Noise, the sound of grunting and snarling comes from sideways and ahead, the spiraling nature of the ramp we race up throwing off all sense of forward or back. I pass a bend, and I see Jor’Mari there, straining with the strangest kind of creature I have ever seen. It appears to be a giant puddle, blue liquid with a faint light, sticking to the floor and to Jor’Mari’s leg and right arm. Inside the puddle moves a strange stone that pulses with red light like a beating heart.

“Fucking glue!” Jor’Mari roars, hand coming down in a fist, a splash of blue liquid as thick as tar jumping up from the impact, but nothing much changes. If anything, the blue liquid climbs up his side a bit more.

Floortrap Ooze(Rank One)

“Kill it,” I yell at him as I keep running, bringing the energy pooling in my staves to its limit.

“What does it look like I am doing?” Jor’Mari yells back. A ring of purple light glows away from him and I skid myself to a stop, grabbing ahold of Clarice’s arm before she can run into it. The man has only had the presence for a few hours, best not to test his ability to tell friend from foe with it. We come up short a few strides distant from the ooze on the ground, Jor’Mari gritting his teeth, straining, as he brings the weight of his soul presence down upon the thing. Apparently, oozes do not scare so easy.

“Gak!” I cries out, hunching and almost falling as a strip of flesh is ripped away from his calf.

“Let me kill it and we can move on,” I say, still keeping well clear of the purple aura that grows more ragged and discordant by the second.

“I won’t be beaten by fucking glue,” Jor’Mari roars back, his eyes ride and teeth barred. Horns start to shoot up from all over the man, pushing through the bunched fabric on his shoulders, sliding out crooked from underneath his fine shirt, the two on his forehead growing larger, their ringed fringes almost seeming to vibrate.

“What–”

My question is cut off by a loud crack, the horns growing all over the man exploding off his skin in all directions. I slap out with my staff, knocking one of the projectiles from the air just before it would have impaled Clarice through the thigh. In the second after the explosion on the man, the explosion on the stone comes, the horns burrowing inches into the ramp and wall without effort. Seven of them stab through the ooze on the floor, a deadly volley if it weren’t what it is.

“Bah!” Jor’Mari’s knee buckles and thuds with a squelch to the ground, burying him up to his waist in the slime of the creature.

“Pride,” I growl, lowering the head of my new staff. The monster is only made of two things apparently, so I take aim at the shifting ball inside that beats like a heart. Most things cannot live without their heart as far as I am aware. I vaguely wonder if I might be on the list of things that can now.

A ball of fire splits from the head of the staff, launching at the slime on the floor, my aim, of course, unerring. A bloom of orange light blossoms in the chamber, the brightest light in the room as of yet I am proud to say. Something halfway between a screech and a burp follows the explosion.

“I got it,” I tell Jor’Mari.

The man lowers his hands from his face, blinking up at me, moving to stand and finding it still difficult to pull himself out of the newly made corpse. “How can you tell?”

A good question, other than it no longer moving so much, it looks mostly the same. The window hovering in front of me, however, is all the tip off I need. That, and the smoking ruin of whatever that odd organ had been.

Eventually he struggles free, bits of sticky blue still clinging to his legs. Jor’Mari looks down at himself, grunting, hand hovering between trying to smear off the ick and not wanting to get it all over his fingers. I place the head of my staff to the weird grossness on the floor, and an instant later it evaporates into pink mist.

“Maybe you should have stayed inside,” I say, looking over Jor’Mari as he is left in his blue-covered situation.

“Do you think that ability might–”

The ramp beneath my feet shakes, and a violent fear of what might happen if it decides to suddenly fall off the wall worms into my gut. It shudder again a second later, and then the pounding begins to become a rhythm. I cast around, looking for anything, everyone is doing it. Jasper points into the dark, a trembling finger slowly tracking something slightly above us through the gloom.

“It’s her,” he all but whispers.

There isn’t even time to ask who he is talking about before I catch sight of a vague shape falling out of the dark. That fear in my guts twists up more as the shape resolves into the underbelly of a massive lizard easily as large as our barn back home. I grab the gawping by the back of his collar, pulling him to the side as the creature slams onto the ramp in the midst of us.

I am not fast enough to pull us both fully out of the way; the side of the great beast snaps into me, would crush me if it didn’t knock me rolling down the slope first. My shoulder bounces off vibrating stone, then a knee, and then I am sliding on the metal backing of my armor that skips and sparks as the stone of the ramp flexes.

I dig my heels into the stone, grinding to a halt, rolling aside as a huge foot slaps down just to my right. Back on my feet, I continue to backpedal, staves coming up and glowing dangerously as I point them skyward. The six-eyed head of the huge lizard turns, looking down at me, tongue flicking out to taste the air. Standing on the head of the monster, is the short-statured figure of a woman I very much wished, Lady Forendous.

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“Kas endembo tora ain kraga,” the woman hisses, her words strange, high in pitch but almost bouncing off the walls. The monster she rides upon hisses, rearing its head back. A shroud of green light explodes off of the woman, rising high into the air, oddly with its light while not lighting up anything in the chamber. Near me, I hear Jor’Mari croak out a groan, catch him staring up at the towering presence.

I might not understand the details of what she says, but I think I got the gist.

The soul presence arcs down like the titanic and crushing paw of some huge cat, deadly, or as close to it as this woman might be allowed to get inside the tower. Despite its inevitability, it wasn’t all that fast.

Three quick steps forward and I reach the raised neck of the big lizard. The heads of my staves detonate, spraying a splash of seared flesh and fluid over me as the monster roars, flailing away and rolling. The diving wave of green power wavers and quakes as the creature screams, a surprised yell coming from its rider. It lands on its side, half leaning off of the ramp, back feet kicking out and raking the air with sword-length claws, scratching up the stone.

“Move.” Jor’Mari has me by the arm, pulling me away from the spectacle.

I take another shot with my staff, charring an armpit with an eruption of fire, but causing nothing more than superficial damage.

The creature bends this way and that, one clawed foot finding the ground while the other scratches wildly, its tail snapping about hard enough to crush a horse’s back. We skirt the wall, keeping well away from its dangerous flailing. Then, with a gurgle, its leg scratches the air, and it slips over the side, a long terrified screech peeling off into the air.

We watch it disappear from sight, and I hope there is no unfortunate figure down at the bottom that can’t get out of its way. The vanishing body of the monster reveals Lady Forendous kneeling on the stone at the edge of the ramp, one hand held to her face, alien blood leaking between her fingers.

Through the crack between her thumb and index finger, one angry yellow eye shot through with red leers at me. Green light rings her like an angry fire, boiling up as she pushes herself to stand, bloody hand falling to show a gash across her brow. The ground shakes with each step she takes, her bare feet leaving an indentation in the stone. A spear of gold slithers out of her shroud like a snake, vibrating in the air just behind her, followed along behind by more weapons of increasing points: two, three, five, six.

Mana continues to pour into the heads of my staves, but nowhere near fast enough. I don’t think that this woman has any plan to hold shy of killing me. I keep expecting a member of the guild to jump in between us, Arabella or someone else, but no one arrives. Didn’t they say that they wanted to keep bloodshed to a minimum?

“Fight like your life depends on it,” Jor’Mari says next to me. The ring on his right middle finger lights for a moment and his hand clenches around an invisible weight, the invisible mace that he still thinks I don’t know about.

“Can’t die yet,” I say. I don’t feel the bravado. With a soul presence, Jor’Mari can at least resist hers a bit, maybe. Without one, I know that I will be at her mercy the second she decides to turn it on me. I remember what happened out on the field.

“Khadsia!!!!!” A man, tall and muscled, wearing a long robe of woven green silk embroidered with dancing dragons, crashes out of the sky. With a twitch of her fingers, two of the hovering, golden weapons move through the air, intercepting a fist ringed with iron. The noise of the collision rattles bone. I don’t know who this green-haired bastard is or what he wants, but at the moment I cannot care so much.

At my side, Jor’Mari dashes forward almost too fast to follow, hand swinging in a graceless arc, not that invisible maces require all that much grace. Lady Forendous’ other hand comes up, two more weapons spinning down, the six-pronged one catching the unseen weapon between its forks, the spear darting out to run Jor’Mari through. He catches the spear in his hand, grunting, straining as it presses on him, drawing a thin line of blood down his chest from the shallowest of cuts it leaves across his chest. Three lights flare around the fighters, one purple, another a springtime shade of pink, and the largest of all a menacing and dangerous green.

My feet kick against the stone. For an instant, Lady Forendous’ eye slides to me, but then Jor’Mari is between us, and I do not give up that advantage. No idea who the strange barbarian is, no idea what became of Clarice or Jasper, no idea what pushes Jor’Mari to attack this crazy woman, I sprint up the ramp for all I am worth.

“This is a distraction,” I grunt, pushing my legs as hard as they will go. The incline becomes sharper near the top, but I am almost there now. “We agreed to go ahead.”

“You did agree,” Galea says from my side. “You both confirmed, whatever it takes.”

“We agreed.”

The white light peeking from the edges at the top of the ramp grows brighter as I rise, three wedges of light at the top of the chamber; I can almost feel the warmth. I snort air, lungs pumping like bellows, obstacles and the occasional monster left forgotten as I sprint by. My foot touches the light, and by Exeter, it is warm.

Almost at the last instant the incline of the ramp levels out, the change so sudden that I find myself stumbling into the room at the top of the tower. Like the chamber below, this room is a huge circular disk of stone, though the ceiling is only twenty or so feet above my head. Three holes of darkness are cut in even spaces at the edges, one being the one I just climbed up from. The majority of the room is dominated by rings of gold set into the stone floor, each growing more thick and filled with more elaborate engravings as they move toward the center where a dais of gold stands bare. Above the center of the room is a crystal set into the ceiling, a perfect white light shining. Set into the round walls are twelve stone doors, all sealed tight, no doubt the exits to this labyrinth.

I feel a shift in the floor, a crack running through the stone, but my attention is stolen away by the sound of boots running. I bring my staves up as three heads appear from the ramp on the opposite end of the room. The Lady of Fate must be with me, because the second of those stolid faces belongs to no other than Coriander Mel’Draven. Power burns through my weapons, and I force in more mana than I ever have before.

She turns, onyx hair whipping about her face, big eyes falling on the ends of my shiny new staff. She spits something in the elves’ secret tongue, the two inconsequential on either of her arms turning frightened faces my way.

I am so focused on her, on making use of this bare instant I have, that at first, I do not realize why my vision blurs. Then, as momentary confusion slips through my concentration, I realize that there is a light between us. The dais in the center of the room has vanished, leaving a wide hole, out of which rises a spinning, crystal object.

Rings of intricate crystal that gleam like diamond, no bigger than my fist, spin about one another as they rise together into the air. The white light of the crystal above catches on the mesmerizing orb, spraying the white chamber with a myriad of rainbow light, a display too serene for how much anger I hold. It is a soul cage, the most beautiful one I have ever seen.

I am just preparing to fire again, to smite Coriander Mel’Draven from the world, when a figure standing on a golden platform begins to emerge from the hole. My anger withers at the sight of them.