Leera gasped for air. It felt like a boulder had been rolled onto her chest – she strained to fill her lungs. Hundreds of candles shed an unsteady light on the odd chamber. Runes and symbols snaked and winded in intricate patterns across the ceiling, while carved stone scorpions threatened to strike from the walls.

“Hey…” a weak voice said behind Leera. “I… I don’t feel so well.”

Her entire body cramping and twitching, Leera managed to turn over.

“Maya?” Leera’s voice felt like gravel in her throat. “Where are we?”

“We’re in the pirate catacombs of Lockhart Bay – the old Re’Dorai hideout.”

Maya’s throat was swollen, and a cut somewhere in her abdomen bled into a pool on the floor. Leera reached out a trembling hand. Straining her eyes, she tried to see the tiny marbles, but all she found was the blood-soaked shirt and the leather of Maya’s armor.

Leera scooched closer, dragging her numb leg behind her, trying to mend Maya's wounds somehow. She felt like she was back at the lake that swallowed her brother, trying so desperately to fly. But despite her efforts, the wounds didn’t close, and the blood kept seeping out.

“Why did you come here?” Leera mumbled, feeling helpless and distraught.

“After the crypt stalker attacked you… and you asked me about the tattoo… I put two and two together… I thought I could handle him on my own… I thought…”

“You’re talking about Ryze, aren’t you?”

Maya nodded weakly.

“I just love when two beautiful women gossip about me,” said a raspy voice from the shadows nearby. “It makes me feel… loved.”

Leera craned her neck, her vision blurry, trying to peer through the curling darkness. She thought she could make out a shifting silhouette just outside the wobbly candlelight.

“What do you want?” Leera said, massaging her numb limbs.

The venom of the scorpion mixed with her blood into a numbing cocktail, spreading through her body. It was messing with her eye-sight as well. The strange symbols swirled above her, strangling her from the ceiling.

“So, I’m curious,” Ryze said, ignoring her question. “How does it feel to be a mundane again? I mean, you just got your powers, it has to sting a little bit, no?”

Leera grunted and tried to sit up. She leaned over Maya, pressing a piece of cloth from her tunic on the biggest wound. Maya’s pupils dilated, and she groaned from the sudden pain. Blue veins snaked across her eyeballs, and a glowing red liquid filled her eyes. Red tears rolled down her cheeks.

“What did you do to her?”

“Oh, I poisoned her,” Ryze said airily. “Did you know she used to be an assassin? Her signature weapon was the red clover nectar – it’s quite lethal – I fed her some of that.”

Maya’s lips moved, forming inaudible words. Her eyes rolled back, and she started to gurgle. Red froth bubbled at her mouth.

“What is wrong with you? How can you just stand there!?” Leera cried, trying to hold the shaking woman still.

Ryze stepped out from the shadows. The creature before her was not human – she saw that in the lifeless lumps of coal that occupied his eye sockets. Wrapped in ribbons of black cloth, it sauntered across the room and crouched next to Maya. The red ink in the shape of a scorpion burned on his forearm.

A sickly smell of incense, balming oils, and rot accompanied the creature like a swarm of flies. Leera felt like throwing up. He was the one she had seen in the vision when the crypt stalker attacked her.

“You’re right,” it hissed. “I hate watching people suffer too.”

Before Leera could react, it pulled out a jagged knife and slashed Maya’s throat. A fountain of rubies gushed from the wound. Leera just stared, frozen in disbelief.

You can’t save everyone. Take that to heart, Miss Eirey.

Quick’s words echoed through Leera’s mind. Still, she pressed her hands down on Maya’s throat, the warm lifeblood leaking through her fingers. She felt like screaming, but the runes in the ceiling were suffocating her – draining her of power.

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“My condolences,” Ryze said and took a step back, wiping the blood from the knife. “But now that we’re free from distractions, let’s talk.”

Leera slumped over Maya’s unmoving body, sobbing uncontrollably.

“I know you’ve just met me, but it feels like I’ve known you forever, Leera Eirey,” Ryze continued and shrank back into the churning shadows of the room. “For the longest time, I thought you’d died along with your parents in that fire. I thought… I thought I’d unlocked the path to ascension, but the rituals just weren’t working. For a while you made me believe I wasn’t strong enough. You… you actually made me doubt myself. Eighteen years of self-doubt is a long time. Do you know what that does to a man?”

With tendrils of darkness licking his sides, Ryze stepped out of the shadows on the opposite side of the chamber. A red circle of shimmering glyphs adorned the floor.

“You’re not… a man…” Leera said through her teeth, desperately trying to stave off the flow from Maya’s throat with another piece of cloth.

“You know, I thought I’d killed off all the Eireys that night. Your dad despised Ignis for what they’d taken from him – it was beautiful… even poetic, that a fire would claim his family.”

Ryze put a golden sapphire-studded chalice on the floor in the middle of the red circle. The numbness from the scorpion venom had spread all the way up to Leera’s shoulders. She barely had the strength to hold the cloth against Maya’s throat.

Carefully, Leera closed Maya’s eyelids. She took her stone necklace and put it around the woman’s neck – it was the only item she had that could qualify as a burial gift. Maya was dead.

“There’s nothing… poetic about murder,” Leera said.

A hoarse scraping laugh rang out through the chamber. It seemed to suck the light from the candles and prick her eardrums with tiny needles.

“Imagine my surprise when an Eirey was voted into the Caeli Senate in Oceanpeak. Luckily, the Eirey girl was dead – or so I thought until Quick, like the fool he is, led me straight to your doorstep. You probably could’ve lived out your entire life right under my nose if your brother hadn’t started talking about you. Do you have any idea how many Caelian girls that had to die, just because you’re so desperate to stay alive?

“I mean, I was surprised. You evaded my earth-benders in Jane’s Spire, slipped through the nets of every head hunter in the land, escaped the deadly grasp of a crypt stalker, and somehow managed to survive your execution on the mountaintop. I thought you had outsmarted me…

“For a moment I was worried. Once you were inside the sacred grove of Minah’s Temple, you’d be outside my reach. I thought I’d missed my chance. Can you imagine my joy when you brought that corpse into the grove and willingly broke Minah’s vow? The ancient sanctuary, shattered in an instant.”

Leera felt dizzy; the room was spinning, her arms refused to move. “I don’t… get it… why… why are you doing this?”

“I’ve wanted to open a portal – much like the one that brought you here – only this one is to another plane of existence. I’ve always wanted to look the gods in the eye – Ambust, Corona, Unglia, and Murndar – I’ve always wondered why they couldn’t get along.”

Ryze crossed the room in a few quick strides and grabbed Leera by the hair.

“We both want the same thing, really – peace between the four nations,” Ryze continued and dragged Leera into the red circle. “You just can’t seem to get it right. Sixteen generations of Iso-benders… failure upon failure.”

“Why me?” Leera whispered.

“Because the last breath of a bender is a potent catalyst for any spell, and what’s more powerful than the last breath of an Iso-bender?”

“Why did you… have to kill those girls?”

“Why!?” Ryze said, kicking her in the ribs. “Because… my dear… dealing with an Iso-bender… Is. Usually. Not. This. Easy! Killing one off before they receive their powers is far more… practical.”

Leera felt the instinct to hold her aching chest and stomach, but couldn’t move her limbs. Limply, she lolled her head over the hard floor. She coughed and felt hot blood seeping down her chin.

“Now, the venom will soon stop your heart, and when that happens I want you to breathe into the chalice,” Ryze said and held the cup up to her face.

Leera heard her blood beating in her ears; the rate was decreasing rapidly. She thought about Quick and felt a pang of guilt. Her last words to him had been in anger. She thought about Bryne and how she had shut him out of the temple. She thought about Aelar and how she hadn’t been able to mend their relationship. She thought about Maya, and how she had failed to save her.

Blinking the tears out of her eyes, Leera saw that the chalice was identical to the one Aelar had told her to melt back in Castle Saltgale. Maybe the venom was making her hallucinate. The shadows in the far side of the chamber shuddered. Her heartbeat was so slow now.

“An angel put her hand on my heart…” A figure in frayed garbs caked with blood stumbled into the chamber. His voice was deep and calm. His face and body were broken, swollen, and bruised. He dragged a sword behind him like a prisoner’s ball and chain.

“You can’t kill me with a sword, you fool,” Ryze said, and the rasping laugh filled the room once again.

“I’m not going to kill you,” the man said and rammed the sword into the ceiling, shattering the rock, breaking the intricate pattern of runes and glyphs. “She is.”

Leera suddenly felt the world around her again. The pressure was lifted from her chest, her senses returning one by one. She felt the pain, she tasted the blood, and she smelled the candle wax. She saw the marbles of reality once more.

With a deep breath, Leera forced the venom out of her system and stood up. Blue embers burned in Ryze’s eyes, and he waved his arms.

“Izsh Faed Ack Nough Der–” he chanted but was cut off as Leera held out her hand and opened his throat.

Dark goo oozed out of the wound instead of words.

“No,” Leera said.

She plucked the marbles away from the creature before her, sending them one by one into the flames of the candles. The air vibrated as she separated the blocks of its essence, melting the ribbons and the foul being beneath them into streams of beautiful glimmering particles. The candles sparked and crackled as they devoured everything until nothing remained.