One of the soldiers tried to flee the lighthouse, to escape this untouchable, unkillable horror. She managed to dart to the side of the wraith, following the curve of the outside wall, and was moving fast when a spectral eel whipped at her. The tip of the eel moved through her armored boots and must’ve brushed her heel because a wave of frostbite cold washed through the area and the woman’s head snapped violently backward toward her feet.

Her shoulders followed.

Then she whimpered as her entire torso started bending backwards.

Something snapped in her hips or pelvis or spine and she howled in agony and the first soldier crumpled into a sphere of flesh. Like a car being compacted, but he was still alive. Still shrinking into that terrible point of contact at his stomach, but clinging to life.

And listen: there came a time when the enemy of your enemy was an ally. There came a time when you simply had to work with horrible people in the service of defeating a greater evil. I understood that. Honestly, I did. And that wraith was pretty much the definition of ‘a greater evil.’

Still, I took the opportunity to hack at Kathina. Because, if you followed my logic: fuck her. And she was so distracted that my blade carved a deep wound in her side. She reeled backward and I chopped halfway through her arm before a wraith tentacle lashed at me.

I dove away as Kathina screamed and wept and dug into her pouch with her uninjured arm. Spectral pain clawed at me, an agonized aura and needles of ice, as the ethereal tendril whipped toward my thigh. It hurt even before it touched me ... and it was an instant from touching me.

I couldn’t dodge, so I turned to smoke and felt a wave of burning acid pressure.

The wraith’s spectral eel lashed at my smoky form and then through the vapor of my self. It couldn’t quite touch me, not really. At least not my soul, not while I was smoke.

Kathina’s wounds healed as she swalled a gold bead and more eels lashed at me, as if the wraith was infuriated by my resistance. I condensed my smoke to a thin rope, to get some distance from the wraith, and Kathina bolted for the exit. Good think that her sudden movement didn’t go unnoticed. Also, fuck her: the moment she attracted the wraith’s attention I returned to my body and threw a hatchet.

The blade caught her in the back of the head. Hard enough to kill any ungemmed person on the spot. The hatchet dug an inch into her skull but she didn’t even hesitate. She stumbled a few steps, swallowed another golden bead, then bellowed a battlecry and poured power into her shield, so much that the crackle of lightening sounded like gunshots.

The shimmering edge of her shield caught the wraith ... but didn’t stop it. Still, she managed to slow the probing, horrible eel-limbs as she pushed toward the exit.

And as the wraith pushed through her shield toward her.

Blood wept from her eyes as she threw even more mana into her shield.

A stretching eel swayed closer to her, then swayed in the air four inches from her arm. Blood gushed from her nose, her shield shrunk into a single patch of brilliance--and she managed to shove past the wraith with inches to spare, and fall through the exit of the lighthouse.

I caught a single glimpse of her tumbling down the slope toward the kobold village before the first soldier’s whimpers fell silent. The other soldier was still keening in pain, though, as her spine snapped backward and the wraith had already touched the other two Sixer, leaving just one, in addition to Tiral-ur.

And me, Wren, Tansy, and Usim.

Wren was sprawled on the ground, facing the wraith with Usim against the wall behind her. Her eyes open but clearly unable to move. And Tansy looked terrified, more frightened than I’d ever seen her, but she still stepped forward, to protect Usim from the wraith. Because I’d told her to. Because that’s what I’d ‘ordered,’ and she’d decided to obey.

Which, fuck. What was I supposed to do? How did you kill something that you couldn’t touch? Something that killed with a touch? I didn’t know, so I just stood there with my hatchets in my hand while Tiral-ur yelled, “To me!” at the last remaining Sixer soldier.

The soldier darted to him, probably for protection, and Tiral-ur grabbed the guy and thrust him toward the wraith

“No! Sir! Please!” the soldier shrieked, slashing wildly with his sword.

His blade moved through the wraith without touching it. Not even a ripple

Tiral-ur used the guy as meat shield, shoving him forward to catch the wraith’s eels that lashed out. Three of them touched the soldier but none reached through him to Tiral-ur. As the soldier writhed and compressed in his grip, Tiral-ur marched to the exit, where he dropped the soldier and vanished from view.

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Then the wraith turned toward Tansy and Usim, whose teeth chattered from fear and the frigid air. The creature didn’t approach them, though. It focused on its meal, bursting the soldier like an overripe fruit. It was in no rush.

Tansy shifted her grip on her useless sword. She shifted her weight, standing fully in front of Usim while knowing that she couldn’t stop the wraith. And Wren lay bleeding on the ground, with tears in her eyes.

Princess murmured in my mind,

I snapped:

I barked in my mind.

“Alex, w-what are you thinking?” Tansy stammered, reading something in my body language.

With my gaze still on the wraith, I tossed Usim my last gold bead. “Give this to your mom.”

“What’re you doing?” Tansy demanded.

Behind her, Usim shoved the bead in Wren’s mouth.

“Carry them out of here, Wren,” I said, as the wraith consumed the soldiers’ souls. “Carry them straight up and out of the lighthouse.”

“Don’t you dare,” Tansy snarled at her. “You leave me here with him you Sixer shit.”

“I--” Wren rose into a squat as her wounds closed. “On my honor, Alex Smokegemmed of the Sunken City. I will see them safe.”

“I’m staying with you,” Tansy growled at me. “I’m fucking guarding you.”

“Get them out of here,” I repeated to Wren, then more softly I told Usim, “Take care of--”

The wraith swayed toward them suddenly, eel-limbs extended.

So I leapt to intercept it, then transformed into smoke, spreading myself thin, into a vaporous tapestry between them and the wraith. A gaseous shield between them and a horrible death. And I prayed that Princess was right, that my smoke could affect the spiritual realm ... could at least deflect attacks on the soul. If she was wrong, I was dead. If she was wrong, we were both dead.

I braced myself and waited for one of those eels to launch at me like--

Princess said.

An almost-hysterical bubble of laughter rose in my ... my smoky self.

We spoke to each other at the speed of thought, yet the wraith still struck before I had time to answer her. An eel fired through my curtain of smoke and bored a hole in my soul. Agony spread through me, a hundred scorpions striking at once, poison rotting my flesh and ...

And no, the hole hadn’t drilled through my soul.

Because my soul, my smoke, had stopped the drill bit. At least the first one. Almost simultaneous with that initial attack, two more eels smacked against my vaporous self, trying to burrow through, to reach Usim and the others--or to reach me, maybe, to reach my spirit. Yet they couldn’t. They couldn’t do more than send pulses of suffering that made me want to weep, made me want to die.

My mind reeled from the pain. I wanted it to stop, I needed it to stop--and I almost recoiled, the way I’d automatically recoil if I pressed my palm onto a red-hot stove burner.

But if I stopped resisting, the wraith would tear through my smoke. Into my self.

Health: 41/57

Mana: 15/24

My world shrank to three circles, each one hand-span wide: the three places where eels were pushing into my tapestry of smoke.

Health: 37/57

Mana: 12/24

Even as I focused on keeping the wraith back, part of my smoke-self saw Wren, now full-sized, clip Tansy on the jaw with a red fist, then grab her slumping body. Part of me saw Usim climbing onto his mother’s broad back.

Health: 30/57

Mana: 8/24

Part of me saw Wren leap upward. The wooden floor, battered by Tiral-ur’s meteoric fall, cracked violently under her feet, at the force of her jump. Planks shattered, but she managed to launch upward and land on the second segment of stairs ... and then crouch for another leap.

However, most of me focused on the farthest vaporous fringe of myself, a long tendril of smoke drifting toward the exit. One wisp wafted nearer and nearer to the door while ghostly claws ripped at my soul. I screamed despite having no mouth, my disembodied throat shredded and bleeding.

And far above me, impossibly far above me, Wren leaped with her two burdens from a jutting segment of stairs and vanished into an upper level of the Old City.

Yet I couldn’t feel any satisfaction through the agony, I couldn’t feel any triumph. All I felt was agony. I billowed in pain, my tendril still moving terribly slowly toward the door, and focused inside.

Health: 22/57

Mana: 5/24

Another two wraith-eels struck my curtain of smoke. Another two poisonous barbs drilled into my flesh and into my bone--and I fainted from the pain.

I lost consciousness at the worst possible time.

At a deadly time. I simply ... failed. I couldn’t handle the suffering for one more second, so I gave up. I surrendered.

Health: 18/57

Mana: 2/24

But here’s the thing about: Arachrys Blooded (Webtouched, Twominds, Resistance). What ‘twominds’ meant was that even if one mind, my mind, had broken, another could step into the breach for a moment.

So Princess took over. She seized the reins of our shared self and re-solidified us at the farthest point from the wraith. Just inside the lighthouse exit, in that distant trailing wisp of smoke, my body took shape again.

My mind still didn’t work. I still remained a passenger in my own self, but I felt us staggering away from the bisected tower. I felt with my blind, webtouched senses as we trotted unsteadily forward on the balance-beam of the broken walkway.

And I felt other things, farther away.

I felt the chill of the wraith, slowly pursuing. I felt that icy cold, deep in my heart.

I felt the shape of Tiral-ur, facing away from me down the slope, looking at a pile on the ground.

I felt that pile resolve into the slumped, terribly-wounded form of Kathina.

I felt her lift one weak, shaking finger and point at me.

And I felt Tiral-ur turn toward me.