“Captain,” Will greeted me, sounding pleased to see me despite everything. She moved to try to sit up in her bed.

“Easy, Will,” I said quickly, going to sit next to her. “Don’t strain yourself.”

“What is this place? It’s so… weird.”

I chuckled softly, faintly. “Angelia is… well, an acquaintance. But she’s the best healer I’ve ever seen. I hope she’s taken good care of you.”

Will nodded. “Mostly, she’s just been making me stay here and drink lots of her soup. It tastes funny.”

“Probably very good for you though.”

“Either that, or she’s killing me,” Will noted wryly, but the morbid humor fell a bit flat considering the circumstances, and she winced afterwards. “.... They’re… all dead then?”

I looked at the floor and slowly nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” Will said softly. “We made our own choices, you know. We decided to stay and wait.”

“If I hadn’t been so insistent–”

“Of what? the truth? You did come back, Leon.”

I was hunched over in the chair, elbows on my knees, and I let my head hang slightly. “Yeah. I did come back,” I agreed, perhaps a bit bitterly.

“You saved me. Not much, but–”

I turned to look at her. “Don’t say that. Of course it’s much. I just wish none of you had needed the saving. None of you should have been there.”

“Most of us would have been dead a year ago if not for you. We were on death row. You saved us once and then again.”

“You’ll have to pardon me if I don’t feel the most accomplished about it right this second,” I said mildly, though I didn’t dismiss her words.

“Do you think I don’t feel the same?” Will demanded.

I took a breath and looked at her. “Of course not. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

She narrowed her gaze at me slightly and then took a breath. “Well. Don’t do that. Being mad at you was distracting me.”

I breathed the faintest laugh and reached over to gently pat her on the shoulder. She still looked so deeply frail.

“So, what’s going on?”

“Going to fight another war.”

“You should stop doing that for them,” she advised.

“Yeah. The Guildmasters got Rufais to sign away his autonomous powers, and I got a bunch of concessions. We’re going to try to make a deal with Killough, but if it falls through, I’m leading the counter-offensive.”

“And Dahl?” Will basically spat the word.

“Jesne– the Crusader who defected to our side– is keeping an eye on him and forming a case. Once the military excursion is over, she’s been promised a platform.”

“At best all that will do is get him to return to Isaria. That’s not–”

“I know, but I doubt his sanity will hold together long enough to argue his case.”

“What?”

“He’s losing it. I don’t know what he’s done to himself, but he’s not the same man who walked through the city gates.”

“So what do you think will happen?”

“I think he’s going to snap and attack someone, and that I’m going to kill him when he does.” I smiled grimly.

“And when the Chantry tries to have you killed for that?” Will arched an eyebrow.

“What else is new?”

Will snorted. “I suppose that’s fair.”

“What about you?” I asked gently. “You’ve been fully pardoned, by the way, so you don’t need to worry about any of that.”

“I think I’m going to move out of the city,” Will answered, speaking quietly. “Move out to one of the smaller towns. Start over. Maybe try being a little bit more like my father wanted.”

I nodded slowly and had a sudden thought, though it would have to wait before I could act on it. “Small towns are usually a bit more peaceful,” I agreed softly.

“I’m sorry I can’t help you with this last fight. Or even with Dahl…. I don’t….” She pursed her lips slightly. “I don’t know if I’ll even still be here when you…. I feel like I should be there, but….”

“You don’t need to be,” I told her, soft but insistent. “You’re not obligated. The only thing you owe any of us is to keep living, to live well. To live better.”

“Better than what?” Will asked somewhat blandly.

Better than us, I thought, but no. That wasn’t quite right, was it? “Better than you were yesterday.”

Will blinked at me for a long moment and then smiled slightly. “That’s a surprisingly attainable goal,” she said mildly. “Do you tell yourself the same thing?”

I opened my mouth momentarily and then closed it again. “No.”

“You should. It’s good advice.”

“I’ll take it under advisement,” I said with a soft smile.

Will nodded and then yawned.

“I think I’ll let you get back to sleep,” I said softly, standing.

“Ugh. All I do is sleep and eat lately,” she muttered.

“It’s been a day, Will; that’s all you should be doing,” I pointed out mildly.

Will started to object and then was interrupted by yawning a second time. “Okay, fine, maybe I need to sleep some more,” she grumbled and then suddenly sat up a bit again. “Captain?”

“Hm?”

“Come see me again? I understand if you’re too busy before the big battle, but… after. Come see me again after.”

I smiled at her gently. “I will. I promise. By then, you’ll probably even be eating more than soup.”

She snorted. “It better be before that, even, or I might go a little crazy.” She rested her head back on the pillow. “Thank you, Captain.”

“Anytime, Will.” I slowly left her room.

“She’s sleeping again?” Angel greeted me as I stepped out from behind the curtain, back into the main shop. She was standing behind the counter, taking pinches from separate piles of herbs and placing combinations in small pouches.

I nodded. “I’m surprised by how well she’s doing. Thank you for taking care of her.”

“Of course. I’m happy to help.”

“Mind if I ask you a personal question?” I looked at her.

“Do I ever?” She grinned at me, as though challenging me to make it a good one.

“Who are you?”

Angelia paused and arched an eyebrow at me. “What kind of question is that?”

“An obvious one,” I said with a shrug. “I’m on the edge of my seat for the answer though.”

Angel narrowed her eyes at me and then laughed. “You’ll have your answer someday.”

“But not right now.”

“I never did promise to answer.”

I rolled my eyes slightly. “Still, you should at least give me something. What kind of person hangs out in Turyn Temples speaking casually to the statues of the Goddess of Death and offers aid to us without wearing the mask?”

Angel clicked her tongue at me slightly. “You’re thinking far too small. There are places in this world where mask or no mask, Turyn or no Turyn, has little bearing on life whatsoever.”

I arched an eyebrow. ‘Have you ever heard of the White Church?”

Angelia paused for a moment in her making of the herb bags before continuing. “Another name for the Chantry?”

“No.”

There was a short moment of silence, and then Angel shrugged. “I may have heard of it.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Not much. They have the goal of defeating Death, making it temporary or avoidable. Blasphemy to your beliefs in perhaps even a worse way than your beliefs are blasphemous to the Chantry. They believe it’s the first step to becoming gods.”

“And they’re beyond the Rifts?”

“The Rifts are the edge of the world, unpassable even by the Fates themselves. Nothing is beyond the Rifts,” Angel recited the Chantry line with a twinkle in her eye.

“What about Riftlings?”

“They are distorted by the Rifts; not from within.”

“And what about demons?”

Angel smiled at me sharply. “What about demons indeed?”

I rolled my eyes after a moment longer engaging in a staring contest with the woman. “You’re not going to be helpful at all, are you?”

Angel laughed. “Perhaps I would reward a straightforward question with a straightforward answer.”

“I asked a straightforward question to start this,” I pointed out.

Angel hummed. “I suppose that’s fair. Well, then let me ask you something. Where do you think the Devourer came from?”

I frowned. The Devourer, the being that had supposedly wiped out all races save for humanity during the Purge, according to Chantry doctrine. The Turyn believed something else, of course; they taught the betrayal of Palados. But I was still familiar with the story. “Are you saying the Devourer was real?”

“You don’t believe it is?”

“If so, where did it go?”

“Where indeed. From whence did it come and to where did it return?”

“Beyond the Rift. That’s your implication.”

“I just asked a question.”

I rolled my eyes. “So you did. Thank you for your help with Will, but I think I’ll leave you to your herbs.”

“Why do you care?”

I paused, blinking. “What?”

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

She shrugged. “A lot of people have questions, wonder if there might be something beyond their world. Some may even swear that they have seen as much, others believe wholeheartedly in every doctrinal teaching passed down to them by others– yet none seem to do anything about any of it. Wherever it ranks on their priorities, it clearly isn’t high. Is it just because it was mentioned by a madman working for the Chantry?”

“I didn’t tell you that part,” I said mildly.

“Willow did, and you’re avoiding the question. Why do you care?”

I shrugged. “It seems important? If there’s… whole other worlds out there, on the other side of the Rifts. If there’s something bigger. That seems important.”

Angel hummed softly. “And it calls to you, doesn’t it? The Rifts call to you, and now you’ve begun to think that maybe it’s something beyond the Rifts.”

“Did it call to you?”

“So loud that for a time I was deaf to everything else,” Angel confirmed with a toss of her straight white hair.

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Yes. And I think you will too, someday. For better or for worse.”

“You talk to me sometimes like you think I’m going to be the antagonist of your favorite novel someday,” I said mildly.

“No. Not my favorite novel.”

I rolled my eyes and moved to the door again. “Have a good day, Angel.”

She nodded in return, and I let the door close behind me, taking a few breaths of fresh air.

Her shop was strange, for I never felt suffocated while I was inside, but the second I left it, it always hit me in a belated fashion, as though I hadn’t been breathing the entire time I had been inside.

“Strange, just like everything else about her,” I muttered faintly to myself, taking another deep breath before heading off to my next location– the Ildanach Dungeons where I had been prisoner just a couple of days previous.

The city looked different now, somehow, as I walked through it. The trees overhead no longer seemed providers of protection but rather as though they were hiding sinister secrets, waiting for the right moment to pounce in ambush. The people didn’t seem friendly and kind; they looked wary and skittered by, taking one glance at my face and then ducking their heads and hurrying on their way. This city that I had once thought I could call home had been slowly turned against me, and now it just seemed like every other city– a place where I stayed for a time, ready at any moment during my stay for those around me to attempt to stick a knife in my ribs or back.

I tugged my coat a little tighter around me in equally feeble attempts to ward off both the cold autumn winds blowing down from the north and to attempt to provide some level of security and familiarity in this now unfriendly place.

In the log room of the dungeons, there was a young soldier there, probably just promoted to Captain and stuck on this duty because no one wanted it. He jumped a bit out of his skin when the trap door slammed shut behind me, and I descended down to speak with him. His nerves only got worse when he saw who I was.

“C-c-captain,” he stuttered. “How can–”

“I’m here to see Keric Thurien.”

He swallowed and then nodded, moving over to the door and wordlessly unlocking it for me.

I stepped into the dark, silently cursing how my chest tightened and the world seemed to tilt ever so slightly, hating how my hands gained a tremor to them and my breathing came a little faster in the stale air. I forced myself to take a slightly deeper breath as I approached the second row of cells where Raesh and I had been held.

Perhaps due to chance or maybe the hand of a cosmic force with a sense of humor, Keric was in the very same cell that I had occupied mere days earlier, lying on the hard, tiny cot.

He rose as I approached, looking somehow pleased to see me, despite the circumstances and the fact that I hadn’t been particularly gentle with him during our last conversation.

“Captain!” He greeted me cheerfully. “To what do I owe the honor?”

“I’d like you to tell me the best way to kill Dahl.”

Keric paused. “Do you have reason to believe a sword through his chest won’t suffice?”

“The reason you gave me.”

“Ah, the experiments,” Keric said. “I told you I didn’t know what he had done to himself.”

“Surely an educated and curious man such as yourself did some poking,” I said, hating how easy it was to charm and flatter him despite what he had done. It was too easy to put aside the hatred and anger, too easy for me to nearly dismiss the comrades I had only just buried. I’d always found it far too easy to move on in practice, a fact that sometimes haunted me more than the memory of their deaths.

Keric hummed, smiling at me sharply. “Perhaps. Perhaps I rigged up my own machine, sent it off from a slightly different location. Perhaps I got my own communication with the White Church, once or twice.”

“And?”

“What do I get for telling you?”

I took a breath, but I’d known what I had been willing to do before I had set foot in this place. No use hesitating over it now. “I’ll owe you one.”

“And you’ll, what, break me out?” Keric asked, arching an eyebrow.

“No. You’ll have to come find me later to call it in; I’m finishing this first.”

“Then what use–”

“I hear you met my raven.”

Keric stopped. He stared at me for a long moment, slowly breathing out all the air in his lungs, eyes getting wider the longer he looked at me. “Your raven? A familiar,” he whispered. “You serve the Great Ones?”

I tried not to let on that I didn’t have the slightest what he was talking about, per say.

Join the club, Teris muttered in the back of my mind.

“I have a bargain. Teris is part of that.”

Keric smiled at me, looking nearly euphoric at my words. “I knew you were something special! I have admired you for some time. To think you followed the same path all along….”

In that moment, he looked more like a madman than I had ever seen– more than mad, he looked out of his mind with zealotry. It was the kind of fevered intensity that led men to kill themselves and others for a taste of the paradise they believed would come their way in consequence for their sacrifice.

“Anyway,” I said, attempting to mask my discomfort and steer the conversation back to someplace sane, “like I said, I’ll owe you one.”

“I wish to meet your master, the one with whom you’ve bargained,” Keric said immediately.

I thought about how much it grated on me to hear him call the demon with whom I shared a mind “master”. And then I thought about how much that same demon would likely loathe Keric, which almost brought a smile to my face. “Like I said, I’m in the middle of something right now. But I have never once doubted that you won’t be staying behind bars for any significant period of time. You escape, you find me later, and you can ask something of me then. That’s the deal.”

“We have an accord then,” Keric said, beaming, and then immediately launched into what he knew with shocking enthusiasm. “The White Church of Vharskuul believes in making death temporary through the arts of combining some form of accelerated healing with some kind of sacrifice to death. The theory goes that when the subject dies, only part of them dies, a piece of them or many even of something else, and then when the healing is applied to the remaining corpse, the subject can live again with what is left. The unfortunate truth of that matter is, unfortunately, that nothing is infinitely divisible.”

“How would that be counteracted?” I asked, deciding to ignore my automatic dubiousness about the sense of what had just been claimed.

“While it was never confirmed to me by any means, I would imagine that it could be done either by stripping away that which is used as sacrifice or by killing him enough time that he ran out of that source. It is slightly complicated by the fact that it seems this was just one of at least two theories, but I did not gain any information on the other.”

I sighed. “So it sounds like I just have to fight him and see what happens.”

“It could be the case that there’s nothing there to begin with,” Keric pointed out. “He could very well still be a very normal mortal man.”

“He could be, but that would mean that something had gone my way,” I said wryly. “That’s not a thing that happens.”

“I would think that your interaction with the Greater Ones would have been in your favor.”

I tilted my head slightly at Keric. “You know, hyperbole isn’t the same thing as lying.”

Keric blinked at me a few times and then arched an eyebrow. “Noted.”

His tone was so dry, I had to fight to keep a smile from my face for a moment. “But it also somewhat depends on how you slice that,” I answered his actual assertion. “More importantly, do you have any indication what Dahl did? or what he might be using as this “sacrifice”?” It was hard for me to imagine Death accepting anything but the real thing.

“Unfortunately, no. But his dwindling sanity might point to some measure of that being used as sacrifice? It was terribly unclear.”

“What about the healing? His body has to recover from mortal injury somehow for that to work.”

“Well, I was running full length experiments on methods of creating accelerated healing processes from partial mutations. Riftlings heal faster than anything else in our world, after all, and it is at least partially transferable– else the crystal farms would have been dead.”

I tried to ignore the flash of anger when he referred to people on whom he had run experiments to make their existences unbelievably torturous for the benefit of gaining more riftslivers “crystal farms”. I succeeded far too easily. “But you never ran any experiments on Dahl.”

Keric shook his head. “He’s a private person.”

“But he was involved, so it tracks that he would be using your procedures. How does that work?”

“Rift energy. Riftlings both generate it and run off of it; it essentially becomes their lifeblood. By absorbing more, their strength is likewise restored. I’m not sure exactly how it would work on a less durable form though. Riftlings have hard carapaces. Dahl, obviously, has not grown one of those, so it’s difficult to say how well it would take to human flesh instead, or what kind of pain it could cause. Rift energy across bare flesh, on the few instances it’s been recorded, has been described as intensely unpleasant.”

I thought briefly about the way that the Riftling energy that I harnessed interacted with my form. I couldn’t use it to heal like it was my lifeblood, the way he described– the mild healing I could obtain was a function of directing the power for that purpose– but I wasn’t even partially a Riftling. I had borrowed powers from one; I myself had not become one. It was a fine but significant distinction. I also rarely contacted the energy myself, save for when I was already in pain– such as when I had been forced to use Rift energy to power the function of my leg after being shot. The added pain at that point always seemed negligible, though I had been informed I was terribly unreliable about such things.

“Wouldn’t healing using a substance that defaults to destructive also require significant internal mutation at a bare minimum then?” I asked. “Brute forcing Rift Energy into a wound isn’t going to help anything unless it has already become a person’s lifeblood, as you put it.”

“Indeed, and we had yet to make such a discovery without also having the outside mutations.”

“How were the successful experiments performed?”

“They always required a slow increase of exposure, which was difficult to handle for those as impatient as Dahl and Friel. A true success likely would have occurred over the course of several weeks if not months of slowly increasing riftsliver exposure, followed by raw Rift exposure, and then, finally, stable injections of riftslivers.”

“And the supplanting of organs?”

“That was a method of brute force, not the kind of finesse that was ever going to produce the results they wanted. We got full transformations that way, but of course they weren’t going to have intelligence after that. It’s, frankly, a miracle any of them survived the procedure at all. If not for the proliferation of riftslivers in common use over the past few years, it never would have worked.”

The reminder that the Chantry had essentially made a fortune off of priming the masses for a great transformation into these beasts was not lost on me. “Do Dahl’s Loyalists have any interest in a mass transformation using that information?”

“It’s still unclear if it’s feasible. However, if they could do it even partially, a single time, it would be the greatest threat ever held over any city’s head. It really only needs to work once.”

“But right now it requires physical surgery.”

“Yes. I did theorize, though, that the slower progression of mutation could be sparked from the inside out through consistently increasing levels of exposure.”

“You were working around the biggest amount of pure riftslivers I had ever seen. No concern?”

“From what I could tell, some level of blood contact was always necessary to trigger an actual transformation, even when it happened accidentally in the mines. That being said, it was definitely a risk.”

“You also mentioned exposure to actual Rifts. How does that work without being destroyed?”

“Building up a tolerance. Exposure to a pure Rift without disintegration of the physical form is the final step. If someone can do that, I believe it wouldn’t take much to begin the internal transformation.”

“And what effects would that have outwardly?”

“No idea. I would theorize a delayed mutation, though.”

“You’d end up as a Riftling beast, just like the ones we destroyed, but it would take longer?”

“The goal and working theory is that by taking longer and being a more gradual process, the intellect would be maintained. It would be an evolution.”

“But it was never done.”

“Correct.”

“If someone were able to stand up to a Rift and maintain their physical form, what would be the last step to trigger the beginning of the process, now that their immunity had been built up?”

“I would either inject or consume a riftsliver to jumpstart the process, assuming pure Rift exposure hadn’t already done it.”

“And once that was done, Rift energy could be used as a healing factor.”

“Could and would be. Also, I feel I should clarify. When I say Rift energy– to heal something as weak and malleable as flesh, it wouldn’t take much. Riftlings have to stay close to their Rifts because they’re so perverted and, ironically, so tough that it takes a lot of force to put them back the way they ought to be. For a hybrid being like this, it wouldn’t take nearly that.”

“So, what, a few riftslivers on the body?”

“My hypothesis was that it wouldn’t even take that. When’s the last time you looked at the sky?”

I stared at him blankly for a moment. “What are you–”

And then I understood.

“You’re saying that there’s enough Rift energy in the general atmosphere from the sky to perpetuate healing from mortal injuries?”

“If my calculations were anywhere near correct? There’s way more energy than is even necessary for that.”

“That energy is not just used for Riftlings to heal.”

“No,” Keric shook his head. “This kind of hybrid would have accelerated healing, inhuman strength, speed, all physical functions would be enhanced– and all it would have to do is breathe. Our entire world is filled with the energy we need for this; we just lack the ability to harness it. If Dahl really has done it, then… he’s done it.” He looked right at me. “It would be a pity if you were to die before I could call in that favor.”

“I can’t die,” I answered, slightly distractedly.

“Really?”

“Yeah. Part of the deal. How do you kill someone who becomes superpowered by the sky?” I asked Keric blandly.

Keric shrugged. “I don’t know. Even better, he might not stay down even if you do.”

“You sound awfully smug.”

He shrugged again, smiling. “A servant of the Great Ones against a man who’s taken the next evolutionary step of our species? I’m fascinated to see how this will turn out.”

“Turning into a monster isn’t evolving.”

“Oh, come now. Humans are already monsters, Kazere. What’s the problem with getting bodies to match?” He yawned and then went and sat down on his cot. “Anything else I can help you with?”

“No,” I said, quiet.

“Then good luck!”

As I walked out of the prisons, I couldn’t help but think I was going to need it.