“She really…” I coughed, “really did me a favour, finding you.”

We sat there under the stars, miles from Mal Malas’s den, a semi-dry patch of brush serving as a makeshift pallet. The place was like a raft floating on a pungent ocean, green-glinting insects flitting about in the darkness.

It sort of reminded me of home. My real home.

“Zel, I mean, or whoever she was. The b-best,” I spluttered, retching for the fourth time. After a few long breaths, I sat back, the heaviness in my chest alleviated somewhat. “The best thing she ever did. How many times have you saved my life, now?” I waved my hand. “I’d say I can’t count them on my fingers, but that’d be doing you a disservice. Hah!”

My voice twisted on the laugh, and the sylph didn’t reply, only looking down morosely at the ground. I regarded him in the pale gremlin-light I’d managed to conjure, a meagre, unnatural, dark-yellow radiance. I’d never seen my fey eldritch look so dejected.

He was my mirror, displaying my true face to me.

I adjusted my undead essence, taking it deeper to dispel the chill, the sliminess of the wet robe clinging to my remaining flesh.

“Why, though? Why would he do it?” I looked down at the shredded sleeve, the mangled stump of a right arm. “He wanted to train me – wanted me strong, to fulfil whatever stupid prophecy he’s been duped by, no doubt – so why take the arm?” I chuckled through the wetness in my throat. “I’m a fool, Avvie. He lied to me from the beginning. He never wanted to train me. He just wanted me… like this.” My voice cracked. “Broken.”

“Unless in this maiming there is a greater strength to be found.” The sylph looked up, his flawless face marred by glumness as he indicated my missing arm with a twirl of his fingers. “If thou might bring –“

“He took my hand!” I screamed. “He took it! How can I…”

I spent a few moments in concentration, and I found I could assemble a shield with my left hand – barely. Construct stars, form blades, direct blades? I could scarcely entertain the notion of doing it in combat.

“With all due respect, Feychilde…”

I looked at him. “You can call me Kas.”

“Kas… Thou art not the first to whom my allegiance hath been owed, nor the fifth.”

“Nor the last.”

He nodded grimly. “I fear thy words shall prove true in less time than they might otherwise. It shames me to speak the words, yet I find myself questioning whether thou hast discovered the centre of thy power. Not all sorcerers are so… concerned with the lives and well-being of others. I hath in my time been called upon to commit deeds darker than thou might conceive, for purposes no book thou hast read might impart.”

I frowned.

“I digress. One such sorcerer – she had been born bereft of arms, the limbs given unto Utenya in the womb. When the magic found her, this disability was no obstacle. I recall that she was fearsome. I am certain that oft she would mock those of her peers with fully-functioning hands, speaking of this in terms of a vulnerability –”

“Look, Avvie,” I said heavily, “everyone knows it’s not really necessary. My hands, they help – helped me channel the forces… Sure, an artist is still an artist without his hands; maybe he can grip the paintbrush in his teeth, or his toes… Maybe your sorceress was just that good…” I looked down at my useless left foot. “But it’s not the same.”

Avaelar was shaking his head, burnished bronze skin glinting dully in the yellowed moonlight. “Is it not possible that Malas,” the sylph shuddered as he spoke the dracolich’s name, “seeks to train thee by so hindering thee? That he doth perceive a flaw in thee and seeks to correct it with –”

“What does it matter?” I cried. I clutched my pants-leg, and struggled to lift my flopping foot with my left hand – with my hand. “Look at me! Look what’s left of me!” The tears started running down my face again, feeling hotter than usual. “Look what’s left… What will Jaroan say? And Jaid? It’s not like I… I… I can’t tell them the truth, can I? A dr-dracolich…”

I shivered even as I wept.

“Whyever not? They are young, but they own the promise of their brother’s strength.” I glanced up at him to find him smiling at me sadly. “Kas, thou turnst too eagerly towards treachery. Tell them the truth. It is a mortal affliction, to behold most-clearly the soonest-to-come, missing the mountain for the boulder in the foreground.”

“That’s how you conquer mountains,” I whispered. “One boulder at a time.”

“Thou canst not conquer a mountain alone.”

We sat in silence for a few seconds.

You’re just a slave.

“Many through both birth and wealth mistake their lofty seats for the high thrones of dominance, and look down upon their fellow men, bearing witness only to the crawling insects – yet I would bid thee: look not down, but out! See freedom! Abandon Wyrda’s shackles! Telior has done thee ill, dwelling on the kraken’s tongue. Wyrda Virdut is a black mistress. The deceptions of this temple of darkness is a matter I have longed to broach with thee, but –”

“What in the Twelve Hells are you going on about, Avvie?”

“Dost thou not see it?” he asked, a certain amount of horror in his voice, his shining eyes. “The slaves on the ships, whose masters trade freely here? The poor on the boardwalk, eating the rats? The starving children, the diseased babies whose parents –”

“All places are like that,” I said, the tone of my voice coming more harshly to my ears than I’d anticipated.

“But not all sorcerers.”

I twisted like I’d been slapped.

“What, Avaelar?” I turned up the wraith, floated back to my feet. “What did you just say?”

“All I have tried to say a dozen times, with a sharper blade for my tongue – yet thou hast felt not the sting, until I struck thee with a blunter implement. I apologise. But this change in thee has been long in the making, and subtleties shall no longer suffice. When thou didst surrender thy unicorn I thought I understood, after the demon’s infection took root in her essence… Yet thy blindness to the poverty of thy new home, the way in which thou hast been elevated beyond such concerns – how it was thou didst apologise to that insufferable villain, that ‘knight’, and accepted his in kind… The people whose part in life it is to clean for thee –”

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“Apprentices!”

“Servants! The Kas known unto me – never would he have suffered himself to be called ‘lord’, no more than he would allow for his sister to be joined with a –”

“Silence,” I said quietly.

His mouth closed of my accord.

I floated there, trembling awfully. All the world had fallen away. The sounds and scents of the marsh. The little glimmering green lights. It was all distant. All background noise. There was just me, and the sylph, staring at one another.

He’d saved me again. He’d pulled me out of death’s path so many times, it almost angered me. Not because of him, but because of me. I was weak. I was vulnerable. I was the plaything of dreadful entities and he, he was going to sit there, mocking me, telling me what to do, chastising me, me, after everything, everything I’d been through? He got to sit there, out of the line of fire, aloof with all his spiritual concerns, while I took the wounds, while all the burdens weighed down on me. When had he ever been wounded, really? Eldritches were for all practical purposes immortal. What did he know of real fear?

Then I remembered our first encounter.

I wanted to hurt him – that was why I was trembling. I knew it would bring me pleasure. I knew it would help assuage this feeling of powerlessness, to inflict my will in the form of suffering on a creature incapable of resistance.

“M-Master!”

The shock in his voice as agony lanced through him – it snapped me out of my reverie and I screwed my eyes shut, turned away.

“I’m sorry. I –”

“And so it is the day arriveth,” he said coldly. “I was right. Thou art just as the others, in truth. The centre of thy power will blacken thy soul, and thou shalt grow strong in magic and malice until a charred husk is all that remains of the tree of thy life.”

I remembered Xiatan, burning under the heat of Winterprince’s wizardry to save me. Then I remembered Flood Boy. Gilaela.

Now Avaelar. One more fey I’d dragged into this mess.

I looked back at him as I heard him getting to his feet.

“Sit down, Avvie,” I murmured. “I’m sorry, alright? It’s not –”

“No,” he said. “I rescind my submission.”

“What? No, Avaelar –”

“Do not use my name!” he bellowed, suddenly flaring his wings.

I’d forgotten how intimidating the tough, magical appendages looked with the blue, jagged feathers around the edges, splayed like a fan of daggers about him.

I clenched my jaw.

“Avaelar, come off it!” I pointed at him, feeling the nervous tingle running through my fingers – it was the tremor of the swordsman being forced to fence with his unpractised off-hand. “You might be catching me on a bad day, sure, but you’re just a sylph. You think you can just run away from me? Fancy fighting Khikiriaz?”

“The Kas I knew would have bade me farewell, and offered a good riddance for abandoning him, perhaps.” He regarded me sorrowfully, looking at my chest. “Kas is gone. Thou didst leave him behind. I do not know this Raz, who makes such idle threats.”

“Idle?” I snapped. “You think I wouldn’t –”

The sylph’s laughter was bitter. “Oh, even if thou wouldst – should such as I seek escape, what thinkest thou a powerful demon might attempt? Art thou such a fool as to die here?”

He met my gaze, then, and I saw him flinch as the pain coursed again in his veins.

“Dost – thou – believe – I – cannot –” he grated, then finally collapsed, panting, to his hands and knees.

The sylph’s glowing gold eyes dripped silver tears.

“Feychilde!” he whined.

I could bear it no longer. I looked down at my missing arm and started to cry again.

“I wish you t-told me earlier,” I said, blubbering and sniffing like an idiot. “Told me plainly. But it’s not your fault. I wish – I wish everything was different. I wish I was different. But he… he’s right. It’s wh-who I am.

“I… release you.”

I didn’t have to look up to do it. The good-for-nothing left hand was good enough for this. A simple wave in his direction, and it was done. I felt the connection fall away, gone as though it had never existed.

Would I have been able to do it with decision alone? With no hands to direct my will? Knowing my luck, I’d find out some day.

Keeping my face lowered, I sank back to the ground and sat there once more, hunched over, letting my tears drip off my chin.

The dryish dirt crunched under his feet as the sylph approached me. I heard his footfalls but, more worryingly, I felt the ground beneath me tremble slightly.

He was supernaturally heavy… mighty beyond material reality. A single blow of his fist could kill a man, easily.

Yet he came without obstruction inside the boundary of the wobbly shield I’d created earlier. He wasn’t going to hurt me.

I didn’t raise my eyes as his bronze feet came into view.

A powerful hand was laid gently on my left shoulder.

“Thank you, Kastyr.” For the first time, I heard him choked in emotion, voice husky. “Y-you cannot know what this means. Thank you… my friend. Truly… thou art no scapegrace, baseborn or otherwise.”

Emerald light consumed him. Without a proper goodbye, he used my leeched energies and left me in the darkness of the bogs, alone with just the flies and the stars for company.

“Goodbye, noble sylph…”

I let the gremlin-light die and lay back horizontally, tapping the wraith-essence liberally to increase my comfort, looking up into those stars.

What do you think? I asked them. Gods above us, about us, what do you think? Have I suffered enough? Have I deserved my punishments? At what point do you do the bleeding? When is it you with tears in your eyes?

The gods didn’t answer with a lightning-bolt or earthquake, so that was something, at least.

I decided I wasn’t going to let Zabalam in on Avaelar’s absence. I didn’t need to drag him into this. I’d leave him asleep, and there was little chance he’d cross the sylph’s path in his otherworld-dream. I could tell the twins I’d given Avaelar time off, that’s why the wings were missing now. Time off, for saving my life, when something bit my arm off… something…

I had to come up with a better explanation. An actual explanation.

At length I finally rose up into the air, adjusted my invisibility, and started drifting back towards Telior. Wraith-flight was so much slower on its own, but it would do. I wasn’t in a rush to get home.

Perhaps Avaelar had been right. Why just tell the Magisterium? Why not tell everyone the truth about the dracolich – what he’d been doing here, what he was likely doing in other places? Knowledge could be a weapon, or at least a shield, used to thwart or fend off any future manipulations Malas might conceive…

Or was that his plan? It very much sounded as though his goals were now within his reach – perhaps he needed no more of his brethren’s remains, and I would be merely fanning the fires of terror amongst the people. Perhaps I’d be mocked for my madness. Making up stories to glamorise the accident that cost me a limb.

But was Avaelar right about the rest of it? Was Lord Raz a betrayal of Kastyr Mortenn? Did I have to end it, give up the ruse, in order to stand a chance of being myself again?

Abandon Telior?

I’d once been so stuck in the mud that I’d bought extra property on Mud Lane. It took me ages to think of moving to Treetown… with Emrelet. Now I thought I’d thrown it all away, the semblance of grandeur, glory – I was outside Sticktown. Mund. Everything.

I’d given it all up once. Surely it’d be worth it to save my soul. Telior was just one more place.

But go where? I couldn’t flee destiny. When I tried, I only crashed into it at a greater speed.

Doomed. I was doomed. Wherever I went, I was still me.

It was almost morning, by the time I came close enough to home to hear the bells ringing.

Not bells, I reminded myself, chimes, in the wizards’ enclosure.

But why would they be chiming at this hour?

Malas – Malas, what have you done?

I slowly climbed higher, to afford myself a proper look at the bay, and it wasn’t long before my breath was stolen away.

“Is this because I cursed you?” I whispered to the receding stars.

It’d been three months, and they’d come for me.

Not the Magisterium. I’d been on the lookout for the wrong enemies all along. This wasn’t an armada from Mund. These were no common battleships.

Not even the dracolich could be so cruel as to deal me such a hand. Oh no. This was all me. This was worse.

White iceberg-shapes flickering magenta, keen hulls pointed like bird-skull beaks, floating in the darkness.

A fleet of dark elven vessels stood at anchor, not half a mile out to sea.