QUARTZ 9.13: HER MISTAKE

“Yes, every corpse becomes ashes! Everything tends to the Void! For what this ultimate struggle? The world grows narrower, and the systems of control only grip the tighter! It is beyond instinct. Time itself contracts. All this valour, all this purpose… it shall be for naught.”

– from ‘Grandfather’s Open Arms’

Ironvine threw down her hands, a gesture that served to propel her little boulder up into the sky.

And cast the sky at the ground.

This time the lightning storm was of such a magnitude, the spears of light raining down with such frequency that night really was transformed back into day, in spite of all the powers of the Sinphalamax. However strong they might’ve been, none of the lesser demons here were capable of preventing the strikes that came thundering down, smashing into Abstraxia, again and again; they were too busy avoiding the blasts that came seeking their own skulls. A few were able to dodge or block the elemental attacks – many were not. The eolastyr who tried to approach their Mother found their routes blocked, and only one of them was daring enough to dance into the lightning-field, receiving a trio of blackening bolts for her trouble.

The dweonatar advanced – and found me in its path.

It snapped closer with its arms out-thrust, trying to create a bridge of marble with its huge flowing sleeves, to deflect or absorb the wizardry hailing down. I hopped, springing up with my right leg, and I crushed as many of my remaining ascended ancients directly into myself as I could take as I rose, using their weightlessness to climb up on the air, intercept the huge, winged demon.

A flood of new voices assailed me, and I realised with some trepidation that I’d taken on twelve; it took me a moment to quell their low-pitched drones, throttle them with my will.

Silence! I must focus!

Robbed of my satyrs, I was in no place to fight a dweonatar. The ancients didn’t move expansively, like the wraith had done, and I’d lost the carrion-bird’s wings that’d granted me much of my speed. I floated up and looped my whips about the arch-demon’s arms, steering clear of the lightning, but three times it shook me loose, and following the third attempt it moved one hand to strike back. Like a blithering idiot, I left myself right in the path of its burning chain, with nowhere near the velocity I’d have needed to escape.

I braced myself –

The links of the chain were each the size of my hand, every portion aglow with the same unbearable heat; they screamed instantaneous cauterisation, my mind recognising their touch as fatal –

Yet… nothing. I felt nothing as it went tearing right through my midriff. If anything I felt better.

Curious now, I changed my tactic. I floated instead toward the massive thing’s face, ignoring the fractured light pouring from its eyes.

“Hey, you! Yeah you! Don’t ignore me now.”

I went to slash at its cheeks with my tendrils, causing it to strafe, keeping its hands extended over its mistress; with a quick upward glance to check Ironvine was safe, I followed, continuing to harass it.

“Come back here! Okk zi kasena! Ikasena! Agar ugrel khalis! Kadis!”

Something finally got through – it snarled and removed one of its hands protecting the Sinphalamax. I caught a glimpse of the little creature – the initial strikes had done their work. Her grey gown had now become a completely-colourless slush covering her body, and the skeletal form was riddled with a million iron branches. Abstraxia’s eye-sockets were empty no longer.

Yet she still twitched.

I returned my attention to her defender as it clawed at me with massive fingers.

“Be… mine,” I intoned calmly, its marble hand passing clean through me.

It tried the whip again, then both hands in a doubled fist.

Nothing. Even less than before. Every moment of contact sapped its might, loaning it to me, and when I clutched at it in turn, Yune’s fingers bit deep into the marble of its face, tearing its lip, its eyelid –

“Dwazisen!” it moaned, turning tail and running. “Zi kason, Sinphalamax, kha… khi rum zlond okk una thanil!”

I cackled, and gave chase, lashing the tips of its wings. There was no way I was catching it, but it was heading the direction I wanted to go anyway.

Towards the eolastyr.

Ironvine was being careful to prioritise incinerating those fiends capable of reaching her; given the way she’d mown through them, it looked like she’d aimed first for those with wings and those she recognised for teleporters, shifting her earthen seat through the air to avoid their counter-attacks, angle herself to strike better at them. But now the Sinphalamax was once more exposed, the wizard concentrated her fire again upon the leader of the Incursion.

This time the Sinphalamax couldn’t catch the sunfire. This time she had to endure it, and its creator knew her name – had spoken that name, right at her.

She couldn’t endure it.

Where the lightning touched her she melted down like a candle, and, as it lashed her up and down, in its wake bits of her body and clothing crumbled off, puffs of greyish matter erupting into the air. Soon all I could see were the metal rods that’d been grown within her, the forks and rivets glowing white-hot.

No death-rattle. No last words. No final say.

Abstraxia was gone.

The trio of eolastyr had given up trying to leap at Ironvine – the wizard simply adjusted the elevation of her floating boulder, and for all their hideous prowess the tigresses weren’t able to just sprout wings and fly after her. As it was, they’d gathered about the glittering crimson sacks and were trying to restart the soul-consuming light, busying themselves while the champion was distracted cooking their maker.

“Girls! You’re after Mummy’s heart to the last, aren’t ya?”

One of them tried cracking! her whip at me, but her two Sisters weren’t so foolish as to expend their weaponry’s reserves with zero chance at success. I smiled gloatingly as I descended into their midst, swinging my whips, driving them away from their banquet. The obliterating light stopped almost instantly.

“This was to be our day, Feychilde,” one moaned piteously, skipping and hopping in a rough circle about me. “You ruined it. Ruined! The Daughters of the Sinphalamax are never wrong…”

I left myself open to an attack from behind, and sensed with satisfaction as one of them lunged, hewing through my neck with a swipe of claws that could’ve toppled a tree.

She enjoyed no more success than her far-bigger brother had done, and I sampled her energies in return. Then I whirled to gaze upon her, my reactions enhanced by her own incompetent attack, and caught her before she was able to skip once again beyond my range.

I carved off the top-right corner of her triangular face, and the familiar darkness came flooding out.

“Your mum’s so wrong, she… she’d back a Sow Matriarch against a Geomancer.” I taunted them again, struck them again. “Your mum’s so off, they couldn’t even label her ‘meat’ on Knuckle Market.” The whips sang as they sliced air and extra-planar flesh. “Your mum’s so not-right, she’s left. Literally.”

It was only as I brought their attention to it that they turned their eyes towards the still-glowing metal twigs which was all that remained of their leader’s material form.

The three-pointed faces bore expressions I’d never seen before, even on the first I’d slain, and a soft, sorrowful crooning rose from them. It affected them on a physical level to a far greater degree than I’d anticipated. Their dusky lips cracked open in lumps and oozed pus as they sang out their incomprehensible distress. Weird wrinkles formed all over what could only be called their brows and cheeks and chins, dark cliffs and ridges gouging deep into the leathery flesh. Their raven hair fell out, lock after lock of it. Even the dark circlets they wore seemed to dull, their sheen fading before my eyes.

This was utter disbelief. This was doubt at its infinite extremity – creatures of such incredible age, such confidence, such blasphemous pedigree… feeling abandonment for the first time. Like turning blind by blinking – opening your eyes again to find the world irrevocably changed, shrouded forever.

I wasn’t stupid. I wasn’t for one second going to try all three. Yet, somehow, the uniqueness of this moment demanded a grand gesture.

Hardly a magnanimous gesture, but it had a certain aspect of conciliation to it, I thought.

I selected the wounded one with my eyes. Of the remaining eolastyr she was the smallest, even if only by a few inches; her purple-and-black fur was standing on end and she was quivering all over, feline knees knocking like those of a frail old granny. Her left eye had almost fallen out of her head, and while she moaned along with her Sisters she had her free hand clasped to her gushing wound. Red light bubbled out at the area of contact, seemingly sealing the injury; the undamaged tiara was dangling precariously from the other pointed temple.

When my gaze found her lightless eyes, there was only one brief moment of contention before it happened, and then once more I was bloated, pushed close to my limit.

A welcome feeling, in these circumstances.

“Now you’re mine,” I purred in her mother-tongue. “Get behind me, heal yourself. Take no offensive actions. And put that damn flail away.“

Welcome, Infrick.

I immediately moved forward, seeking to interpose myself between my new prize and the possible wrath of her former allies. Before I even drew alongside her, my pet eolastyr underwent a near-complete reversion. She didn’t stop shaking, didn’t move the paw from her grievous injury, but her face smoothed out once more. Her hair sprouted back in clumps. Her expression became one of fawning adoration.

“O, Master! Merciful Master I praise you.” She nuzzled me with the unwounded side of her head as I slipped past her, and gave a small sigh of pleasure… perhaps enjoying the way contact with me was no longer something to fear. “Come, Sisters, join us. It is… such relief…”

“No,” I said as the two remaining arch-demons before me seemed to realise what was happening, turning on me, the expressions on the withered faces now indecipherable – was that envy? “No – you two should leave.” I made them a hell-portal, crimson flames flickering right before them, hovering a foot above the blood-smeared stone. “Tell your poor Mother what I’ve done here. If killing one of you is really worth something to her, maybe she’ll think twice about finding a way back if I’ve got a hostage. I know we didn’t keep our bargain –”

“You did not!”

“You are not supposed to be here!”

“– but it will be to you to persuade her,” I went on, ignoring their protests, “and keep your dear Sister alive.”

Weeping openly now, spurting blue tears that smoked as they traced lines down her face, the closer of my two remaining enemies spat the words: “She will not come back, fool! Not until you and this world are dust! Not until she can claim your soul for her own. Mother… Mother has friends in high places – surely you must know this?”

“I don’t think Mekesta wants anything to do with her anymore,” I said coldly.

“Mekesta?” the other said laughingly. “You do not even suspect… Grandmother might destroy me with a thought, yet she is an ant beneath the boot of Mother’s friends.”

I straightened up, and brandished my whips.

“Send them, if they’re fools-enough to come. Kultemeren at my side: they’ll line themselves up, only for me to knock them back down where they belong. I swear it.”

From what secret source the words arose unbidden I was unsure, but the moment I mentioned the God of Truth they winced, and the crying one loosed a high-pitched feline sob.

She launched herself through the portal I’d made.

The last took a less-certain step towards the gateway, then looked back at me, hesitating. She turned her head to follow the path the dweonatar had taken in retreat.

“What of my Brother?”

I gave her my one-shoulder shrug. “If he won’t leave… we’ll make him. One piece or many.”

She bowed her head, stepped through, and was gone.

I wanted to sigh, seethe, scream… stop…

But the glistening red sacks were right there. My latest acquisition was crouched with a demure expression right in their midst, as if just awaiting my command. And Ironvine was still circling around up there, busying herself with the other fleeing fiends.

I could at least tick off number one on my list.

I sighed, then extended fingers to the seams of the crimson shielding nearest me.

“Come on, give us a hand. Two hands, if your head’s better. We need to get everyone back on their feet.

“We’ve got big bro to hunt.”

* * *

Wand-frost spilled through the imps on the flanks from a dozen sources, leaving me free to engage the raging nabburatiim in their midst. Whips took its limbs apart. A force-blade split his head open. Within seconds it was over.

“Happy now?” I called.

“Happier,” Ana cried back from her position on the balcony halfway up the street. The tip of the wand in her hand was still steaming; she turned her head to gaze across at the other vantage points then used it to gesture at her troops. “Smooth, guys. Extract and expatriate. On to Brinklion Pass!”

She gripped the rain-wet rail in her free hand and vaulted over, taking a fall that should’ve killed an ordinary person completely in stride; she performed a little roll, and then she was running through the puddles, thrust forwards with the momentum of her descent.

Her hired goons followed via less-lethal routes, climbing down or dropping to intervening balconies.

“Where’s Brinklion?” one of them muttered, a young lad with a distinct limp.

“You know, the tree place, behind the Tower of Knowledge – off Dandelion!”

“Twelve Hells,” the limper swore; but he seemed to redouble his efforts, hopping along with all his might.

Gong! Gong! Gong!

I smiled as I watched them go. The conversation with Anathta had been brief, and her Annoythta moniker had never been less fitting.

“Kani said you might be back. She said you’d be dark.”

“Dark, now, is it? What’s that mean exactly?”

“That you killed people. That you don’t care.”

“It’s… not that simple.”

“That’s what they always say. Well, that’s what I always say. So…”

“So…”

“Come to help us kill stuff?”

The crew disappeared into the darkness, and at last I held out my arm to my companion, letting her curtain of invisibility drop away.

“You do not need me to fight your battles,” Infrick surmised as we took to the air again.

“I let you help with the thinfinaran.”

“Still…”

“I just don’t want you frightening people, that’s all. You’re… exotic.”

“Why thank you.”

“Okay, so… first thing you need to get used to around here: Infrick really isn’t gonna cut it.”

For all that she was an arch-fiend of unlimited evil with a surpassingly-ghastly appearance, she was still able to look dejected.

“Oh – sorry. I know what it’s like when people do that. No offence intended, really. But yeah… tell me, is that going to like… grow back?”

“I honestly couldn’t say.” She raised her free paw to the gleaming red stump right beside her left eyebrow, patting it gingerly and wincing a little.

“No? Say, how do you feel about Trapezoidhead? You’ve got this… lopsided thing going on…”

“I feel less than certain, Master.”

“I’m with you. Need to work on it. Important stuff.”

“It seems everyone is… never mind.”

“No – go on. I don’t like it when things like you are quiet.”

“You don’t like it when things like me are quiet?”

I frowned, then felt a smile touch my lips.

“Things smarter than me, I mean.”

The tigress laughed, and somehow the sound of it wasn’t unutterably wicked.

“You have me there, Feychilde. I am more intelligent – you are more powerful. Therefore, as is the way of all things – I bow.”

“Not right now. Steer us around that.” I indicated a big blocky tower in our path. “We’ll drop over the Temple of Compassion before Treetown.”

“Of course.”

I was betraying my uneasiness at not having complete control of my flight; if she could steer us around the storm’s lightning, towers were no obstacle.

We were now flying above an empty, unscathed street in south-east Hightown, her claws gently placed on (or perhaps, a little, in) my forearm. I wasn’t letting her have much of the spirit-form, but that didn’t seem to matter. I held the reins, but she was the horse that had the momentum.

The half-glass tower ahead was a dark cube, all the fixed lights dimmed to their lowest or dispelled entirely. She slipped us around it with barely a sense of change in angular momentum; we still seemed to be shooting forwards, but the building was to the side of us – behind us –

“Don’t think I don’t realise you changed the subject there.”

She smiled.

“What were you going to say?”

“It… it seems everyone is going to be very uncomfortable around me for some time. Perhaps, forever. I’m not so useful as –“

“If this is some pretext, let me just get this out there: I won’t join with a demon, and even if I would, I’d never join with something like you. No offence, again, but – yeah. The whole intelligence thing. I may be dumber than you, but I’m wise enough to know it.”

She didn’t reply, her lips closing firmly. She pushed me, changing our course slightly again.

“The Temple of Compassion,” she said at last, with a slight grimace.

I looked down at the beautiful avenues, the wild groves and pools.

“That way,” I said, pointing a finger.

“Of course.”

The wizard-flight on us was still active, even after all this time. Almost two hours. When I’d asked, Winterprince had merely encased himself in ice and flew away with Voicenoise and Spirit; Mountainslide either ignored me or didn’t hear me, responding to Doomspeaker’s questioning instead. None of the heretics were paying me any heed, not after what the Sinphalamax did to them – almost to the last man they took flight, keeping their aeromancy to themselves.

No one wanted to touch the arch-demon, it seemed.

It was Ironvine who in the end granted us her spells; at first she’d looked like she too would deny me, and, though she gave no outward sign, as she sank down into the ground I felt a familiar buoyancy settle about my already incorporeal body – and a glance to my side showed me she at least hadn’t found my request completely unpalatable. The same wizardry encompassed my eolastyr.

Now I didn’t need wings; in fact, they’d have only hindered me. Infrick was faster than any wings I’d ever worn. Her powers weren’t quite the same as an arch-diviner’s, apparently acting more as what she (and the books) referred to as a dampening field when she was in the presence of other chronomancers – but the degree to which they really differed had me mystified. She could carry me along with her with almost the same ease as… as any arch-diviner ever had.

Nightfell. She had me perplexed, but it helped that she didn’t seem to fully-understand the reasons why, always managing to make me feel more and more comfortable despite the blocks on her future-sight. Me and my weird assistant had checked in two times already, returning to Firenight Square to meet her at the hastily-constructed base of operations. She and Spirit had managed to cobble together a bunch of other enchanters and diviners from the remnants of the heretics, along with a healer’s tent and representatives from many nearby temples. The magisters and clerics present stared at me whenever I soared through, but none of them said anything, returning their attention to their various duties after a few moments. Doubtless they were saving their recriminations until afterwards.

If we lived to survive this.

The first time I’d returned to summarise the enemies I’d encountered, I queried Nightfell as to why she wasn’t out there fighting, and she just said that she already was.

“Benefit of being able to be in two places at the same time,” she’d continued, tucking the white tip of a strand of her hair back behind her ear. Then she eyed the supposedly-invisible Infrick and grinned. “Even you can’t do that.”

The eolastyr, perceivable only to me – and, apparently, arch-diviners – had bowed her head morosely.

I looked around at the priests, the teeming wounded. “You’re not getting bored here?”

“Oh, you mean – no, Kas. We’re swapping regularly. No one can tell, don’t worry.”

I’d tried not to frown. “So which one are you, then?”

She bunched up one cheek in a disappointed half-smile.

“I’m Vardae. But only Tanra would be brave enough to be so honest, wouldn’t she?”

She tutted in response to my stupefied silence, then turned aside to speak to a now wide-eyed Bor.

The second time I visited, thirty-five minutes later by the eolastyr’s pinpoint-precise reckoning, I asked again.

“Which one are you now?”

“Tanra! Though, I suppose Vardae might lie…”

I’d been expecting something like that.

“Har-har.” I glanced about, catching the glare of a brown-garbed priestess of Lynastra right beside me, then retreated. “Be back in a bit.”

“It’d help if we could link, you know,” Nightfell called as I floated away.

“Help who, exactly?” I called back, then I was too far away to hear any further replies.

Whichever of them was the real one, I’d lost the ability to track it. Of course, that was her point, wasn’t it? They were both real. I had to stop thinking of Vardae as an enemy. She’d changed. She was… she was a Great One, a champion. Her fall and my own – were they so different, really?

I’d killed.

I’d killed.

My mistrust of her only went so far, it seemed. I’d gone past the midpoint of my loop around the city now, so I was technically on my way for a third return, curving about in the mile-wide arc that would bring me back to the centre of Mund once more. For all that I might’ve felt frustrated, I was still carrying out her orders, wasn’t I? Still doing what Vardae told me to do…

I didn’t know if Nightfell was doing it deliberately, but she was keeping me on the east of the city – keeping me from Sticktown. And that was exactly how I wanted it. There was no room in my head to accommodate the fates of my friends. What exactly had happened to Xan and Xas and Orstrum I was unsure, and I was enjoying the flux, leaning hard into the uncertainty. For all I knew, they were fine! Absolutely fine. And until this was all over… I really didn’t want to find out, one way or the other.

Orcan and Kirid had finally arrived, I’d heard, and Nightfell had thrown them right into the action in North Lowtown. What had caused them drag their feet on the way I had no idea, and the whereabouts of the strange dwarven knight they’d carried along with them were a mystery. I could only hope that this quite literal trial by fire didn’t send both of them packing more speedily than they’d arrived. The Telese druid and wizard were far from battle-veterans, and an Incursion was hardly the most welcoming sight for tourists. But if they stayed, they could be moulded into champions, of that I was certain. Two more archmages might not have sounded like much, now that I’d successfully freed the heretics from their shell, mobilised many of them into a fighting-force… but how was I to know beforehand that I’d have won such a victory? And for all I knew two more archmages might’ve been all it was going to take to just tip the scales in the final conflict in our favour – turn back the Dracofont, bring to an end their unceasing lust for power.

Yet those were concerns for another day. As I’d been tasked, I scoped out each landmark on my route. At first I had no idea why she’d sent me to the Diamond Mare – the glass tavern’s rudimentary wards were still standing, along with its fragile-looking walls. I could sense no corpses, no demons, behind the dark windows staring out onto the street. Then, not thirty yards away, a thinfinaran had come crashing out of the high-up floors of a lofty tower, landing with a thud in the centre of the paved road.

Thinfinaran armour was like paper. We disposed of him before his little army had chance to follow him into the street, then followed the trail up, back through the building, killing all his previously-summoned soldiers even as they tried to scurry away from us.

It was only at this point that I’d ran into the Last Daughter of N’Lem and her cronies. Keeping what I now knew of N’Lem firmly to myself, I joined their motley crew and briefly helped her ‘kill stuff’. Up until this stage I hadn’t had the vaguest suspicion it was her gangs doing the Magisterium’s job for them – and they swiftly gave me an insight into just how well-prepared they really were. I was probably superfluous to requirements. I moved on in search of juicier prey.

My visit to the Temple of Compassion showed me that the demons were still steering clear of the major centres of worship, and I reduced us to near-invisibility just to avoid the attention of the guardian-clerics – this didn’t stop a couple of them sensing us as we soared past, pointing fingers and maces in our direction. One talented priest even threw some celestial fire into our general vicinity, yelling a warning to his colleagues.

They hadn’t known about the nest of rhimbelkina and mizelikon hiding just behind the wall outside Wythyldwyn’s gardens, however – but Nightfell had. I ignored the clergymen and found the fiends buried in the trees, ending their depraved plans in one fell swoop. It was only as Ana’s little group came sprinting up, a few lagging behind with their stitches and sprained ankles, that I realised this was where they’d been heading all along.

I offered her my apologies, told her to get Ibbalat to link in with Spirit at the Square, then headed off once more.

Two hours, and still the fires burned on. Still the black storm of Abstraxia’s enduring wrath raged above and about us. Behind us, the Mourning Bells rang on and on and on, the waves of its ceaseless sound seeming to propel us onwards.

And then, ahead of us, there lay the forest.

Having seen a number of actual, proper forests now, I could genuinely say that the druids had done a good job. Treetown was indiscernible from the real deal. The ancient, primeval woodlands of the northern lands I’d camped in were bigger… that was about it.

It was nice to course through the rain with the trees beneath me, even if it was a bit creepy in the unnatural darkness. For all that the Bells were ceaseless, after so much time in Hightown the sounds were practically quiet from here. The scents of blood and charcoal were overridden by the natural odours of loam and wet pine.

Yes, it was nice, and yet the place held so many memories I’d been suppressing for so long. The last time I’d been in Treetown had been…

With her.

It was a memory of horror, now, all that fateful day. The Maginox library. Planning the attack. Killing Infrick’s Sister.

Our bower. Our special place.

I turned away from that special place, that special disgust still there in my memories. What Tyr Kayn had done to me, to Emrelet… it was beyond unthinkable. I couldn’t even muster the volition to recall holding the beautiful, foreign arch-wizard in my arms – not even that. Not the feel of her lips. Not her eyes, the smell of the platinum hair…

There was only the pit, the yawning emptiness that knew she’d gone before me into the shadowland. That she was all alone, lost in the darkness, searching for a way out. And that it would be years, decades, centuries on Materium before she found the Door, the path to Celestium…

And I never knew her. It was never the real Emrelet. Always something out of my imagination. For all I knew, Tyr Kayn had taken everything I’d ever wanted and filled her head with it. She could’ve been anyone – anyone…

There was nothing I could do. There was no comfort even one such as I might’ve offered to a ghost, even the shade of an archmage. She’d died, and it was clear I wasn’t ready to accept it yet, for all my wishful thoughts to the contrary. Hells, I’d even thought Ironvine might’ve been Emrelet in disguise earlier, despite her stoop, the heavier body shape – I was just clutching at straws to make some sense out of reality’s nonsense. The woman looked nothing like Emrelet, even in the champion’s garb.

Easier to move on in memory. Better the recollections of combat and struggle than of my doomed tryst. Less painful.

The Incursion, the death and madness… Aramas. Theor. Striking Linn. Bor’s enraged roar inside my head. Everything that followed.

We zig-zagged over the trees, following the course Spirit had drawn over his floating map, exposing to my senses every last square inch of Larkhouse Wood – when we reached the canal-border we’d do the same with Mermont’s Grove, then work our way all the way around to Cadersglen before returning to Firenight Square…

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

At first I’d thought it was all going to be over soon – I still clung to the notion of finding the dweonatar, ending the Incursion, stopping the storm. Now? I had to admit, I was ebbing. Whatever the Sinphalamax had done, it wasn’t ending like it was supposed to. She had something else cooking. We were going to find out, of that I was certain – but when?

When?

“There’s a lot I don’t understand,” I admitted.

“I expected something like this,” Infrick replied. “I’ll tell you in advance: I was Sixth, and there are – were – just seven of us. I don’t know as much as you’d hope.”

“Really? I figured Mummy told her girls everything. You’re never wrong.”

“Very amusing, Master. What are you having trouble with?”

I glanced at her. Her expression was unreadable; she was scanning the canopy beneath us, dark eyes fixed on the rain-drenched shadows below.

“All of it. This storm – it belongs to the Sinphalamax, right? Not Mek- Mother-Chaos?”

For a moment there I’d been about to say it.

The eolastyr nodded, smiling as if privy to some joke beyond me. “It is a spell bound to the arrival of our Brothers, permitting them to move about your city unhindered and unseen. Until he is slain, or driven from the plane – I do not think it will abate.”

“But – I don’t understand – why Meh… why Mother-Chaos helped me. Why she wanted me to win…”

“I couldn’t possibly say.”

“Speculate!”

“Grandmother doesn’t wish Mother’s Master to become a god.”

“But then – I don’t understand the point of it all. Why does Abstraxia want us to fight the dragons, if she serves them? Or if she doesn’t – who else but her own Mother’s will could she be serving?”

“It’s okay, Master. It’s all going to be fine.”

“That is not an answer.”

“Oh, but it is.” She beamed, displaying a full set of perfect white teeth to match her perfect white skin, gleaming like pearl. “It’s the only answer. We aren’t… my Sisters and I aren’t wrong, but this doesn’t mean we are omniscient. Must we have at our fingertips all the machinations of the Twelve Hells and their rulers? We are Daughters of the Sinphalamax. We are…”

“Minions. Right, I get it. But she seems to love you all the same. She gets sad when you die, even if you’ll be back in a few centuries.”

“Centuries are not so swift in all dimensions. And do mortals not weep at the deaths of their children, though they hope to see them again in another life?”

“Yet – to her…? She’s so old. She must’ve had many children.”

“Hence her willingness to spend my Brother in this fruitless endeavour.” She gestured with a claw at the broiling blackness swirling above us. “Your wizard cost you, you know. I think my Mother liked you. It is my firm belief she would have sent us all home.”

“Oh, really?” I used an I-totally-believe-you voice. “I think our wizard cost your Mummy more.”

“You are not wrong about that, but I am not wrong either. Mother would have brought us home, indeed – to destroy us.”

“Wait… what?”

She nodded gravely. “To the last. Her name, so-known? This will be the talk of the Twelve Hells for hours.”

“You mean… Oh… Oh, gods.”

“When she once more takes shape she will leave forever, or close-enough that her name will be forgotten, even amongst the immortal races. One day, perhaps, I’ll see her again. I am glad to have you to lean on, Master.”

She turned to gaze upon me, while I stared off, trying to imagine the true scope, the full ramifications of my actions on this day.

What did it mean, to ‘leave’? Leave the Twelve Hells? To go where?

“Must one become so grumpy? Especially when one wears upon one’s head the font of all such delectable lore. Do you tease me, Master? Do you seek to draw untruths from me, whereupon you might punish me?”

“No! I – I hadn’t…”

“A shame.” The disgusting thing put a coquettish smile on her face, and I blenched, turning away again. “I do so enjoy a grisly punishment. We are the first to be flensed by our flails – do you know this? It is an integral part of our amalgamation with those animal –”

“Be silent,” I groaned. “Come on. We’re done here.”

She grinned, but kept quiet, and led us on to Mermont’s Grove.

* * *

I came soaring into Firenight Square, passing over the huge black lengths of chain to which a diverse bunch of monsters would’ve ordinarily been leashed. The place, like most places, had been abandoned, the beast-masters clearly keen to remove their expensive assets from such an open area. I’d forgotten to restore the invisibility-effect covering my eolastyr from view, and as my luck would have it there was a familiar face waiting for me right on the edge of the crude camp, staring south as if in anticipation of my arrival.

“I never thought I’d see you again, sorcerer,” she called as I slowed to a halt just twenty feet from her. “I hear we have you to thank for what happened at the arena.”

I regarded her. Kanthyre wore a light chain battle-harness over her robe, which included pauldrons of shaped steel. She forewent a helm, her red hair pulled back tight in a riotous bun. Her shield, engraved with the shining rose of Wythyldwyn, was strapped to her arm, the scintillating blue mace dangling from the loop at her belt. Upon her brow a thin white circlet had been set, a single square-cut jewel burning with a soft amber radiance in the centre of her forehead.

I could tell at once that Mund had changed her. She was drenched in sweat and covered in the ichor of her enemies, but that was nothing new. No. It was the look in her eyes. The demeanour. She knew now, what it was to be in control. She’d found her assertiveness.

“Still hate my guts?” I said in reply.

“I never hated you, Kas.” Her voice had softened. “I never understood you, it’s true, and I don’t like sorcerers.”

“Understandable.”

She cocked her head. The attempt at amusement failed thoroughly.

“I understand you even less now.”

“Bit late to throw invisibility over her, isn’t it?”

Kani nodded solemnly. “That’s not what I was referring to, but now we’re on the topic – give me the demon’s name, Kas. Give it to me, and let’s end this charade right here.”

I put an offended look on my face. “Demons are people too, you know, Kani –”

“That’s Exalted, to you,” she said. “And no. No, they really aren’t.”

I squinted at her. “You don’t know any demons. You don’t have the vaguest idea what you’re talking about. It’s just empty noise.”

I moved to fly forwards, past her and into the camp, but she put up a clenched fist, displaying the silver fire nestled there, holy heat trailing up into the air.

I froze.

“They aren’t people. The things of which they – she – are capable –”

“People are capable of the same or worse,” I said, trying not to sneer.

“And I assume you are speaking from experience?”

“Maybe.” I met her gaze with my own. “Her name is mine. I won’t relinquish it, or my rights to her, earned in combat with blood and tears and all the rest of it. An arch-sorcerer’s tools are no different to those of any other arch-“

“It’s an arch-demon. The Keeper of the Grove descended from the Gardens of Mending to inform me of your current… preoccupation. The Keeper herself! Don’t you see? This creature – this crown – they’ll be the end of you!”

“Tell Wythyldwyn to take it up with Yune,” I spat back, edging forwards once more towards the healer’s tent, the illusion-table where the diviners had gathered. “And if you want me to take the crown off, just get in line. If I’m not doing it for Tanra, you can be damn sure I’m not doing it for you.”

She didn’t throw the fire at me – a fact of which I was thankful, given that her divine magic was an unpredictable factor. But she swivelled to follow my route with her eyes just the same.

“Then you’ll end up just like him!” she cried at my back. “Worse! Every priest in the city will be baying for your blood!”

I stopped again, looked back at her once, then continued on my way.

“The new Exalted of She Whose Eyes Overflow really is a feisty little thing,” Infrick purred. “The Maiden chose well. As did I.”

She said it boastfully, proudly, and pulled herself closer to me.

“Yeah, sure,” I muttered, eyeing the magisters and healers who were eyeing me right back while I flew overhead. “You chose me…”

“I might have tried to resist! But I let down my walls, let you penetrate –”

“Shut up, and let me throw this over you.” I twisted my wrist to remove her claws from my arm then, the both of us floating there, I cast Zab’s cloak of invisibility about her, shrouding her head to paw. A few worried moments later, I redoubled the effect. “Good. Better, I mean. Come on.”

It was only ten seconds of flight to bring us into the heart of the camp, and I marvelled at the sheer number of people who’d turned out to help. Since my last visit, the place had trebled in size and headcount. At first I’d thought everyone here was at least affiliated with some organisation, a church or a college, the Magisterium, the watch… but I was wrong. Half the folks here were common, salt-of-the-earth types, probably bringing their wounded to the site and then hanging around to help. None of these brave men and women had any idea about crowns of Mekesta or purple tigresses of considerable power. They probably didn’t care, either. I elicited a number of gasps from those who didn’t yet know I’d returned, along with cheers and even some applause.

No boos. No jeers. If the priests were going to bay for my blood, they were going to have to bay a little more loudly in order to get themselves heard. Maybe they could form an alliance with the Magisterium. The eyes of every magister I passed only hardened, more and more as I progressed towards the middle. My smile only grew and grew.

Nightfell had her back to me and she was stabbing her finger at South Lowtown on Bor’s rotating map.

“Fourteen summoners! Why hasn’t Brokenskull checked in?”

“Voice is down?” Bor suggested, an almost-crazed expression on his face. I could only imagine the kind of hell he was going through, to be at the centre of everything happening in spite of the day he’d had.

“It has to be the dweonatar,” Winterprince’s ice-mouth grated. He was floating, fully suited-up, opposite the seeress. Then he tilted back slightly, evidently spotting me as I floated up. “Send me and Feychilde.”

Nightfell whirled to look at me, while me and Winterprince exchanged a nod.

“Dammit, Kas, could you hang a bell on one of those spikes so I can hear you coming? It’s creepy.” She looked exasperated.

“Can you get more predictable?” I retorted with a big grin.

“Urgh!” She whipped back around. “No, Winterprince, I can’t send you both. You two can take on challenges solo and if I pull you out –”

“If you don’t pull us off the rotations, fourteen summoners will be forty.” The ice elemental growling was a sound I’d long missed. “Come on, Feychilde.”

I caught myself looking askance at Nightfell, then I snickered.

“Sure. Let’s go.”

But before me or the imposing ice-clad wizard could move one whisker, a familiar tiny gnome came barrelling up.

Doomspeaker got right in Winterprince’s face – well, shin – and gave him the dressing-down of a lifetime, leaning back to stare up at him with her hands on her hips.

“How dare you! I don’t care who Nightfell is, she’s done a damn fine job setting this up in the absence of…” Her eyes flashed across us from within the ram’s-skull mask, lingering just a moment extra on me before returning to Winterprince. “As for you – I don’t give one jot what you think you know. You’ll do as you’re told, and never you mind what demon you think’s where. Nightfell,” the gnome turned to her human counterpart, “where do you want Winterprince?”

“Sticktown,” she said at once, jabbing the miniature illusory map again. “There’s something spawning those horrible zikistakram things smack in the middle of Funnel Mile, and they –”

“Why Winterprince?” I asked. “Come on. You know I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but –”

“Kas, you shouldn’t go there, I’m sure of it.” She folded her arms across her chest, and there was concern writ large upon her features as she stared up at me. “I don’t care if I can’t see it – it won’t do you any good. I’ll tell you now – Orstrum is dead.”

A part of my soul shrank back, curled up and withered away.

“Xan and Xas are okay… ish… and I can try to keep them that way but only if you steer clear.”

“I get it.” I closed my eyes, re-establishing my concentration. I couldn’t think about this kind of thing right now, not till the Incursion was over. “Can’t someone shut the Bells up?”

“We’re all thinking that,” Bor supplied glumly. “Enough to Mourn already.”

Nightfell hesitated, then put her hand on his arm. He shivered, then seemed to accept her touch.

I found myself smiling again, even as tears fought to fill my eyes.

“Fine,” Winterprince rumbled, seeming unsettled at this turn in the conversation. “Feychilde gets Sigrand’s Rise. Just don’t dawdle.”

Before he’d gone ten feet, the paving erupted on the eastern side of the area, throwing a mist of fine rubble into the air; then Ironvine was there, crouching on the ground just five yards from me.

The dust settled instantly, unnaturally. The stone beneath her sealed itself like time was playing in reverse.

As she straightened up, unfolding her rings and sheets of metal, she spun about to face us. The voice behind the chain mask seemed to borrow its metallic qualities, twanging softly.

“Shallowlie has it. The dweonatar. Just outside Salnifast.”

* * *

“I think it’s dormant,” Netherhame said. “You can sense it too?”

I nodded grimly. It wasn’t really something I’d ever expected to sense.

A man. A huge, winged man, spread-eagled. Not standing, or even lying, but buried, at an almost forty-five degree angle. It was like he’d slid feet-first into the hillside.

We floated above the landscape just two miles north-east of the harbour-town’s walls, regarding the rolling field into which the dweonatar had apparently sunk himself. The sky was still black, even out here. I had difficulty seeing anything other than the violent swishing of the long grass in the storm-winds. I was thankful for the brief flashes of lightning that let me take my bearings. It only just occurred to me that I had no idea what time it was. Every clock I’d seen in the city had been subverted by the weird magic of the Sinphalamax, or perhaps just by the Incursion itself – the hands of most had simply stopped somewhere around mid-morning, and the one in Blackbranch Square was running backwards.

“Top of its head’s only thirty yards down,” Netherhame continued. “Why hasn’t it reacted to us yet, d’ya think?”

“I dropped the chronomantic field a while back,” our arch-diviner offered, her back still turned. “It’s not cos of me.”

“You can cut oaf it said?”

It took me a moment to react. Min was looking to me; I followed her glance down to my empty right side, to my burning fingers, and then I understood.

“Cut – off its head… maybe. I’m more worried about –”

“Traps?” The Nightfell who’d attended the mission was floating below us, closer to the hillside than the rest of us; she didn’t turn as she interrupted me. “You’re remembering our first arch-demon, aren’t you, Kas? Yeah. Its head seems to be thirty yards down, but if you went in, into the dark earth, it’d suddenly be three hundred, or three thousand…“

“That… wasn’t what I was going to say, but… Damn, what if you’re right…?”

The seeress spun about. “What were you going to say, then?”

She was so irritated, even my smile was starting to slip.

“I’m more worried about the fact Ironvine can’t sense anything,” I said.

The wizard was stooping atop a flying boulder not five yards away on my right, and her veiled gaze still seemed to be raking across the landscape, trawling the soil with her power.

At my words she looked up, hidden eyes glaring at us briefly before returning to their task.

“Still no luck,” I muttered.

“What if it’s the other kind of trap?” said Spiritwhisper out of nowhere. He was behind us, silent all this long while, at least out loud where I could hear it; I turned in some surprise to regard him.

“A diversion,” he went on. “A – a –”

“Decoy,” Nightfell said.

“I knew that!” he growled. “Look, I’m no expert – you’ve got demonology-guys and prophets and – earth specialists runnin’ around – but I… I dunno.”

“I agree.” Netherhame sounded troubled. “These things are never that simple. Arch-demons don’t just bury themselves for no reason, doing nothing.”

“His plans fell apart, though,” I said. “He’s… depressed. Haha, how apt. Lost, and alone, waiting for death…

“Trapezoidhead!”

I’d had no idea just how effective the doubled invisibility-spell was, until I tested it like this. I warped it with a twist of my fingers, making it look as though a crimson curtain brought Infrick back to our world, her hand in mine.

All of them had good reason to see through my deception. Ironvine had cast the flight-spells that were still active on us. Bor was an enchanter of the very highest calibre. Tanra and Vardae were two of the world’s pre-eminent diviners – whichever one was here, she would’ve seen through gremlin magic easily, like before. Ly and Min were arch-sorcerers!

And every one of them drew away – some more than others, but it was clear to me not one of them had known she was still there all along. Interesting.

Perhaps I’ve Mekesta to thank…

Nightfell muttered scornfully, repeating the eolastyr’s new moniker under her breath.

I ignored her. “Trappy.”

The tigress didn’t look best-pleased, but she obeyed.

“Master?” she enquired sweetly, forcing a smile to her lips.

“Detect anything trappy?”

“Your humour is delightful, Master.” She curtseyed on the air with her free arm, and her smile became even more sickly in appearance.

She took a deep sniff, sunken nostrils flaring. It went on for seconds, longer, longer still – whatever she had inside her that passed for lungs, it sounded like they were bottomless –

Her gaze fixated on the same patch of grass that’d been the subject of so much conversation during the last minutes.

She’s playing along. Interesting.

“I sense it now,” Ironvine said suddenly, her voice hard.

Infrick started nodding. “Yes. My Brother is sleeping there.”

“Sleeping?” Nightfell asked.

Infrick snarled, then looked at me and pouted. “Must I answer the one-eyed mortal?” the tigress asked petulantly, thrusting out her lower lip and batting her eyelashes.

I looked from her to Nightfell then back again.

“If she’s one-eyed, then I’m blind – is that what you’re saying?”

“Master…” she crooned morosely.

“Answer her questions – all the questions asked by these five archmages – as though they were spoken in my voice.”

She pursed her lips suggestively. “None of them could command me like you do, my lord.”

“Answer!”

Infrick turned and, with a sigh, deigned to provide solutions to a mere one-eyed mortal’s queries.

The dweonatar was sleeping. Yes, this meant he was potentially in communion with the inhabitants of Infernum, so far away and yet so near. No, he wasn’t likely to be able to summon much help outside the walls of Mund. Every place was hell-adjacent, of course, and Mund’s wicked counterpart on the hot side was a hive greater in scope than our own, teeming with fiends, fiends of all shapes and sizes and power-sets. Beyond the city’s boundaries, however, was a dark desert, a wasteland-swamp in which only the crudest creatures crawled, shrinking away from all the dread majesty of infernal warfare, preferring the gibbering madness, the gnawing suffering –

“Okay. Got it.” I raised a hand to cut her off. “Any suggestions?”

Trappy smiled, a hideous expression of pleasure. “O, my gratitude, Master! The greater the imagination of the prisoner, the crueller the cage. There is no balm for the keenness with which we feel the pressure of our bars, save this – to be used, not for the sake of the labour we might perform, but for the sake of our designs; the value of our minds.”

I glanced at the others, then back to her.

“So… suggestions, then?”

“She’s thinking,” Nightfell said in a mocking tone. “Whenever a diviner of her calibre witters on like that, you can bet good money it’s because she’s still exploring the ramifications of the advice she’s about to dole out.”

“And do you have anything to add to the debate, mortal?” Trappy asked sweetly.

“I got a few ideas.”

“Why do you not enlighten us all, then, mortal? Regale us with your mortal notions. Don’t leave the fates of your friends in my hands. I kind of have this problem when it comes to being gentle.”

“You’re bound,” I snapped. “You can’t suggest something risky without making the risks clear.”

“Of course,” the eolastyr said airily, waving a few fingers. “But this, this one-eyed one, she does not believe in your power. She believes I could lead you astray, send you all skipping to your deaths. Such could not be further from the truth, and yet, this ‘seer’ has –”

“Okay! Enough bickering. Enough… wittering.” I cast my glance around again. “If you aren’t going to actually make a suggestion any time soon, I’ll start. Why don’t we just –” I made a sweeping motion with my arm, palm cupped “– lift all the soil off him. All in one. Then –” I brought my arm back down, fist clenched “– all fall on him together.”

Ironvine grunted. I looked at her, but she was still staring down at the shadowed fields; evidently she’d only made a sound as an acknowledgement.

“Or – better idea,” Nightfell said. “We send you in there alone, all wraithed-up –”

“The wraith’s dead… deader, I mean. But yeah, I get you. I got alternatives. Then what?”

“I… was being sarcastic, Kas. What, you wanna go in there alone?”

“Well…” I shrugged. “You’re still yet to give us an actual idea, so –”

“I’m half-way to believing we’d be better off without you.”

I dropped my jaw.

“I mean, I don’t even know what you can do, I can’t plan around you, don’t you see?”

“My Brother himself is beyond your sight, mortal,” Trappy gloated. “Don’t blame my Master for your failings. You of all –”

“Be silent, until spoken to,” I said, cutting her off. The eolastyr went straight back to pouting. “What was your big idea, Nightfell? For real this time?”

“One: Ironvine sends her metal up at him. Drives him up and out. You’re already working on something like that, aren’t you?”

The heavyset wizard grunted again.

“If we’re going to scoop off the dirt,” the seeress continued, “we should put the metal in him at the same time, so you can light him up instantly. That means two wizards, at least. We could bring –”

“I’ll manage.”

All eyes turned to Ironvine.

“Two…” Nightfell seemed to struggle to get herself back on track. “Get a weave together. Then, the three of you send in everything you can. No –” she copied my previous gesture, hand clenched in a fist “– falling on him. We stay at maximum range. This isn’t like when we butchered Trappy’s sister.”

Infrick bristled, but said nothing, did nothing other than tense her tail.

“We aren’t trying to take his weapon. Ironvine’s our weapon, here. Everything else we do is to slow him.”

“He can’t hurt me,” I said. “Trust me, he already tried. I chased him out of there. He ran from me.”

“You want to swing your new arm at him?” Whichever Nightfell it was, it was so like Tanra’s voice, and there was no amusement in it. “Sure. I’ll pass, though. I’ve quite had my fill of giant statue-men for one day, and this one down here could’ve eaten all the others for breakfast. I’ll stay back, thanks.”

I had no idea the type of demon to which she was referring, and at this point I didn’t care. I was just glad we seemed to be getting somewhere.

“I doan wanna figh’ him,” Shallowlie murmured. “I wi’ focus onna weave.”

Spirit had a black expression on his face, but he kept quiet. Netherhame looked for all the world like she was ready to fight at my side, but she said nothing either.

Infrick was gazing at me despondently.

“Go on, then, Trappy. Just – don’t make me regret it. Make it snappy.”

The hideous, gloating smile came back to her dusky lips in a second.

“Infernum,” was all she said.

The sheer brevity of her comment forced me to go over the options, the possible meanings of that lone, terrifying word. What was she trying to insinuate?

I opted for a dry chuckle. “Nice one. I’ve got no eldritches in there – out there, I mean –”

“You’ve got me. Respectfully. Master.”

“I…”

“If he’s only there in soul-form,” Netherhame said, “he’s weak, right? Like a ghost of hisself. We can’t kill him there, just make ourselves a pain in his ass. You’re dreaming if you think he’s gonna take his body there – he’s gonna bring his soul back this side, and all we’ve done is warn him we’re ready for him. Droppin’ great.”

Trappy nodded – a slow, luxurious nod, with that degenerate smile still there on her misshapen face. Then, every bit as slowly, she turned her gaze back to me.

“Perhaps the two of us alone should go, m’lord. It seems you keep craven company, and I know you don’t wish to linger longer.”

I had no choice but to grin back at her while the others spluttered.

“I’d say to send me alone if you would,” Infrick went on, “and you would, but the judgement of these others will stay your hand, won’t it? Do you not have a maggot you trust? Some bug you could send in our stead, to check the way is clear?”

“It’ll be a plant,” Nightfell said with a sigh.

I put on a shocked expression. “I don’t currently have any vegetable eldritches in my retinue. Winterprince incinerated –“

“Plant like, impostor,” the seeress growled.

“Beware, the Devious Composter,” I muttered.

A few people chuckled mirthlessly, seeking to gratify me, but Netherhame ignored me completely, whirling on Nightfell. “Impostor – from you!” she burst out. “That’s a bit too rich, Vardae.”

“Oh, shut it, the lot of you.” Tanra scowled moodily.

“No, I mean, we should think about… Trappy’s idea,” Ly said in a reasonable tone. “It’s not easy for an eldritch to fake its service. There’s all these… parameters, Dustbringer used to say. Things it has to control, like how it gets taken…”

“I’ve had some experience there,” I admitted. “Been tricked once. But… once burned, twice learned, and all that. My minions are all mine. I’ve checked.” I turned to Infrick. “And yes – there’s at least one I trust to not just do the minimum. Pinktongue!”

I summoned my faithful envoy. He was looking a little worse for wear – one of his wings seemed singed at the upper tip, and no ordinary fireball would do that to a member of his breed. His ugly-cute bat-face was tired, the lower jaw trembling a little.

But he seemed himself when he enquired:

“Master?”

He peered about at the others curiously – his eyes lingering just a little longer on the eolastyr than the others.

“Don’t be afraid, little one,” Infrick said to him coolly. “This one would have our Master command you to cut off your arm, just to assuage her fears as to your fidelity.”

Pinktongue blenched; Nightfell complained loudly, and Infrick was more than happy to abuse the loophole and start replying, no more quietly than the seeress.

I for one was starting to feel sick.

“Ignore her. Ignore all of them.” I commanded my imp’s attention with my gaze, and his met mine; I could instantly tell he was no longer distracted by Infrick’s words, and, better than any punitive measures, I was reassured that he was truly mine. “I want you to visit Infernum’s reflection of this place. A dweonatar is there – inside that hillside.”

I pointed, and he shivered as he followed the line of my finger.

“I want to know what he’s up to. Report back with your findings immediately.”

“V-very well, Master.”

The terror in his eyes had no bearing on his actions. Without hesitation, he vanished into red flame.

“I swear it’s a trap,” Nightfell muttered, glowering at Infrick.

“I know you mean well, and you’re only concerned for our safety, but… just stop, Tanra. Vardae. Whoever you are, whoever you want to be; I know you say you’re both the same and I don’t care. Just stop.”

“Or else what?”

“Or else I’ll send Trappy over whenever you’re just getting off to sleep, to sit outside your window and yell stuff about trust all night long.”

“Or else we’ll start saying ‘yes, Mum’ to everything you tell us,” Spirit grumbled.

I sniggered. I’d have to remember that one.

He shot me a wan smile then looked aside, and the smile slipped from my own, just for a moment, as the impossible pressures of reality came seeping through the blanket of action and violence in which I’d cloaked it.

So much death. So many… dead…

And tomorrow I’d probably have to answer for my own crimes in that area. I could see their corpse-masks whenever I dared allow my imagination to brush the memories, even if only for an instant, bringing back the faces of the three magisters I’d brutalised, painting them there as though there were an easel set up before my mind’s eye, faces for me to gaze upon till the paint cracked.

No, they wouldn’t come for me soon – not tonight. Even if the Magisterium had its act together, there was still the whole Arrealbord thing to sort out. Nightfell would have her own chat with Henthae’s dogs, I supposed. Half of her frustration during this Incursion was going to be stemming from the fact she’d just undergone a whole metamorphosis of her own; I did realise all that, but it was hard to keep it in mind when you had your own problems swimming around in your head.

Your own corpse-faces…

I put the smile back.

“C’mon, Pinktongue…”

“Why you call i’ Pinktohg, Feychile?” Min asked. “Dey all have a… pink tohg.”

“All gungrelafor. He was my first.”

“Ahh.”

“You don’t have names for your minions?” I looked between the sorceresses.

“They have names already,” Ly said. “Why confuse things?”

“But we can’t use those names in front of people,” I retorted.

“You just command ’em, don’t yer?”

“What about… you know…”

“I think you’ll find you’re the only sorcerer who treats these things the way you do, Kas.” Nightfell was eyeing me critically. “If it weren’t for the fact you’ve always been this way…”

She seemed to think better of finishing that sentence.

“You’d be blaming his crown,” Infrick said, her voice an amalgam of reverence and disgust.

I laughed. I was too tired to go on with the debate. When Pinktongue suddenly reappeared, flapping away just a couple of yards from me, I was relieved.

“Hey! Did you see the big guy in there?”

“Master…” The gungrelafor had a morose tone to his voice, his eyes downcast. “Master, I think it is safe. But I – I think you should see this for yourself.”

* * *

In the end it was just me and Netherhame who went through to see what was going on. Min would’ve come, but quite sensibly opted to keep an active shield over the others, in case some surprise-attack came out of nowhere. Ly was too keen to stay behind, practically biting my other arm off when I asked if anyone else wanted to come. It wasn’t unlike her, precisely, but I had the notion Nightfell or one of the others had used the link to ask her to accompany me.

It made no difference. Both of us were struck dumb the same by what we found.

We didn’t land before we went through, both of us opting to use contact with a nethernal host to keep us aloft in case something went wrong with our wizardries. Most imps couldn’t confer weightlessness with a touch, and neither of us had a wyvarlinact or other such winged beast at our disposal. I kept Infrick at my side, borne aloft by my retinue of elves. The eolastyr’s only comment after crossing over was that the crown suited me even better over here. I had no idea what she was talking about, and Ly didn’t look to be in the mood for her games. It felt a little heavier atop my head, but my sorceress companion hadn’t reacted to any visible change in appearance when she looked at me after we went through.

Clearly nothing to worry about.

We floated away from the ruby-red gateway, letting it close behind us, and looked out on a void of dark wind. Acrid smoke was being carried on the air but it was moving so quickly that it didn’t really catch in our throats, boom, boom, booming across the open emptiness. Far below – farther than the ground should’ve been – I caught glimpses through the clouds of luminous yellow pools, like motionless lakes, great expanses of congealed pus or phlegm. Other than a few zikistakram lounging on the shorelines of the pools, there was nothing to be seen.

We followed the imp, flapping his way what should’ve been eastwards through the easterly wind. We were there within a minute, and Pinktongue had been right; I wouldn’t have believed him if he’d told me. I had to see it for myself.

“Oh, Brother,” the eolastyr beside me sighed softly.

The semi-transparent dweonatar was sitting in one of the bile-ponds, bathing in the fetid gloop. He was submerged up to the midriff; the pools were deeper than they might’ve appeared. His kneecaps protruded from the steaming yellowy surface and he was hunched over them, elbows on knees, head bowed.

Sobbing uncontrollably.

He was sitting there, just weeping, white-hot tears the size of grapes, pattering down and sizzling away on the hell-water.

I exchanged a long glance with Netherhame.

“They’re people,” I said. But I wasn’t quite sure any longer what my point was. My voice sounded harrowed to my own ears. Netherhame just shook her head, face even paler than I’d ever seen it, eyes wide and incredulous.

“The crown really suits you, Master.”

I turned, looked Infrick right in the shiny black eyes, reflecting the miasmatic radiance of the Twelve Hells back at me from their depths. Her inhuman smile suddenly stabbed at my heart.

What was she? How did this happen to her? What is the meaning of that, that reply, when she knows I’m questioning her very nature…?

She wants me to swell up with pride? She wants me darker still? Or… she seeks to ingratiate herself with Mekesta, somehow?

The smile broadened even as I watched, its deviousness unmatched by anything I’d seen on the face of man or demon.

She knows. She knows she confuses me and despite our bond she is able to luxuriate in it! That is the real message. No matter what I say or do – I’m never going to get the answers I seek. There’s always an evasion. And even if I’m told the truth… I’ll never know it. It’s never going to be something Kultemeren cares about.

Abandoned. Like that Durgil. Like all those who died today. I’m supposed to be the champion of the gods of light – but how dark is the path supposed to really be? How can I do this, one-armed? If it hadn’t been for Yune… my fingers…

I cast about one last time, refocussing on the sobbing, half-present dweonatar.

The dark gods aren’t any better.

“How’d you want to play this?” I asked Ly.

“We can’t kill him here.”

I shook my head, feeling irritated. “Can’t you take him?”

“Oh, sit on a stick, Kastyr.” Colour came back to her cheeks with an affronted look like I’d slapped her. “We’re not all made the same, you know. I don’t know… I don’t want to know how you do it.”

“I’m sorry… I didn’t mean it like that, Ly.”

I saw her scowl deepen, and I remembered… this wasn’t the way to deal with her.

I scowled back instead. “Whatever. You taught me, when I knew nothing. Be a brat if you have to. Don’t blame me.”

Her scowl became a grim smile. “Ha! You know what I think about… things like these.” Ly was clearly including Trappy in her denouncement. “Do what you want. I want it dead.“

I turned my head, and called out in Infernal.

“Hello.”

He clearly already knew we were there, because he didn’t react to my greeting.

“Hey. Stonyface. Over here. I’ve got a bone to pick with you.”

I floated just a few feet nearer. Still well outside what should’ve been the range of his weapon, wherever the whip was currently…

“We need you gone, one way or the other. The Incursion must end, do you get it?”

“It must not!” he roared suddenly, lifting burning white eyes to stare at me, causing me to back up. “It was Mother’s wish! This was to be the Incursion for which we hath awaited, so long. And thou! Thou hast brought all to wrack and ruin!”

I tried to sound stern. “Now, I know you may be a bit thick, but has it occurred to you I was trying to stop wrack and ruin?”

He instantly dispelled any illusions I had with regard to his intellect.

“Thou canst not encompass the exigencies of the Sinphalamax and her Sons and Daughters! Each criterion contains a myriad of limiting factors. A misspoken word… a single step placed awry, falling only half-footed upon the stone… What now for the future, when thou hast taken it upon thyself, shouldering the city as one might a captive – whence shalt thou bear it? Hidden beneath which canopy might we find now our Day of Glory? I search the undergrowth with blind fingertips! It is gone! It is all gone from me!”

“Dear Brother, please,” Infrick cried. “Hear me, if you won’t hear my Master. Join us.”

“I can’t,” I barked. “Weren’t you listening?”

“I can,” sang a delighted voice over my head.

“What in –” Netherhame spat.

“Twelve Hells?” the crown jeered softly, and cackled. “Aaah-ha-haaa…Oh, child. Distract thyself, Lyanne Faircrowd.“

The sorceress instantly slumped over, reclined atop her nethernal entourage. She wasn’t asleep, but a bemused expression slipped across her features, eyes sliding off to fixate on empty space, meaningless streams of foul smoke, as though she could discern something in the patternless patterns.

The dweonatar, eolastyr and gungrelafor were all staring at me with their own surprised expressions – I reached up to grab the thing off my head, whether to fling it aside or look down at it in my hand while I spoke back to it, I was unsure.

But it cut me off before my hand moved six inches.

“Stay those fingers, sorcerer. Shouldst thou touch me now, here, thou shalt surely lose thine other, thy last remaining arm. Thou hast brought me unto mine own domain, and here I rule. How fitting, Kastyr of Mund. Nay! Lower it. Thinkest thou that in Hope’s mercy thou couldst be granted one more set of those wicked barbs thou hast put to such use this day? O, to give thyself so wholly to the struggle! To double thy weaponry – might it be worth the pain? Art thou such a sword as to sharpen even thy hilts? Nay. Lower… thy… hand.”

Trembling, I acquiesced.

“As a toddler thou hast stumbled hence, a feat of foolishness not one of thy forebears hath accomplished since this Ring was given unto my disposal. Yet now all my seeds are full-grown and bear their own fruit; thou art here, latest in the line, fresh-forged for the tempering. Remiss would I be to forego this opportunity to see thy strength measured to thy mettle, increased in kind…

“Ah, now, gremlin-fire! I see thy devotion. Nay. I will remain. It shall be permitted…”

“Wh-what do you –“

“Silence! I shall swallow the dweonatar for thee, and see it attend upon thee, such that it shall be in all things as though thou wert in truth its rightful Master. Thou shalt bear it thence to Materium’s shores, and it shall be my agent in thy city –“

That was her mistake.

An arm was nothing to pay, nothing, if a loose dweonatar in Mund was the price.

I reached up, grabbed the crown, and threw it hard with a downward swing of my arm.

Netherhame came back to herself just in time to see it disappear into the lake of bile below us.

“Fool!” she cried, unknowingly echoing the crown.

“I know!” I hissed back at once. “Trappy – can you go in after it?”

The eolastyr didn’t smile at the prospect, but she understood my urgency on a fundamental level. I released her from the clutches of my ascended ancients and she produced an effortless dive, breaking the surface of the pool head-first without producing a bubble.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Ly yelled at me. “Good riddance, yeah, sure, but we can’t just chuck something like that away. What if it gets found by the wrong person? Can demons use it? We have to keep it, safely, or destroy it!”

“I know, I know! Do you think I’m an idiot? I just –“

I should’ve just gone straight back to Materium. Damn it, Kas!

“Don’t make me answer that, Feychilde.”

“I just wanted – I had to get rid of it, and she said – she said she would take my arm off…”

I looked down at my hand.

Mother of Darkness. Mistress of Secrets.

“She used my fear against me,” I said. “She knew I wouldn’t be her champion. Maybe – maybe all she wanted was for me to lose the crown…”

I didn’t even fully understand my reasoning. I was making excuses to myself already as to why I’d sent my eolastyr in after it. Part of me wanted it back just to put it on my head again – I knew that much. If I just went with it to Materium, Mekesta would lose her control of the crown again, surely. She’d never cast a spell through it until I brought it here… I could still use it, couldn’t I?

When Infrick gets back with it. When she gets back with it.

Come on, Infrick.

Idiot. Idiot, idiot, idiot…

“I’m going to talk to the others. If we can’t –“

Infrick resurfaced. She looked up at me and shook her head – then, with a sudden burst of reflexes she seemed to flinch, leaping high and flying, ignoring the embrace of my ghosts in her urgency.

There was no more time for debate.

The dweonatar lit on fire.

Not the red infernal flames I’m sure he would’ve taken as a comfort, but a coruscating white-blue light, flickering in and out as though it were only half-real.

He certainly treated it as though it were real. His howl was deafening.

The conflagration didn’t take hold of a particular body-part first; at once it covered every inch of him protruding from the pool, and probably the hidden sections of him too. After all, on the plane that was the source of the fire he wasn’t submerged in any fluids at all.

We took too long. I took too long. Made Nightfell and Shallowlie paranoid.

So Ironvine attacks without us.

Before the first howl of pain finished leaving his lips, he flickered like the flames and vanished.

Me and Ly exchanged a single furtive glance before hurriedly rising up, away from the pools, both of us conscious of potential shifts in the place’s geography. We worked the gateways in unison and fell back into the material plane, scrambling to rejoin with eldritches.

The dweonatar had already left his buried sanctuary. A great sizzling rent was left behind him in the hillside as he’d propelled himself straight out of the earth and at his targets, screaming incoherently.

He was angry. Not thinking. Not running. In the throes of his agony he’d reverted to his base instinct. His first orders. His primal hunger.

Taking powerful archmages with him back to hell.

He was riddled with barbs of incandescent iron, lightning pulsing down with staggering precision and regularity, reaching down to touch him with their fatal fingertips over and over and over again.

Even as the two of us got our bearings and started soaring towards the others, it was over.

He only had the strength left in him for one strike and we watched it happen. He launched himself into the air, beating titanic marble wings, and for the first time I saw a dweonatar fly. The wind of his ascent struck back at me even with the ghost-state, slowing me.

Giving me a moment just to watch.

He swung, the searing whip stuttering, falling into Shallowlie’s shield, which would be torn asunder –

Just at the last moment, surely thanks to some telepathic switch set up by Spiritwhisper and Nightfell, the floating quartet withdrew. Only far enough that the shield eluded the whip’s reach by a matter of inches.

Then the shield warped itself into a blunt, crude instrument. A hammer of pure force, such as I’d seen her wield before, if rarely.

Shallowlie cracked the dweonatar right in the middle of the forehead, instantly up-ending him, sending him spinning, crashing back down to the ground.

“You get him, girl!” Ly whooped, a vicious grin on her face.

We were still thirty yards off when he hit the field beneath him, followed up with a triple lightning-bolt chaser. The whole area seemed to shake, as far as the eye could see. I wouldn’t wonder that they had books fall off the shelves in Salnifast.

A fierce breeze came rushing down, courtesy of Ironvine, clearing away the smoke and dust. Where the dweonatar had touched down there was now only a debris of marble chunks; most were as fine as pebbles, while a few others were misshapen fleshy rocks beyond the strength of ten men to lift unaided.

And each one was crumbling, falling away into darkness, even as I watched.

Out in the distance, the faint gonging seemed at first to falter –

Imagination rang out the sounds against the drum-skin of the mind, but ears automatically strained themselves, proving the imagined sounds false.

Understanding followed swiftly on the heels of sensation, the lack of sensation – the knowledge of what this meant finally hitting home…

It’s over.

The Bells have stopped.

And we lived.

We lived…