It did not take long for the harbinger to recover from its dive. Less than a dozen seconds after I blinked away, the creature winged aloft and immediately began cutting a wide arc through the air.

“It’s heading back this way,” Ghost warned.

Looking over my shoulder and seeing the same, I nodded. My stealth was holding, but it might not when the harbinger drew closer.

I didn’t have long to decide my course.

How does the harbinger know to turn around? I wondered. Both times that I blinked away, the stygian had picked the correct direction in which to head without hesitation. I was tempted to send Ghost racing ahead and to teleport to her again, but if the stygian could see her, that tactic would be useless.

Had the harbinger seen Ghost? Was that how it was locating me? If my foe could see the spirit wolf, then flight was useless. Best I make my stand here.

I drew ebonheart.

Glancing down, I saw the stygian seed still clutched in my left hand. I’d been holding it the entire time, and it was a wonder I hadn’t dropped the thing. Hastily, I moved to stuff it in my pocket. There would be time enough to deal with the seed later.

Halfway through the motion, an errant glint caught my eye.

I paused. There was no light for the seed to reflect, which was why the flash struck me as odd. Perplexed, I stared at the thing.

A phantom thought flitted through my mind, too fast to follow. I chased after it but caught only the faintest of echoes. It had sounded oddly like a… mocking laugh.

A laugh?

Even then, for a split-second, I failed to make the connection. Finally, it dawned on me.

Of course.

It was a seed that was giving away my location.

My mind shield was down—it had to be for me to use my psi abilities—and in the intervening chaos I’d nearly forgotten about the seed’s danger.

Or had been made to forget.

What if… the seed’s first touch had been a misstep? What if the thing had been more careful the second time around. What if it had been subverting my thoughts all this time?

The fog clogging my thoughts burned away. And finally, I realized the truth. I was being manipulated, artfully so. Revulsion tore through me. The seed was truly insidious. Gah! I spat, almost throwing the thing away in horror.

But no, that was the seed’s desires speaking again.

I wouldn’t let it go. Not so easily.

“Prime?” Ghost prompted. “Whatever we’re doing, we better do it quickly. The stygian is closing on us.”

Glancing up, I saw that the harbinger had completed its half-circle and was heading directly for me. This time, the creature had declined to announce its approach, and was gliding in ominous silence.

“One second. I need to think.” The urge to act was strong, but I feared if I didn’t follow the thread I’d worked free, I never would.

When I’d been in the rift with Simone’s party, the stygians had also found me time and again, and each time they had, I’d been holding a seed. It was only after I’d thrown it away that my stealth had held.

At the time, I’d not known how the nether creatures had managed to locate me, but now, armed with knowledge that the seeds were aware—and more than just aware—I had an inkling of how it had been done.

The seed in my hand had to be communicating with the harbinger, just like that other seed long ago, had communicated with the stygian serpents.

The question now was what to do about it?

I glanced back at my foe. I had only seconds to decide the seed’s fate—and my own. Unfortunately, I had no handy rift nearby to escape through, which left me only two options.

The first was to discard the seed. It wanted that. I didn’t know how I knew that, but I did. Proof, if I needed more, that the seed was in my mind. The thing preferred me dead but would gladly accept its freedom. I was not about to give it what it wanted, though.

That left only the second option.

Unclenching my left hand, I dropped the seed, and raised ebonheart. Before I could reconsider—or be made to reconsider—I took the black blade in a two-handed grip and stabbed downward.

Ebon point met stygian crystal and was rebuffed.

But not entirely, I thought, noticing a hairline crack along the seed’s crystalline shell.

A cry rent the air behind me. “What are you doing? Stop, fleshling!”

I smiled tightly. The stark fear in the harbinger’s words only encouraged me further. “Go,” I said, glancing at Ghost.

Understanding my intent, the spirit wolf dashed off, down the chasm and in the opposite direction from the stygian. I raised ebonheart again.

The harbinger roared in unbridled fury and flapped its wings, abandoning all attempts to conceal its approach. It knew what I was about to do. Something had told it.

My gaze dropped to the seed.

“Your minion is not going to save you this time,” I whispered, not caring whether the thing understood me or not. Then, I brought my sword crashing down again, point first and squarely onto the weakened spot.

The seed shattered under the blow, exploding into dozens of little shards.

You had destroyed a stygian seed!

With a thunderous scream that set my ears ringing, the harbinger threw itself into a precipitous dive. It would miss me by a wide margin, I judged. Still, I had no desire to hang around.

Stepping into the aether, I shadow blinked to Ghost.

✵ ✵ ✵

It took the harbinger a long time to calm down.

Nestled in the shadows, I watched intently as the stygian paced up and down the chasm, searching for me. It had passed my hiding spot multiple times already but without the seed’s help was unable to pierce my stealth.

I could have fled outright, of course, and it would have been prudent to do so, but my foe ranted while it paced, and I was keen to learn what more of the stygians I could—and the harbinger in particular.

The creature was proof the stygians were more than simple beasts. Some of them at least were intelligent. Cunning. That made the void more dangerous than I’d originally assumed. And what I overheard of the harbinger’s tirade only reinforced that notion.

“That was a mistake, wolfling,” the harbinger raged at one point. “I’ll rend you from limb to limb for this. I’ll hunt you down to the ends of the sector.”

A fairly standard threat as threats went, but it had called me wolfling again, setting to rest any doubts I had that the stygian knew what I was.

After another few minutes of name calling and vile curses it revealed something else of interest. “There will be no shelter for you, not anywhere! We own this dungeon. We control the safe zone and the portals. You are not getting out.”

That bit was mildly concerning. I suspected my foe was exaggerating the extent of the void’s influence, though. I’d seen enough of the dungeon already to know the nether didn’t control it, but that the stygians knew of the safe zone troubled me.

“Do not think you can escape from whence you came either,” the harbinger hissed another time. “The overlord informed me of your coming, and I will warn the rest of my brethren! From now on, no sector will be safe for you. We will hunt you wherever you go.”

And finally, most damningly, it added, “You can’t hide your true self from us. I can smell what you are. The Adjudicator will not save you. The guardians will not save you. Awakening your blood cannot save you. Your Primes tried for eons to leash the void. They failed! You will be no different. We will feed on your blood just as we did theirs!

✵ ✵ ✵

Eventually, the harbinger left.

I remained where I was long after it was gone though, pondering the creature’s words. They did not a pretty picture make.

Not only were the nether creatures intelligent, they were coordinating their efforts across multiple sectors. They knew of the primes, their fight against the void, and were aware, too, of my own bloodline.

Then there were the stygian seeds. I was certain the thing had subverted my thoughts. Its touch had been so insidious though, that even after knowing that to be the case, I was unable to pinpoint where my own thoughts ended and its manipulations began.

Do the new Powers realize what the seeds are capable of? I wondered. Given how freely seeds were traded and handled by players, I couldn’t believe that they did. Loken and his fellows were many things, but I couldn’t see them allowing their Sworn to be manipulated by anyone but themselves.

Another thing I hadn’t figured out yet was the seeds’ place amongst the stygians. That they were important was obvious. They appeared to play a central role in the void’s spread, whether within a sector or between sectors. In fact, given what I’d witnessed, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that it was the seeds themselves that created the free-floating nether.

What was unclear though, was the relationship between the seed and the stygian creatures. Was the harbinger and others of his ilk subservient to the seeds—and by extension, the trees that birthed them—or was it the other way around?

So many mysteries, I lamented. So many questions still to answer.

I rose to my feet. I was not going to figure out the answers sitting here, though. And as troubling as the bigger picture was, the immediate implications of smart stygians concerned me more.

The harbinger did not strike me as the type to give up.

I suspected the stygian Power would hunt me relentlessly, not stopping until it had made good on its threats. I sighed. On top of the elites and the nether itself, the harbinger was another headache I didn’t need.

Moving slowly, I strode to where I’d last seen the seed and drew to a halt a safe distance away. The remains were untouched.

“What do you make of it?” I asked Ghost.

“I can’t feel anything from here,” she replied. “Should I go closer?”

I hesitated, then waved the spirit wolf forward, making sure to stay by her side. I wouldn’t have allowed this much, but the Adjudicator himself had reported the seed destroyed, and the harbinger hadn’t taken the remains with him when he’d left. Both were proof the seed really was dead, but a little more confirmation wouldn’t hurt.

Ghost lowered her head over the seed’s remains, her nose wrinkling as she sniffed each piece separately. “It’s gone,” she said with finality.

“You’re sure?”

“I am. Whatever mind occupied these pieces is either fled—or dead.”

Finally convinced, I bent down and inspected the remains myself.

These are the remains of a stygian seed. You are unable to discern their properties.

I stared at the Adjudicator’s response for a moment. To my surprise, the Game description implied that the remains possessed whatever arcane properties the seed had before I’d destroyed it. Did that mean the remains were just as valuable?

Maybe they are, I decided and swept up the fragments into my bag of holding.

You have acquired 1 set of stygian seed remains.

“Where do we go from here?” Ghost asked when I was done.

I glanced at her. “What did you make of our friend?”

The spirit wolf flopped down. “Big. Ugly. And scary.”

My lips twitched. That was as apt a description of the harbinger as any. “To answer your question, let’s head on up to the plateau.” The stygian Power had left but there was no telling when it would return and with what forces.

“You’re giving up fighting the elites?”

I shrugged. My curiosity about the dungeon’s denizens had waned and any inclination I felt to pit myself against them was tempered by the thought of the harbinger intruding. Ghost had raised a valid point, though, and I did still have a stolen spell at my beck. I couldn’t waste the opportunity to level.

“Let’s head to the plateau first, then you can find me a suitable prey to hunt.”

Ghost ears perked up. “Suitable prey? Such as?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A fire giant may be.” If the dungeon harbored frost ents, it might contain elemental creatures of other types too, and what better foe to use my cold sphere against than one that would be especially vulnerable to its touch?

“In the meantime, we’ll keep heading north, towards those fires we spotted. I’ll admit, after finding out there are stygians in Draven’s Reach, I am more curious than ever about whose campfires those are.”

And how they’ve managed to survive both the stygians and elites this long.