They weren’t assaulting the shields. It was something else entirely.

We came roaring onto the scene and I could almost see the waves of time, rippling out through the rain-filled air – from us, from other arch-diviners on the grounds – everything was moving at different speeds. Still, I could instantly tell what was happening.

Mounds of earth in humanoid shapes were locked in struggle about the library – champions and arch-magisters were rallying crowds of mages in a valiant effort to stop the heretics from landing destructive attacks on the building. Fiends covered the library’s roofs, but they were Magisterium-bound demons, launching spell-bolts or strange missiles at the besiegers.

I instinctively dipped towards Starsight, taking a number of blasts aimed at the library’s walls across my shields instead – Star was darting across the parapets, contending with a Hierarch diviner. As I arrived I immediately set about surrounding him in my shield and letting force-blades ripple out at the heretic; the darkmage skipped backwards on the air…

Beyond, I saw the effect as Timesnatcher, Killstop and Zakimel arrived – it was instantaneous, the tide of the attackers falling back, dismayed – Tanra ripped a couple of regiments of wights to pieces as the two men descended on the more-mortal opposition.

Then she was there, in the thick of it, dancing on the wind with her blonde curls bobbing: the Hierarch formerly known as a champion, as Everseer.

Everyone around her drew away, even the heretics.

“What a merry little get-together,” she enunciated, staring at her rivals.

Tanra, Irimar and Zakimel, by some unspoken agreement that didn’t come across on the link, converged on her in a single chronomantic blur.

Stormsword ‘took care of’ the heretics who were throwing fireballs at my section of the library. When Starsight successfully took advantage of his opponent’s imperceptible slip-ups and caught him, raising his gold dagger to strike down at the man’s unprotected chest, I flew away towards the deadly duel, the quartet of arch-diviners.

They’d kept her trapped, the three of them forming a loose ring around Everseer. The glow of their passage flowed here and there on the night airs, but stayed in a relatively-confined area. I could even pick out snippets of the action if I watched a particular area very intensely, see how they were faring against her…

One of them striking at her in not quite the right spot, another desperately trying to twist out of the way of her attack, and the third doing their best to help the second not get skewered.

Every snippet was the same, Everseer dominating, the others switching position from instant to instant.

It hardly filled me with confidence.

“You can do it,” Zel whispered. “You don’t have to rely on them. Cast your net over them, use the inward-spikes… It’ll leave those who bear you no ill-will untouched.”

I don’t know if that would count Timesnatcher.

“What a pity…”

I know you hate other diviners, but really, Zel, that’s low.

Of all things, the last I expected was to hear her burst into tears.

What is it? Zel?

“N-n-nothing…”

Drop on it…

I got close enough to loop my diamond around them.

It only seemed to take them a second to realise that Everseer couldn’t go beyond a certain threshold, that something was holding her back. I assumed they knew I was floating here thirty feet beneath them.

“S-s-see Kas… T-Timesnatcher’s… he’s…”

I know, Zel. It wouldn’t harm him.

“Do it!” Zakimel snapped over the link, his voice echoing strangely. “Before she breaks it!”

“Feychilde…” Timesnatcher said in a tone of warning. He wasn’t warning me against it, though. He was warning me against inaction.

Then Killstop submitted her opinion: “No, don’t!”

Their voices rolled about inside my head, the chronomantic effect warping the sounds into guttural or sibilant refractions of the originals.

“Damn it all!” I roared back.

I brought the diamond down instead, descending at the same time, swinging it at the earth. It would pass through the soil and, trapped in its boundaries, she’d collide with the ground, knocking her out, letting one of our druids get their hands on her –

“What does it even matter?” Zel said bitterly. “They’ll only kill her anyway.”

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Too little, too late.

The diamond was still fifty feet from the grass when she twisted her daggers at my shields, a rhythmic series of blows, like someone chipping away at the corner of a window, steadily tapping it with a little pebble – she shattered the barrier.

I made a new diamond, made the blades I should’ve made last time, but she pirouetted, her spellbound knives slicing them away from my surfaces, like a gardener expertly strimming the thorns from a stem.

And then she was away, snapping a magister’s neck with a slap from the heel of her hand; the motion wasn’t even entirely designed for the poor guy – she was primarily throwing her dagger at another magister, who took it in the throat – then she was on the victim’s chest, pulling her knife free, moving away again –

The others followed her and, already, there were two deaths – on my head.

Answers. I need answers.

I looked towards the edge of the confrontation; there had to be a heretic I could take, interrogate –

“You need to get your head in the game!” Zel bit at me.

Go to sleep, Zel.

“No! Kas, you aren’t –“

I said go – to – sleep!

“If you aren’t going to listen, I’ll…”

As I realised, she realised I realised and her voice dropped away.

“N-no. Kas, please –“

I… understand now. I understand it all.

How had the story-book put it again? Something about how the imp used an illusion to supply a false name to its captor, so it could get away again once the sorcerer wasn’t looking. It got found out because it didn’t perform its task correctly, cutting corners in order to be freed from its new master early. It didn’t respond correctly.

Here she was, and not for the first time. My willpower, the overriding urge to get her to shut her face, should’ve been just as overriding to her as it was to me. She should’ve found herself forced to shut up.

But no. Not Zel.

“Kas…”

I’d read things about eldritches and their names, but I hadn’t paid much attention – as an archmage, I didn’t need to. I looked at them and apparently they just had to submit – I didn’t need their names, and I could take them freely if I wanted once they were bound.

I could take them freely, once they were bound – from a previously-unbound eldritch.

Zelurra. She wasn’t an illusionist, though. She had –

Olbru. Whose own name would be another lie…

“L-look Kas, there’s a lot more going on here than you realise, and it’s really important that you not lose your head –“

I trusted you. Both of you!

“You can’t know! You can’t know what it’s like, to be me!”

I rejected her, in every part of my being, and she was pushed straight out of me, hanging disoriented on the air before me.

I raised my hand; satyr reflexes let me snatch her up in my fist despite her sudden lunge away.

“To think, I listened to all your lies!” I growled in her tiny face.

Some heretics flew at me; I batted them away like they were just flies buzzing around me, still staring at the fairy.

The little queen was staring back defiantly, struggling against my grip. She didn’t seem to be gripped by any special agony from my gaze. “You’re sceptical, too sceptical for your own damn good.” She sighed, relaxed a little, and turned her head aside. “Too many hell-cursed arch-diviners, too much mess… I never saw this. Not one moment of it. I thought… But no. I wondered, when you’d figure it all out.”

“You wondered…” My voice faded away.

The extent of the betrayal was only now beginning to dawn on me.

Her eyes widened. “No, you can’t kill me, not now! I can’t restart the cycle, not when –“

She cut herself off.

“When what, Zel? What is your real name?”

I gazed deep into those wide, miniscule eyes, and for the first time I could sense it.

A hold over her so profound and so submerged, that since the day we met I’d taken it for a part of her own soul. But it wasn’t. It was something else – someone else.

“Who?” I whispered. “Who is your true master?”

Sudden, sharp pain and an intense kind of itching spread my fingers apart, an automatic reaction – enhanced durability and reflexes meant little to a sly diviner who’d spent precious seconds planning just the right way to escape my grip.

My hand split open, just for an instant – I saw the tiny blade in her hands – then there was a green flash and she was gone.

Gone.

Zel was gone.

My first instinct was to open the jadeway, follow her, extract answers – but my hand halted even as it started the gesture.

How did I know this wasn’t going to land me in even deeper trouble? If I couldn’t trust her – this was Zel – she was so unpredictable –

“Feychilde!” Storm yelled over the link. “Shield needed!”

I met her at the corner of the library, where she’d moved aside the earth to form a deep trench like an empty moat, and together we repelled and cremated a legion of dog-sized ants that had burrowed under us and were chomping away the foundations with their vicious mandibles.

I moved my body through the air, my fingers through their motions, letting them steer themselves, my higher consciousness all but removed.

Nothingness was what I really experienced. A sensation like falling. Falling, without caring.

Everything was lies. No one could be trusted. Everyone was killing.

Nothingness was peace. But it couldn’t last.

When the tide of battle took me away from Em, I was glad – the last glimpse of her I got, she’d hefted a band of panicked darkmages with one hand, then hurled them down at the ground at a speed that would crack then like eggs.

Like she’d done with Hierarch Thirteen, only these were lesser magic-users, with far less chance of escaping their impending dooms.

I’d drifted away, wraith-form turned up and rain falling right through me; now I was almost invisible, hanging over the edge of the war-zone that surrounded the library. It was relatively quiet out here, except for the link – occasionally someone would ask for me, but they probably assumed I was busy elsewhere, and what with my current mood being due to a snarl of fate it was possible even Timesnatcher couldn’t tell what I was up to.

I floated through a patch of trees, their almost-bare branches left untouched by the battle, and came near to a group of heretic healers. An illusory construct was shedding a white light across their work-space. A few slumbering individuals were stretched out at their feet, and most of them had their eyes, minds, spells all focussed on the fight – they were gazing out at their colleagues embroiled in the battle, sealing their wounds from a distance. But one of them was bent over a hideously-scorched heretic, laying their hands on directly, in order to better-effect their magic.

Even without my usual perception-boosts, something about the hunched-over druid called out to me. A kind of recollection.

The poise. The slight stature. The tapping foot, the simple motion repeated endlessly as though in annoyance, nervousness.

The grubby hand with which he worked his healing, the almost-emaciated elfin digits caked in mud and blood.

All of it – familiar. Coldly familiar.

There was nothing that prompted my memories about the robe itself, a shapeless, soiled thing of burlap, or the purple cowl or simple belt. In fact, they looked wrong on him.

And when he slowly retracted the hand, spinning on the spot to gaze up at me from the shadows of his hood, I knew.

I knew.