Arai was stunned. "I can't believe it," he said. "I can't believe you can bring the dead back to life."

"It was a very difficult calculation, even for me," Lillandra admitted, "but I'm sure I can do it. In fact the calculation was nearly complete when you attacked me at the Nightfall. In a few more months I would have had enough magia to finish the spell."

Lillandra's hubris was amazing -- meddling in matters of life and death as though she were a goddess. If anyone in Iona Magister was capable of casting such a spell, however -- of bringing the dead back to life -- it was the Night Queen. "A swordsman," he muttered. "You overthrew the king, conquered Velon, and spent a hundred years constructing this spell, all for the sake of a single swordsman."

"Julien," she affirmed.

"And that's why you're so anxious to return to Velon? You wish to complete this spell?"

"I have to," she said firmly. "It can't have been for nothing."

Arai absorbed all that quietly. Was it true? Had Lillandra really done all these things -- killed Prince Ryal and taken over Velon -- not for herself, but for the sake of love and vengeance? It did fit with what he knew of her history. Despite having conquered Velon, she seemed to have no interest in politics; she had left the government in the hands of the Pierces. Why go to the trouble of taking over a kingdom if she had no interest in ruling it? But if her true goal, all along, had simply been to take revenge on King Reemus and his son and to begin work on this gigantic, impossible spell...

"And if you do complete this spell," Arai ventured, "what then?"

"What do you mean?"

"If you succeed in bringing Julien back to life, will you give up power in Velon?"

She snorted. "I never wanted that power in the first place," she said. "It was a hassle, anyway, a distraction from my work. I don't think I was ever more than a figurehead, anyway; the Pierces made most of the decisions while I slept. As I said, I only spoke to them once or twice a year, during those brief periods of wakefulness. They gave me reports on the state of the kingdom, how much revenue was coming in, and so forth, but I never paid much attention to them." She frowned. "And if what you've told me is true, they seem to have deliberately misled me. I wasn't aware that the kingdom had been overrun by monsters, or that the Al'mud were gaining in strength, or that the taxes had become so high that hardly anyone could afford to pay them. I believed Velon was in good hands."

"What about the uprisings? Did Lord Pierce ever tell you about those?" There had been a number of risings and rebellions since the Night Queen had taken power.

"He mentioned them," she confessed. "They didn't sound all that serious. People used to riot even during King Reemus's reign; I didn't think these little uprisings were anything out of the ordinary." She looked at him. "But then you showed up."

"Ah."

"Lord Pierce told me about you. He told me you were a mercenary, from far away, and that you had gone in search of the Radiant Blade. That was a few years ago. Then, at our next meeting, he told me that Catalyus had been destroyed by your Ice Wyrm and that your mercenaries were closing in on the capital. He sounded worried. I was worried, too. I tried to finish the spell before your forces arrived at Fort Drakness, but I couldn't do it; I just didn't have enough magia yet."

"And then we were both transported to Addis, leaving the spell unfinished."

She nodded.

"But you haven't answered my question," he went on. "If you complete this spell, will you give up power in Velon?"

"Of course. I'll go away with Julien. We'll build a life somewhere. We'll put all this blood and horror behind us."

"How romantic," Arai muttered. Lillandra may have been a magical genius, but she was also a teenage girl, hardly eighteen, and a rather selfish and short-sighted teenage girl at that. She had apparently convinced herself that all she had to do was complete this spell, and everything would be fine; her happy ending was waiting for her back at the Nightfall. That the people of Velon might resent her, that Julien himself might resent her for all the things she had done in his name -- these seemed not to have occurred to her.

"As for Velon," she said, "if you want it, you can have it. You'd make a good king, I think."

"I never wanted to be king, either," he grumbled. "I only wanted to avenge my father, and to make life better for the people of Velon."

She looked at him curiously. "What will you do when we return to Velon? When all of this is over?"

"I hadn't really thought about it," he admitted. "Marry Maya, perhaps, and settle down somewhere. I've had enough of the mercenary lifestyle."

"Marry Maya? I thought you said she was only a friend."

"Well, she is," he said, a little flustered. "But I always thought...I thought maybe she could be something more."

"I see."

He shook his head, dismissing the conversation. "We're both getting ahead of ourselves. We need to get back to Velon, first, and before that, we need to get out of this damn hole." But then he turned to her, and smiled. "Thank you."

"For what?"

"For telling me about yourself, about how you came to be the Night Queen. I think I understand you a little better now."

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"I wonder," she said vaguely.

It was strange to think that Lillandra had done all she had done for love -- she was a skeptic and a cynic; he wouldn't have expected her to believe in a mawkish thing like true love. But apparently she did believe in it; she believed in it so strongly, in fact, that she conquered a kingdom in the pursuit of it.

Suddenly restless, he stood up and started pacing around the perimeter of the hole, wondering if he might be able to climb out on his own after all. While wandering around, however, he stumbled across another one of those strange monstrous statues, mixed in with the paving stones that had slid into the hole with them. It was broken in half, but the monster's head -- a grinning, lizardlike thing -- was still intact. Arai plucked it out of the dirt and examined it. "What are these things?" he wondered. "What are they supposed to represent?"

Lillandra frowned at it. "Demons, I think."

"Demons?"

"I didn't want to frighten Shell," she said, "so I didn't mention it earlier, but there's a good possibility that they weren't worshipping gods here. They may have been worshipping demons."

"Worshipping demons?" Arai could hardly conceive of something so obscene.

"You saw that altar up there. Human sacrifice was common among demon-worshippers."

"How do you know that?"

"I read it in a book. I didn't spend all of my time sleeping in the Nightfall; I did a fair amount of reading as well. I had Lord Pierce collect books for me."

"Books about demons?"

"Books about magic, mostly. But I read some histories, too, and some of these were very old, written just a few years after the Harrowing. The people who wrote those books had actually survived the Harrowing, had actually seen demons, and they had a lot to say about them."

"But worshipping them? That's hard to believe."

She shrugged. "The demons had taken over almost all of Iona Magister. They were incredibly powerful, and their victory seemed imminent. People were frightened. Some of them chose slavery over death; some of them gave themselves over to the demons completely, and started worshipping them. Their gods seemed to have abandoned them, after all. What else were they supposed to do?"

"Fight."

"Well, some of them did do that, and it's good thing they did, or we wouldn't be standing here right now. Not everyone's as brave as you, though."

Arai studied the statuette he was holding. "And this is what they looked like?"

"Demons came in all shapes and sizes. Some were gigantic, bigger than dragons and wyrms, but some of them had human shapes. In fact some of them were nearly indistinguishable from humans. But they all had special powers. The demon's craft, people called it. It was something like magic, but different."

Arai had never heard these details before. He knew the basic story: about two thousand years ago, the demons had suddenly appeared in Iona Magister and attacked humankind, in an event which came to be known as the Harrowing. After ten years of war, a group of desperate, embattled sorcerers, holed up within the Riven Mountains, had banded together to cast the White Rain, which had weakened the demons enough for humans to kill them with ordinary spells and weapons. The final confrontation had taken place somewhere in the Scarred Lands, when the legendary heroine Maximine drove her sword into the demon king Enlil.

But he didn't know anything about demons or what they looked like, and it surprised him to learn that people had actually worshipped these monstrous invaders. "Interesting," he said, tossing the idol aside.

Lillandra, meanwhile, had started wincing; Arai noticed it. "Your ankle?" he asked.

"My head. The magia is so thick down here it's giving me a headache."

He didn't like the sound of that -- magia, after all, meant monsters. "Hopefully Shell will be back soon."

He sat down again, and they waited. They talked some more, about themselves, about their lives. Arai told her stories about his travels -- visiting the Free Cities with his father, avoiding assassins in the alleys of Salos City, sneaking into Arl's Trust disguised as a farmer into order to deliver a message to insurgents in Holybell, and laying siege to castles and fortresses all over the Marquisates. He told her about his father's lieutenant, Grizz, and about the Steelmen, who had been like a family to him. He told her about his father's house on the Tuv, and how he had deliberately burned it down after his father's death.

"Why did you do that?" she asked.

"So that I wouldn't be tempted to return to it," he said. "So that I wouldn't forget my mission."

"To avenge your father."

He nodded. "To find Silus. To save Velon."

She surprised him then by saying, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have left Velon in the hands of the Pierces. I should have paid more attention to what was going on in the world. What happened to your father...that really was my fault, wasn't it?"

"I think you made some bad decisions," he said carefully. "But I don't think you're a bad person, Lillandra."

And then something very surprising happened: her eyes began to glisten with tears. "Thank you," she murmured.

Arai had never seen Lillandra like this, and he didn't know quite how to respond. "Lillandra..."

But she shook her head suddenly. "No," she said. "We'll talk later."

And they sat there, quietly, for another half an hour. Arai was just beginning to grow drowsy when Lillandra snapped him back into alertness: "Something's happening," she whispered urgently.

"Is Shell back?" he yawned, stretching his arms.

"No. It's the magia. It's beginning to take shape."

"What does that mean?"

"It means a monster is being born."

They both went still. After a moment Lillandra whispered, "The magia has gone still. It must have manifested somewhere up above."

"Can you tell what kind of a monster it is?"

"No," she said, "but it's strong, whatever it is, and if it materialized here, in the middle of this unholy place..." She grimaced.

Arai understood the implication -- monsters that materialized around cities and man-made structures tended to be very unusual, like the chthonic salamander they had fought in the catacombs of Kingsaile. He drew his sword, sliding it out of its scabbard as quietly as he could. "If it finds its way down here," he said, "I'll kill it."

"What if it finds Shell?"

He hadn't considered that. If the elf girl returned with Twine or some other crewman, and if the monster surprised them... "You're right," he said. "We can't risk them stumbling across it. But how the hell are we going to get out of this hole?" He looked around for something he might grab hold of, but the walls of the hole were made of loose dirt which crumbled when he touched it. Some of the paving stones from above and fallen into the hole with them, but even if he managed to dig these out and stack them up, he would still be at least ten feet short.

"I could try casting a spell," Lillandra suggested.

"A spell?"

"I could try to levitate you out of the hole."

"I thought you couldn't do things like that."

"My spells usually just break down if I'm not placing them in zemi," she admitted, "but they misfire sometimes, too, and when a spell misfires, just about anything can happen. I don't like to risk it. But if we have no other choice..."

"How much risk are we talking about?"

"The spell could blow your head off. It could blow my head off. It could launch you a mile into the air. It could crush you like a bug."

Arai shuddered. The idea of this monster prowling around up there, however, lying in wait for an unsuspecting Shell, spurred him to action. "Cast the spell," he said, resolved

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. I trust you."

She studied him for a long moment. "All right," she said at last, and started to work on the spell, closing her eyes and waggling her fingers in the air.

Arai closed his eyes as well, and sheathed his sword, and took a deep breath to steady himself. When a spell misfires, anything can happen. He started to say a prayer to the God of the Monuments, but before he could even whisper the first verse, Lillandra had finished the spell...and just like that, he was flying through the air.