The dungeon itself had only the two residents of whom we’d already heard, and somehow news of the queen’s defeat spread faster than we could approach – by the time we’d reached the weird fences marking the entrance to the palace jail, the goblins who’d seemingly been set here to guard the place had long since passed us in the passageway, three bends earlier, their wails of glee or despair impossibly to properly discern. We walked unhindered around the gates and into the dank, mouldy cavern of bland brown-white rock. From the high vantage it offered, we looked down into the pit where they’d been chained. Blofm and Jaid alike loosed whimpers at the sight of Bircanos, but where my sister made a sound of dismay, the goblin’s was more one of lust, hunger.

This place might’ve been used as a latrine from time to time, and the goblin-drop was pooled in the basin at the bottom of the pit, where the two prisoners lay. The once-proud unicorn was coated almost hoof to horn in stinking muck, his eyes closed, chest rising and falling rapidly. Atop his head, the glittering horn’s light was untouched by any grime, and yet its golden radiance was dimmed to a muted, burnished glow. The elf, not ten paces from the unicorn, looked no less broken in both spirit and body. This was no elf of Materium, born of mortal flesh, but a true high elf, his otherworldly nature made plain by the extreme length of his fingers, his tapering ears, the impossible cheekbones. As if to spite his inherent perfection in form, his autumn-red hair had been roughly shorn short, his body left almost naked, just a tattered bit of fabric fastened into a loincloth to protect his modesty. Both of the prisoners were emaciated, their ribs protruding as they breathed.

Both appeared to be sleeping.

“Blofm… thanks for today, but I’d like you to leave us now, please.”

Against her will, my goblin suddenly started to backpedal, and, with a brief grunt of annoyance, she was soon out of the jail and out of my range.

The steps cut into the side of the cavern let us down to the edge of the fetid pool. Close up, it challenged even our Sticktown-trained stomachs – I felt no less pale than the twins turned right before my eyes.

“Twelve Heavens.” I chose my swear-word with some care. “Cover your mouths.”

Even Jaroan acquiesced to my order, which I suspected said more for the noxiousness of our environment than it did for a change in his attitude.

Our scarves pulled tight across the bridges of our noses, we went right up to the edge.

“Good morning!” I called. “Erm… Lord Elf? Lord Unicorn?”

“They probably think this is some trick,” Jaroan murmured.

The elf’s eyelids fluttered open.

“You mean… you mean… it isn’t?” he moaned in a strange, high accent, the words stilted but nonetheless comprehensible Mundic.

“No…” I really didn’t know what to say, or how to reassure him. “My good man…”

Seeing him looking back at me, his gaze cool and blue despite the goblin-drop literally everywhere – in his eyelashes – I felt more sick than ever.

We have to get them out of here.

The Queen of Moths and her bellyful of plane-locked children could wait. This would suffice. This would strike a blow for the gods of light.

“Show me the chain,” I muttered, breaking eye contact with him and looking instead at the collar about his throat, the links leading to the fastening in the rock…

Everything was so soiled it was difficult to tell at first, but there seemed to be an amethyst tint to the steel no amount of muck could occlude. Something only my eye could pick up.

Malas’s magic…

“I can’t… move,” the elf gasped. He did his best, clutching at the chain-links nearest his throat with trembling hands.

“Oh… never mind.” I saw the patterns now, becoming ever-clearer as if rising up to meet my eyes as I studied the matrices embedded in the links. “It’s draining your energies, and using them to reinforce the binding instead.” I looked down at the pool in thought. “Erm… I think I can do something about that, actually.”

If I could remove the ensorcellments, the chains would probably be no more durable than ordinary steel. I could have my bintaborax rend it easily… It was just a matter of pulling the force-lines through each other, against their natural inclinations. Like inverting a shield.

I crouched down beside the pool, reaching out a hand to the chain binding the elf –

“Hold.”

Everyone’s gaze was pulled to the unicorn as Bircanos spoke, though the word was in Etheric.

His eyes were still closed, but the light emanating from his horn brightened just a touch.

His words weren’t for us.

“Do not believe him. Do not go with him.”

“What’s he saying?” Jaroan asked sharply.

I stared at the unicorn.

“Why?” I asked bluntly. “What did I do to you?”

Bircanos’s equine eyes opened, flaring, white-hot coals.

“Do not speak the tongue!” he snarled. “Apostate! You I should very much like to destroy. I warn you – should you free me, once I have pulled down this demi-plane I will spear you through the heart and bear you as a trophy to my Lady’s side, show them all what becomes of infidels!”

When he spoke of destroying me, of spearing me, spittle came flying from his mouth. I could hear the emotion in his voice. The elf was staring at me in trepidation, and I could feel the twins’ confusion without having to see the expressions on their faces.

“I don’t know what you think you know,” I said slowly, “but it’s not true. I’m a friend to fey – see, I’ll summon my sylph –“

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“You bound my sister, and now where is she?” he choked. “I know of her fate. Lost, forever, to that child of Illodin! She came before me. You cannot lie to me. And I cannot lie to you! I will destroy you, Feychilde! You are mine!”

Gilaela… came before him?

I had no retort.

“Please –“

My lame attempt at remonstration was interrupted as he tossed his body violently, in what must’ve been a show of incredible strength given his drained state. He dragged back on the chain, kicking muck so that it spattered all over us, causing a din as he smacked and slapped his flanks in the pool and against the very stone.

“He’s insane,” I muttered quietly in Mundic for the benefit of the twins.

Hoping he wouldn’t hear, wouldn’t correct me, wouldn’t explain to Jaid what I’d done to Princess…

Please, Bircanos, I prayed silently. Nentheleme –

I caught myself.

Yune, don’t let him tell. I don’t know how much it’d take to break her, and that…

I still remembered what I’d done to one of my most faithful followers, remembered it so clearly I could see it in my mind’s eye even now –

The thorns, entering her –

The shiver of absolute, unutterable agony –

The nausea overcame me and I threw my scarf off, retching.

I only brought up a few mouthfuls of phlegm, and, shuddering, I replaced my scarf. Jaid and Jaroan weren’t saying anything. I sensed them backing away, fear overtaking their young minds. The lord of unicorns was still thrashing about, writhing like Gilaela in my imagination.

This was no place for them. What had I done? I thought this would be some merry adventure. Instead I brought the twins face to face with one of Mal Malas’s personal servitors, brought them to the rancid heart of a goblin fortress to bear witness to the shattered souls kept trapped within…

I stood up to my full height as Bircanos finally settled down, his last fitful throes truly pitiable. He lay there quivering in the waste of his goblin captors, mouth half-submerged, the exposed nostrils spraying drop across the pool with every heavy breath.

“Maybe you want to destroy me,” I said, “and maybe that’s what I deserve. Gods know, you’d find a lot of people who agree with you where I come from.”

The one eye above the surface of the drop opened again slightly, a slit of white light seeping through the crack as he regarded me again.

“So we’re going. But first, I’m going to free you. Because that’s what I have to do.”

I sent the twins back first, depositing them in the cave-system which was Materium’s analogue of the demi-plane we’d entered. Leaving them in the care of Avaelar and the satyrs, Zabalam there to light the air, I couldn’t help but hold the desolate look on Jaid’s pale face in my mind as I traversed the gateway back into the goblin queen’s halls.

I started with the elf. A swift spell, and a word to Junior Cuddlesticks while I gingerly held onto one of the demon’s spikes – and it was done.

“Can you make do from here, or would you like me to bring you with me?” I asked him in as tender a voice as I could manage, while I worked on the spells binding Bircanos.

The high elf just shrank back from me at that, his leaf-shaped eyes full of horror, thin fingers clutching at the pulverised links of the chain still fastened to the collar around his throat. He wouldn’t stop staring at me, wouldn’t change the look on his face from one of fright.

“I don’t need to keep you!” I paused, waiting for him to react, but he either didn’t believe me or couldn’t properly understand me. “Or do you want me to help you with that?”

I put a hand to my throat to indicate the collar about his neck. He just shook his head violently.

“No – no – please…” he whimpered. “No. I’m – no.”

I sighed, going back to my spellcraft.

I could just take him. Calm him down on the material plane.

Then I cast my gaze back down at Bircanos’s one open eye, its gleaming glare still fixed on me.

No. Best not.

I finished breaking the spell, and decided it was time for me to put out a hand, to call back my fiend –

In the very instant the nethernal essence-sapper gave way beneath my sorcerous fingertips, before I could even move my arm to beckon across the planes to Junior Cuddlestick, Bircanos stirred.

This time, in a single savage rearing-up, he wrenched the entire chain loose of the rock, its fastening exploding from the stone with a loud pop! while the rivets went pinging across the chamber.

Golden light rippled over him in waves from horn to hoof, moving ever-more strongly, brighter and brighter – and with the sudden scent of burning grease every wound, every mark, every stain and smudge was washed clean.

His hair and mane shining as though they had been woven from threads of pure pearl, Bircanos stood now not in the pool but hovering above it, marble-like hooves poised nonchalantly on the air almost twelve inches over the slop.

I was paralysed at the glorious sight, so amazed that I forgot his promise.

If I had thought my hand in his rescue, that my persistence despite his threats, would go some way towards changing his mind, I had been sorely mistaken.

The unicorn leapt, finding more than enough purchase on thin air to bear down upon me, thrusting his head at me as a swordsman thrusts his sword-arm.

I fell awkwardly through the jadeway, stumbling backwards, only just closing the planar boundary as the tip of his horn plunged down at my upper chest.

Avaelar caught me, and, as far as I could tell from the speed and angle of my re-entry to Materium, none of them should’ve gotten a glimpse of my impending glittery doom.

“Is all well, Feychilde?” the sylph asked at once. “Why didst thou not call upon mine aid?”

I straightened up, thanked him with a nod, and heaved another sigh.

“Well, it’s done.” I peered up at the shadowed cavern ceiling, just beyond Zab’s reach. “I guess we’re going to have to go wraith if we want to get out of here sometime this week. What’s the betting we’re ten times deeper-down than we should be…”

The sylph’s weren’t the only questions I avoided, shedding the burdens of mortal flesh and donning the spectral cloak of my undead minion. I rejoined with the others, and I promised the twins I’d try summoning Blofm later, supposing she survived the unicorn’s wrath – and that I’d try to get some explanation out of her regarding Bircanos’s insanity, his apparent hatred of me.

That night it didn’t rain, and the wind wasn’t quite so cold as the previous night, so we made our camp in the arch of a shallow cave opening. I hovered enwraithed beside the campfire while the twins pestered Blofm for almost half an hour, looking for answers the goblin could never give them. Finally, feigning exhaustion, I dismissed the eldritch and turned over horizontally on the air, as if to fall asleep.

They didn’t talk between themselves while they sorted their bedrolls, and they didn’t even sleep close to each other for warmth as I’d told them to. Five minutes after they both stopped making sounds, I swivelled around to check on them and found them lying on opposite sides of the cave mouth, barely able to touch one another’s fingers if they’d both stretched out their arms.

Jaroan had nodded off almost instantly, but Jaid’s eyes were still reflecting the starlight. She was staring up at the sky like a corpse. If she noticed me turn over, she gave no sign of it.

I gently flipped back, and resumed my own sky-staring. I supposed if she looked like a corpse, I must’ve looked like a ghost.

I’m sorry, Gilaela, I said to the stars. I wish I’d been able to think of something different I could do. But I had to get home. I had to get back to them.

Or had I? Was all this, any of this, really necessary? Were the twins better off here with me than they’d been with Xan and Orstrum? Wasn’t it just base selfishness driving my actions, my mindless, murderous urge to escape Magicrux Zyger at all costs?

The stars held the answers, but they held them back, like a smiling sorcerer wrapped in shadow at the edge of the campfire’s smoke.

And when at last I plunged into them, it was not the stars but the darkness, the darkness in my dreams that held the answers, held them and displayed them with fingers spread, so that my naked third eye might drink in the sights, the names of my guilt writ large in subcutaneous ink upon every parcel of skin, suspended there between seven executioners’ swords.

It wasn’t just Gilaela I’d betrayed. Not just her I’d failed.

I’d failed everyone, everyone I’d ever known.

The hands closed. The names expunged. Lost to the darkness, lost forever.

This was my redemption, wasn’t it? This self-imposed exile. I had to run from my doom. I had to, didn’t I? For their sakes?

I awoke the next morning, and, if I’d grasped at some celestial acknowledgement of my doubts during my slumber, the gods’ fingerprints left impressions on my mind like the imprint of falling feathers upon stone, images and words evaporating faster than dew under a bright sunrise.