“There are two means of refuge from the misery of life — music and cats.”

- Albert Schweitzer

Alyssa huddled in the small house overlooking the village from its vantage point up against the hillside. Her left arm burned from the light that had seeped through the cracks in the old wall. On the ground, in front of her lay the dead-once-more remains of a large house cat probably with some wildcat mixed in. Whiskers drooping sadly, fur singed and frozen- in whatever order it had happened.

Dark energies had begun to infiltrate the dead tissue once more and morose as she was at once again having to hide from her friend's magic she was interested despite herself. The intricate dance of necrotic energies mimicking the vivacity of life itself.

Looking closer she raised her left hand and the residual void magic resonated with her own bringing a sort of closeness as if meeting an old acquaintance if not a friend. Glassy eyes sparked with green flame as glyphs rotated and sprang to life inside the jewel inset in her wrist.

‘This is such a bad idea.’ But when had that ever stopped her before, she suppressed a mad giggle.

With a crackle, the ice broke as frozen muscles flexed and with a rasping sound, the cat tried to stand. Power flooded into the small body and she saw the connection forming between her, the undead feline, and the void. Shadows seemed to writhe and the formerly dull fur regained an unearthly sheen.

Gasping Alyssa fell onto her back hitting the wall with a dull thud.

Stumbling but rapidly regaining its footing the small undead slunk closer brushing its head against her side.

“What are you?”

Cyrus who had been outside the hut snaked his head through the door and hissed at the cat who reciprocated by bristling its fur while making growling noises.

“Cyrus! Stop, I...I did that.” She regarded the feline with distrust. “Do you understand me?”

The cat blinked sat back raising its hindleg and tried to lick its feet but the tongue was still frozen to the lower jaw and would not move. Irritated it batted at the offending appendage without much success.

“Alyssa!” Outside, Mireille called for her.

“Can you hide?” Alysse hissed softly. The cat blinked its eyes and slunk back into the shadows, becoming one with them. After a look at the gem embedded in her arm, still glowing with rapidly fading energy, she stood up, brushed the dirt from her clothes, and shouted back, “Coming!”

The field before the palisades was still bathed in a sourceless white glow. The dead seemed to be peaceful somehow, and even the wind did not disturb their rest.

Alea shivered and hugged herself. Calvin looked at her warily and then, smiling grimly to himself, patted her shoulder as the girl flinched at the touch. “Well done. But that was visible for quite a ways. I hope we didn’t do the good people here a disservice by calling attention down on them. But they should be safe enough now. Let’s gather our things and leave.” He got a short nod in return. The girl’s face was nearly completely hidden by the blindfold, and a heavy dark blue shawl wrapped around her chin and ears.

Lutz and Mildred, the innkeeper, and his wife, stood before the southern gates with the villagers arrayed behind them. “Thank you for saving us! Now we have a chance!” A tired smile crinkled the man's face. Some of the gathered people echoed his sentiment. Most were still lost in grief.

“And our friends and family can know peace.” Mildred sighed. Subdued sobbing came from some of the villagers behind them.

Silhouetted by the winter sun falling toward the distant horizon, the group trudged toward the forest through snowed-in fields and past small barns and a few outlying houses.

A shadow slunk along a ditch and passed behind a forgotten cart sheltered beneath an overhanging eave. Eldritch light flashed in the darkness as dead eyes regarded its mistress and companions.

The forest was silent and mostly empty. The wind increased in intensity over the day and howled among the treetops as dusk colored the ice in rose and red.

“We have to find shelter for the night or get our tents up.” Calvin decided. Looking crossly at the barely visible forest path. “We seem to have gone farther west than I had hoped. But going cross country would have been even slower.”

And after searching until the light had dimmed to near darkness, they gave up and erected their tents in the shelter of some great oak trees.

Alyssa leaned against the trunk of the greatest among them, staring through the bare branches swaying with the gusts of wind, groaning and creaking intermittently.

She raised her left hand, looking at the stars through the gaps in her fingers. The eye of the hunter stared back at her as the constellation of Irkonos whirled far above in a silent dance that would continue long after her death, which would more than likely be soon. She felt the cold, but she no longer shivered; she was rarely uncomfortable anymore, but neither did she feel the delicious warmth she remembered when she was huddling before the fire, her back cold as ice as she strove to get warm in the cold of winter.

Her thoughts flicked back to Firswending.

What was her father doing now? Was he arrested, sold to the viscount? Did he even survive? His cold craggy face, mouth turned downward in a bitter arc rose from her memories. The eyes had been full of life and ambition once. She remembered that she had seen it but could no longer conjure that memory.

She would do as she had promised.

Go west.

Kill the Heartstealer.

A demigod, an unkillable undead.

Should she separate from the others? It was more than a fool's errand, it was prolonged suicide or worse. She sighed, and a tear froze beneath her right eye still capable of such action. A cat made of ice and shadow slunk onto her lap, purring like creeping frost. Cyrus hissed and regarded the undead uneasily before pressing into her right side, worming under her cloak for scant warmth. Her hand found his head nearly on its own, stroking along his smooth scales, eliciting a purring hiss.

The cat blinked its eyes. Like green stars winking in the darkness.

A breaking branch and the sound of footsteps preceded her as Mireille trudged through the snow and walked up to her seated friend blowing into her cold hands while keeping the mittens clamped between her elbow and side. “There you are. I was looking for you, you know?” Without waiting for an answer, she sat down and put the protesting wyvern on her lap scooting closer to Alyssa, leaning against her side. “What are you thinking about?”

The cat had dissolved into the shadows, its presence felt but not seen.

“Should I go alone?” Alyssa murmured, staring at nothing.

“Are you daft?” Mireille raised herself to get a better look at her friend. “Naturally not!”

“I fear I don’t have much time anymore. Look at all of this.” Her white hair gleamed in the starlight reflected from the snow. She made an expansive gesture. “Undead roaming freely, the Nordmark becoming traitors, rebels in the cities, and…” She sighed. “I’m not sure how long I can keep going.”

“What do you mean? You have the potions, us, Vanessa, the academy. What can go wrong?”

“What can’t go wrong? That is the better question. The assassination of the king was no accident, followed by all that I already mentioned. The Heartstealer is awake, and she is coming for this land, for us. And the potions? I did not tell you, but with my changes progressing further, they have less and less to work with. I can feel it. This year. It’s only this year now. Other than a miracle, that’s it. I don’t want you to die or Alea. So I should go alone. What difference would it make? We can’t do anything. We are students, children. If it works by some strange fate, it should do so even when I’m alone, right?”

“Shhh.” Mireille hugged her close. “Don’t. You are making sense without being sensible. My mother’s saying.” Alyssa felt her friend's smile with Mireille’s face pressed into her hair. “What if you never reach her? There are countless dangers on the way over the mountains and into Ulsolm. And even then, what if some giant clubs you to death without you ever laying eye on her? We have to believe that your Asandria has something planned, that this is something more than a simple suicide. And this here is more than enough reason to try. Do you really think that this ends before either she or everyone else is dead?”

“I don’t know.”

‘You friend speaks truth.’ Asandria said quietly. ‘I cannot promise you will live. I cannot promise anything. But what I can say is- The Heartstealer is awake, and her ambition is boundless, she wants, and she will never get. There will never be enough for her. A living being could change, see reason, but she, she will never do so.’

“What about Vanessa?”

A cold smile formed on the transparent specter's face, stars shining through her figure. ‘She did something to herself to keep her mind. But even that will not be enough to face eternity. She is one of the strongest undead on this continent. By the Eternal Queens' own design, but what she did robbed her of most of that power. That sacrifice and the centuries of sleep kept her sanity. You don’t think that the Heartstealer would give up even a fraction of that to keep a mere mortals mindset?’ She scoffed. ‘If she still had it, it would be the first thing she discarded.’

They sat in silence until Calvin called to them, “Come to the fire, you two! We have decided on the watch order, and you are most certainly included.”

Groaning, Mireille pulled Alyssa to her feet, and both walked back without saying much more on the matter.

Alyssa woke to a sharp pain in her right index finger, and she felt warmth pooling on the tip. Opening her eyes, she saw the shadowy cat licking at her blood welling from a puncture made by the very sharp canines of the creature. “What are you doing!” She hissed. The cat blinked innocently at her, and she felt something like a touch inside her mind. She had tried to form a more comprehensive link with Cyrus and recognized it as something like telepathy. An art she had never mastered before.

Accepting the intrusion, she suddenly saw a scene of an early morning. Grey light filtered through dense branches up overhead. Endless rows of undead, villagers mostly and the long dead, their clothes rotted to an unrecognizable mess, marched through the woods spread out through the trees. A small group of armed soldiers, nervously looking at the thronging corpses, escorted a pale elf in dark robes carrying a staff made of fused bone. He suddenly raised his head, looking about suspiciously beneath his hooded cloak. The viewpoint then shifted rapidly and the one seeing all this seemed to be racing along the branches in the trees, jumping impossible distances and sometimes seemingly teleporting from one shadow to another. There was an impression of time passing, perhaps an hour or two, before she saw the tents, and then her own sleeping form.

Gasping, she ripped her mind free of the vision.

“You saw all this?” She fixed her eyes on the cat. Mireille grumbled in her sleep, pressed against her side.

The cat slowly blinked its eyes.

“Thank you. I have to warn the others.” She struggled to extricate herself from Mireille and Cyrus before stopping. “Where was this? Which direction?” The cat raised a paw toward the south. “What are you? You are not a simple cat, even a simple undead cat.”

The cat began to lick its left front paw.

“Five minutes,” Mireille mumbled, still half-asleep.

“Wake up!” Alyssa shook her friend, and the redhead unwillingly opened her eyes.

“What time is it? Do we really have to?”

“There are undead and Nordmark troops on the way!”

Suddenly wide awake, Mireille sat up. “Where?”

“They are a few hours away, but we have to hurry!”

“Then I could have slept at least ten minutes more!”

Alea was sleeping beside Mireille under copious amounts of blankets, and even the commotion had not been enough to wake her.

Soon all were assembled around a glowing heat stone.

“So you say that troops are coming from the south. How could you know?” Calvin scratched his head and yawned while eating a bit of stale, frozen bread.

Alyssa gritted her teeth and tensed, “I might have summoned something yesterday.”

“Might have?” The wizard looked at her while slowly raising an eyebrow. “How is that in any way uncertain?”

“Because it started out as a cat.”

“Don’t make this like pulling teeth. Out with it!”

“I raised an undead cat because it seemed like the thing to do, and then as I strengthened the connection, it became something more. And now it went and found the troops probably on their way to apprehend us and told me.”

“Told you? Ah, whatever. I’m getting too old for this. Where are they? And don’t think for a moment that this is over only we have something more important to do at the moment, and me yelling at you might alert something else.”

“They are a few hours march in this direction.” Alyssa pointed south and a bit east.

“Damn. That is the direction of the fortress.” Calvin rubbed his chin. “Nothing to it. We try to circumvent them by going west and then south.”

“That will bring us deeper into the Nordmark territory,” Alea interjected.

“As if I didn’t know. But other than taking our chances with the Wolf-Tribe I wouldn’t know where to go. And east is a very rough country near the border. So southeast it is.”

“You would know best.” Mireille shrugged. “Geography was planned for next semester.”

“Ha.” Calvin grimaced and breathed deeply. “So. Gather your things and be quick about it.”

Alea looked at Butler One, who went and dismantled the tent in record time.

“Would have given much to have something like this when I was still a student.” Calvin looked impressed. “And where is this special cat now?”

“Shall I call it?”

“Do it. I want to know what you did this time.”

Concentrating, she easily found the connection, and then there was a cat winding around her ankles, rubbing it’s midnight black fur on her boots.

“This is it? Ah, I see. It’s an Alp. It’s a nightmare being that gains strength by killing people in their sleep, suffocating and tormenting them to gain more energy. I’m horrified and impressed at once. Keep it away from me, you hear? But it would make a very good scout, so don't dismiss it for the moment. You are certain that you can control it?”

“There seems to be no issue there. The spell came from the jewel.” She raised her wrist.

“The gift that keeps on giving. I don’t think we have the time to discuss that further, but discuss it we will!” Calvin gestured. “All of you, fall in.”

And then he adjusted his backpack grabbed his staff tightly, and walked into the woods, away from the path they had used. The rest of them walked behind him in single file.