Kajsa threw herself back into work, having grown tired of sloth and eating Lucius’ cooking. She told herself that it was to earn her keep, that the smelters weren’t going to teach themselves how to work the factory. Her other excuses about construction taking too long and insufficient chemicals had withered over time, but still gave her enough justification in her mind to explain why that was the day she went back to the factory in earnest.

She knew deep down that it was because Aisha had returned. The redhead hadn’t said anything unkind to her, in fact it seemed like Aisha was positively avoiding her and everyone else in the manor. The thought of being in the same room as Lucius’ lover made her skin prickle and her stomach twist in ways she didn’t understand. She no longer knew what her relationship was with the young governor, and what it meant that he wasn’t the man he claimed to be. At this time, she didn’t know that anyone else knew of his lies and kept her mouth shut accordingly, but that itself was part of the problem. It made her a conspirator, privy to something no one should have known and a great deal of childhood history too.

Being slightly older than Lucius, she had never much considered him as a man. Of course, this had to do with him leaving before reaching puberty and to call a boy a man has a certain foolishness to it. Confronted with him as he was then however, she found herself forced to realize that she had partly ignored him because of his injury. She had discriminated against him for missing his arm and assumed that he would end up as something like a groundskeeper for a temple somewhere, if not part of some other minstrel group’s attractions of the grotesque. That he would rise to be a nobleman of sorts was inconceivable.

Of equal surprise was his arrival at the factory, half naked and barely able to stand. His body was a putrid mass of congealed blood, bruising, swelling, and so many lacerations that his stigmata could hardly be made out. Worst of all, his hair had been destroyed in a manner more gruesome than I care to detail here.(1) He looked like a corpse dug out of a shallow grave and forced to march.

And then he dropped a severed head on the factory floor between them, not of a human but an aberrant serpent. The skull would have been too large to fit a bull, with a maw large enough to devour a human whole, mincing them along the way with rows of barbed teeth. It was no ordinary animal, despite the size; it was cyclopean. An orb like glass containing fire sat center in the skull, blinded by a broken sword thrust through the center of it until the hilt had jabbed into the orbital socket.

And its tongue still lapped at the air. The flickers of muscle made blood ooze from the stump as ragged flesh writhed as though yearning for the rest of the body.

Kajsa screamed, tripping over herself as she scrambled away from it.

“Relax,” Lucius said, his mauled face slurring his enunciation. He gestured at the head of the demon as he said, “It’s not going to… Hmm… yeah, you should stay away from it. It’s pretty poisonous.”

She turned from it to him, her brow furrowing as she tried to pull herself back to her feet. “Are you alright? Do you need a doctor? You don’t look alright. By the goddess, what happened?”

He laughed and scratched at some of the scabs forming on his cheek. Ripping them off made discolored puss ooze down his jaw. “It’s not really over yet.”

“How is that thing still alive? What is it?”

“That,” he said before a laceration opened up inside his throat and blood gushed from his neck into his stomach. He at once began coughing and staggered into the wall as he spat the poisoned blood across the floor. One of the workers, Walter as it happened, offered him a waterskin, which he drained in entirety before explaining that it and the stain on the ground would have to be burned because of the poison. When he turned back to Kajsa, her fear was written plain across her face.

She was an alchemist of faith, not one of war. The two of them were of different worlds entirely and by keeping her at his side he realized he would be dragging her into a depth of conflict that few would choose of their own accord. So, he kept the explanation brief. Sitting down on a workshop stool to catch is breath, he said, “That is your fuel for the factory.”

“What?”

“Constantly harvesting wood from the jungle would be expensive, wouldn’t it? Burn that instead.”

She glanced again at it from the corner of her eye. “Is that safe?”

He shrugged. “I wouldn’t breathe the smoke but you shouldn’t do that anyway. Keep the furnace hot enough and it will just be ash coming out, not the kuku drug. You pretty much won’t run out either. I figure for the next few years that thing will just keep regrowing. Keep it burning and it won’t ever do anything.”

She asked, “Is that… the demon? Is that what you fought? Lucius have you been out all night? How are you not dead on your feet?”

He laughed. “Amphos root will do that to you. I couldn’t sleep right now if I wanted to, and trust me, I do.”

“Is your healing not enough?”

“It will be, eventually. Don’t worry about me. Hey, you,” he said with a gesture towards Walter. He had put on some weight since returning to land, and stopped complaining about his use as a bellows. “Use a shovel or something and put that in the furnace, will you?”

Walter fetched a shovel but hesitated. “Do you want the sword back?”

Lucius laughed. “Not enough to reforge it, actually… sure. Will make a good trinket,” he said as he rose and walked back over to the head. He put a hand to the forehead, but his fingers weren’t working well. He had to take a few tries to brace it properly with his foot before he had a strong enough grip to rip the weapon stump free. Fire sprayed out of the pierced eye, singing the ground as people jumped away. Lucius kicked it over with his boot as it healed and the fire stopped.

The sword was blackened entirely, only as long as a hand given how it had fractured. Due to the tempering of the divine blaze, the end no longer held an edge. In fact, the metal looked almost like it had lost some of its form and become a crude impression of an object, like a recollection of the original.

“I bet I’ll cause a stir if I use this as something like a passport, what do you think?” Lucius asked as he rolled Umbra’s head onto the flat of the shovel.

Kajsa wrinkled her nose and stepped out of the way as Walter lugged the body part over to the furnace and threw it in with the wood. Lucius was the one to slam the gate shut as the fire enveloped Umbra. Just as its miasma of sloth and impotence enveloped the Misty Isles, Lucius began the long process of burning it away to nothing but ash and memory. The furnace howled as it pumped smoke into the sea wind.

For weeks after, people who had inhaled the kuku bud second hand, or long ago, experienced nightmares of fire. I could find little coherence between them, as though the will of the Divine Beast were thrashing about in agony and casting its emotions and impressions without a lick of Will. I suspect that my pupil was lucky the factory had been built so far from downtown out of necessity . There might have been a riot if the smoke directly sifted into the city. Instead, it diffused into the ocean and if any feeding frenzy occurred among the reefs and shoals, the children of Sapphira won.

With the fight finally over, the strength began to drain out of Lucius. Even the burn of amphos root could only last so long. The coherency in his words faded, and Kajsa took it upon herself to guide him back to the manor. She didn’t take him inside because he insisted that he didn’t want to be seen until he had healed up some more. Instead, she guided him back to the training ground and helped him sit down against an old tree where he promptly fell asleep.

Axel and Lexa took turns standing silent guard for him, permitting no one to reach him before he woke. With one exception however. Someone delivered him a warm loaf of bread and a kettle of tea. When he roused, he ate and drank without knowing who had brought them. Before he lapsed again, he quipped that a feast was in order.

Naturally, a feast was being prepared. Most of his subordinates were busy cleaning up the city and tidying loose ends. The cultists who had sworn themselves to Umbra were wracked by mental agony as their link to the demon burned, making their arrests trivial but time intensive. The need to act swiftly made it a struggle to stop and cheer, which made it all the more important that Aisha was coordinating a pig roast in the manor’s front lawn.

A pit had been dug in the morning, the animal slaughtered and spitted. Hour after hour they fed wood to the blaze and basted the beast. Every patrol of soldiers was allowed a smell, but anyone who attempted to pilfer food was beaten over the head by Miss Lynnfield. The fat beast, a great expense, was slowly made ready just in time for Lucius to rouse and stagger over with a ravenous stomach.

He never thanked me for not interrupting the feast. I very well could have. I had arrived that day at Aliston, based on correspondence with Golden, and was eager to see what my pupil had achieved without me. Instead, I let him have his night of fun.(2)

While the death of Umbra brought the strife of the Misty Isles to a close, Aillesterra still marauded the southern sea. The pirates withdrew not out of fear of Vassish naval might, but because it became more important to concentrate their harassment along the Giordanan coast and prevent the recapture of Puerto Faro. Peace thus came to the Misty Isles for a time.

And that time was precisely until the first shipment of tobacco and grain arrived in Hearth Bay. The nobility simply had to reward Lucius for his hard work, but I shall get to that soon enough.

A pleasant side effect of his stigmata was the rapid regrowth of his hair. He also lost his scalp in the fight against the godling east of Rackvidd, but a night of feasting gave him all the fuel and time needed to bring back his blonde hair in full. I still don’t understand why it didn’t do the same for his beard until much later in life. I spent that night fetching Golden from the temple. The poor creature had stayed behind in the re-sanctified chamber. He burned off every odor of Umbra, every vestige of Titania and pleaded with his goddess–his own mother–to show herself. Unfortunately for him, she had not spoken for some centuries and that was not the year she broke her silence. Out of consideration for his pride, I kept his distress private, but the dead need no such privacy.