Author: Tower Curator

 

“Viscount Lethster has managed to scrounge up another eight hundred from the towns in his realm. He claims he will find another two hundred more.”

“Viscountess Quincy already supplied well over two thousand men for the invasion of Evestani. She is unsure if she can amass a meaningful number of additional conscripts.”

“Baron Bombast sends kind regards and a request to cease attempts at conscripting his miners. At least so long as you wish for the Kingdom to be supplied with his iron.”

Abe Lafoar, King of Chernlock, let a weary sigh escape into the air as he listened to the reports coming in. It had been thirty years since the last war. Thirty years since his father abdicated the throne and left him with one simple command: Do better. Thirty years of relative peace and prosperity, minus the incident in Vaales. For the last few years, in which Duke Woldair had been courting the daughter of Evestani’s sultan, Abe thought his father’s rule might have been the last of the animosity between their nations.

That he could end his reign content in leaving a legacy of peace.

“Fifteen hundred beasts of burden have arrived at the Chernlock-Mystakeen border. Production of transport carts is moving according to schedule. Supplying our men will not be an issue as long as they are well protected.”

“So long as this year does not end in a lengthy drought like last year. It would be disastrous. I petition for a cabal of spellcasters to rotate between our largest farmlands, ensuring they are well watered.”

“We can’t spare good casters on the possibility of a drought. They will be needed for the fight. The Oracles of the Abbey have foreseen no complications in food production this year.”

Abe continued to ponder the reports, eyes sweeping over the members of his court as they each spoke, while mentally adjusting his strategy for the impending escalation of the conflict. Evestani on their own was bad enough, but they were a familiar foe. One whose tactics and strategies were a topic of study for those militarily minded within the Kingdom. The balance between maintaining a strong military presence and ensuring the stability of the kingdom’s infrastructure was a delicate one at the best of times during war. With the addition of the Eternal Empire, they had a new threat, one unknown but dangerous.

The king’s mind was a whirlwind of worries. For most decisions, he would consult with the Abbey if they could share some of their insight, but he was still the one in charge. Each choice he made carried weight. A single word from him could sentence entire townships’ worth of people to their early graves.

A peaceful legacy was out of the question.

Abe shifted in his seat, feeling the weight of the crown more heavily than ever.

If his people couldn’t have peace, he would do everything in his power to ensure their future.

He leaned forward, preparing to issue the edicts he and his advisors had agreed upon before this meeting.

The tall doors at the opposite end of the chamber flung open, admitting a young woman with mousy features and brown hair. One of his aides. Her eyes, wide and far too innocent—reminding Abe of a younger version of his late wife—searched the room with a hint of embarrassment. At her intrusion, all the members of his court stopped, looked to the door, and stared.

“Rebecca,” Abe said, waving her forward with a kindly smile on his face. He had to keep smiling. If he stopped, he might let the despair he felt upon seeing his aide’s face show to his court.

There was only one reason for one of his aides to interrupt this meeting. That was news. Given the state of things, Abe did not expect good news. He tried to analyze Rebecca’s face as she skirted around the round table and its various dignitaries.

She was nervous. Tense. There was a tightness to the muscles around her eyes. Her breathing was heavy and, from the slight sheen of sweat on her brow, Abe guessed that she had run here from wherever she had been. In her hand, she clutched a long bit of parchment. A letter? It was open. She had read it, as was her duty so long as the letters lacked the confidential signet.

Rebecca stopped just a step away from his chair, stumbling slightly as she wanted to close the gap but remembered at the last moment that etiquette required a bow. Abe simply waited patiently, partially because dismissing the notions of etiquette would take longer than her bow and partially because it delayed him having to hear whatever news was on that letter.

Sadly, the delay did not last forever. She stepped up alongside him, leaned over, and whispered in his ear. “It’s over. The war, Sir. It’s over!”

Abe blinked over and over again, trying to process what she was saying. It couldn’t be over. He was seated upon his throne. If it was over, his head would be resting in the cradle of a guillotine. Aside from the early response army they had sent initially to support Duke Woldair and, after his death, Prince Cedric, there were no forces on their side that could have advanced forward to deliver the same fate to his Evestani counterpart. The last he heard, Evestani and their allies had engaged with one of the leading mercenary companies in Mystakeen.

“Over?”

“Prince Cedric sends word,” Rebecca said, holding out the letter in a trembling grip. “Evestani’s army has surrendered. Evestani’s palace is under our control. The Eternal Empire’s army is in the process of being rounded up. He is going to venture out to Evestani to take the helm personally,” she said, licking her lips. “It’s over.”

Slowly, hardly believing what he was hearing, Abe took the letter from Rebecca’s hands. His eyes skimmed down the lines, moving back and forth. It was only when he reached the end that he realized he hadn’t processed what he had been reading. With a slight shake of his head, he snapped his gaze back to the first lines and began again.

Cedric had done it, utilizing the preposterous walking fortresses created by Company Al-Mir—reports of it had reached his round table, but hardly anyone believed such a thing could exist. Yet his son had gone forward, analyzed the situation and available resources, and accomplished everything. In a scant few months, no less. The Duke had been killed mid-winter and it was barely mid-spring now.

An entire war, opened and closed before they could even transition the Kingdom into a war economy.

He looked up, somewhat dazed, and met the eyes of his court. They were waiting. He couldn’t help but snort. Just like him when he first saw Rebecca enter the room, they were steeling themselves to hear the terrible news he had just been delivered. He let out a small laugh, looking over them.

They must have thought he lost it.

He had half a mind to send them all home. A simple goodbye, get out.

But, unfortunately, there was more work to be done. The efforts they had gone to in preparing weren’t going to go to waste. Not completely, anyway.

Cedric, as stated in his letter, was on his way to Evestani. It was to be the fifth province of the Greater Kingdom of Chernlock. He would need support, both in maintaining whatever peace existed and in securing Evestani’s borders to prevent the Tetrarchy or the Tribes from swooping in to take bites from the territory like vultures.

“Verify this,” he said to Rebecca. “Send letters. Meet with the Abbey. Whatever is needed to confirm the veracity of this letter. Now.”

“Sir!” she snapped, turning and practically sprinting from the room.

He turned back, pulling himself to his feet. “Lords. Ladies. I have good news…”

Darius Vrox moved down the narrow corridors of the old archives, his gait uneven with the limp in his leg. He wasn’t using his cane at the moment—his arms were too full of old tomes—forcing him to move a bit slower than usual. It was something he had grown used to, not being able to bend his knee the same as before.

“—killed the Empress? Really?”

He slowed further, coming to a stop just outside the open door to Lyra Zann’s room.

“I knew he had some heavy hitters—Agnete among them—but I’m still surprised. Was she being careless or overconfident? Or is he that good? A combination of the two, I imagine.”

Slowly, he peered around the corner. Lyra was draped across her desk, lying on her stomach with her cheek flat against the wood and her red hair sprawled out, flowing over its edges. She did that sort of thing often, he had realized. Her lazy, lackadaisical attitude didn’t mesh well with his image of a head archivist, an avatar of the Holy Light, or potentially the main driving force behind the Abbey.

Sitting on the desk, just a short distance from her face, was that old basin. Lyra had a finger in it, idly swirling the water around. A small pulse of light lit up its edges, just the way it did when she was speaking to someone with a matching basin—either her fellow avatars or the basin she gifted to Arkk—but this time, Darius heard no noise.

A light, almost melodic laugh slipped out from Lyra. “No. It’s a weight off my back. I just feel it is too soon. We have no alternate solution ready. If we can’t get one ready in time…”

Another pulse of light from the bowl with no accompanying noise.

“I imagine time isn’t something you consider much of a factor. For us humans, time is an ever-present concern in the backs of our minds. If only—”

A pulse interrupted Lyra, resulting in another light laugh.

“Yes. I know he is there.” Lyra lifted her head, ignoring the way her hair now hung over half her face, and locked eyes with him. “Come in, Darius. You don’t need to hide away.”

Darius jolted, surprised that she noticed him, but more embarrassed than anything. “I didn’t wish to interrupt your conversation,” he said as he stepped fully around the corner. Taking three limping steps, he set down his collection of tomes on top of one of the shelves on the side of the room.

“Liar,” Lyra said with a faint grin, no real heat in her tone. Her eyes held his gaze for a short moment longer before she slumped back to the desk. “You’re a snoop and a spy. As expected of someone with your background.”

“I admit some curiosity.” He glanced at the bowl. She hadn’t removed her finger from the water. “Others you have spoken with have had audible voices. This one…”

Lyra lifted her head, staring for just a second before a pulse of light in the basin made her laugh. A real, true laugh that sounded like the chiming of bells. “I am not speaking with the Holy Light,” she said after taking a moment to calm herself. “None of the Pantheon are… Well… They aren’t the kind of thing easily conversed with, even for their chosen.”

“I didn’t say that you were,” Darius said, leading to another short burst of laughter from the woman on the desk.

“Of course not,” she said, still grinning at him. “No. I am speaking with my predecessor.”

“Predecessor?”

“I don’t recall if I’ve mentioned this to you, but the avatar of the Holy Light isn’t the same as that of the Heart of Gold or the Almighty Glory. Upon our successful instigation of the Solution, all three of us were granted a sort of immortality. Given that it was directly tied to our power, our deaths would weaken the Solution and cause… this.” She lifted her hand from the basin to wave around vaguely. “Goldy and Glory gave their avatars unageing bodies. But the god of knowledge went a different route.

“A single mind was too stagnant for the Holy Light’s sensibilities. So, we age normally and die normally. But we select successors. We bestow upon them every memory, every scrap of knowledge we’ve managed to accumulate in our short lives, giving them to another who might have a new perspective on some of those old ideas. Thus, we might come to new conclusions, view knowledge in new lights, and generally increase our knowledge far more than a single mind that might find themselves locked into habits.”

“I… see,” Darius said. Had she mentioned something like that before? It was possible, though not in such great detail. Perhaps an offhanded comment, nothing more. The kind of thing he might have thought to ask about at a later time, only to forget with the vast amount of work that they had been doing since his arrival at these archives. “Who is your predecessor?” he asked, unable to stop himself, wondering just what kind of position in the Abbey or Kingdom that a former avatar might hold.

“Was, Darius,” Lyra said, tapping her finger to her temple. “She died several years ago. Now, she lives as nothing more than a copy in my mind. The basin helps me separate her memories from my own, allowing me to look at matters with a perspective more akin to hers than to mine.”

“Ah.” That explained the lack of a voice. She was speaking to her own thoughts. “And her opinion on current events?”

Lyra frowned as a few pulses of light lit the basin. “Arkk’s plan is too risky. We have a proven Solution. With Agnete acting as the constructor, we could repair the barrier and resume our regular lives without much difficulty.”

Darius admitted that he was far less knowledgeable about the Calamity, its effects, and even other worlds compared with Lyra or, distressingly, even Company Al-Mir. However, he had been present for Arkk’s most recent exchange with Lyra. They used a parable of a dam breaking to illustrate their opinions on the subject. They had been concerned about the dam breaking or the dam eventually overflowing even if built properly.

His concern was that three people had apparently been all that was holding back an apocalypse. “She would reconstruct the barrier using only two avatars?”

“Ideally, Agnete and I would have a far less antagonistic relationship than the relations I held with my former contemporaries,” Lyra said with a smile.

Darius considered, a frown creeping across his face. “This relies on the Burning Forge granting Agnete some measure of immortality. Even then, it sounds worse than the previous solution. An apocalypse held back by three individuals has far too many failure points. Two is unpalatable, in my opinion.”

“Certainly a factor to consider,” Lyra said. Her tone of voice likely meant she was already factoring it into her ideas.

“What of your predecessor’s predecessor? You have some manner of collective gestalt in your head. Why not vote on it?”

“First of all, I am an individual,” Lyra said with a glare. “I’m looking at matters with a different perspective, not literally communing with the dead. Second, all their memories are tinged through the lens of my predecessor. I didn’t know any of them and have no references beyond my predecessor’s memories. It might be possible to look at things from their perspective, but I feel that is more of an academic possibility than a practical one.”

“Fair enough,” Darius said, not wanting to offend the avatar further. “I suppose the real question, then, is what is your opinion?”

Lyra hummed, still stirring the water. A rapid series of lights pulsed in its basin, but she didn’t give voice to any of the commentary. Instead, she pulled her finger from the water, flicked the droplets off, and slowly lifted herself from the desk, sitting on its edge. She didn’t speak for a long moment. Her silvery eyes, illuminated slightly, stared at him for several long minutes.

Darius shifted, placing a bit more weight than he should have on his bad leg, and promptly shifted back. “Lyra?”

Lyra drew in a deep breath, held it, and then let it out slowly. “My perspective on the situation is… complex. If there is a possibility for a solution that does not involve two people desperately holding the gate closed while an ever-increasing weight presses against it, I would be all for it. The problem is that we don’t know if it will work. Or how long it will take to implement…

“Or whether it is a good idea to funnel mass amounts of magic straight into the maws of waiting demons.”

 

 

“Found you,” Arkk murmured.

It wasn’t a big thing. A small sliver of a wall going missing. Perhaps the length of his hand and the width of a finger. But Fortress Al-Mir’s Heart was incredibly sensitive to any disruptions. Any damage to its structure set off alarm bells in the back of Arkk’s mind. Alarm bells were currently tolling in one of the vertical shafts blocking the way forward.

Arkk teleported to the shaft, standing on a small grate made specifically to prevent anyone from moving up and down the shafts. Lesser servants were already there, burrowing small holes through the shaft’s walls, digging into a vacancy on the other side. Kia, Claire, and Agnete were primed and ready, anticipating a teleport at any moment. The two dark elves were quite eager for revenge.

Arkk just needed to make an opportunity.

With the Empress outside the fortress proper, it wasn’t an easy task. If he hadn’t tried to kill her with the trap room, he likely would have had a solution by now. Even if that solution was a slow death from starvation in the Maze of Infinite Paths. Her being in her own little tunnel was an inconvenience, although he did have to thank her. With her in there, he had a little more time to plan rather than try rash things like his earlier attempt that got six of his orcs detained.

An idle part of his mind wondered if he could visit the temple and make a plea to the Jailer of the Void for their release, assuming detained meant what it sounded like and wasn’t just Tybalt’s euphemism for obliterated.

He would try that later. Once the danger passed.

Once this Empress was in the ground for good.

There was a cavern on the other side of the wall. His servants swarmed through it, searching. Despite the alarms having tolled only seconds ago, there was no sign of the Empress within.

Which was concerning. When he had initially ordered the shaft construction, it had been a defensive action. Insurance to make sure that the Empress couldn’t reach the Heart just by popping up beneath it. But upon later thought, and a brief meeting with Rekk’ar, they realized that the Empress would likely be surprised to dig through what she expected to be dirt only to suddenly find herself back in the fortress.

Arkk had planned on capitalizing on that brief moment of surprise.

But she wasn’t here… and the hair on Arkk’s arms was tingling.

Arkk teleported.

A void swallowed the ledge he had been standing on an instant later.

“Did you find her?” Agnete asked, standing with flames coiling around her bare arms. She was ready to fight at any moment.

Kia and Claire stood in the ready room as well, the latter looking stormy after her collapse. It was good she was back on her feet for this. In the future, he would have to find a solution for them—a magic-filled amulet that would keep them active when the Heart couldn’t or when something threatened to disrupt their connection. They both had swords in their hands, gripped lightly. They all had been waiting for a teleport, not for Arkk to teleport to them.

He shook his head, scowling. “My trap for her turned into a trap for me,” he said, trying to sense the level of damage. Had the Empress slipped through to the inner part? Past the vertical shafts? Lesser servants had dug out a second layer of shafts a little closer to the Heart, just in case he somehow missed her here.

Lesser servants swarmed over the area, scouring up and down the vertical shafts in the first layer. The Empress had to be nearby. There was no sign of loosened, collapsed tunneling in the area between the shaft layers. Arkk directed the lesser servants to seal the opening off immediately. Other servants in the outer section were claiming territory in the cavernous area as fast as possible.

One touched something. It felt something that should have been emptiness.

“Ready!” Arkk shouted, the only warning his specialists got.

Kia and Claire teleported near each other, arriving the moment the servant claimed the land in his name.

They immediately split apart, their bodies reaching out with dozens if not hundreds of afterimages. Each ghostly silhouette sliced through the air in a different direction, intent on leaving not a single space larger than a kitten untouched by their power.

A spurt of blood flew through the air as Claire’s blade sliced through an empty spot. All the afterimages immediately shifted, some collapsing back into their parent forms, the rest all swinging toward the spot Claire struck.

A bright flash filled Arkk’s vision. Without hesitation, without even being able to see, he teleported Kia and Claire back.

He mentally blinked away the blindness.

The Empress was there, standing tall in her black, militaristic attire. She was closer to the shaft now than she had been, but she was facing the spot where she and the dark elves had just been standing.

A black void now encompassed that area. It collapsed down to nothing, taking part of the wall, floor, and a lesser servant with it.

“I got her,” Claire hissed. “I felt it. Felt her blood.”

“She doesn’t even look injured,” Arkk said, scowling at the Empress. All her other abilities left him unsurprised that she could heal as well. “Sending you back.” They reappeared next to the now-visible Empress. “Agnete, going to pop you behind her the moment she tel—now!”

Kia and Claire were back as a flash of light filled Arkk’s vision.

Heat and flame flooded the small cavern off the shaft. Agnete didn’t bother trying to hit the woman precisely. She simply unleashed everything she had. Warning bells went off as the fire started eating at the reinforcement magic of the fortress, but Arkk put them out of his mind.

He hadn’t seen where the Empress teleported to. He didn’t think it mattered with what Agnete was doing.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t see through the flames. Even using his link to directly observe Agnete, she was so wreathed in fire that nothing else was visible. Nothing except a sudden flash that washed out the flames.

Arkk teleported her out the moment after noticing the flash, sending her to one of the deeper level rooms to avoid a sudden rush of fire incinerating anyone else. He couldn’t risk leaving her near the Empress for any length of time. Not while he couldn’t see what she was up to.

He couldn’t allow Agnete to be detained.

Lesser servants returned to the tunnel. A few died in the heat haze of the air, but the few seconds Agnete had been there weren’t enough to truly turn the cavern into a furnace. Some started reclaiming land destroyed by the fire. The rest surged through with no gap between them, searching for anyone invisible.

In the meantime, Agnete had lowered her flames. He teleported her back alongside Kia and Claire.

“Did you feel her in the fire?” Arkk asked.

Agnete slowly shook her head. “I can tell when the flames curl and wrap around bodies. There was something like that, but only for a moment.”

“She must have teleported again the moment you arrived. I don’t suppose it is too much to hope for that your flames caught her on fire and are now eating her despite her teleport?”

“Couldn’t say.”

“I have to assume no then,” Arkk said with a frown as the lesser servants reclaimed the cavern.

There was no invisible woman inside, as far as he could tell. She must have teleported just out of reach. Not in the shaft. The grates were still in place. Her teleportation was too blinding to manage to teleport up the shaft without notice. Unless she could render the flash unseeable as she could herself. Still, there were solid walls and doors in the way.

If she could teleport through them without revealing herself, Arkk felt like she would have done so a long time ago. Her teleport must require line of sight—or else was otherwise limited. She had never teleported more than a few steps away from her position.

“Back to the cat-and-mouse game,” Arkk said as he scowled in concentration.

It was getting irritating. But the mouse was running out of places to scurry.

Any little slip-up could be a clue to her location. Movement of dust and dirt, a shift in light, obviously any attack on the fortress or servants.

“If possible, aim for her head,” Arkk said as he scanned the corridors, halls, and newly claimed territory in the cavern.

“Oh yeah, sure. Aim for the invisible bitch’s head,” Kia said with a frustrated sneer.

“If possible,” Arkk stressed. “I think I’ve got her. Ready…”

The cavern wasn’t the entirety of the tunnel. One of the lesser servants, boring small exploratory holes, found another pocket of air just on the other side of a thick dirt wall. The Empress reached over and crushed the servant with her bare hand before it could claim any territory.

“Hold,” he said, redirecting all available servants to swarm into the new air gap.

The Empress couldn’t kill every servant. Not without magic. Even then, she had to be wearing thin. The Heart of Gold’s avatar hadn’t been able to use his full strength repeatedly. Of course, the Heart of Gold’s avatar could have blasted a hole straight from the bomb room to the Heart. He had already shown that he could bore a hole through a mountain with one of those blasts.

Was the Empress not as strong? Or was she deliberately restraining herself?

The latter being possible only made Arkk want to end this immediately, before she did anything else.

When the Empress stopped killing his servants, drawing in on herself with her eyes closed, Arkk almost teleported all of them straight into the chamber.

A little niggle in the back of his mind was the only thing that saved them from an explosion of air that spread out, flinging lesser servants against the walls with enough force to render them little more than smears.

The Empress, in addition to fine black attire, wore one unusual piece. A halo that hovered just behind her head. It bore nine sharp blades made from gold, arranged around the ring in the same manner as the Eternal Empire’s banner. It, along with the golden glove she wore around on her right hand, was the only bit of color she had on her. Everything else was black or white.

Except three of the nine spikes weren’t gold anymore. They had tarnished, withered, and lost their luster. Another withered and tarnished as she continued with her wind spell. It started ripping apart the freshly claimed tiles, ignoring the magical reinforcement of the fortress. Dirt and rock tore apart and the small holes the servants had been using to invade the space widened and split as more and more wind rushed through.

Storage for magic? Or spells? Something akin to glowstones that let her use stronger magic? If she needed such an aid, perhaps she really wasn’t on the level of Agnete or the Heart of Gold’s avatar.

Not that it helped the lesser servants. They couldn’t stand against the gale. The wind liquefied their already amorphous bodies, splattering them against walls and floors before the walls and floors ripped off the ground. Bits of the newly claimed chamber—and the cavernous chamber adjacent to the shafts—lost their connection to the fortress. The servants joined with the wreckage, moving away from the woman in the only direction they could.

Up the shafts, tearing out metal grates as they rushed past.

The Empress drew her hands together, taking in a deep breath as she opened her eyes. Without hesitation, without looking around to see the result of her magic, she immediately started moving forward once more. With the shaft cleared out, she simply looked upward and jumped.

“Acceleratæ,” Arkk said, casting a haste spell on Claire.

The moment the Empress touched down on the upper level, Claire teleported beside her.

“Acceleratæ,” Arkk said again, repeating the spell on Kia.

He could feel the drain on the Heart. After their enhancements, both were a drain on the Heart rather than a boost for the same reason as their collapse after the demon tricked them into snapping the link. Two wasn’t a problem normally. With the acceleration spell on them, it was like having a hundred employees of their abilities.

Arkk could handle it. For now. He wouldn’t be able to maintain two spells for any length of time. But he didn’t need a great deal of time, just enough time to stab an Empress.

Watching Claire, he couldn’t even track her movements, nor the movements of her afterimages. She struck at the Empress from a hundred different angles at the same time.

Even with the haste spell, he fully expected the Empress to teleport before she could take real damage.

He did not expect her to reach out and grab Claire by her wrist. The moment she made contact, all the afterimages collapsed back into one, leaving Claire with a dagger aimed directly at the Empress’ face but unable to move.

As the Empress reached her other hand out toward Claire’s face, Arkk teleported Kia in on the opposite side.

“Acceleratæ,” Arkk said one more time.

Accelerating Agnete didn’t drain him much at all. Presumably, because most of her power came from the Burning Forge, not from the contract with his Heart.

Kia, much like Claire, split into a multitude of possibilities. With her haste spell, she must have guessed at what happened to Claire. As the Empress switched from reaching toward Claire’s face to extending a hand to block Kia’s attack, the afterimages snaked away, slipping just out of her grasp. The Empress swept her hand backward, striking another afterimage just before a blade could go through the side of her head.

The contact collapsed the afterimages into one point, leaving Kia stumbling slightly from the force of the blow.

Claire didn’t remain idle. Having their afterimages disrupted like that seemed to startle them but, with a flick of her captured wrist, Claire flung her blade straight toward the Empress’ face. Her other hand swung out, grasping a shorter dagger that she pulled off her belt.

She still wasn’t splitting into her afterimages.

“The others will be present,” Arkk said to Agnete as the Empress simply tilted her head, dodging one blade completely and taking nothing more than a slight cut from the flung sword. He did not want any accidents when she went in. “Kill the Empress if possible. Free Claire if not.”

Arkk teleported her before she nodded her head.

Agnete appeared directly in front of the Empress. She didn’t hesitate. Her fist slammed into the Empress, hitting her sternum hard enough to crack steel, while her other hand swept down, striking the arm that held Claire. The flames followed both, swirling around Agnete’s arms and into the Empress. Arkk could see her skin blacken and peel apart.

He saw it until a bright flash filled his vision.

Arkk teleported all three out.

No void appeared where the Empress had been. She hadn’t even moved. All injuries, from the minor cut on her cheek to the gaping wound in her chest, were healed. Rather, her clothes had healed. One more of her halo’s daggers was tarnished. They were wearing her down, but could they exhaust the remainder of those daggers without her either reaching the Heart or killing one of them?

Or could they get rid of it more directly?

The Empress didn’t look around. Back in the upper hallways, she started walking again. There was a slight change to her previous actions. Again, she started detaining anything in her path, cutting out large parts of walls, doors, and even furniture in the rooms she was charging through. As she did so, Arkk watched one of the daggers, formerly withered, start to regain its luster.

Either detaining the surrounding environment charged them up or simple time passage fixed them. Exhausting them just became less realistic of a goal.

Arkk had half a mind to go back to the Maze of Infinite Paths idea again, but he wasn’t sure there was time to implement it now. The Empress was past the first vertical shaft. She wouldn’t have far to go before she reached the second shaft Arkk had dug.

After that, the Heart.

“Ready to move,” Arkk said, watching the way the Empress moved. He could see the tension in her shoulders, the way she flicked her eyes around, watching for another teleport. He had little doubt that she was ready for another teleport attack.

So he watched and waited.

“Acceleratæ,” casting the spell on himself.

That was a drain.

“Kia. Swing, mid-level. Left to right. Claire high-level. Right to left. Agnete, relieve her of her halo. Ready…” Arkk held his hand.

“Electro Deus.”

Arkk teleported all four of them. Him directly in the front, already slinging a lightning bolt. Kia and Claire on the left and right side of the Empress respectively. Agnete in the back.

Kia and Claire’s blades both came from the front. The Empress caught Arkk’s lightning bolt with her golden glove. She swiftly transitioned into blocking Claire’s sword with her glove, like she was about to catch it, and slipping to the side, letting Kia’s multitude of afterimages all just barely miss.

Arkk swapped Kia and Claire even as he threw another lightning bolt.

Kia and Claire’s swords came from the rear, still swinging from before their teleport, barely avoiding Agnete. If they hadn’t been in mid-swing, they would have sliced the purifier to pieces.

Instead, Kia’s sword dug deep into the back of the Empress. Claire’s sword clipped just beneath the halo, slicing through her neck.

Even with that, even with the blade passing straight through her neck, the expression on the Empress’ face remained neutral. No surprise. No pain.

Not until Agnete’s fingers closed around the halo. A faint light flashed from one of the daggers, but her burning hands were already destroying the artifact. The gold ran molten, dripping between her fingers in an intense glow. The ring folded in half as the blades, both tarnished and golden, fell as if they had been held in place by willpower alone.

The Empress’ eyes widened ever so slightly. The luminous white glow within flickered.

Her head hit the ground with a thump. The rest of her body collapsed on top. Kia and Claire’s multitudes sliced into the body, cutting it to pieces, while Agnete continued melting away the halo.

Arkk stared, waiting, expecting one final trick.

The Empress remained in a heap, blood running thick across the tiles of Fortress Al-Mir.

 

 

As Ilya stepped into the main chamber of the palace, her eyes were immediately drawn to the intricate patterns adorning the vaulted ceilings. Dozens of small tiles formed large, decorative circles and waves with swirling motifs of gold. The room was vast and wealthy. Rich tapestries hung from the walls, each telling the tale of Evestani victories and prosperity in golden thread, now overshadowed by the banners of the Greater Kingdom of Chernlock. A faint scent of incense lingered in the air, barely overpowering the stench of sweat.

Hawkwood moved alongside her while the two commanders for the King’s army and the Prince’s army were already present. Rows of soldiers stood along the walls, all standing at attention. They looked more ceremonial than proper soldiers were, dressed in polished armor that gleamed in the golden light of the chandeliers. Each stood before the recently erected banners of the Greater Kingdom of Chernlock.

At the center of the room, Sultan Sule sat with regal defiance, his iron chains sticking out against the fine cloths and opulent chamber. Heavy iron balls attached to the chains sat on the floor, forcing him to remain seated. His legs, his arms, his neck, all were locked in place and light runes etched into the chains sapped any magic he might have had. It was a bit excessive, in Ilya’s opinion. Like they thought he was going to sprout wings and reveal himself a dragonoid.

Despite the defeat lining the wrinkles of his face, his eyes bore the fire of a ruler. He stared dead ahead, determined. Determined for what, Ilya couldn’t say, but perhaps the chains were necessary after all.

Some of that determination slipped to surprise. His eyes widened upon seeing Ilya.

“Alya?”

“Her daughter,” Ilya said after a moment of staring.

“That’s the first thing he’s said since we found him,” Hawkwood whispered. “He just accepted the chains with outstretched hands and then sat down.”

“To be fair,” said Sydney, commander of the Chernlock portion of their combined army, “we have been a bit busy securing the city to spend time interrogating the man.”

“That will change shortly,” the Vaales commander said without a pinch of mercy in his tone. Ilya still didn’t know his name. He stood, staring relentlessly at the sultan, fists clenched as if the man had personally offended him.

Maybe he had. Maybe the commander just wanted the location of the treasury out of him. The heart of the golden city surely held vast stores somewhere. Or maybe he was more practical, wanting the locations of any commanders, soldiers, anyone who might put up a resistance, and other elements along those lines. Ilya didn’t particularly care. The man had invaded her lands, had almost killed her with his assassins at the Duke’s party, and had sentenced his entire nation to future occupancy and likely annexation by the Kingdom of Chernlock with his defeat.

But she was curious about one thing.

“My mother told me about you. She said you were a good man. Someone who wanted to do right by his people. Someone interested in peace even despite the history of conflict between us.” Ilya squatted down in front of the sultan, putting her on almost the same level. Her elvish height still had her a head above him. “Why the war?”

Sule drew in a heavy breath. More of that defiance in his eyes slipped away, this time replaced by sorrow. “When your god comes knocking, you don’t say no.”

Ilya frowned, disappointed. She had never met a god. Arkk had; Agnete had. Neither had particularly good things to say about them. In the short time between Agnete’s return and Ilya moving to the spire, she had heard Agnete’s… complaints. The god of creation, fabrication, and creativity was surprisingly rigid, focused entirely on THEIR machines and THEIR concepts to the point where Agnete had effectively been a prisoner, forced to fabricate more of those machines that made up the Anvil’s population.

Arkk, on the other hand, had a personal audience with Xel’atriss, Lock and Key. While he had been awed by the situation, he had confessed disillusionment as well. Xel’atriss was someone who, he was certain, could have resolved all issues with the Calamity with an absent thought. Yet THEY didn’t. THEY had THEIR agenda or focuses and couldn’t spare more than a thought toward the world down below.

She doubted either would have had trouble saying no to a god. Agnete effectively had said no with her return to this plane.

It was even worse when she realized that Sule likely had never met a god. From their interrogations of captured Evestani, she was aware that they referred to the avatar as their god. He was no god; just a man with enough power to make his eyes glow.

Standing, Ilya turned to the three commanders. “I am leaving,” she said, no longer interested in Sule or whatever fate the commanders had in mind for him. “I am returning to Mystakeen.”

“So soon?” Hawkwood said. “I thought you were going to stay for a time and ensure the city was secure.”

“The sultan and palace are secure. The garrison has been disarmed. We have secured the city. You have enough forces here to keep it secure, at least until the other detachments of your armies arrive,” Ilya said with a small nod toward the two commanders. “I have done my part. I am needed elsewhere.”

Fortress Al-Mir was under attack. It had been for a while now. Arkk had done something when she took control of the spire’s Heart, something that allowed her to see into his territory. She couldn’t move about his minions, but she could still see.

She saw a lot of damage.

He hadn’t tugged on the link between them. He hadn’t called her back. It rankled somewhat. The spire wouldn’t be able to get there in any appreciable timeframe—both of them knew that—but to be left ignored like she couldn’t help at all… Why had she even accepted the Heart in the first place if she wasn’t going to be useful with it?

There was use in capturing Evestani, but even then, Arkk had done most of the work in ridding the world of the avatar. Ilya just had to mop up the mess left behind.

Hawkwood and the other commanders could have handled it on their own, even if it would have taken longer and, likely, spilled more blood on both sides of the sword.

The tower now outside Elmshadow wasn’t wholly safe. From the area around it that Arkk had claimed, she knew there was still an army of the Eternal Empire outside, even if their numbers had been reduced. They weren’t invading the tower—they likely didn’t realize that most of the defenders had returned to Al-Mir—but that might not hold out forever. Ilya could get to the tower in a fraction of the time it would take to get across Mystakeen to the Cursed Forest.

She could at least help there.

“You turned what might have ended up a multi-month siege into twenty-four hours of work,” Sydney said, stepping forward to shake Ilya’s hand. “On behalf of King Lafoar, and the men whose lives you saved through your tower, thank you.”

Ilya wasn’t sure what to say to that. Her mother would likely have come up with a long diplomatic response, preaching about aiding one another in times of strife, maybe some words about going easy on the people of Evestani since they had already lost enough in this war.

Ilya simply nodded her head before turning away. “Good luck,” she said, shaking Hawkwood’s hand as well.

She didn’t bother offering her hand to the Vaales commander.

Before anyone could stop her with more questions or comments, she teleported across the city straight back to the spire. That was something she wouldn’t get tired of soon. She could be anywhere that was hers. She was anywhere that was hers, all she had to do was materialize. With her constant awareness of everything inside her territory, which was depressingly limited to just the spire—for now—she saw no real distinction between the two ideas. She was her territory.

Ilya wasn’t sure what Arkk thought of it. They hadn’t had time for lengthy, philosophical discussions on the nature of the Hearts or towers. From what he had spoken of, she was fairly certain that he still saw himself as himself. Ilya did as well, to an extent, but it was more like the spire was simply part of her. A new limb that she could flex as easily as her own arm.

With her constant awareness, she did a quick headcount. Arkk had loaned her several people who weren’t directly connected to her. She didn’t want to leave any behind in the city if possible. The order had gone out before she left to inform the commanders of her departure, so she was pleased to see that all had returned.

Except one person.

Ilya turned to Olatt’an with a small frown. “Do you know where Vezta is? I can’t find her in the spire.”

The old orc hummed, wrinkled face frowning as he turned to look around the command chambers as if he were only now noticing the monstrous woman’s absence.

“I’ll take that as a no,” Ilya said with a scowl. Vezta should have been here. She had been here when Ilya gave the order to rally up inside the spire.

“She knows instinctively how to make teleportation rituals,” Olatt’an said with an unconcerned shrug. “She’ll catch up.”

“I’m more worried about what kind of trouble she’s getting up to…”

But Olatt’an was right. And Arkk would know where she was. Ilya couldn’t tap into his minions, so there wasn’t much she could do about it unless she wanted to go out and scour the city.

It was much too large to find a single individual, even one as distinctive as Vezta.

“We’re setting off for Mystakeen,” Ilya said. “I hope we make it in time to help.”

Dakka marched across the land, clad in fresh shadow armor. Not everyone among her crew was so lucky. Plenty were making do with metal armor and weapons. Even she carried her old battle axe, just in case she needed the certainty of steel.

Two hundred orcs marched with her. Lyssa’s Shieldbreakers walked ahead of the orcs. Richter’s army of mostly humans filled out the flanks. Battlecasters followed behind, safely away from the front lines while they prepared and cast their magics. Two Protectors lumbered along, taller than much of the army. Gorgon slithered forward, syrens and harpies flew overhead, war machines jittered and shook as they trudged along, and Priscilla took the vanguard position despite her unhealed injuries.

Lelith’s bombardment team hammered those carracks and caravels into pieces the moment they sailed into range of the Cursed Forest. Now it was their turn to mop up what was left.

They didn’t have exact numbers. Originally, the Empire’s forces marching across Mystakeen with Evestani had been estimated to number between six and eight thousand. Two of those thousand remained in Woodly Rhyme and had fought at the tower. But four to six thousand seemed like a lot to fit on the mere four ships sailing up the swollen river. When magic was at play, common sense like that couldn’t quite be relied upon.

For all she knew, the insides of those ships were larger than their outsides. That seemed like something Zullie would have been able to accomplish.

Dakka almost hoped it was true, if only because they had dropped those magic-eating worms on the ships. What would happen when a larger-than-normal space lost its enchantments and suddenly reverted back to normal size while still holding too many people?

The thought had her grinning.

Still, she hoped some survived.

She needed something to take her frustrations out on.

“Good evening, Katja my dear. And how are you this fine day?”

Katja, elbow on the table, pressed a finger against her brow to keep steady a twitching muscle at the corner of her eye. She glared at Edvin, not bothering to don any expression more diplomatic than a glower. “Why are you here? I thought you got reassigned.”

“Now don’t be like that,” Edvin said, casually sliding into the seat on the opposite side of Katja’s desk in the office the Prince had deigned to give her.

Things had been going fairly well as of late. Ever since Mags left, her immaculate knowledge of the goings-on of Mystakeen made her effectively the chief advisor. Even if it wasn’t an official position, Cedric turned to her, and her words carried weight.

“Can I not visit old friends?”

“You don’t have friends,” Katja said. “You have allies of convenience who will cease to be allies the moment it isn’t convenient.”

“Isn’t the same true for you?” he asked, his tone lacking that friendly cheer that he so often kept up when trying to kiss someone’s ass. His stare lasted only a moment before he smiled once again. “But you’re right. I am here on business. Arkk is quite a busy man but he was able to take a second out of his conflict to send news both good and better.”

“No bad news?”

“Not for the Prince’s ears.”

Katja nodded in understanding. She opened a small notebook, dipped the golden tip of her pen in a small pool of ink, and waited.

“First, the best news: Through the combined efforts of Company Al-Mir, White Company, the noble armies of Chernlock, and the noble armies of Vaales, Evestani’s palace now flies the banner of the Greater Kingdom.”

“So soon?” Katja said, surprised. She knew of the multiple armies stationed on the border, waiting for the opportune moment to advance into Evestani and take back a pound of flesh, but last she heard, two days prior, they had only just started moving out. Even disregarding the time taken to advance across the land, she expected a siege to take place, one that would last for weeks, months, or even years depending on what kind of storehouses the capital might hold.

Edvin simply smiled. “Arkk,” he said.

As if that explained everything.

With a shake of her head, Katja marked down the note. Not that she thought she would forget.

“Very well. Then you had good news?”

“Quite. Evestani’s avatar is no longer among the living and the Evestani army within Mystakeen has surrendered,” Edvin said, only to pause and shift in discomfort. “What’s left of them, anyway. I saw a bit more of that fight than I really wanted while snooping about one of the scrying teams. The Prince’s little demon ripped them a new one and then some.”

Katja stiffened, her pen producing an ugly scratch in a line of otherwise pristine writing.

“Ah. Right. That’s the bad news,” Edvin said, noticing her jitter. “The demon has fallen.”

“Fallen?” Katja didn’t like that ambiguous term. “How so?”

“Literally. It fell out of the sky.”

Katja’s lips pressed into a thin line.

“Then it died during a battle between Arkk and the Eternal Empress—also an avatar, it turns out.”

“Dead?” she asked, just to make sure Edvin wasn’t playing more word games.

“The demon is no more. Whether those beings can be killed is a question for the philosophers of the Abbey, not for me.”

Katja let out a small sigh, relieved. Then, she remembered one of many, many contingencies that she and Arkk had come up with. One in particular, if they confirmed the death of the demon… She leaned in close. They knew the Prince likely had ways of spying on her. Scrying, perhaps. Maybe just someone sitting inside a secret passage in the walls, listening in.

She didn’t need to voice her question. She had worked with Edvin enough that he knew the expression on her face.

“It is unfortunate,” he said, tone neutral, “but it is what it is. Anyway, Arkk believes Prince Cedric will wish to venture to Evestani to assimilate the land and people. I’m sure they’ll meet and discuss such matters eventually and, if the Prince doesn’t wish to go, will come up with other plans to move forward.”

Katja leaned back, marking a few more notes down.

No assassination then. Not yet, at least, but it might be on the table if Prince Cedric didn’t get out of her territory.

“Such a meeting will have to be delayed, however. There is still ongoing fighting within Mystakeen. I have full faith in Arkk that he will settle matters soon enough. He simply wished that the Prince receive a progress report.”

Katja couldn’t help but scoff. Of course Arkk would manage. If Edvin wasn’t embellishing on the capture of Evestani’s capital—something that wouldn’t surprise Katja in the slightest—what couldn’t he manage?

“Very well. I’ll update Cedric,” she said, placing her pen on a small rest.

Cedric wouldn’t leave for Evestani today, but his days in Mystakeen were certainly numbered. One way or another. Finally, Katja would be back in power.

For so long as Arkk suffered her rule.

Katja would just have to make sure her rule didn’t cause him suffering.

 

 

Watching Agnete work was something of a wonder for Arkk. Without even a slight incantation, a wall of flame moved forward. The dust and debris in the collapsed rooms burned away completely. Stone walls, scorched first by the explosion, blackened completely as the fire swept through. The air cleared up with the dust burned away, allowing them to see into the trapped rooms.

Arkk stood well back from Agnete and was still overheating. A spell Priscilla taught him was helping a little, but not enough. He would have to move even further back if he wanted to stick around for any length of time. Which was something he was loathe to do. If that avatar popped out of the smoke and fire and attacked, he would react much faster if he could see it up close.

As the flames continued burning, he started feeling a strange rush of air from his back. It began with nothing notable at first, but as the flames continued burning, the intensity of the air rushing past him increased. Eyes widening, he teleported both of them away. Wind control was a demonstrated power of the Eternal Empress.

“What’s wrong?” Agnete asked, tense as she looked around the much smaller room.

“Did you not feel that air?”

Agnete frowned, stretching her face enough for the molten metal in her veins to brighten the faint cracks in her skin. “Was it too hot? I apologize.”

“No,” Arkk said, focusing on the edges of the territory, searching for any sign of movement. He couldn’t see too far inside. “It was moving. A rush of air.”

“Ah. No, I don’t think that is a problem.” Agnete brought up a small flame in the palm of her hand. She waved her other hand over the top of it, feeling the air. “I don’t know the full mechanics, but hot air rises above the flame. That air has to come from somewhere. A small flame like this won’t do much—it draws in air from all around, using too much space to be noticeable. But that room only has one real entrance, the one we were standing in, so all the air must come from the hall.”

“I haven’t noticed that effect before…”

“I don’t think I’ve burned such a large area in such an enclosed space before, at least not with you at my side,” Agnete said with a simple smile. “Shall we return? If I notice anything truly wrong with the air, I will alert you immediately.”

Arkk pursed his lips. In lieu of an answer, he teleported them both back to the hallway outside the formerly trapped chamber. He stood much closer to Agnete now, though he still gave her plenty of space. Hopefully, the flames starting their real burn further into the room beyond would spare him some of the heat he would no doubt be feeling.

In their absence, the flames had died out, filling the room and part of the hall with smoke. It was a bit thinner than before, at least in the hall, but still blocked out most of the room beyond. Arkk had to breathe through a damp cloth pressed up against his mouth just to avoid choking.

Agnete clapped her hands together. As she pushed outward, a gout of flame erupted, rocketing forward as if a dragon breathed. It filled the space, stretching from one crumpled wall to the other. With a wave of Agnete’s hands, it began advancing through the room, burning everything away once more.

That wind started up again. Maybe he had noticed something similar happening around Agnete in the past, maybe not. Either way, he likely would have dismissed it as nothing too unusual. It was only because the avatar utilized wind that he was paying extra attention to it now.

After a short few moments, Agnete began advancing into the room. Arkk couldn’t follow. The floor was glowing from the heat. Some smaller parts that stuck out, odd bits of debris and larger chunks of rock and earth, melted completely, turning into a thick liquid that flowed over the ground, almost managing to smooth it back out.

Of course, the ground itself was down a bit of a drop from the rest of this level of Fortress Al-Mir. With the clay bombs having been planted beneath a false floor, that false floor had been utterly destroyed. That alone caused a small dip, but then the bombs went ahead and blasted out a fair portion of the actual floor as well.

Agnete hopped down off the ledge, leaving his territory. He could pull her back at any moment and could see her through his employee link, but a deep disquiet filled Arkk’s chest as he watched her walk through the molten room that no longer counted as his territory. The very second the air turned from scalding to uncomfortable, a lesser servant would reclaim the entire place.

Perhaps sooner, if the cold spell he used on himself would work without freezing the tar-like mucous that made up servant bodies.

For now, he watched with bated breath, hoping to see that avatar once again, but this time down on the ground. The flames Agnete was using were intensely hot, but they wouldn’t render a human body to ashes in an instant. It would take time. Unless, of course, that human body had been rendered little more than a pink mist sprayed across the walls and debris. That was also a possibility.

Arkk still didn’t believe it. She could have escaped through some other means. Perhaps she had protected herself from the blast and used the opening it made in the ceiling to return to the surface. Arkk had the entire Cursed Forest claimed, but his omniscience wasn’t complete. The avatar was replicating powers granted by other gods. If Lexa, wearing a garment from the Cloak of Shadows, could slip through his fortress in a way that Arkk could only notice through his employee link, it was entirely possible that the avatar could do so unnoticed. She already had demonstrated the ability to render her flying ships invisible—though Arkk still believed that the demon had destroyed whatever was causing that effect, just to force them into the open and force the fight.

Arkk hoped that her being invisible wasn’t the case. The avatar, from what Arkk had seen, wasn’t one to trend toward subtle actions. She blasted apart walls and stalked forward on a relentless march.

Even if she was sneaking around, she wouldn’t be able to progress to the Heart. Not without destroying several doors or walls, which would instantly alert Arkk to her presence.

About halfway through the destruction, Agnete paused. She crouched down, leaving the wall of flames to continue forward on its own. “Arkk,” she called out after a moment. “You should see this.”

“Easier said than done,” Arkk grumbled. Checking that Priscilla wasn’t busy with eggs or anything else at the moment, he teleported the dragonoid to his side.

She immediately hissed, pulling back away from the heat. He watched her jaw unhinge and widen.

Arkk had barely a second to teleport away before a freezing blast of ice and cold chased after the flames in the destroyed rooms. He waited a long moment, tapping his foot on the ground with his arms crossed. Impatience egged him on, but he had to wait. Just a little longer. Priscilla’s wave of cold finally petered out. That was his signal to return.

“Thank you, Priscilla,” he said as he teleported back to her side.

“What—”

Arkk sent her away to deal with one more egg. She was too injured to assist with this anyway. Lacking a wing and an arm, the avatar would make quick work of her.

Rather than a layer of snow and ice, the destroyed section of the fortress was simply wet. The air went from dry to humid—enough so that Arkk felt like he was walking into a swamp. It was still hot. A little more ice would have cooled it down, but it wasn’t blisteringly hot. He could stand walking into it.

As he moved forward, lesser servants trailed behind him, claiming the territory. None of them particularly enjoyed the heat, but they weren’t boiling to death either, all thanks to Priscilla.

The area immediately around Agnete was the only place still dry. “Some warning would have been nice,” she said as he stepped over a bit of unstable ground. Part of the ceiling was now on the floor, though the jagged edges had since melted off.

“If that was enough to harm you, then I have severely overestimated your abilities.”

Arkk might have been more concerned, but Agnete didn’t look bothered in the slightest. The rogue avatar was a far more pressing issue than a little humid air.

“Down here,” she said, hopping off a larger chunk of the roof. “We might have a problem.”

Agnete crouched down next to…

“A hole,” Arkk said with a heavy scowl. “She went underground?”

“Unless this hole was caused by your trap, it looks like it.”

“The traps were beneath the floor. The floor which has been entirely removed thanks to the explosion.” Arkk hummed a moment, staring. It wasn’t odd for the blast to have also traveled downward. A bit of a weaker spot of ground would have caved in. But the hole was just too… there. “Flood it with flames.”

Agnete shook her head, peering further down. “Looks like it has collapsed at some point just a few steps beyond the opening. Wouldn’t have even noticed it were it not for all the molten rock falling in. Even then, might have missed it if I had allowed the rock to cool without spotting the hole.”

With a quick incantation, another pair of servants appeared at Arkk’s side. One started eating away at the hole—Arkk was hoping only its entrance had collapsed, leaving a clear shot at the avatar beyond. The other started burrowing back into the room, digging deeper in a line directly between the hole and the fortress Heart.

Assuming that was still her goal, she could skirt between the layers of the fortress, only coming up when she reached the Heart.

That was… not good.

Every available servant in the fortress immediately began digging straight downward in a wide arc a fair distance from the Heart, claiming territory as they went. The avatar would have to break through those vertical shafts eventually if she wanted to get to the Heart. That would provide a warning. But with her underground, he couldn’t trap her path.

“Damnit,” Arkk hissed. He had been planning, despite the risks, to use the Maze of Infinite Paths again. If it succeeded, she would have been trapped. If it catastrophically failed, hopefully she would have been trapped in the Maze. Either way, a win for him.

Now, that solution was off the table.

“I’m surprised she survived,” Agnete said, frowning at the hole as the servant continued eating away at the disturbed dirt, trying to follow the path of the tunnel “I’ll be surprised if she can breathe down there.”

“She can manipulate air.”

“Manipulation doesn’t equate to creation. If she can’t create more air to breathe, she will eventually run out.”

That would have been a good thing, as she would have to surface in short order, but they didn’t know enough about how her powers worked. For all he knew, she could create air. Or she had drawn enough down there, compressed into a little ball, to slowly siphon off as she made her way forward. It was too much to hope for the avatar to have miscalculated and wind up suffocating. She wasn’t—couldn’t be that stupid.

The vertical shafts would act as a barrier. Once complete, he could scatter the lesser servants throughout, trying to find the tunnel or, if she was collapsing the entire thing as she went, any spots where the dirt was less compact.

A certain calm came over Arkk as he realized the full implications of what the avatar had done.

It was a good trick. He would give it that. Something he could have seen himself doing. Company Al-Mir had always been more about trickery, using the right people in the right places, and obscure magics rather than blunt force. Slipping between the layers of a fortress, delving into the most critical part of it, was inspired.

If he hadn’t noticed—or if Agnete hadn’t noticed—he might have celebrated their success a little too early, only to be caught off-guard when his Heart ended up detained right out from under his nose.

But he had noticed. He was deploying countermeasures. Arkk might not be able to lay traps in her path now, but he didn’t need to.

The avatar had trapped herself. Not completely, as she was obviously moving, but underground, forced to rely on her powers to progress, she now lacked complete freedom of movement. She could dig a hole to her left, right, up, down, or wherever, but that would take time and effort, even if just a little. She wouldn’t be able to use her teleport freely in a cramped space. He didn’t know the exact limitations of it, but if she could teleport any reasonable distance, she surely would have popped straight into the Heart chamber.

She had trapped herself.

“Finish burning away this whole place,” Arkk said. There was still a slight possibility that this tunnel was either designed to mislead or was simply a coincidental accident that came as a result of the explosion. He wasn’t willing to focus on it wholly until he knew that the avatar wasn’t just taking a casual stroll across the surface of the Cursed Forest while hidden from view.

Arkk stepped back well away from Agnete as the intensity of the flames increased tenfold, monitoring everything. The lesser servants in the ground were safe from the flames. The other lesser servants making the shaft barrier were still working to reach the second level of the fortress—he wasn’t quite sure just how deep he needed to go, but he could always dig deeper. No eggs had hit the fortress in the last few moments; maybe Sylvara and Hannah hit the whale ship or maybe it was just pausing between volleys.

There was no sign of the Empire army entering his territory. The worms may have delayed them or forced them to call off their assault entirely. Arkk would have to check in with the scrying team.

But he wasn’t yet willing to leave Agnete. Not until they were certain there were no surprises here. He couldn’t risk her being ambushed from behind the curtain of her own flames.

So he waited, impatient, eyes on Agnete while he waited in apprehensive dread for the inevitable tug across the link signifying some other disaster about to befall poor Fortress Al-Mir.

It never came.

The destruction of the rooms and adjacent corridors left the destroyed chunk of the fortress in a roughly oval shape. Very rough. But it made it easy to tell when they were nearing the end. The wall of flames began to shrink, narrowing down until the bulk of the far end was only about the size of a door. There were a few gaps in the oval, other rooms that had only been partially caught in the blast. Outside the doors blown off their hinges in the initial blast, none of the connecting passages had been damaged and most of those areas were still intact enough to be under Arkk’s control.

No doors within the connecting corridors had been breached.

The flames collapsed and Agnete turned to face Arkk. “Nothing,” she said. “I felt nothing unusual within the flames either, so she wasn’t sitting invisible in a corner of the room, bending the flames around her somehow. And you said that her teleportation produced a bright flash of light, so doubt she teleported from one side of the flames to the other.”

“Good. Do you believe there is merit to scouring the surface of the Cursed Forest?”

“The entire forest?” Agnete frowned. “That would take a great deal of time, even for me. I could sweep an area the size of this chamber in half the time so long as I don’t have to worry about people or burning through walls. You think the tunnel is a decoy?”

“No, but I like to be sure.”

If it had been a decoy, it would have been more noticeable than a small depression in an already deformed room.

“I could burn the surface. I doubt it would be conclusive. With the lead she would have if she were up there, catching her in flames is unlikely.”

“I’m going to send you up there anyway,” Arkk said. “Alone, for now, so feel free to go all out.” Sylvara and Hannah were well away. Neither were in their chairs anymore, nor was Who trying to adjust them. They must have succeeded. “If you sense anything amiss, tug on the link and I will teleport you to safety instantly, without even checking on what is going on.”

“Very well,” Agnete said.

With that, she was gone. Her flames would disrupt his claim over the surface territory, but if she accidentally caught a stray avatar in the mix, it would be a nice stroke of luck.

For now, Arkk had work to do.

That avatar was digging her own grave. Arkk just needed to ensure that she stayed there.

 

 

Primvila stretched her leathery wings wide, angling to catch an updraft. Normally, she enjoyed flying. As a syren, most people who lived on the ground didn’t take too kindly to her presence. Syren voices carried a certain type of magic that made their words more appealing to those who heard them sing. It was nowhere close to the mind magics that Savren got up to, yet people—humans especially—generally looked at her with ire and suspicion.

Humans didn’t fly. That meant she could stay in the air to her heart’s content without worrying over people. Even if they tried to attack her, they couldn’t reach. She could fly high above their heads, higher than their arrows could shoot, higher than their magic could reach, higher than they could even see considering her lithe form—not that humans ever looked up. She couldn’t quite reach as high as those ships that had been attacking, but humans didn’t normally have those kinds of things.

Normally, Primvila enjoyed flying. It was an escape. Freedom. Even the few times Arkk had asked her to scout some location, it became a nice chance to stretch her wings after long days in the tower or fortress. Humans in Company Al-Mir were more accepting of her, perhaps having grown used to working alongside gorgon and strange beings like the Protector, so she wasn’t so much looking for an escape. She just enjoyed flying.

Normally.

Normally, Primvila didn’t have a metal sphere the size of her head strapped to her chest. It wiggled and jostled on its own, occasionally throwing off her flight, as the things inside it squirmed and wiggled. If those worms were stronger than expected, if the metal was weaker than expected, if she accidentally bumped the small release lever while performing a maneuver, she could easily end up covered in worms. She didn’t know exactly what they were, but they were being used as a weapon. That alone was enough to make her wary.

She glanced off to one side. Her fellow syren, Igvile, flew in the distance, getting to stretch his wings after spending most of his time in the ritual rooms working the bombardment magics. He wasn’t particularly enthused with this plan either.

Three harpies were in the air as well. Primvila didn’t know what they thought. Despite both being winged species with humanoid bodies, harpies and syrens didn’t get along. Harpies liked to play up their friendliness, mingling with everyone, taking up jobs delivering letters and packages over long distances, and all manner of activities that syrens, simply through distrust, couldn’t participate in. Primvila was sure some individuals never felt that envy or jealousy and managed to get along. She was not one of them. There hadn’t been any conflicts among them within Company Al-Mir, but they didn’t seek each other out for company either.

Still, she doubted they were excited. Even if these metal spheres were perfectly safe, the worms were creepy enough on their own that nobody wanted to get too close. There was a whole subset of Arkk’s men who shuddered at the mere mention of wurms, former criminals, mostly.

The sooner they were done with this, the better.

And it looked like they would be done soon.

One of the lead harpies, Nora, if Primvila recalled correctly, let out a sharp screech that sounded like that of a hawk. Loathe as she was to admit it, harpies had sharper eyes.

In this case, it was likely that Nora had simply been paying more attention to their mission. As soon as Primvila turned her attention to the ground below, she easily spotted their targets.

Four warships traveled up the river, barely able to fit despite the swollen river being at its largest with all the snowmelt. Each proudly waved the black and white flag bearing nine swords of the Eternal Empire. As far as she understood the situation, the Eternal Empire’s remaining army, those who hadn’t been at Woodly Rhyme, were aboard the ships. With the river passing directly adjacent to the Cursed Forest, running right past Smilesville Burg and Langleey Village, they practically had a straight shot at the fortress.

Thus, they needed to be dealt with.

Thus, the worms.

Nora pulled her wings back, angling into a dive. Primvila, Igvile, and the others swiftly followed. Not knowing what kind of magical defenses the warships had, but certain they had something, Arkk had been very clear in his warnings against moving too close and staying too close. At the same time, to drop their worms on target, they had to get a little closer.

Her heart pounded in rhythm with each powerful stroke of her wings. The closer they got, the more intense the sense of urgency felt. The warships loomed larger, their flags rippling in the wind. The air roared past her ears as her world narrowed to the task at hand. Her mind raced through the instructions Arkk had drilled into them.

Approach fast. Release. Depart immediately. Do not linger.

She glanced to her side, catching a glimpse of Igvile. His face was set in determination.

As they neared the ships, Primvila’s eyes flicked over the deck, searching for any signs of activity or weapons trained skyward. It seemed quiet, almost eerily so, but she knew better than to trust appearances. Figures were moving about, but not in alarm. Like they were oblivious to the danger descending upon them.

Humans never looked up.

Nora’s screech cut through the air again, the signal to release. Her sphere fell away from her first, aimed perfectly toward the rearmost ship. The metal slats over the sphere retracted mid-way down. Hundreds of squirming, slimy worms filled the air, raining down upon the ship.

With a swift, practiced motion, Primvila followed suit. She bent her wing mid-flight and pulled the lever on her sphere. A loud ticking noise, audible even above the rushing wind, started immediately. The clasps on the harness holding it to her chest popped off, leaving the sphere dropping, spinning toward the deck below.

Primvila didn’t watch it hit. She angled up and to the side immediately, banking sharply to veer away from the ships.

Something hot streaked past her, singed her tail, and continued off into the distance. She immediately began taking evasive lines through the air, but after the third hot streak, all counterattacks cut off.

She chanced a glance over her shoulder. Igvile got away. All the harpies were away as well. And the boats…

With the growing distance, it was hard to see the individual worms. However, the men atop the ships, clearly in a panicked fight, were fully focused on the load they had just dropped. None of the ships were even trying to shoot down the fliers.

Primvila focused on her flying once more, merging with Igvile and the harpies into a loose formation as they all turned southward. Although she didn’t know exactly what those worms were, they had stopped the ships from continuing to attack them. She could only hope that they would stop the ships entirely.

It had been a long few days. Ever since the tower set out from Elmshadow. She hadn’t even been in the thick of the fighting and she was worn out. She couldn’t begin to imagine what the poor orcs felt. They were always the first ones in, the last ones out.

“Some of them better survive,” Dakka said, slamming her gauntlets into each other in front of her chest. “Enough with this magic bullshit. Give me a real fight.”

Arkk pursed his lips. Dakka’s anger radiated in a near tangible manner. Not that he could blame her. She was blaming herself enough as it was, for not being quick enough in taking off the avatar’s head, resulting in six other orcs falling victim to that void magic. She needed an outlet and was looking at the approaching ships with that in mind.

As much as Arkk didn’t want more to fight, he hoped a few survived as well if only to let Dakka take out her anger on them. He tried to clap a reassuring hand on her shoulder, but with the armor in the way, he wasn’t even sure she noticed.

At the same time, he wasn’t sure how willing the enemy army would be to continue the fight. Watching through the scrying team’s crystal ball, it didn’t look like they had any real answer for the worms. An individual worm wasn’t much of a threat. They could be crushed and stomped upon, slashed with blades, or taken care of through practically any spell. They weren’t strong creatures. But there were so many of them and they were such awkward opponents with their small size that it made fighting them difficult at best.

Agnete, Priscilla, and the machines were his best counters to them. The former two were able to sweep magic through an entire room, eliminating everything within in one fell swoop while the Anvil’s soldiers were simply so precise and so modular that they would either cut through them individually in rapid, coordinated strikes or attach alchemical flame spewers to their wrists and copy Agnete’s tactics, albeit less effectively.

Most of the Eternal Empire’s army was made up of swordsmen wearing magical armor. Not a lot of spellcasters among their bunch. Although their armor granted them strength and near invulnerability to conventional weaponry—and even plenty of spells—they didn’t grant them the coordination that machines had. The enchantments on the armor made them mere food for any worm that managed to latch on.

“Keep watching,” Arkk told the scrying team. “Once things have settled down, alert me. And keep an eye on the worms. We don’t know what, if anything, they might evolve into once they eat enough magic.”

Hopefully, it would be something that troubled his enemies further.

Hopefully, it wouldn’t be something that came back to bite him in the ass later.

They had floated the idea of dropping alchemical bombs on the ships, but based on his experiences with the Eternal Empire thus far, he doubted they would have done enough. Magic-eating worms, on the other hand, would rip away the enchantments that protected against such things as bombs and bombardment. Theoretically, sending the fliers back out with bombs now would be their best bet.

Arkk was a bit wary of that. The Empire would be on guard against similar attacks.

They were nearing the Cursed Forest. The river skirted alongside its northern edge, heading eastward for a time until it ran right past Langleey Village. Lelith was currently setting up a secondary ritual room in the north quadrant of the fortress, one that would be in range of the river. If those boats did deal with the worms, hopefully, they would have done enough damage that some bombardment could finish them off without too much issue.

Aside from the avatar—who was currently on a detour around a small lake of molten metal and was about to enter a chamber filled with caustic gas from an alchemical experiment Arkk had messed up a few months back—the next most pressing problem was the remaining whale ship. It was still in the air despite the best efforts of Hannah and Sylvara.

Teleporting to the surface, standing between their aim-assist chairs, Arkk frowned as he stared upward. “What’s the issue?”

“It won’t stop moving,” Hannah hissed through grit teeth. “The other one just sat still. I think taking it down and blasting apart the main ship must have spooked the people on this one.”

“We’ve hit it once or twice,” Sylvara added, looking equally frustrated. “Not the fins and obviously nothing vital.”

“What do you need?”

“How about a spell that tracks its target instead of firing off in a perfectly straight line?” Sylvara grumbled.

Arkk had nothing like that. Not with the range they needed, in any case. Electro Deus would work, but…

Arkk clenched his clawed fist, lips tightening. The first time, he had blown his arm clean off. The second time, it remained intact, but he still almost passed out from the backlash. He could try again, but if he ended up passing out, the avatar would have free reign to advance as fast as she could manage until he regained consciousness. For all he knew, he would wake up to find his Heart destroyed. Something Vezta said would likely kill him.

Priscilla hadn’t died, but she was also a dragonoid. Their hardiness far, far outstripped that of humans.

No one else could use the Electro Deus spell at the same level that he could. The Heart, the territory both local and in Elmshadow, and his employees all fueled the spell. Even Agnete, avatar that she was, would have difficulties.

If Agnete used her own magic, would she be able to hit the aircraft? He had seen her form a tight-knit rope of flames, attacking the airships back at the tower. But they had been much lower at the time.

Arkk fell silent, watching Hannah and Sylvara for a few moments. Both were reconfiguring their own seats, twisting the knobs, and adjusting the position of the chairs. Now and again, one of them would try that rainbow-like spell. Most of the time, they didn’t hit anything but air. Then it was back to configuring the chairs again. With Lelith working on reconstructing bombardment rituals for use against the warships, they had no one to assist.

Arkk wasn’t sure that anyone else in his employ could assist. Perhaps the Anvil’s soldiers. Who had built the things, she should know how they worked.

More eggs fell from the maw of the monster. It wasn’t so much attacking with them as it was drooling on them as it moved. The result was the same. The eggs would land, burrow into the fortress, and have to be dealt with before they hatched.

Who wasn’t immediately busy. With the conventional battle having fallen by the wayside, at least for now, the foundry was mostly idle. A portion of it was active, crafting armor and weapons to replace the shadow armor ruined by eggs and worms, but with the Iron Mongers from the Anvil doing most of the actual fabrication, even that was more or less a non-issue.

So he teleported her up to the surface. A tuft of steam escaped from somewhere under her chin as her smooth head snapped left and right, quickly analyzing her surroundings. In short order, her attention focused on the seats she had crafted and their two occupants.

“ᛏhere is no problem in my creations,” Who said with utter certainty, “but perfection is always a moving goal.”

“They’re having issues. Aiming while seated and aiming while casting are too difficult against a moving target.”

Who motioned for Hannah to stop her efforts, leading the abbess to slump back in the seat, closing her eyes. Beads of sweat dripped down her temples. Sylvara, despite casting the spell twice as often, looked much more composed. Arkk wasn’t too surprised, having already known that Sylvara was on the high end of spellcasters.

“I can creaᛏe a more ergonomic control system. The original design failed to factor in human limb rotational range limitations. There are several gear-shift modifications I can add in to make it smoother—”

“This sounds like an extended project. We don’t need a long-term solution, Who,” Arkk said with mild exasperation. “There’s only one ship. Once it is down, we don’t need these anymore. Help Sylvara target it.”

The amount of sheer offense a faceless being could project through nothing more than a slight turn of her head was a wonder to behold. And slightly terrifying. The link between them wasn’t strained, however, so Arkk tried to brush it off.

“You can redesign the chairs to your heart… engine’s content later, just in case we ever have to deal with things like this again. A patchwork solution is all we need now.”

“Fine.”

Who moved away from the still-resting Hannah to take over the controls of Sylvara’s seat. Her arms split apart, unfolding into several small gripping devices. Like that, she was capable of manipulating every one of the knobs at once. She crouched and tilted her head, aligning whatever she used for sight with the lenses that assisted with targeting.

Arkk didn’t stick around to watch. If they were still having trouble in a few minutes, he would return and see what else could be done.

The avatar, as Arkk had mostly expected, wasn’t stopped for long by the room with toxic gas. She could manipulate wind. Of course, she could blow all the gas off to one side of the room, leaving her with a clear shot through it.

It did buy just enough time to finish setting up her next expected obstacle. Except where impossible, such as the molten metal lake, the avatar moved in a perfectly straight line directly toward the Heart, taking out walls and doors that were in her way with her copy of Tybalt’s spell. That made her extremely predictable.

She entered a relatively small chamber, obliterating the wall. As she walked across, her foot came down on a small plate designed to mesh seamlessly with the natural maze-like tiles of Fortress Al-Mir.

A rod connected to the underside of the plate pressed downward, through a small hole in the floor, where it connected with the top of a clay pot. The small point on the end cracked the pot, mixing the contents. The explosion spread outwards, striking pot after pot until all forty-seven hidden beneath the room’s floor broke.

The room vanished from Arkk’s awareness, as did neighboring hallways and a small slice of the dormitory Richter’s men had used while they were stationed in the fortress. The rumble shook the floor beneath his feet despite it being clear on the other end of the Cursed Forest.

Taking hold of the crystal ball that the bombardment team had been using, Arkk focused in on the section of the fortress that was no longer his.

He couldn’t see a thing. There was so much smoke, so much debris drifting through the air, and even some lingering flames that the dust hadn’t extinguished. The entire roof was gone as was the layer of ground above, but even the sunlight couldn’t penetrate the plume of smoke that was billowing from the gap in his fortress.

He waited, searching, eyes flicking through the image in the crystal ball for any sign of movement that wasn’t from the smoke.

If he were being honest, he fully expected the avatar to survive. The bomb, devious as it was, felt too simple for a being like that avatar to fall to. Perhaps the Heart of Gold’s avatar would have died to it—or at least lost a possessed body—and maybe even Lyra despite Arkk’s lack of knowledge regarding her abilities and prowess, but the Eternal Empress?

Surely, if a bomb could eliminate her, someone would have done so at some point in the last thousand years. An angry subject, a rival politician, or even the other avatars.

Yet there was no gust of wind clearing out the smoke. No walls and doors detained by the void. No continued march through his fortress.

Success?

Arkk’s paranoia insisted that no, it was not success. Yet the evidence pointed to it being true.

Something was burning in the room, constantly creating new smoke. It would diminish eventually, surely, but Arkk didn’t want to wait forever.

The lesser servants couldn’t enter. He could feel the lingering heat at the edges where his fortress was intact. They were too weak to survive in an environment like that.

Arkk teleported to Agnete—no longer having to watch over the egg Who had harvested—as the former purifier incinerated one of the eggs. “I require your assistance.”

To her credit, Agnete didn’t look surprised. “The avatar?”

“Indeed. You up for something a little dangerous?”

Agnete rolled her neck back and forth, cracking her neck. When she finished, she looked to Arkk, eyes bright like the molten metal of the lake.

 

 

Arkk staggered back, slumping against the wall. The fingers of his recently regrown draconic arm twitched and jittered. Sparks of lightning jumped from claw-like fingernail to claw-like fingernail despite having been interrupted before he could fry the Empress. At least he hadn’t blown the arm off this time. He wasn’t sure if that was because he had been more careful, the talisman that Zullie gave him that was supposed to redirect any backlash into a depleted glowstone, or if the draconic-looking arm was just that hardy.

“Claire… Claire!” Kia said, kneeling on the ground where she lightly patted Claire’s cheeks.

“She’s alive,” Arkk said, shoving off from the wall. “I can feel it.”

Kia’s afterimages turned to him, worry riddling her face, but her actual real head never turned. “She isn’t waking up.”

“If I’m right about demons draining magic, it is very likely she is suffering the same thing that happened to the two of you when you accidentally broke the contract with me.” Arkk drew in a breath, holding his other hand to his chest as if that would help with the palpitations. “The two of you were unconscious for an extended period of time until Zullie got the idea to charge you up with glowstones.”

“Then—”

“That ritual isn’t set up here. With that other avatar running around, I’m sorry, but there isn’t time.”

He was able to monitor the avatar running through his halls. Despite what happened to her ship, despite the fight with the demon, and the distance she fell, she hardly looked ruffled. Her black militaristic dress did have a few cuts and scrapes, but nothing large. There were no wounds on her skin. Even her hair, long and blonde, was straight and well-kempt. Which, in Arkk’s eyes, should have been impossible after that fall. A halo of miniaturized swords, all attached to a thin golden ring, floated just behind her head as she moved.

Even had Arkk not been aware of her, she would have been impossible to miss with the constant Tybalt-like abilities she was using to break through his reinforced walls. Each one set off intruder alarms in the back of Arkk’s mind. And he wasn’t quite sure how to stop her. A snap of her fingers and large sections of the fortress were just gone. Tybalt, at least, hadn’t been immediately hostile.

Arkk tried teleporting in Dakka with her blade already out, ready to slice the woman’s head from her shoulders. But the woman was both quick and strong, able to avoid, dodge, or simply block whatever he tried to throw at her. Even with Dakka’s blade at her neck, she bent backward, letting the scythe blade skim just above her nose as Dakka swung. A twist of her body righted her, facing Dakka well within her guard.

The avatar reached up, grasping Dakka’s helm. Even with Dakka being one of the shortest orcs, she still stood a head taller than humans. The avatar didn’t have any trouble dragging her down, slamming her knee into the shadowy helm’s faceplate. Her knee didn’t break the metal, but Arkk could still feel the pain as she rang Dakka’s head like a bell. A quick step forward, linking her foot behind Dakka’s foot, and an almost casual shove had Dakka falling on her back.

She raised her hand, snapping her fingers…

He barely managed to teleport Dakka out before one of those voids opened up around her.

Dakka was one of his most skilled warriors. Even with her blade already around the throat of the woman, she hadn’t scratched her. The avatar was prepared, waiting for more people to appear around her. Blocking her path with soldiers would only see them obliterated or detained or whatever those voids did.

The avatar couldn’t possibly stand up to everything. Six orcs, teleported in, all with their blades trapping the woman’s neck. A single step from her, a single pull from the orcs, and she would lose her head.

He saw the muscles tense, he watched those shadowy scythe blades move, he saw the blood start to drip from the woman’s neck.

The halo of swords flashed a bright white light. It lasted barely an instant. Not even the time it took to blink.

The orcs pulled their scythes, slicing through nothing.

The woman stood, unharmed, several steps backward. Her fingers were already snapping.

A great void opened and collapsed, only slightly slower than that flash of light. With it, six orcs vanished, their links cutting off as one.

Arkk grimaced, ill feelings digging into his stomach. “She can teleport too,” he hissed, annoyed. “How many powers does she have?”

All of them, it felt like. Tybalt’s void magic, strength that had to be enhanced in some manner, the ability to control wind and air, teleportation, and probably more that he had yet to see. At this point, Arkk wouldn’t be surprised if she started breathing icy air or igniting flames with a wave of her hand.

It was a small consolation that they had fallen far on the outskirts of Fortress Al-Mir. With the size of the Cursed Forest, traveling all the way to the Heart could take hours at a walking pace, especially if Arkk found a reliable means of slowing her.

“I’m sending you and Claire to the infirmary,” Arkk said. “Let Hale know that Claire is suffering from the same thing she was last time and she’ll be back on her feet before you know it.” Hopefully. “However, I may be teleporting you on your own. That woman…”

Arkk pursed his lips.

“I need to speak with Sylvara,” he muttered.

That void magic was by far the most dangerous aspect of the woman and Sylvara had the most experience with it through Tybalt. Assuming it was the same Jailer magic. Beyond Sylvara, Lyra Zann might have information. Given that Lyra was the self-admitted reason the avatar was at Fortress Al-Mir in the first place, Arkk wasn’t really sure how far he could trust her. Especially since she said she wanted the avatar to remain alive.

Arkk didn’t think he could abide. Even if she hadn’t been killing his men, both through the war and now personally, capturing someone of her capabilities without killing her didn’t seem feasible.

Without another word to Kia, he teleported the two dark elves to Hale and himself straight to Sylvara.

The inquisitrix jolted, startled by his arrival, but composed herself in short order. She stood from the targeting seat, drawing herself up. “Ready to take down the other ships?”

Arkk couldn’t help but grimace. The other whale ship was the only thing in the air at the moment. It was not idle. Eggs rained down upon Fortress Al-Mir without pause, as if enraged by what happened to its counterpart—or the avatar. From its height, it seemed able to target just about any spot in the entire Cursed Forest. Agnete, Priscilla, and a squad of orcs were on cleanup duties, but they were starting to fall behind.

Taking it down was a priority.

“Unfortunately, there is a slightly more pressing issue at the moment,” Arkk said. “The avatar is inside Fortress Al-Mir.”

“We killed… Not the Golden Order’s avatar,” Sylvara said, frowning to herself. “The Eternal Empire?”

“She seems capable of using the same magic Tybalt used, albeit with a snap of her fingers instead of making a window with her hands. I was hoping you had a way to nullify it.”

Sylvara closed her red eyes, drawing in a short breath. “Last I saw of Tybalt’s Binding Agent, it was around his wrists in Elmshadow. As he almost certainly got someone to remove the manacles, they are likely still there.”

“Would he not have destroyed them upon removing them?”

“They were made to resist his power. I suppose it might have been possible. It isn’t something we ever really tested.”

Arkk’s mind jumped to Elmshadow. Despite the tower having moved, the entire land was still under his control, both above ground and below it. Every part of the city had been claimed by his lesser servants. The homes built atop it were made through the power of the fortress magic. He scanned through it all with his near omniscience of his territory. He had seen the manacles before, back when he first met Tybalt. They hadn’t looked like anything special. More like a bracelet than actual binding chains. When equipped on Tybalt’s wrists, runes glowed along their edges, but otherwise, they were just cuffs of metal. It wouldn’t surprise him to find that Evestani had found them and tossed them aside, not realizing what they were. Or even for him—or one of his employees—to have sequestered them off in some storage box in ignorance.

“Can they be remade in short order?” Arkk asked, even as he continued searching.

“How short are we talking?”

“Ideally five minutes—”

Sylvara laughed in his face.

He expected that.

Quite intimately familiar with the size of the Cursed Forest, both from living in Langleey Village all his life and then his occupation of it through the fortress, it was fairly trivial to guess a few numbers. “She doesn’t appear to be in any rush. As long as I can do it safely, I’ll throw whatever I can at her to slow her down further.” Perhaps flooding her path with molten metal from the Iron Mongers would force her to detour. Collapsing a few areas might help as well, though she could probably tunnel through if she never tired of using that void magic. “I think… six hours at most?” And that was assuming he could slow her.

That was only before she reached the populated section of Fortress Al-Mir. Not that the Heart was far away from there.

“Six is still too short. You remember what it took to make that effigy for the Heart of Gold’s avatar?”

“A month or so of research and development, yes. But I was hoping that since you had already developed one set of manacles, you’d be able to develop a second much faster.”

“I didn’t develop those manacles. But you’re also forgetting the excursion to another realm, which won’t be easy since the portal was damaged.”

Arkk ground his teeth. It wasn’t impossible to visit another realm at the moment if they used the highlands portal. But with the unknown dangers that came from visiting such places, it likely wasn’t any more feasible than simply getting lucky with killing the avatar with what they had on hand.

“I’ll keep looking for the manacles in Elmshadow,” he said. “If you have any other bits of advice, I’m all ears.”

Otherwise, it might be time to speak with Lyra Zann.

“The magic utilized by Purifier Tybalt was exceptionally potent. Outside the Binding Agent itself, which was specifically designed to counter him, I have never seen anything caught within the borders of his spheres survive intact. He always referred to it as detainment, but as far as I was concerned, he may as well have been obliterating everything he came across.” Sylvara paused, frowning. “There was no known way to block the effect. Even other purifiers couldn’t interfere, their abilities vanishing into oblivion when the spheres collapsed.”

Half that, Arkk already knew. The rest was… not good news. He had considered using Agnete to block the avatar’s path. It was a good thing she was busy with the remaining eggs. Kia and Claire might be fast enough to stab the avatar before she could teleport, but Arkk could see in her movements just how wary and cautious she was being. He could try to keep up with her teleports, constantly teleporting his own people to match her movements, but that moment she teleported had blinded him. Brief though it had been, it had been just enough time to miss the void opening around his men.

It was a risk.

For now, lesser servants were collapsing large swaths of the path before her. That should buy a little more time to properly plan.

“You think you’re good to take down that last whale ship?” Arkk asked. The eggs were still a problem. The sooner they were dealt with—and the sooner he lobbed one of those eggs into the approaching Empire army—the better he would be able to concentrate solely on the avatar. “Actually,” Arkk said before Sylvara could respond, “with the main ship out of commission, it probably doesn’t matter. You aren’t in danger of a counterattack. I’m sending you and Abbess Hannah up there. Take it down at your leisure.”

Arkk teleported in a perfectly normal set of manacles to ‘capture’ Sylvara. The inquisitrix held out an arm, staring at the chains for a long moment, before she a little note of epiphany.

“Ah! Tybalt, Chronicler Qwol, and I were on the lower floors of the Elmshadow keep when that ray of gold struck. He slipped away while we were concerned with evacuating personnel. When later tracking down his movements, we came across a detained segment of the keep’s inner wall.”

“That means he removed those bracelets somewhere within the keep,” Arkk said, immediately narrowing his search area. It was still a large chunk of the burg which had seen two separate occupants and a great deal of fighting, but it was better than having to search through the entire city. Unless, of course, it had been moved out into the rest of the city—but there were a million what-if scenarios. No sense in bothering with them.

Either he would find the manacles or he would find another solution. Given that the manacles could have been melted down for scrap at any point, he was leaning toward the latter. He had no other options.

Failure was not an option.

Arkk teleported Sylvara to the surface, along with Hannah and the aim-assist chairs. He didn’t stick around to watch their work. Hannah could alert him once they were done. If she ‘captured’ Sylvara, he wouldn’t even need to return for them.

Once they were settled, he teleported himself down to the temple.

The statue of the Holy Light had its arms crossed, looking like it had been waiting impatiently. Looked like he wouldn’t need to light one of the candles to get Lyra’s attention. Before approaching, however, he took a quick survey of the room, making sure nothing had changed since his last visit. The empty pedestals were empty and the filled pedestals were filled. None of the statues save for the Holy Light had moved.

“You’re back. Good,” the statue said, perking up as he approached. Again, it shifted from its impatient waiting pose to an interested lean forwards without crossing the intervening space. Quite the contrast from the way Lyra acted when he returned from the Maze. “I believe there is merit in your theory. Precautionary note: My findings are hastily done and tentative. I would need a demon to examine—”

“The demon that has been harassing me is dead,” Arkk said. “But I didn’t come to discuss that.”

Arms crossed in disappointment, the statue glowered down at Arkk. “Oh?”

“The avatar. The Eternal Empire’s avatar is inside my fortress. If you want me to keep her alive, I need options. And I’m going to need them quick. No long drawn-out research projects. I need a solution I can implement in less than three hours.”

“That… might be a problem. I do not know the true scope of the Almighty Glory’s granted powers.” Lyra sounded upset with herself, her tone turning almost embarrassed at the end of her sentence. “The few conflicts that happened between us over the centuries ended with my utter defeat. I can hold off Evestani given some time and preparations, but not the Empress. The only reason I still exist is because it is in the prideful nature of the Empress to display compassion toward her defeated opponents. Given the threat you represent to the Calamity and the mark you’ve made on her pride, I doubt you’ll see much compassion.”

“So there is no point in attempting to convince her to stop and no tools you can provide to de-escalate the situation.”

“Arkk, please try to avoid brash actions,” Lyra said, now with a warning in her voice. “I cannot yet predict how long this solution might take to implement, assuming our reasoning is not flawed. If the existing solution fails further and we cannot replace it in time, this world will wither.”

“Then you better start working faster,” Arkk said, teleporting away without another word.

He reappeared next to Agnete, who was still containing the egg he had asked her to keep neutered. It was clear that she hadn’t been fully successful. The egg had grown since he last saw it, bulging and pulsing in unpleasant undulations. But it wouldn’t need to be kept for much longer. Who was already here, working on attaching some metal machine to its side. Arkk didn’t question how the machine was supposed to work, trusting that Who would have made it correctly.

“You recall Purifier Tybalt?” Arkk asked, making Agnete frown. “I have it on authority that your powers will not affect the type of magic he used, but I’m likely going to need you and the dark elves to… do something dangerous for me.”

Agnete flicked a finger, slicing off a thin, freshly grown tendril from the egg as it reached out toward Who. She didn’t turn to look at Arkk as she spoke, maintaining concentration on the egg. “Can it wait until Who has finished?”

Arkk turned his head, watching Who screw a large rod of metal into the egg. The mechanical lifeform seemed utterly unbothered by both the tendrils and the lances of flame that sliced them apart. She simply worked, siphoning worms from within the egg into a small bucket. “As long as she finishes soon,” he said.

“We have an avatar to kill.”

 

 

Something was wrong.

The Empress sighed, finger pressed against her temple as she leaned against her armrest.

Something was off.

Everything had been going well enough, considering the lack of resources she had to work with. Thanks to information from her luminous counterpart, she knew where the fortress was. She had been able to lay siege with only her airships. The attack must have taken the Keeper by surprise; there were holes in the fortress everywhere within the so-called Cursed Forest.

Once her army arrived to invade and wipe out the defenders, she would be free to venture forth in person and destroy this troublesome Heart once and for all. The tower at Elmshadow would be left vulnerable and simple to destroy. Finally, she could put this issue to rest. Permanently.

The Empress sighed and stood. She moved forward, crossing her chambers to the large window. Rather than look downward at the hole-filled fortress, she peered upwards.

Her eyes did not see the sky as others saw it—as she herself had seen it before her ascension. She saw beyond the flimsy veil that protected the minds of the ignorant, through the fractures to the great void beyond and the watchers of the Stars—the gods of the world without gods.

They couldn’t interact with the world around her. Even if they could, they wouldn’t. It wasn’t in their nature. Yet, somehow, they were more… more. More prevalent, more visible, and more active than she had seen in centuries. It was like they were waiting for something.

She had already felt the disparity in magic as the Solution finally started to crumble. Was it that? Did they wish to see the sweeping tides of magic lay waste to the world? She doubted it. While it might prove interesting for a time, the watchers watched. Should this world turn into a hollowed-out ruin, there would be nothing to watch but the slow decay of everything that once was.

The Empress could feel the magic levels rising. She doubted many others could. Few were as sensitive to every kind of magic as she was. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to be concerning. Without the Heart of Gold’s power, she would have to look into replicating it, just as she replicated the powers of the rest of the Pantheon. She didn’t expect trouble with that; it was always easier to replicate abilities that she had seen wielded in person, and she had seen the Heart of Gold’s power more than most. If her luminous counterpart was willing to lend her assistance, the process would go much smoother.

She turned, frowning at the still basin. For a few moments, the avatar of the Holy Light had urged her forward, identifying this fortress as the place to be if they wanted to stop the Solution from failing.

Then it failed anyway. They had been too slow. Or perhaps by the time they began, events had already been set in motion to destroy the Solution and they simply hadn’t realized at the time. Either way, magic leaked from the other realms and the bowl went silent.

Plotting something, likely.

It had been the Holy Light’s power, albeit weak and flimsy, that had taken down one of her armada.

And now… Something was wrong. Something beyond the magic leaking into the world. Something beyond the traitorous actions of her contemporary avatar. Something more immediate.

It was quiet.

The cannons were silent.

“Adjutant,” she called out.

When all was well, the door to her chambers would open immediately. When all was well, she would hardly need to speak to have her commands carried out. When all was well…

The door opened, slowly sliding into place. A wiry man with a perpetually furrowed brow stepped inside, black nails dug into his little notebook as he held it close to his chest. He stopped at a respectful distance, bowing his head as he awaited her edicts.

“Why have the cannons ceased their assault?” she said, peering out the window again. “Our opponent is distracted with the destruction of the crashed vessel, but that won’t last. It is important to keep him suppressed.”

“There is damage to the main gunnery,” the adjutant said, holding his bow.

“Progress on repairs?”

“No progress, I’m afraid. The engineers are dead.”

The Empress stilled, turning to narrow her eyes at the adjutant. “Every one of them?”

“All that I could find. If there are others, they have sequestered themselves away.”

“How.”

“Oh a myriad of gruesome ways,” he said, eyes closed in his solemn bow. “Heads twisted around backward, hearts pulled from chests while they’re still beating, disembowelment… It would likely be easier to list ways they hadn’t died.”

“Infiltrators,” the Empress hissed. “Assassins.”

“An astute assessment.”

“Rally the guards. Deploy—”

“I’m afraid the guards are dead as well. All the ones I could find aboard this ship. As are the cannoneers, navigators, helmsmen, armorers, quartermasters, cooks, surgeons, battlecasters…” The adjutant looked up, a smile spreading across his face. “And your adjutant.”

The Empress turned fully to face the impostor. She drew herself up to her full height, shrugging off the militaristic jacket from her ensemble, leaving bare muscular arms on display.

“You really shouldn’t have sequestered yourself off like this. Maybe if you had been more integrated with the crew, you could have stopped me.”

“I do not know why you have given up your advantage of surprise,” she said, looking up and down the thin form of her adjutant—or the creature that wore his skin. He hadn’t taken a ready stance. He wasn’t even looking like he wanted to fight. He stood there, hunched slightly, still holding that notebook. “You are mistaken if you believe I will fall. I would have suggested a dagger to my spine from a trusted source, but it would not have helped.”

“A surprise attack?” The grin spread across the face of her adjutant, moving wider than was humanly possible. “Where’s the fun in that?”

She snapped her fingers.

A space-warping void blitzed through the air, collapsing the moment it made contact. The notebook the impostor held vanished within where it would remain detained until the end of time.

But the impostor did not go with it. In a blur of movement so fast that it was almost imperceptible, he moved, clinging to the ceiling with sharpened claw-like hands. He didn’t remain there, staying overhead just long enough for a second detainment cell to pass harmlessly beneath his head. As soon as it was gone, he launched himself forward, claws outstretched.

Muscles rippled across the Empress’s skin. A swipe of her hand knocked his arms aside. A sidestep maneuvered herself away from his continued momentum. A flat shove downward against his back slammed him into the metal floor. She had long studied the arts of the war god, the Red Horse.

She slid aside a light lock of hair, the only thing on her person out of place, as she slammed the heel of her boot into the impostor’s spine.

She did not hear the crackling of breaking bone and torn cartilage.

The Empress snapped her fingers again. The void appeared and collapsed, swallowing metal plates, beams, and rivets whole.

The impostor jumped out of his skin, pinned as it was under her heel. It shedding it as a snake sheds their scales—or as a lizard sheds their tail when in danger.

Looking up, her lips twitched in an imperceptible frown. “Demon,” she said, cold and plain.

The creature that clung to the wall no longer bore a resemblance to a human. Its body was an amalgam of flesh and bone. Jagged lines of fractured light ran along its sleek, angular frame, pulsing in rhythm with an unpleasant heartbeat. What had once been clawed fingers were now spindly appendages ending in razors sharp enough to carve steel—each digit twitched in a subtle, unnerving eagerness. Legs jointed backward hooked into the wall, effortlessly perching.

The face—or where a face might have been—was a twisting nether of spiraling energies, constantly drawing in magic in the air like water down a drain. Outlines of the adjutant it once mimicked framed the spiral, leaving a head that was distorted and incomplete. Mocking. Even that melted away as a smooth, black rubber melded over the surface of its head.

The voice that came from its oscillating maw was layered and grating, both high and low at once. “Your magic is strange. I can taste so many marvelous flavors within.”

“Enjoy it,” the Empress said. “It will be your final—”

A strange buildup of crackling energy filled the air around her, turning it thick and heavy. A charge that tingled the hairs on her skin. She didn’t know what manner of magic it was—the demon, cocking its head in confusion, wasn’t the source. All she knew was its power was dangerous.

With a snap of her fingers, a rush of air filled her chambers, pinning the demon to the wall it clung to while throwing her to the opposite side of the chamber.

A blinding white light filled her vision, painting the world in stark, shadowless light before rendering her momentarily blind. Before the light even began to fade, the sound arrived. It was more than just a noise. It was a concussive blast that shattered the air itself with a crack so sharp and immediate that it felt as if it were rending apart a narrow sliver of the fabric of the universe.

A lesser human would have fallen unconscious.

The Empress simply fell as the floor of the airship gave way beneath her feet.

By the time she could see again, she was well and truly falling while bits of debris cascaded down around her. Twisting, putting her back toward the ground, she scowled at the ship overhead. It looked as if an alchemical bomb had gone off inside the front half of it. Most of it was still intact, still hovering in the air, but it wouldn’t remain that way for long without her presence.

Debris fell. Bits of metal, wood, even a chunk of her throne. It all fell in nice, straight lines toward the ground. That made the sudden lateral movement all the easier to spot.

The demon. Now sporting a pair of wings, it swooped through her field of vision before folding its wings up, and diving directly toward her.

She waited, watching with calm eyes despite the wind rushing past her head. The demon approached, closing the gap between them, while she simply waited.

She waited for the opportune moment and…

A snap of her fingers shifted the air currents around her. A welling cushion of air slowed her fall at the last moment. She twisted, facing downward with her hands splayed out. The demon missed, slicing through the air she had occupied an instant before. Her hands grasped hold of its wings as it flew through.

The wind now rushing sideways made her feel as if she were grasping an iron bar over her head, hefting herself up. It was not helped by the force of the wings as they suddenly beat against the ground, jostling and jolting her.

The flesh of the demon in her grasp melted and shifted, turning in mid-air to face her while leaving its wings right where they had been. A thin tongue slid out from that void of a maw, whipping in the wind for a moment before snaking along its body toward one of its wings. Intent on reaching her.

The Empress released the wing the tongue had been heading towards, grasped the opposite wing with both hands and slammed both boots into the side of the demon.

The wing ripped out from the demon’s body, tearing a thin strip of flesh with it.

Wind caught in the dismembered wing, yanking her whole body backward. The demon rocketed onward while she, still grasping the wing, used it like a ship’s sail. A quick twist of her wrist maneuvered her to one side just as a long plank of wood fell to her side.

Her eyes narrowed, searching the field of debris. If a demon could be rendered inert by something so simple as ripping off a wing, it wouldn’t be a demon. Her eyes hopped from point to point as she cycled through all the powers she knew.

The Whispering Gale was a favorite of hers. It provided control over the wind and weather, at least what aspects she had learned, and was the main reason falling as she was didn’t concern her. However, she doubted that a breeze would bother a demon. The knowledge she copied from an avatar of the Bloated Mother couldn’t be utilized in short order. It required growth and gestation. With more time, some aspects might harm a demon, but nothing she could prepare before landing on the ground below.

The Jailer of the Void detained anything it encompassed. To the best of her knowledge, nothing could escape it. Not even an avatar of the Jailer could nullify its effects. The demon had avoided her first use of that power so quickly that even her trained eyes hadn’t seen it move—which likely meant that not even a demon could escape. All she needed to do was create a situation in which it couldn’t dodge.

The Empress scanned the debris field, calculating her next move.

Air combat would be difficult. There were too many vectors of travel for the demon to use as an escape. On the ground, one vector would be eliminated. A cave—or inside the fortress—would further eliminate escape routes.

As she descended, the ground loomed closer. She twisted her body, using the dismembered wing to steer through the falling debris. A snap of her fingers adjusted air currents, pushing her to an area where she would have a clear landing—one of the large holes made by her assault on the fortress. With her airships having maintained their maximum altitude, the ground was still far below. Her makeshift glider slowed her fall, further distancing her eventual landing.

There it was. The demon—higher up than she would have expected from a beast missing a wing. Because it wasn’t missing a wing. Its body shifted, reforming still. It seemed to be assessing her, calculating its next attack.

The same trick to avoid its dive wouldn’t work again.

Before she had a chance to plan, it rushed her, moving far faster than before.

She released the wing, letting the wind carry it away as she snapped her fingers. A void appeared between them, forcing the demon to divert. Making it appear where she had, she had hoped it wouldn’t be able to escape before the detainment cell collapsed, but the demon never came close. It turned in mid-air so sharply that she suspected it didn’t need those wings to fly.

If it could move like that, it must have been toying with her. Not unexpected given what it said about fun. If it started serious, she might have been in actual trouble.

That meant she needed to end this sooner rather than later.

A snap of her fingers generated a slipstream of wind, accelerating her descent. It turned what might have been two more minutes of falling into half a minute. A second snap of her fingers reversed the gust of air, slowing her just enough to land safely in a vacant room inside the stone fortress.

She immediately hopped several steps backward, avoiding the demon crashing into the ground without making any effort to slow himself. If she hadn’t moved, she would have been flattened into a paste.

That strange dual voice of the demon chuckled and giggled. It started saying something. The Empress flicked her eyes around the bare chamber, ignoring it. Hubris was something with which she was intimately familiar—it could always be exploited. All she needed—

The demon abruptly stopped speaking. A strange, transparent blade slammed through its chest from behind. Its vacant face looked down at the ghostly sword as a second one ran it through.

Real blades, colored black with shimmering, twinkling lights, cut through his chest, falling into the exact place those ghostly swords had occupied moments before. The flesh and bone that made up the demon’s body started peeling apart, spiraling through its chest from the point where those swords made contact.

“Arkk,” the demon snarled, craning its head.

Two luminous red eyes stepped forward from the shadows. A rather unassuming man, hands clasped behind his back, stared at the demon with utter impassion.

“We could have killed this bitch. Together.”

The so-called Arkk did not respond. There was a certain lack of emotion on his face as he watched the unraveling continue. One of those black blades pulled back, slamming through another ghostly sword at the demon’s neck. The Empress caught a glimpse of a dark elf over the top of one of the demon’s now drooping wings. More of the demon started unraveling at the new point of impact.

The other blade pulled out as another ghostly sword slashed through the demon in a different spot, the real blade following a moment later.

Notably, they avoided the spiraling nether that was the demon’s face. The Empress couldn’t be sure if it was to make the demon suffer or if there was fear of coming into contact with that location.

As more cuts slashed through the demon, the speed of the unraveling increased.

The Empress raised a hand, fingers pressed tight together.

She froze as she felt a metal blade against her neck. Irritation buzzed in the back of her mind. Venturing into an active fortress was always a pain. The complete control the Heart afforded its user could be dealt with, but, focused on the demon, she had been woefully unprepared.

Arkk’s red eyes lingered on the demon for a moment longer, watching as the unraveling demon seemed to collapse into that twisting nether it called a face before they flicked to her.

“I was asked to let you live,” he said slowly as if he were still trying to decide whether or not he was going to. A dark elf stepped closer to him, clearly protective, while another continued slashing at the parts of the demon that had yet to unravel.

The Empress looked back to the demon. She had only seen two demons die in her thousand years. Neither quite like this… but if patterns carried true…

She doubted anyone present had seen a demon die.

“Lyra Zann wants as much time as possible to work on a new solution. Weakening the barrier further with your death will accelerate that.” He paused, frowning. “But I think we’ll have time enough.”

“If you intended to kill me,” she said, eyes still watching the demon collapse.

The spirals of the demon’s face curled inwards, reaching for the deepest point.

“You should have done so the moment you saw me.”

A thunderclap of magic crashed through the room. The dark elf closest to the demon was flung back, leaving a trail of afterimages behind as she struck a wall. The other elf stepped in front of Arkk, only for both to be thrown back.

The Empress, while bracing against the magic, gripped the sword at her neck with her bare hands, crushing the shadowy material it was made from. A fist to the chest sent a shadowy-armored orc to the ground with a grunt.

She snapped her fingers, forming a detainment cell in the corner of the room where Arkk had been. He wasn’t there anymore. Of course, he wasn’t. The detainment cell still left a gaping hole leading further into the fortress.

She took off in a calm, steady walk, keeping herself prepared since she was fully aware that she would be facing the irritant that was teleporting opponents in short order.

The Heart powered everything here. All she had to do was destroy it, then she could leisurely spend her time cleaning out this place. Or even wait for her reinforcements to do it for her.

Either way, this would soon be over.

 

 

“Those lenses should help,” Lyra Zann said as she rummaged about in a far corner of the room, waving a hand vaguely toward a pair of glasses sitting atop the desk.

The hidden library within the Chernlock Grand Archives had changed since the last time Darius saw it. The desk he had once used was now covered in books, as were the surrounding shelves and even the floor. Books weren’t exactly a strange sight in a library, but they hadn’t been here before.

Darius Vrox pulled a pair of tomes off a shelf. They were ancient. Beyond old. It was a testament to the care with which Lyra Zann maintained her collection that they didn’t fall apart in his hands. Unfortunately, as was the case with most tomes older than a few hundred years, they were utterly unreadable. The language within bore similarities to that of the modern day, but that only made the odd word that he did recognize all the more confusing.

Donning a pair of glasses provided by Lyra, everything changed.

The letters on the pages transformed before his eyes, rearranging themselves into coherent words and sentences. The tomes contained detailed accounts of ancient rituals and incantations, knowledge that had been lost to time. Every once in a while, an odd word or sentence stuck out, forcing him to parse the line manually, but as a whole, it was a wonder.

Lyra dropped another two tomes on his desk, partially leaning against them with a weary sigh.

“These should be everything,” she said. “All the records of what we did to enact our barrier between the realms.”

Darius looked up from the text, about to respond until he noticed Lyra through the enchanted glasses. He stared in confusion at the worry written on her face. Faint, glowing symbols were etched into her skin, flickering and changing with every small movement of the muscles in her face. The slight pinch of her lips read as irritation and the narrowing of her eyes meant annoyance. There was more to Lyra than just emotions. Beauty and care and effort. It was as if he were reading a book outlining her daily routine, from the lotion she used on her face to the meager exercise she performed to how much sleep she got lately—not much.

There were other symbols as well, more mystical symbols, the likes of which would be found in rituals. They weren’t translated, either because of the inherent necessity of the symbology of the shapes or because they were already familiar to him, he couldn’t say. Her eyes, especially, were utterly alien.

Lyra noticed his stare. Her lips quirked into amusement, temporarily pushing away some of her worries and fears. “Yes, yes. Those lenses do more than just see. I dare say that you are seeing more of me than I’d care for anyone to know.”

Darius quickly slid the glasses off, noting with some relief the way he saw nothing more than Lyra’s dark red hair and faintly luminescent silver eyes. “Sorry,” he said.

“It isn’t like I gave them to you with the expectation that you never see me, but I draw the line at staring.” She rested her hands on the stack of books on his desk, moving on before he could say anything. “As I was saying, these are the… well, they are the Calamity. Everything we did to enact it. I need you to go through them and identify all the portions my golden counterpart was responsible for. In addition, note down any parts that seem like they might come in handy for a god of construction and fabrication.”

Darius sighed as he looked around. There were stacks of books on the desk, some on the floor piled up as high as the desk, and more on shelves surrounding him. He hadn’t counted them. He didn’t really want to count. “I know my way around a library,” he said slowly, “but some of the archivists, curators, and other librarians here would surely be better suited for such a task. Not to mention more people would make for faster work.”

“Trying to shirk your duties onto others, Vrox?” Lyra said with a disappointed tut of her tongue. The silver in her eyes intensified for a brief moment before fading. “You are the only one here who knows of my true nature or the hidden library within the greater archives. I would prefer if it stayed that way. Besides, this does not need to be done today.”

Darius sighed, looking over the hundreds of tomes stacked up around him. He slowly donned the glasses once more and was swiftly assaulted by a wealth of information that he didn’t need to know.

“Now, now. It won’t be that bad. Just a little light reading,” Lyra said, laughing. “I’ll leave it to you.”

“Hold on… You aren’t joining me?”

Lyra paused in her retreat, looking back to Darius with pity in her alien eyes. “Not now. Perhaps later, if my other subject falls through. This is busy work, a mundane task that just about anyone can handle.”

“What will you be doing?” Darius couldn’t help but ask. He had grown a little closer to the avatar. Close enough that he had a bead on her personality even without the glasses letting him read her like a book. She wasn’t going to fry him without due cause and a question, even in indignation, wasn’t cause enough.

“You are carrying out the backup plan. If all else fails, you, Darius Vrox, will save the world through your efforts. But Arkk has an alternate solution.”

“Of course he does,” Darius said with a frown. “Something insane, I presume?”

“Oh yes. Quite.” Lyra grinned wide. “Fascinating, but insane. I’ll be investigating the plausibility along with his quasi-avatar of Xel’atriss, Lock and Key. Zullie, I believe is her name.”

Darius narrowed his eyes in distaste. Her again. What a menace.

“I know that look,” Lyra said, somehow smiling wider. “She isn’t anything you need to concern yourself with. You focus on those books.”

Darius sighed as Lyra walked away, looking around him once more. He sat down, pulled the nearest tome closer, and dipped a pen in a pot of ink.

He barely read a single page when a stray thought came to him.

“I miss field work.”

“I must reiterate, restate, and repeat that I am doing this under protest.”

“So you’ve said,” Arkk, exasperated, said with a sigh. “I’m surprised. I thought this would be something you would find fascinating.”

“Fascinating, yes,” Zullie said, folding her arms over her chest. “I can admit that. But that doesn’t mean I’m an idiot, regardless of what you think of me after those recent… miscalculations. There are things even I know not to mess with and punching a permanent hole into Hell is certainly one of those things.”

A bright, bubbly voice came from the basin in the room, shining with silvery light as Lyra Zann spoke. “That is where I come in. Obviously, no one wants a tide of unbound demons to come flooding into our world. The goal isn’t to open a portal to Hell. No, no, no. We wish to prevent physical matter from moving between planes while allowing magic to flow freely.”

“I started to bring it up with you before,” Arkk said. They had gotten interrupted by all the war problems. Even now, he only had a few minutes to spare before he had to see to the defenses and offensive once again. “Speaking with Lyra only confirmed my suspicions. The demons killing their god is what caused the events leading to the Calamity. The god ate magic, or in some way disposed of it. The demons, in killing their god, took on this role.”

“Whether through ignorance, intentional avoidance of responsibility, or through the flow of magic breaking with the demon god’s death,” Lyra continued, “this mechanic of reality broke, leading to the steady accumulation and build-up of magic in other realms.”

“Long story short, we need to force magic down their throats whether they like it or not.”

“Possibly,” Lyra amended. “This is a theory. Not even, actually. Not quite a hypothesis. A guess. Logical and reasoned through experience and knowledge, true, but still just a guess at how the world works. Arkk, an interview with your demon might assist.”

Arkk scowled. “It is probably still at Elmshadow, snacking on the Evestani army.”

“See what you can do,” Lyra said. “In the meantime, Zullie, while Arkk confirms his guess, we need to discuss combining our abilities—and possibly those of Purifier Agnete—to create a new solution. The validity of whether or not the solution of breaking these boundaries is possible.”

Arkk paused, noting the continued scowl on Zullie’s face. Normally, she would have been upset until she started thinking for a few moments. Then her face would shift to one of interest before she threw herself into her work. Not this time.

“This doesn’t need to be done soon,” Arkk said. “I’m talking multiple years. There will be time to check over our work thoroughly.”

Zullie huffed, glancing aside. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it,” she said. “Just that, when the world is overrun by demons, I claim no responsibility.”

“I doubt many people will be alive to care,” Arkk said, shaking his head. Warning bells from the fortress stopped him from saying anything more. “I’ve got to go. Try not to kill each other while I’m busy.”

“I’ll try not to drown in the shallow basin,” Zullie said with irritated sarcasm.

“Good luck. We’re all counting on you.”

Drek, the young gremlin on the scrying team, hopped in place when Arkk appeared in front of him.

Arkk felt a bit bad for startling him, but he had been the one to pull on the link. He really should have expected a sudden appearance.

“Problem?” Arkk said, already leaning over the crystal ball. He must have been flicking through images as Arkk didn’t see anything particularly alarming, just the wide and desolate Cursed Forest.

“Two things,” Drek said, smoothing down the front of his tunic, which had ruffled when he jumped. “First, our uninvited guests are a short distance from Smilesville.”

“Did the evacuation finish in time?” Arkk asked, fearing the worst.

“Yes. With our aid, about half made it to Langleey Village and the other half are at Stone Hearth Burg.”

“Good.” That was a small relief. When they had first realized the enemy army would be approaching from the north via the river and that Smilesville was right in their way, Arkk had been in the Maze. Even warning them of the approaching danger had been a trial, organizing a few of Richter’s men to escort them had to wait until Arkk returned.

That had left them with precious little time to move them, but he did have tunnels and ritual teleportation circles set up around Fortress Al-Mir. The burg hadn’t held too many people and this was hopefully a temporary evacuation.

Langleey certainly lacked the resources to support too many additions. Stone Hearth was better off, but not by enough.

“If the enemy army makes no attempt at staging, they will enter our territory in roughly seven minutes at their current pace. They just entered the range of bombardment spells.”

A quick peek through his domain had Arkk frowning. Lelith had certainly taken his orders to heart. She was still flattening the crashed whale ship. The highlands portal had been reconfigured to connect to the Underworld once again, allowing those in his employ on the other world to return, bringing charged glowstones with them. Still, he should probably put a stop to her efforts now.

Not that bombardment had held up well when targeting the Eternal Empire’s army outside Al-Lavik. Fortress Al-Mir also lacked a few of the more esoteric bombardment rituals, the few that had worked.

An idea popped into his mind.

Their armor was enchanted. Magically enchanted.

And for the last hour, Fortress Al-Mir had been bombarded by magic-consuming eggs that grew worm-like monstrosities that also ate magic.

“Hold your second thought,” Arkk said, holding up a finger for a bare instant before he teleported himself across Fortress Al-Mir. He performed a quick examination of the entire fortress and, in short order, selected a target.

He and Agnete appeared side by side.

Quite a mistake as heat washed over him. Like he jumped over a bonfire. A follow-up teleport sent them to opposite sides of the room where, it seemed, Agnete noticed his presence and quickly dialed back on her temperature. A haze of heat still swirled around her, warping and bending the air.

She raised a hand toward the egg in the center of the room.

“Wait!” Arkk called out, teleporting her in place to face her toward the wall. Arkk made it just in time to watch a swirl of flames travel up her arms, coalesce in the palm of her hand, and fly forward in a tight line.

Agnete cut it off quickly enough once she realized she wasn’t aiming the way she had been aiming. It did leave a deep gouge in the wall, but given the state of the fortress as a whole, he wasn’t too worried about a little minor damage.

Arkk teleported back to her, relieved that he didn’t singe the hairs on his arm from proximity alone. “I need you to not destroy this one,” he said, earning himself a frown and a furrowed brow. “Keep it from causing problems, yes. Destroy the tentacles, yes. Leave the egg itself as intact as possible.”

“Reasoning?”

“I think we can use it. I saw what it has done to the Black Knight armor. That stuff is nearly indestructible and these things—and the worms they spawn—eat right through it.”

“Ah. I see,” she said, slowly looking toward the egg. A thinner line of flames severed two of the tentacles, both of which had been burrowed into the floor of the room. “They don’t seem smart enough to tell friend from foe. Is that what you’re thinking?”

“Eggsactly.”

Agnete turned to him, eyebrows crammed together as she gave him a look.

“I… Sorry. I don’t know what came over me,” he said, taking a wary step back. “Sorry. Keep it under control. I’ll be back shortly.”

Teleporting away in utter embarrassment, he reappeared in front of Agnete’s mechanical counterpart.

“Who,” he said. “I have another job for you.”

A long, thin whistle noise came accompanied Who’s turn. A sigh? Or was it excitement? It had a slight up-tilt at the end that made him think it was a positive noise.

“Were the targeting seats faulty?”

“No. Not at all. One airship is down. We’ll take down the other two shortly. But first… you have seen the worms from the eggs, yes?”

“I have.”

“Is there any way you can construct a non-magical way to contain them? Maybe a hollow metal sphere, if they can’t eat through it, or even a bucket with a lid.”

“A bucket,” Who said, tone flat and unimpressed. “You come to me for a bucket.”

“We all have to do things we don’t want on occasion. If it were up to me, you’d have nothing but interesting projects to work on. This is war, we all have to make sacrifices…” Arkk frowned, then continued. “If you want this to be a little more interesting, come up with a safe way to extract the worms from the eggs and put them into your container.”

Who tilted her head, gears turning behind some of her casing. “I shall need to examine a subject,” she said with hesitant interest.

“Agnete is protecting one. I’ll send you to her. When you want to return, you can pull on the link.”

“Understood.”

Who vanished from the foundry. Arkk did as well, reappearing in front of Drek.

This time, with little warning given, Drek still jumped in place, even despite Arkk appearing several paces away. The gremlin wasn’t as nervous as Luthor, but he still startled easily.

“You had a second issue you wished to raise,” Arkk said. Not a question, a simple statement of fact.

“Yes, Sir. It’s the remaining airships. They’re acting… oddly. Ever since we shot down the first.”

“Odd how?” Arkk asked, approaching the crystal ball to peer inside.

The current image was focused on the airships from underneath, looking up at their underbellies. Both sat there, hovering in the air. Without the ground adding context, it looked like they were utterly still. Neither moved, both were a short distance from one another. Nothing looked odd about either.

“They haven’t done anything. It has been five minutes since the last egg drop. Seven since the main ship unleashed its cannons.” Drek tapped his finger against the crystal ball, scowling at its contents. “I think they’re up to something.”

Arkk bit his lip. There were still a few eggs inside Fortress Al-Mir. But he realized that Drek was right. No new one had crashed down in a while. Priscilla, Dakka, and even Perr’ok inside one of the war machines were taking care of them.

“Maybe they ran out of bombs and eggs?” Arkk said with a hopeful note in his voice.

“Sir. We are not that lucky.”

“Of course not,” Arkk agreed with a sigh. “I… I think I’m going to try something mildly foolish.”

“Sir?”

“Lightning forced that airship away the first time around. It came at a bit of a cost, but Hale fixed me up. If they’re just going to sit overhead, with no army to protect the ground just yet and no attacks coming in…

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t try a second time.”

 

 

Sylvara and Hannah aimed, pointing their arms above their heads at the circling airships. Neither enacted their magic. They held off, waiting as Lelith moved about, minutely adjusting the exact position of their arms. The dark elf squinted up into the sky, consulted with a crystal ball, readjusted their arms, and held up a finger of her own.

“Hold,” she said, eyes glued to her crystal ball. “Ready… Now!”

Twin waves of multicolored light ocellated through the air. Unlike most spells, there was no travel time. Fireballs, the golden waves of Evestani’s avatar, and even lightning all took at least a short amount of time to reach their targets. Whatever magic the avatar of the Holy Light had bestowed upon the abbess and the inquisitrix did not.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t as damaging either. Where the rays of gold obliterated all in their path through sheer destructive force, the narrow waves of light had to hold position, frying all they touched over a short amount of time. The actual wave looked like it went on forever even after hitting the target, stretching off into the sky as far as it was possible to see. It likely went even further.

Watching through a telescoping spyglass, Arkk couldn’t help but frown. One wave pierced directly through one of the whale ships. It struck its underbelly, dead-center, and emerged somewhere out the top, punching a relatively small hole in the clouds before carrying on toward eternity. Despite knowing how the magic worked, he couldn’t tell if it was doing damage. It was too bright to look at for more than a second.

The other spell, unfortunately, missed. Not by much. It sheared off the end of one of the fin-like structures on the sides of the whale ships in short order. But it missed the main bulk.

Lelith hissed, obviously displeased. “They’re far enough away that even a minor deviation will miss by a hundred paces. If we had some kind of adjustable brace for them to rest against—”

“Explanations later,” Arkk said as the main ship swerved in the skies. Spyglass down, he couldn’t see anything distinct, but he could see the glow from the underside cannons.

Sylvara and Hannah cut off their spell. Arkk teleported Hannah and Lelith away. Sylvara, because she had still not joined up with him, was a bit more complicated to evacuate. He clamped a manacle around her wrist, capturing her. As a prisoner, she could be moved around.

It was a tenuous solution at best. Given the sloppy and obviously poor job at capturing her, the only reason it worked was because Sylvara didn’t try to fight back. Even the slightest bit of resistance from her and Arkk would likely wind up stuck on the surface, trapped under the oncoming bombardment since he was chained to her.

Luckily for all their sakes, Sylvara wasn’t suicidal. They both reappeared in one of the safer lower levels.

“It’s my fault,” the inquisitrix hissed, pulling the pin from the manacles before Arkk could even move. She flexed her gloved hand. The one that Hale had used as practice when she first started replacing limbs instead of just healing them. “It is a bit heavier than my old arm. I should have used my other, but it isn’t my dominant arm. It doesn’t feel right.”

“As I was trying to say,” Lelith said, “if we had some kind of brace that I could properly aim, we could hit whatever we wanted.”

“We have a whole army of master craftsmen at our disposal. I’ll speak with Who. I’m sure they’ll have something whipped up in minutes.” Arkk first teleported the crystal ball from Lelith’s hands into his own and quickly focused on the whale ships. “I’d like to know we’re causing actual damage before anything.”

“Hannah’s spell scored through the ship there,” Lelith said, pointing into the glass. “You can see the ruined metal and seared flesh. But it is such a small hole. Couldn’t your avatar have taught you a spell with a bit more oomph?” she snapped, glaring at the other two.

Abbess Hannah visibly bristled. “The Holy Light is the god of knowledge and enlightenment. Not the god of… of… blowing things up!”

“That didn’t stop the golden boy, did it?”

Hannah pursed her lips. “The Heart of Gold is the god of greed. What is greed but envy? Is it any surprise that the Heart of Gold would be envious of other powers and try to replicate them?”

“Then shouldn’t the god of knowledge know more destructive—”

“Enough,” Arkk said. He didn’t need infighting now of all times. “That spell is the only thing that can hit at the distances we need, so we make it work. The avatar is busy researching a topic I gave her that is a bit more important than this fight, so we can’t go ask for a different spell. So unless you have better ideas—” Arkk shot a glare at Lelith. He paused, waiting just long enough to be certain that she wasn’t going to actually have one. “That’s what I thought.

“Sylvara’s spell, though it missed the main mass, did do damage,” Arkk continued. “It sheared off a portion of a fin. Maybe we aim for the fins and the narrow point of the tail for now.”

“No disrespect to the inquisitrix,” Lelith said in a hedging tone. “But that was pure luck. It is hard enough to hit the main mass. Aiming for something so small and you might as well ask me to thread a needle in a hurricane.” She sighed, looking at the others with a determined expression. “Maybe if we had the brace I mentioned, something to stabilize and guide the aim precisely, then maybe—just maybe—we can try for your idea.”

“Her Holiness said that we should aim for the heart or the brain,” Hannah said, sounding hesitant. “Those things are living creatures, so the heart or the brain will kill them.”

“Then perhaps she should have mentioned where the hearts and brains are,” Lelith snapped back. “Even creatures that large can have pea-sized brains. We could poke a thousand holes in them and still miss.”

“I concur,” Sylvara said, nodding at Lelith even as she shot an apologetic look at Hannah. “I vote we follow Arkk’s plan. Maybe without fins and tails, they’ll crash into the ground.”

“Then we can bombard them with proper spells,” Lelith finished.

“It’s a plan then,” Arkk said. “I’ll speak with Who.”

Who was, perhaps understandably, quite eager to work on something she had never worked on before. She called it a good change in pace from creating mundane armor or repetitive components. She had a sketch down practically before Arkk finished describing what he needed. In collaboration with one of the large factory machines they had brought over from the Anvil, they threw together prototypes in less than fifteen minutes.

The pair of chairs didn’t look like much. Who promised she could make better ones, but Arkk didn’t need fashion, he needed function.

They certainly looked functional.

One arm of the chairs could be raised and lowered. Ratcheting locks kept them in place. Each click of the ratchet in the arm was fairly distant, but the elbow ratcheted as well in much finer degrees. That finesse only increased at the wrist. The fingers, each with little straps to keep them in place on the machine, could be finely tuned for exact aiming. A series of telescoping lenses in both the seat and beside the seat—for Lelith—should allow for targeting.

“You’re really ᛏaking these?” Who stepped between Arkk and the prototype seats, spreading her arms as if that could block him. “I could make them so much nicer. A bit of leather, a bit of padding, some nice brass instead of the crude iron—”

“We’re at War. No time to doll them up for a king.”

“But—”

“Thank you, Who.” Arkk teleported himself and the seats away.

“Perfect,” Lelith said as she fiddled with one of the chairs. “Better than I imagined. We keeping those Anvil folk around after this? Because I could think of a thousand improvements they could make to the ritual rooms for bombardment magic back at the tower.”

“If they’ll stick around, I’d be glad to. Agnete said something about making a town for them to live and work in though. Some city of progress, or something. There hasn’t exactly been time to discuss the details.”

“As long as a few of them stick around…” Lelith said, hopping out of the chair. “This will work. It’ll take a full trial run to see exactly how accurate they are, but if they’re as close as they look, cutting off the fins and tail might be doable.”

“Why wait? Let’s put them through a live trial right now.”

“You read my mind.”

The whale ships generally stopped moving in the minutes leading up to them vomiting more of those eggs. That meant that the optimal time to get everything ready was just before an attack. It was also the best time from a defensive standpoint, given that Agnete, Priscilla, and the other defenders didn’t need his attention—all the existing eggs would be gone. Or they had better be gone.

Given the little worm things that popped out of the more mature eggs, he wasn’t looking forward to seeing what it looked like when one fully hatched.

Ideally, one would never fully hatch.

“Almost ready,” Lelith said. She was working to adjust Hannah’s seat, turning a small knob to adjust just the tips of the abbess’ fingers.

“Take your time, but be quick about it,” Arkk replied, monitoring the ships through the crystal ball.

Sylvara adjusted herself in her own chair, her eyes focused and determined. There just wasn’t enough time for Lelith to work on both chairs and, once she adjusted one, any minor movements in the ship would ruin her efforts while she worked on the other. Thus, Sylvara had to try on her own. “I’m ready when you are,” she said, her voice steady.

“Hold. Just a moment more,” Lelith said, ticking the knob back and forth. With a slight twist of her neck, she stepped back. “Ready… now!” she called.

The multicolored beams shot forth, guided by the new contraptions. Arkk grimaced at the blinding light, turning slightly to shield his eyes while still watching through the crystal ball. Both beams struck the long, flapping fins of one of the ships. Hannah’s hit directly at the joint, the narrowest point. Sylvara’s was just a titch off, hitting the wider part of the fin.

The whale immediately tried to move. Hannah’s didn’t look like it had held position long enough, but when the fin flapped, the entire thing broke off the main body. The whale ship sagged in the air, tilting away, consequently bringing Sylvara’s beam into direct contact with the main mass of the ship.

The ship froze for a bare instant before swinging off to the side with no fin. Dipping in altitude, it forced the other whale ship to climb to avoid a collision. It didn’t stop with just a dip. The entire thing began a slow, lofty spiral toward the ground.

“That can’t have been because of the fin,” Arkk said, watching as it fell. “Did we luck into hitting the heart?”

“More likely it is because of the fin,” Sylvara countered. “Chop off a bird’s wing in mid-flight and that same thing happens.”

“You sound like you’ve seen it.”

“Tybalt,” was her only response.

Arkk decided not to question her further. Not that they had time. “Hold on,” he said, clamping the irons around Sylvara’s wrist again.

All four of them—and the chairs—vanished from the surface just as ordinance rained down where they had been standing.

“Lelith,” Arkk said. “You’re going to the ritual room. Once that thing hits the ground, bombard it until it is flat. Everything we’ve got.”

“If it recovers before it lands?”

“It’s lower now than it was. Should be in range of something. Force it down then flatten it.”

“With pleasure,” she said, accepting the crystal ball from Arkk as he offered it. She would need it for aiming purposes. The other crystal ball was with the scrying team.

Lelith vanished, teleported away. That left Arkk, Hannah, and Sylvara—who quickly unchained herself.

“You two… Depending on where that ship lands and the vigilance of the other ships, the surface might be dangerous for the next cycle. So, while we deal with that, I want you two practicing with those chairs.”

Two lesser servants appeared in their midst. Both immediately took to eating away the wall of the room. With a snap of Arkk’s fingers, the two chairs reoriented themselves, now aiming toward where the wall had been.

“We’re off in a corner of the fortress. The hallway there is long and unoccupied and nobody should be entering it. Nothing valuable is on the other side of the far wall. It won’t be exactly like aiming at the ships, but it’ll be close enough. I’ll make a mark on the wall for you to practice targeting. Sound good?”

Hannah looked at Sylvara, but Sylvara maintained a steady gaze. “I won’t miss again,” the inquisitrix said.

Arkk was about to tell her that it really wasn’t her fault. Both times, Lelith had been assisting Hannah at the moment they fired. Even just the light drifting the ships did was more than enough to throw off someone’s aim. Seeing the determination in her red eyes, he decided not to patronize her. He simply nodded his head, teleported to the far end of the hall where he marked a cross into the wall with a bit of chalk, then teleported out to his scrying teams.

One ship down. Two to go.

It took several minutes for the whale to finally hit the ground. Whether it had simply been that high or if it was trying to use whatever kept it aloft to avoid falling, Arkk couldn’t say. All he could say was that it didn’t hit the ground lightly.

It didn’t hit the ground at all. Through luck or aim, it crashed through the ground, striking in one of the places that had been most hit by the bombardment and eggs. It slammed into the fortress, broke through the weakened ceiling, and landed in the middle of the alchemy laboratory. The impact sent out a shockwave, blasting open doors and kicking up dirt and dust. Some part of the alchemy lab exploded into a plume of violet-hued smoke.

His claims over the surrounding area were disrupted, unfortunately. The Heart was screaming at him, warning him that the fortress was under attack. So easily accessible, he almost sent in the lesser servants to reclaim the area and then Agnete to ensure the entire thing was rendered nothing more than ash, but Lelith didn’t hesitate in her bombardment even with it having landed inside the fortress. The moment the thing hit the ground, it was under siege. Multi-colored flames, boulders, even the strange, dark Xel’atriss-derived spell that Zullie had developed all crashed down upon it.

He could send in Agnete later to ensure everything was dead. For the time being, he had other things to focus on. The approaching army, for one. They would complicate matters. Arkk would have said that they were a non-issue. Fortress Al-Mir hadn’t seen proper combat since the inquisitors broke in, but it was still secure. He had gone out of his way to enact traps and false passages and reinforced doors at every junction. The maze of pathways covered the entirety of the Cursed Forest, giving him plenty of space to work with.

However, with the attacks from above, his fortress had more holes in it than imported Tetrarchy cheese. Assuming the incoming army was all wearing the heavy armor that granted them their near imperviousness, he had some plotting to do.

 

 

The Maze had rapidly grown more and more uncomfortable.

Ever since reaching the portal, it felt like the air had shifted. Some aura seeped into the land, like an observer, constantly breathing down on them as it watched from an outside perspective. The few lesser servants he had sent around to explore and safeguard the area surrounding the portal, those not connected to the larger mass, vanished almost instantly. As if that observer were actively upset at their efforts to remain together and was pushing them apart.

The sooner they got out of here, the better.

Arkk got the feeling that the Maze didn’t like them not being lost.

But the time was almost upon them. Morvin was fiddling with the highlands portal frame, following directions from a lesser servant which was doing its best to explain what Zullie was explaining to Arkk. The degrees of separation, even with the servant mentally bound to Arkk, made him a little nervous about their odds of success.

But it had to work.

Arkk watched, breath held, as Morvin activated the highlands portal.

The runes on the portal in the Maze started glowing.

Whether through a blessing of Xel’atriss, bridging the gap home, the Fickle Wheel tilting in their favor, or Unknown, the Enigma deciding they had outstayed their welcome in is realm, or sheer hard work on their part—the portal was working.

The membrane stretched across the crystalline archway. Its silvery, liquid-like material shimmered and rippled, stilling after a moment with a thankfully familiar view. Zullie held out a hand, inspecting the portal for a long moment. Eventually, she gave him a nod, confirming its stability. Holding hands with her and the scrying team—he wasn’t going to trust their makeshift rope through realms while the Maze was being so hostile—they all stepped forward as one.

Morvin stood, ready to greet them on the other side. He looked about as relieved as Arkk felt. “Welcome back,” he said. “Glad you could get back. We weren’t exactly sure what happened. I had theories based on the evidence left behind, but those were really just guesses.”

Arkk was well aware that he was inordinately lucky. Having all of them appear within the Maze together, bound to that displaced command center, kept him from losing anyone to the strange topography. They hadn’t wandered off before realizing the scope of the situation. And, with endless capacity for summoning servants, they had managed to escape with relative ease. Had anyone else been in that position, no one in the Maze would have been seen again.

“Excellent work,” Arkk said, clapping a hand on Morvin’s back. “Both in selecting the stone and getting it out here when things went awry.”

“Indeed,” Zullie said. “Keep it up and you might just make senior junior assistant by the end of the year.”

Morvin’s smile at Arkk’s praise turned to a puzzled frown. “I wasn’t aware there was a hierarchy.”

“We can discuss company structure later,” Arkk said, cutting off whatever Zullie had been about to say. “Fortress Al-Mir is under attack. Right now, it is just the airships that have been attacking Al-Lavik, but they’re being significantly more effective against the wider target. But it won’t be just that for long,” he said, turning to Harvey.

The flopkin nodded his head, peering into the crystal ball clutched in his small hands. “I’d guess we have about an hour? Maybe more. Maybe less. Depends on how they navigate the narrowed bend ahead of them.”

The crystal ball displayed a worrying sight. They had been concerned over the surprising lack of Empire soldiers at Elmshadow, wondering where they had gone off to. The crystal ball held the answer.

They were approaching Fortress Al-Mir via large ships traveling up the river. They must have been out at sea, perhaps even headed toward Cliff, when the airships decided to bypass his tower and Elmshadow to directly siege Fortress Al-Mir.

“Right. Harvey, Camilla, Luthor, you’re on messenger duty. Once we’re back at the fortress, I’ll teleport you around. Whoever you appear in front of, inform them of the approaching Empire soldiers. Tug on the link as soon as you’re finished and you’ll be teleported again. Once done, you’ll be on the lower levels, the safest place in the fortress at the moment. Continue standard scrying duties.”

The three gave him affirming nods, leading to Arkk motioning toward the teleportation circles.

As they moved, Arkk turned to his spellcasters. “Morvin, Zullie—”

“I have an idea,” Zullie interrupted. “If we—”

“No ideas,” Arkk said, voice far harsher than usual. “I need things that work. Not things that blow up in our faces.”

Zullie’s shoulders deflated as she turned aside.

“I have Kia and Claire in the Heart chamber. They’re on full-time Heart guarding duty. If you can erect a layered shield—just the regular old one we used at the start of Al-Lavik’s defense—that would free at least one of them up to help elsewhere.”

“But—”

“No buts. Morvin, you’re in charge of keeping her on task.”

Morvin sighed but nodded, resigned to his duties. At his side, Zullie did not look pleased. Perhaps owing to her being the principal cause of their detour through the Maze, however, she did not protest, merely frowning in Morvin’s direction before stalking after the scrying team toward the teleportation rituals.

“If she does something you think is dangerous or foolhardy,” Arkk said, leaning in to whisper to Morvin before he could follow, “tug on the link and I will deal with it.”

Even if he had to throw her into a dungeon cell for the duration of the attack. There would be no more incidents caused by his side. They had enough to deal with from the Empire.

Morvin nodded, hurrying after Zullie. Arkk remained for a moment more. He looked around the highlands portal chamber as a lesser servant scaled the portal frame. There were no guards or defenders. If that keystone hadn’t led to the Maze—hadn’t led to them—Morvin could have easily opened the doors for anything. Given the relative desertion of most other realms, it likely wouldn’t have meant much, but all it would take was one hostile creature like the Anvil wyrm slipping through to kill Morvin and leave the portal open for a flood of fresh enemies. At least until the glowstones powering the portal ran dry.

Depending on what came through, they could have proved near impossible to displace. Especially while he was fighting a war on another front and trapped in another realm.

It hadn’t happened. But it could have. That alone was reason enough to keep Zullie from making another mistake.

Arkk caught the keystone, tossed down by the lesser servant, and immediately headed toward the rituals.

The Eternal Empire thought they could assault him without even a ground force to occupy his defenders? No longer. The Holy Light’s avatar taught Hannah and Sylvara how to hurt the airships. Between him, Agnete, and now Priscilla, those eggs would soon become a non-issue. Protective magics around their weak points would halt bombardments. They had an hour to solve their current issues before an expected force of six thousand Empire soldiers descended upon the Cursed Forest.

If there was one upside to the approaching situation, it was that the Empire’s soldiers would be forced to march across the relatively massive Cursed Forest, slowed further by whatever bombardment and defenses he could erect before they departed their ships. They would arrive weary and exhausted with no time to set up camp to recuperate. Unfortunately, with the constant battle his forces had been engaged with since they started marching Al-Lavik toward Woodly Rhyme, it was more of an evening of the playing field than an advantage toward him.

His men were tiring. He could see it in every swing of an orc’s scythe, every thrust of a Shieldbreaker’s spear. Even the machines from the Anvil were slower now than they had been before. Arkk hadn’t thought beings like them would be capable of tiring, but unless something else was going on, they were.

With him back, with him able to use his localized omniscience to properly organize the defense, he hoped to buy shifts of rest for at least some of his forces. And, once the opportunity presented itself, shift their defense into an offense.

He had experienced quite enough assaults from foreign nations. Evestani was already defeated, with their capital captured by Ilya and their avatar dead. It was time to do the same to the Eternal Empire.

The first order of business was finding out why Alma kept pinging him. The little tugs on the link had been going on for a while now. Almost the entire time he had been in the Maze. She clearly had something for him, something urgent but not something that posed an imminent threat to her.

She was trying to be unobtrusive, not drowning out any other tugs on the link. Yet she was persisting.

But she was also still at Al-Lavik, seated on the floor in the small chamber that held the Holy Light’s basin. Whatever she wanted likely involved the Holy Light’s avatar.

Arkk left her there for the moment—he thought of teleporting her to the ritual room, but depending on what was wrong, her presence at the basin might be a necessity. He didn’t have enough information to make a judgment just yet. But that could easily be resolved.

Fortress Al-Mir’s temple room had changed once again.

The first and most notable change was the Permafrost’s statue. A miniaturized blizzard swirled around the ice carving of the dragon. Its glowing blue eyes slowly tracked him as he teleported into the room. The Permafrost wasn’t the only statue to have changed. It seemed like every other statue was no longer static as they had been before.

The Fickle Wheel tilted and turned, rotating in place. The dark tendrils emerging from the door behind Xel’atriss twitched and squirmed. A fire roared around the base of the Burning Forge’s anvil. Wind, unfelt throughout the rest of the temple, picked up and jostled the Cloak of Shadows’ wisp-like cloak. Each of them now had some small aspect animated.

And there were new additions. Four more pedestals were filled. A tall, armored figure with a spectral cape and elongated limbs stood at one. They stood in place, locked in a pirouette, with only the tail-ends of the cape fluttering. A veil obscured the face.

The Veiled Dancer. Deity of sensuality, arts, and flow in all forms—water, air, words, and, of course, dancing.

Unknown, the Enigma… existed. The pedestal was there. Arkk could tell that something was occupying it. But what, exactly, he couldn’t tell. His eyes slid from its form, unable to process what was there. He couldn’t identify a single aspect of it, not even a vague shape, color, or size.

A shirtless, muscled man rode atop a rearing horse on the next pedestal. Even the most fit of his orcs would find themselves envious of the man’s build. Dark red liquid flowed endlessly over both the man and the horse. The Red Horse. God of war and physical prowess.

The final pedestal was somewhat unpleasant to look at. A blob of flesh. Rows of breasts and a belly hidden beneath of titanic proportions. Its corpulent body, sessile due to its own size, spilled over the sides of its pedestal.

The Bloated Mother. Deity of life, fertility, and disease.

That only left a single empty pedestal. That of the Whispering Gale.

Based on the process of elimination, he was fairly certain he could add the Gale at any time, simply by using the keystone borrowed from the Anvil.

For the time being, however, Arkk moved to the statue of the Holy Light. The shimmering light making up the clothes seemed so much more vibrant now, cycling through dozens of bright colors instead of just the pure white it had been. He teleported one of the candles the avatar had given him to his hand and, with a small flame spell, lit it. They were supposed to alert the avatar, allowing them to meet, if not face-to-face.

It didn’t take long for the statue to come to life.

“Arkk. You’re back.” The avatar did not sound pleased. “This is… not good. This is really not good.”

“Is there something you need to tell me?” Arkk asked, presuming that was why Alma kept pinging him.

The statue shifted, knuckles digging into its temples. “Yes,” Lyra said. “I needed to tell you not to return, fool. Do you realize what you’re doing? What you’ve done?”

“You’re speaking of the Calamity,” Arkk said, looking around the temple, eying the fluttering banners of the Almighty Glory and the gentle rise-and-fall of the Eternal Silence’s chest. “I suppose I have some idea. I imagine the Calamity is weaker than ever before. The temple is populated. One of the three traitor avatars is dead. You all were holding the Calamity together, weren’t you?”

“You knew and you still…”

“I’ve seen the effects of your Calamity,” Arkk said, teleporting a short stool into the chamber. He had been walking for the last hour. If he were to be stuck in a conversation for the moment, he would multitask and use the opportunity for a quick rest. “Entire worlds turned to wastelands. Do you know how many must have died slow and painful deaths?”

“Don’t you dare judge,” the statue snapped, pointing a finger toward Arkk. “You don’t know what it was like. Magic levels started increasing. Everyone thought it was a great boon. Feats of magic were being performed on a level never before seen. A wave of the hand and all problems could be solved.

“Except me. I knew. You’ve seen the other worlds.”

“Magic toxicity,” Arkk said with a nod of his head. “Something about plants is different from animals and people. Too much magic kills them.”

“It is a bit more complicated than that, but yes. At the smallest scale, plants are rigid and unable to accommodate magic beyond a certain amount.” The statue’s head shook, snapping from one side to the other. “I tried to warn others. Tried to explain the problem, tried to generate support for possible solutions. But, in the end, my past self could only find two allies.”

“The Heart of Gold and the Almighty Glory.”

“Their avatars. The gods themselves—I hesitate to say that they do not care, but they certainly do not operate on a level that we do. Glory-hog and I came up with the Solution. Greedy Gold joined. The Heart of Gold was the key to it all, gold, you see, does not tarnish. That concept expanded to encompass the barrier between realms, keeping it safe.” A low, sorry chuckle slipped from the statue. “Glory is all about the pride and nobility. But I imagine my golden counterpart only loaned his abilities once he realized that he would have a whole world with next to no competition to call his own.”

“So you cut them off,” Arkk said. “Condemned millions. Billions? More?”

“We saved as many as we could,” the avatar snapped. “Brought as many to this world as we could. People died, yes, but only so that more could be saved. The barrier was the only thing keeping this world from ending up like them. Do you comprehend how many people you will be killing in the coming decades? The last bastion, the solution, lain to ruin because of you.”

Arkk nodded his head, closing his eyes. “How long have we got? Anything more precise than decades?”

“You don’t have many dams up there in Mystakeen, do you?”

“I… don’t think so?” Arkk said, confused at the odd change in topics.

“We have a number in Chernlock. It is a desert, you see. Manipulating the rivers and lakes is vital to our continued survival. With proper construction, a relatively thin wall can retain a truly massive amount of water.” The statue held its hands together in front of its face. It poked a finger forward, making a hole in the wall. “But even a tiny hole will lead to disaster. At first, only a small trickle of water escapes, but that water rushes through, forced by all the weight of the water behind it, tearing away at the wall around it.” More fingers poked forward, breaking the wall. “Until the entire dam fails and an entire lake’s worth of water rushes down, flooding anything near the river.”

“I take it this is a metaphor?”

“We’re at the point of that first tiny hole. Even if I were to measure the amount of magic that is certainly making its way into this realm at this very moment, I can’t estimate when that hole will widen or when the entire barrier will come crashing down.”

“And it cannot be repaired, even temporarily?” Arkk asked.

“As I said, the Heart of Gold is the main key to this solution. Unless a new avatar is appointed in a hurry—and they never are—and we find that avatar, and that avatar proves at least as adept as his predecessor in utilizing his powers, and he proves willing to assist instead of blinded by greed, and—”

“‘No,’ I take it.”

“Not likely,” Lyra corrected. “At least, not with the Heart of Gold. But I haven’t been sitting idle in the last few hundred years. I’m the avatar of enlightenment, after all. There are other powers out there. Some far more adept at construction than the Heart of Gold.”

“Agnete,” Arkk whispered, eyes widening in realization. That was why she kept asking for the other avatar. It was likely why the Abbey of the Light went to such lengths to accommodate or subjugate their purifiers. She must have been plotting this for some time. Plotting to cut out the avatar of Gold. If Arkk had handed Agnete over earlier or killed the avatar of Gold without opening a bunch more portals, it probably would have worked.

He frowned, wondering why she hadn’t told him earlier, only to immediately realize… He was here trying to break down the Calamity entirely. Lyra had either found out, perhaps from Vrox, or simply surmised based on Vezta’s existence. Either way, she would have wanted Agnete without telling him why.

“I didn’t expect the barrier to be quite so damaged,” the avatar said, all but confirming his suspicions. “But if anyone can fix it, it would be the avatar of the Burning Forge. Arkk, once again, this time with the fate of the world at stake, I implore you to hand over Agnete.”

Arkk leaned back in his chair, staring at the maze-like pattern of the temple ceiling. It was a solution. Likely the easiest one. But he had promised Vezta that he would bring down the Calamity. If Agnete helped repair it, it would likely be stronger than ever. Perhaps even impossible to bring down at a later date.

“Could you call off the Eternal Empire?” Arkk asked without looking back down at the statue. He teleported Agnete around, dropping her in front of an egg that looked near to bursting. Priscilla was freezing another. Sylvara, with his assistance, was able to visit the surface to try to attack the airships, but the main one seemed especially focused on bombarding any source of the rainbow-hued light attacks.

When he realized that Lyra wasn’t responding, he glanced down, frowning at the sheepish look on the statue’s face. An odd expression for a god to make, even if it was only a depiction.

“Avatar?”

“I… Remember how I said that her whole thing is pride? Well, I think you’ve damaged some of that pride. I can’t get the Empress to respond to me right now. She might be a bit upset with you.”

“Great,” Arkk muttered.

“It might go against your instincts, but if you would please avoid killing the glory hog, it would be best for the world.”

Arkk could only shake his head, sighing. “We’re in a war here. I make no promises.”

“Arkk—”

“And my answer remains the same with regards to handing over Agnete. Agnete is a free woman, she can go where she chooses. Thus far, she has shown no inclination toward returning to you.”

“Arkk, be reasonable—”

“I have a question for you, Lyra Zann. Assuming you repair the dam, what happens when it overflows? When the water level reaches the top and then keeps going up?”

“What? What are you—”

“As you said, I’m not too familiar with dams. But I can’t imagine anything good. That water would rush past over the top, damaging the structure. Maybe it would be slower, since it doesn’t have all that weight behind it, but it would damage it nonetheless. Or am I wrong?”

“That was a metaphor, Arkk, not a literal explanation of the situation.”

“So when all the other realms fill to the bursting point, your barrier will remain in place?”

The avatar did not respond. The statue shifted, adopting a frown as it stared at Arkk. But there was no response. Which, Arkk decided, was an answer all the same.

“I have another question, Lyra Zann. When did demons become a thing?”

“Demons? Are you still having demon problems?”

“Not problems, per se. Solutions, maybe. Though I intend to kill this demon if only to avenge Leda.”

“Arkk. Demons aren’t a solution. A single demon, given the opportunity, would destroy the entire world all on its own. It would do so for no other reason than because it could, because it was bored. They could do it too because of what they are.”

“Yes, they break the laws of magic. So I’ve heard—”

“Heard from who? That’s wrong. Utterly wrong. Every one of them acts somewhat like an avatar. Powerful avatars. Think on the level of Agnete, were she to go rogue, sweeping her flames across entire nations. They don’t break magic,” she said with a scoff, as if the thought were absurd.

Arkk folded his arms, frowning. Zullie had told him that. It… well, it wasn’t much of a surprise to find out that she had been wrong, especially about a subject outside her fixations. “That isn’t what I wanted to question anyway,” Arkk said with a shake of his head. “When did demons become a thing?”

“I’m not sure. Since perpetuity. Why does that matter?”

“I’m no avatar, certainly no avatar of knowledge, yet… I am willing to bet that demons became a thing shortly—perhaps shortly on a vast time scale—before you started noticing those problems with the magic toxicity.” Arkk clasped his fingers together, staring at the statue. “You had to enact the Calamity because they killed their god.

“And, if I am correct… there may be a solution there that does not involve building your dam taller and taller until it collapses under its own weight.”