in this safer ward.

"Go back to bed," Mulia said. "Close your door."

The twins did not. "Now!" Their mother ordered again and only upon this extra urging did her daughters obey. Mulia pushed open Dimia's door and found the girl sitting up in bed. Her face was a mask of fear as she looked out the window. "There was a boy outside! A dead boy! He reached for me!"

Mulia went to the window and looked down to the rainslicked coachway and found it empty. The sky was an angry cauldron but the streets were serene. Mulia returned to Dimia and held her.

"His skin was cold and wet as a fish," Dimia whispered with a shudder.

Mulia hushed her. The damage done to this poor girl's mind had been severe. Perhaps the trauma she had experienced at Marrow had scarred her for life and she would be forever cursed to see the dead. She may need better care than what Mulia could provide or the latter might join her in madness.

— • —

Unable to act, Halo watched Rattanak hatch his designs. The old emperor was a quick study. He had not the bounds of a physical brain, limited by runery he now himself modified with Halo's hand. The August One's intellect spiraled into greater exponential scale as he consumed the rich contents of that crystalline library, sucking up admixed souls of all walks and learnings. Rattanak plotted further murders and enrichment of his hoard of secrets. He would cut down the Gluttons and the High Templars and know their filthy histories. Rattanak would seek out and slay that emissary of the Blind Prophet as well, Phus, who had quickly fled the human fort just before it was ambushed by the Reapers. Had that been mere coincidence... or had the emissary been complicit in the ruinous transpirings after his departure? His soul would tell all. Written in Phus' blood would also be all he knew of Ixhalal. Where the prophet hid, what his true aims were. Of all things Rattanak learned by glimpsing the lives of hundreds, thousands, he came to know this above all: Trust no one.

— • —

Shroomer could not believe who was in the bed before him. Old Adamore, Reaper instructor of great distinction. Still alive and breathing after all this time in the wild. But at great cost. The master herbalist had resorted to using powerful natural protections while incubating and healing under the forest floor for this long stretch. It had surely been Adamore's only choice after receiving the mortal wounds visited upon him by the Justicar and his sandmen. Barda and Jasha had described in great detail the ambush in which they all thought Adamore had possibly died or been captured. Instead the clever oldster had managed to hide himself in the understory and use its boons to keep himself alive. Shroomer could clearly see where the elder's wounds had been patched with mosses and salves and stitched with thin strands of whipvine that had been quickened and sculpted to cocoon the injury site. Vines had grown from the poor alchemist's orifices, which Shroomer and his nurses promptly clipped away before then bathing him. Thriving nests and hives occupied his body. A younger man would have perhaps survived the ordeal in better condition and recovered sooner. But a younger man might not have had the knowledge of root and moss and seed to pull off such a feat in the first place. It was only thanks to Adamore's unrivaled skills in Shroomer's own field of study that he had survived at all.

Adamore's emaciated and vine-strangled frame twitched. His mossy lips parted and he drew in a ragged awful breath. "There are wild gods," he said weakly as Shroomer leaned closer to listen. But not too close. "Born from nature's fertile womb with their primal minds already lost. We held communion as I languished beneath the soil. I spoke with the oaken titans and they spoke to me. There are two ancient trees that struggle against one another in the heart of the old wickeds. Their leaves compete to choke each other from the sun's light and their limbs are embraced in eternal strangulation. Their bark is thick as man's mightiest wall and embedded with the thousands of ylfish bodies sacrificed to them over the millennia. The animals of those woods dare not disturb those bloody offerings for they belong to the twin gods alone. Offered up by the woodfolk to the titans' keepers in some dark and timeless bargain."

Shroomer listened on, fascinated and horrified. Had the old man lost his mind out there in the wilderness? Or was there truth in his ominous words? A beetle crawled out of Adamore's mouth. Shroomer plucked the insect off the elder's lip and crushed it under his heel.

"These twin trees wage a slow and ponderous war," Adamore said in a voice like wet earth, "with gains and losses made in terms of inches over the centuries and they demand that all others of that rampant land choose a side. The two oldest entities alive, locked in eternal strife, their limbs intertwined, grinding out the oldest war that ever was fought. But something has changed in the titans. They have suffered too much of man's havoc on their tangled rootworks and have gone mad. They rage against anything not of the True Wild. Even the ylfs, whom they perceive as mere lice. To those giants we are all parasites. The titans have chosen to call a truce in the longest war the world has ever known so that they may turn their united attentions against us."

Shroomer's face paled at the old Reaper's prognostications. "We must cease our destructive ways or those ancients will end us all," said Adamore. "We must go to the titans if we seek mercy. We must go to them and kneel..."

— • —