It was a shame, but it had to be done.

The Javelin swerved around, angling for its newest victim.

Then Dorian paused. A neat idea had come to him.

“How about this?” he said gently. “You seem like the honest sort, Pebble. And you’ve been of great help to me. Renounce the Rat-King! Join me.”

“…Hum,” said Pebble, wide-eyed. “I can do that?”

“Sure! Hells—your boss is crippled. His best fighters are dead! There’s a power vacuum there, isn’t it?” Dorian shrugged. “Why don’t you fill it? We get along pretty well—with you in charge of the Outskirts and me working inside, I’m sure we can come to a deal that’ll help the both of us. What do you say?”

And all of a sudden, my plan of conscripting all those Outskirters for the war effort is resuscitated. The Outskirter-to-citizen ration was nearly one-to-one, and any moron with a working set of thumbs could wield Dorian’s stick. This might double his meat shield count in a stroke!

Pebble, meanwhile, looked to be struggling mightily with the idea. He hemmed and hawed, gnawing on his lip. “I dunno,” he said at last. He shook his head quickly, as though to clear it. “I gave him my word I’d kill you, and bring him one of your eyes as proof! Once you’ve given your word, you can’t get it back,” he said sadly. “You’re gonna have to kill me, I think…”

“Ah. Shame,” sighed Dorian. He tapped his lip. “Maybe there’s a way around this. Here’s a thought: what if we pretend you’re already dead?”

Pebble blinked. “Huh?”

“Let’s think this through. This is how our battle ends: you’ll run at me. I’ll stab you. Then you’ll die. This is what will most certainly happen in the next, oh, five seconds or so. Right?”

Pebble nodded. “Yea. Almost certainly!”

“What a hassle,” sighed Dorian. “I’ve got to go through the trouble of using my qi and my Bloodline powers. Then I’ve got to wipe your brain juice off my Javelin—do you know how hard that stuff is to clean? And you’ve got togo through the trouble of dying, possibly in great pain. Neither of us wins out here.”

“I guess… but what else can we do?” said Pebble, scratching his head.

“Simply this.” Dorian pointed an imperious finger at Pebble. “You’ve said that you must fight me. And you and I both know that when you do, very soon, you’ll die! Let’s skip all the muck in the middle, shall we? I hereby declare that you, Pebble, are now deceased! I have killed you.”

“Um,” said Pebble. “Pardon, but I don’t feel very dead?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” said Dorian patiently. “But if both of us agree that you, Pebble, will die very, very soon, your actual status in the present is but a quibble. A technicality, really, a mere difference of a few seconds! Let’s not wring our hands over this. Why don’t you simply agree to act as though the entity known as Pebble is now dead? It’ll save us both the hassle of going through with it! And you would no longer be bound by whatever vows that Pebble person made. That person’s dead, after all. Or rather, he might as well be, which is basically the same thing.”

“Uhhhhhh….” Pebble squinted at him. “Are you sure that makes sense?”

“Yes. I am absolutely certain. I swear it on my honor,” said Dorian, tapping his chest. “Would I lie to you?”

“No way,” said Pebble. His eyes shone. “You’d never. You’re honest as honest come—I could tell the first time I saw you!”

…You might need glasses, bud. In any case—

“Great! Then we’re in agreement?”

Dorian was getting a little antsy. Every second that went by, his grip on his shadow domain slipped a smidge further. Holding all this in place was a hellish drain on his qi reserves. They’d dwindled to less than a fifth!

“Well, there is one thing. If Pebble’s dead,” said Pebble, mystified. “Who would I be?”

Dorian shrugged. “Whoever you want to be. From now on, you’re a blank slate. Take a new name! Be a new man—er—boy? Join my side, and leave your past behind.”

“Hmm.” Then Pebble brightened. “New name… what about Crag? Ooh. I quite like the sound of that.”

“Sounds good to me!” Decide, child! Dorian was down to only a sixth of his qi now.

Pebble smiled. “Okay! I’ll go along, friend Io! But first, you’ll need to prove to me that Pebble really would be dead. You need to show me you can kill me for sure!”

“Wait,” said Dorian, frowning. “What are you—“

Pebble pounced, claws flashing.

Woah!

On instinct Dorian threw up a hand. [Blacken the Sky!]

A swathe of shadow before him took his will as an order. It rose in an oily wave from the ground, blocking the way. It hung there, shimmering, devouring Dorian’s qi at a truly absurd rate—but still he stared at it, gaping.

I can do that?!

Then his lips curved into a wicked grin.

Pebble skidded to a halt. “Woah! That’s neat—hey!”

All about him, shadows shot up. He tried turning, skidding around, but shadows met him there too—left, right, front, behind—one even slunk over the top, making a cage of sorts. Pebble stood there, frozen. Dorian saw the realization flit across his stunned little face.

Every single shadow was a portal. Dorian could’ve skewered him two dozen times over.

“Need I send my trusty Javelin through, or is this enough?”

Pebble made a face. “Okay, fine! You’re right. From now, on, Pebble is dead. Dead and gone!”

He let his claws subside with a little huff. Dorian let out a breath as he, too, let loose his grip on the shadow domain. It was hardly a choice; all his playing around meant qi reserves, great as they were, were shot. Darknesses fled instantly, zipping across the floor in messy streams, snapping back to the spots nature intended them to be.

Smiling brightly, Pebble held out a hand. “Hello, friend! The name’s Crag—I’m new around these parts. It’s so very nice to meet you!”

Dorian shook it with a grin of his own. “Welcome, Crag. I have a feeling we’ll get along just fine.”

***

Halfway across the Oasis, sitting in a high spire of the Church of Jez, High Priest Talen cradled his head in his hands. Father Zacharias paced back and forth before him, his whiskers flaring.

“You had but one task!” he said. “One. How were you incapable of luring his sister here?! The girl’s an idiot!”

“I know,” moaned High Priest Talen.

“By Jez, you could’ve tied an ice pop to a fishing rod and she would’ve come bounding after you!” Zacharias squeezed his eyes shut. It was his task by day to play the kindly priest. Kindness was Jez’s chief virtue, after all. But all that smiling and bowing and pretending to care about, say, some moron’s problems with his increasingly distant wife, who Zacharias had to pretend he was not sleeping with—all that piousness—it wore on a man.

“Restrain and renounce, Zac,” he whispered, kneading his temple. “Restrain and renounce. Yes, yes…alright. I am calm. Calm-er. I am fine.”

He sighed. “Perhaps it is not, in the grand calculus, so important. Lord Jez’s followers already have sound purchase here. When the reckoning comes we shall be ready regardless. Only—she did have quite the affinity for Jez’s blood. It’s a pity…”

“Um,” said High Priest Talen.

“The Ugoc branch heads did seem quite insistent she be recruited. I wonder why.”

“Um,” said High Priest Talen, louder.

“What?” Zacharias whirled on him. “Spit it out, fool!”

Talen pointed one trembling finger out the stained-glass window.

Two stories below, standing and grinning and waving in the street, was Kaya Rust.

“Hi!” she shouted.

Zacharias poked his head out the window, rubbing his eyes.

“It’s me!” Kaya continued. “The girl you gave that gold card to? That thing that gave me powers, right? Something about, um, a contract?”

“Yes! Yes—exactly right!” spluttered Zacharias.

“Great!” said Kaya. “I just got my spleen punched out of my stomach! See, this is an issue, ‘cause I want to be the one punching the spleens out of other people’s stomachs. Which means I need to get stronger. Way stronger!”

She grinned up at them. “Can you help me?”

***

With that little detour sorted, Dorian strolled back home. Home, nowadays, was the penthouse suite that the Heilong Family had given him in one of their swankiest high-rises. A balding doorman bowed to him as he neared.

“Good evening,” he said. “This is for you.”

He thrust a scroll in Dorian’s hands.

“Oh?”

The doorman promptly turned tail and left. At which point Dorian realized this was no doorman at all.

He frowned. Then, shrugging, he unfurled the scroll. Its surface was blank: like the surface of a pool of bronze.

Then a familiar face resolved in the parchment. It smiled.

“Hello,” said High Prince Nijo of the Ugoc Tribe. “How have you been?”