Chapter 128 - Solaneum, by Night._Memories of the Fall

> Come to me here, from Crete…

> To this holy temple, where

> Your lovely apple grove stands,

> And your altars that flicker

> With incense.

> And below the apple branches, cold

> Clear water sounds, everything shadowed

> By roses, and sleep that falls from

> Bright shaking leaves.

> And a pasture for horses blossoms

> With the flowers of spring, and breezes

> Are flowing here like honey:

> Come to me here.

> Here, Cyprian, delicately taking

> Nectar in golden cups

> Mixed with a festive joy,

> And pour.

> ~Sappho, 7th Century BC.

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~ CORNELIA — THE ARMONT QUARTER, BENEATH SOLANEUM ~

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*Drip*

*Plip*

*Drip*

Cornelia paused at the intersection of the excavated street, deep beneath Old Solaneum, listening to the chiming echoes of dripping water.

It was oddly nostalgic to be walking these streets again, however many thousands of years it had truly been since these districts of Solaneum had been on the surface.

Behind her, the four nymphs who were accompanying her on this trip into darkness were peering into the dark voids of the buildings beside them with a child-like curiosity that almost bordered on the aggressive. Holding their torches into darkened doorways and peering in over-lowered windowsills into ancient shop fronts that now held only broken pottery and mouldering masonry.

That fearless curiosity, and the fact that all four were periodically walking ‘on’ the surface of the shallow, silty stream that was the paved surface of the street itself, was the only sign that they were anything ‘more’ than young, mortal women.

-Women who would not have dared walk these streets alone, back in the days they were uncovered, she reflected with a sigh, watching the four, dressed as she was, in shoulder-clasped stola and palla, both so dark of hue they were practically shadows in the shadow, explore.

A part of her had to admit that the rotten, flooded and decrepit subterranean décor of these ancient streets—looted and re-looted by aeons of exploration and exploitation—felt much more fitting as an ambience that reflected the nature of this place beneath its surface than any it had held back in those ancient days. And this neighbourhood had been among the worst. A place of licensed brothels and slave markets and less legal gambling dives.

“Come on, there is nothing down here but us,” Ianthe, who was nearest to her, observed with a giggle that melted into the pervasive dripping of water on stonework.

“Us—and a small eternity’s worth of broken dreams,” Alira chimed in, holding up the oleander-wood torch she was carrying to better illuminate their surroundings as she also came over to join them. “Via Attacas…” she mused, reading the water-worn street name where it was carved into a plaque next to them on the wall. “Don’t tell me we are lost, or did Phiale screw up the hydromancy, despite doing it on the midnight hour?”

“—Hey!” Phiale objected, puffing out her cheeks.

“—No,” she shook her head. “The old Temple to Ap—the Church of Saint Maurice and Lady Armont—is at the far end of this concourse.” She pointed her own torch to the right, into the gloom of the partly excavated street that stretched away into darkness in that direction. “I was just reflecting on how… appropriate the ambience is for how this place used to be.”

“It’s definitely got the ‘we forgot to do the landscape gardening or building maintenance’ vibe that the stygian borders are so well known for, down pat,” Ianeira, the eldest of the four, agreed, holding her torch into another doorway with a shake of her head.

“That was held to be part of its ‘charm’ back then,” she sighed, her gaze lingering on some of the barely visible graffiti, which was the traditional collection of smut, political commentary, curses and advertisements. “The quaint old buildings, centuries old, the narrow streets—”

“—And the painted whores selling their pimps’ favours in every alley,” Phiale added sourly, tapping her foot on the surface of the shallow, silty water.

As the ripples spread, she fancied for a moment that she could genuinely ‘see’ the street as it had been—a dusky reflection of vice and avarice, upon which poor, unfortunate souls were hung like mawkish puppets, playing the parts this city had twisted them into.

“It seems they cleaned it out pretty good at any rate,” Ianthe mused. “Even the floor tiles of some of these places have been ripped up.”

“Exploration of the Eastern Provinces’ ruins was a growth industry, of sorts, during the ‘Great Consolidation’,” she elaborated, unsure if the four had ever been in this part of the world during that chaotic era. “Even the commonest relics of Old Solaneum were desired by collectors and nobles looking to build their new estates in styles that evoked the ‘romance’ of its ‘ancient past’.”

“Ever is it so…” Ianeira agreed with a sigh of her own, as they both started off down the street in the direction of the chapel.

“Later, as the city continued to sink and the corruption grew greater, the lower levels became less accessible, even with the prodigious power that the rulers of this land tried to direct towards it,” she continued, scanning the path ahead pensively as they walked. “Those cursed by their association with this miserable place started—”

“Ehyaaaa!” she turned at the oddly ‘playful’ scream to find Ianthe waving her oleander torch threateningly in the face of a shade—a gaunt, dead-eyed man dressed in a green tunic who had slunk out of one of the partly excavated side-alleys they had just passed. “—Ged-id-away-from-me!”

The shade half-grasped for the nymph, before recoiling with preternatural speed from the torch and vanishing back into the shadows.

“What were you saying about us being ‘all alone down here’?” Ianeira remarked drily, as Phiale rolled her eyes.

“Booo…” Ianthe pouted, shoving her torch into the alley and pointedly peering into it.

Glancing back down the street in the direction they had come, she fancied she saw a few more shades slink backwards into the shadows of doorways and windows.

“Ah! There’s a body in here,” Ianthe exclaimed, waving for them to come over.

Crossing the tunnel, she peered into the narrow entrance to the alleyway to find a decomposing figure in corroded mail slumped face down in the mud. A two-handed axe was buried deep in the wall beside it, several further rents into the stonework telling the tale of its last moments.

“One of those who came with the one we are seeking?” Alira asked her, peering in as well.

“—Or someone who came in search of them,” she mused, as Ianthe clambered over and flipped the body over with her foot.

To her eyes, the mail and the helmet lying nearby in the dirt were the right style, and two-handed axes and such had been a common weapon well into that period among arms-men and the like, as far as she could recall.

“Explains why it stayed here, at least,” Alira observed as they all considered the melted hole in the mail covering the body’s chest and the seared symbol for ‘seal’, the pneuma of which was still just about discernible to her senses, on its exposed flesh.

With a silent snarl, the gaunt shade reappeared beside her, putting a hand on her shoulder—

She stared at the hand—as for a brief moment she had a vivid impression of the man grasping her, pushing her down and branding a slave mark on her—then at the shade. Its hungry expression turned first confused, then fearful, as it realised it had no means at all to influence her.

Almost comically, it gave her a very awkward smile, as if she hadn’t just seen its intent very clearly, and tried to step back into the shadows of the tunnel. Before it could, however, she caught its wrist and stopped it.

“Did you kill him, slaver?” she asked in Latin, the language of the time the slave trader had been alive.

“…”

The shade’s smile slipped, and its eyes flitted this way and that—

“You should answer her,” Alira murmured, stepping behind the shade and grasping it by the back of its neck.

“Unless it can’t,” she mused, grasping the front of the shade’s tunic and ripping it open to expose a faint blue-gold shadow of the same ‘seal’ mark on its chest.

“Back then, what was the penalty for one such as this, if they dared lay hands on a noble daughter of a patrician house?” Ianeira asked drily.

“Strung up and flogged with orichalcum flail,” she replied blandly as the shade’s expression paled. “Then enslaved. I guess if they had some status or property, they might have had that confiscated instead, and been exiled.”

“I guess by the rule of law, he has some property,” Alira chuckled, nodding at the corpse. “So—”

In one smooth motion, Alira withdrew her orichalcum dagger from beneath her stola and stabbed it laterally into the stunned shade’s lower back. With a silent scream it collapsed, leaving her holding it up off the ground with one hand as its legs vanished.

“Exile is a bit tricky,” Alira shrugged. “—And dreaming to lay hands on a companion of Artemis is a crime even gods have suffered for.”

“Though not half-way enough,” Phiale muttered under her breath.

She considered the twitching shade for a long moment, then passed it over to Ianthe, who dragged it unceremoniously into the alley and dumped it at the back, before making her way back out to join them.

Probably, she could have released the seal, but given how the shade had lived its life as a participant in this neighbourhood’s main industry—human misery—she had no sympathy for its plight. Even then, there was no guarantee it would have shared anything useful, and in a way, the presence of the seal itself was confirmation enough that they were on the right path.

“Onwards then,” Ianthe declared brightly, holding up her torch to illuminate the excavated street ahead of them.

As they continued up the cleared concourse, more traces of ancient fighting started to become apparent.

Stretches of the lithified dirt walls held a glassy iridescence in the light of their torches, and the exposed paving beneath the shallow water was visibly rippled and distorted beneath the silt.

Here and there, there were also other bodies, or the remains of them. They passed several shadowy afterimages on walls, their outlines blurred by the passage of millennia, the nature of their demise and the stygian ambience.

“Some powerful dimensional magic was used here,” Ianeira observed, pausing to look down at something as their path started to widen out.

Holding her own torch up, she saw what the nymph meant. Here and there beneath the waters, she could glimpse shadowy figures, drifting silently in the reflections scattered by their torches. As they passed over them, some even stirred, hands of men, women and even children grasping towards her feet, only to repelled by the underside of the water surface.

“Or a ‘divine’ intercession,” Phiale suggested, pointing ahead of them towards a figure half fused into the wall of a building ahead of them. “Look at his hand,” she added, holding up her torch so it more clearly illuminated the figure.

In the shimmering light she caught the glimmer of dull gold, both where the body’s petrified flesh was flaking away, and on its outstretched hand, which was scarred by a misshapen metallic smear, the open palm imprinted with a holy emblem of the church.

“—Bless This Blade in the Lord’s Name,” Alira, who had picked up a melted sword out of the water nearby, murmured, tracing the inscription on it with her fingertips. “This style seems from the Kingdom of Jeris. Armont was one of their ‘Living Saints’, right?” she added, turning the blade over, exposing the heraldic symbol of the saint on the hilt.

“He was,” she confirmed, walking over to stand before the remains of the warrior priest.

“The Armont family have history with Solaneum as I knew it as well. They started off as Equites, but the wealth their land in this district generated them eventually led them to purchase a position as an uplifted patrician family—Lady Claudia Armont funded the conversion of the temple your divination showed, too.”

“From trading in slaves of the body, to slaves of the soul,” Ianeira sighed, shaking her head as she took in the street as well.

“—And every vice in between,” she added, under her breath, tracing the barely visible signage of the wall of the brothel into which he was fused—

She was just about to move on, when a pallid, feminine hand suddenly pressed against the glassy ‘inside’ of the wall, the ghostly figure of a young woman with a slave brand, appearing to stare at her. After a moment, she was joined by another… and another, until almost a dozen shades of slaves, both male and female were watching them.

“Tempted to free them?” Phiale asked.

“I have no quarrel with the poor souls this place ruined,” she replied, stepping forward and putting her hand against the wall. “And anyway—” She touched her free hand to the Sword of Harmony, which was currently transformed into the broach fastening the shoulder of her stola, and focused on the idea of freeing them and returning ‘harmony’ to the relationship between the wall and them.

In her reflection on the wall, the symbol for ‘Dawn’ glimmered in her irises and on her forehead. A ripple of pneuma radiated out from her palm, and then the sense of ‘forbiddance’ infused into the wall melted away.

“—I also have some responsibilities,” she murmured.

The shades stared at her, then the young woman hesitantly pushed against the wall, her eyes widening as her hand passed easily through it.

“Y-you…” another, slightly woman, her voice like a distant breath of wind, fell to her knees.

“O Goddesses…” a young boy whispered, clasping the hem of Alira’s gown.

“What should I call you?” she asked the young woman who had first attracted her attention.

“I… V-Valeria,” the young woman whispered, staring at her with wide eyes.

“What happened here, Valeria?” she asked gently.

She didn’t truly expect these shades to have much knowledge of the specifics of the fighting that had occurred here, but information was still information.

“I… there was a woman,” Valeria mumbled. “It… as if it was a nightmare, she was weeping… and bloody—”

“—Cursing the god of Armont,” another young woman hissed.

“Armont, that family bought me…” another young woman whispered.

“—Men like soldiers and priests… chasing her,” Valeria nodded, shuddering.

“They cast their cultish spells…”

“Tried to bind us…” a young Ur-woman snarled.

“Such Pain…”

“Such Rage…”

“They tried to seal her… seal us… we tried to resist, but she…” Valeria trailed off, looking haunted.

“It’s all a blur,” the young Ur-woman muttered, putting a hand to her head. “Like a half-remembered dream… and then we were…”

“It feels like it was just a moment ago… and also so long ago,” Valeria mumbled.

“What of his spirit?” she nodded to the priest.

Several of the shades made a ‘poof’ gesture.

“His symbol ate it,” the young Ur-woman elaborated, in case they didn’t get it.

“Their god did not save them,” a young man sneered.

“He saves nobody,” another dark-haired young girl agreed. “I prayed and I prayed… but he never saved me.”

“Will you save us… Goddesses?” the young boy who was still grasping Alira’s gown sobbed.

Phiale gave her a ‘look’ that spoke volumes, and which she chose to ignore.

Granting their souls passage to the afterlife wasn’t impossible, but the destination or the nature of what it would entail probably wasn’t what the shades would expect. In many respects, the lands around Solaneum had been well on their way to becoming a pocket underworld long ago.

“Salvation is a promise even Gods do not hand out lightly,” she said at last. “However, if it is a matter of the proper rites, that I can do.”

These poor former slaves’ deaths in ancient Solaneum, and the lack of proper rites over their bodies due to that status, had ensured that no matter their ‘faith’ or actions in life, they would reside here in some form for as long as the stygian strength of the land endured.

Ianeira passed her one of the ceramic serving bowls they had brought with them on this endeavour, then the four nymphs stepped back, taking up positions so she was at the centre of a square between them, each holding up their own torch.

Crouching down, she filled the bowl to the brim with cold, clear water, then held it up before the shades.

“I offer you the waters that nourish the gardens of the blessed, as recompense for the oath broken by those who should have watched over you. Speak your name, that their blessing might cleanse you.”

“Attacus,” the young boy who had grasped Alira’s gown whispered immediately.

“Claudia,” the dark-haired young woman murmured, closing her eyes.

“Arimus,” another young boy hissed.

“Laashae,” the young Ur-woman stated after a moment’s hesitation.

“Valeria Sura,” Valeria stated, also after a short pause, bowing slightly to her.

In short order, all of the others also spoke the name that she presumed had most meaning to them.

“—Aphrodite of the Gardens, hear my Plea, take these poor souls into your loving embrace,” she whispered, pouring out the water from the bowl and focused her inner thoughts on those oft glimpsed scenes of Elysium—

The first poured drops to hit the water’s surface gave off faint chimes that echoed through the excavated street, rising and falling like the notes of a funerary hymn. As they washed over the shades, their forms became subtly ‘clearer’. Something of the constriction of the dark legacy of the place they were in also fell away and their eyes became brighter.

“…”

The shades all stared at her as the chimes faded away, confusion replacing trepidation.

“You are already in the underworld,” Phiale remarked drily.

“However, now you are free to travel within this place as you wish, no longer bound to the nature of your demise,” she added.

The shades all continued to stare at her, as if they had not quite understood the words she spoke, until Laashae’s eyes widened, then she rippled and vanished, the waters beneath her reflecting the rolling grassland above them.

With almost comedic slowness, the other shades all turned to look at the spot where Laashae had stood, then back at the five of them, then all but Valeria and Claudia vanished into reflections of the surface landscape above them.

“Is there something else?” Ianeira asked the two shades.

“Ah… uh, no…” Valeria shook her head, a little hurriedly, she thought, then bowed and, grabbing Claudia by the hand, the pair of them also departed, a scene of the acropolis and the converted temple of Jupiter mirrored beneath them.

“Interesting,” Ianthe mused, eyeing the spot where they vanished.

“Indeed,” she nodded, making a mental note to follow up on that pair, because her instinct towards complicated bullshit in this place had just been gently plucked. “Right, shall we go see about what we came to do?”

“Says the woman who keeps finding distractions,” Phiale chuckled.

Shaking her head, she gave the petrified priest a final glance, then set off down the street once more.

“Imagine coming all the way down here and dying prying ornamental bricks out of the facing of a cheap and swift taberna,” Alira muttered, as they walked on, gesturing at a half-deconstructed wall, off to their right, where the half-petrified, desiccated body of a youth lay, slumped amid a pile of bricks, traces of a rusted crowbar still in hand.

“Thieves come, thieves go, families remain the same,” she observed drily, eyeing the body and the tumbled stacks of bricks and the ornamental patterns on them that would have formed the chasing around the opening into the shop’s interior. “Most of the construction here was done by the Calduneii and Armontii.

“If you got a few good pieces from down here, they could set a family up for months,” she added.

“—or die horribly, without a grave, your shade cursed to join the rest,” Ianthe sighed, using her torch to illuminate a further skeletal body lying inside, slumped beside a partially exposed dolia pot that had been set into the shop counter.

“That was their fate, more often than not,” she agreed. “But enough did make it back, oddly enough, that they kept coming.”

“Of course they did,” Phiale chuckled darkly, eyeing the sealed shade of a portly man wearing a fancier dark green toga, who was pawing sluggishly at the underside of the water, as she passed by it.

With a derisive snort, Ianeira tapped her foot on the water surface above him as she passed a moment later and the shade warped and scattered amidst the ripples, its hungry expression turning fearful and confused.

In silence, they walked on, past other signs of looting, fighting and several more slumped, petrified priests, until at last, after some forty paces, the street opened out into a broad, flooded, cavernous area that had originally been both one of the largest slave markets of Old Solaneum, and the administrative forum for this neighbourhood.

Even now, she could all too easily conjure the hustle and the bustle that had once filled it, the clamour of voices selling goods and flesh in equal measure, with little distinction between.

Their destination, the Temple to Apollo Invictus—then converted to the Chapel of Saint Maurice by the same Armont family that had helped fund it as a monument to their role in conquering this land—stood on the far side. Now, its columns were just half-exposed pale marble, barely catching the light of their torches, however, she could still recall standing on its steps, back before… everything, listening to her father give speeches at the great festival commemorating the province’s founding.

Back then, even though its status as a temple was diminished, they had still been painted blue and yellow, its marble steps polished till they gleamed, its bronze, domed roof a shining beacon that reflected both sun and moon in equal radiance, easily visible from miles any direction.

“It seems they came down here in some force,” Alira noted, gesturing with her torch to a scattering of frozen figures to their right and left, near the edges of the flooded plaza, their armour glittering under the torchlight.

Looking around, she quickly spotted more, beneath the now waist-deep water, its chthonic, stygian strength preserving their bodies like pale statues where they had fallen.

A quick count suggested at least thirty corpses, and that was just the ones she could see, and which had been strong enough in life to have endured in this environment. There were glittering reflections elsewhere in the silt coating the plaza that could either be bones, discarded weapons or just scattered, scavenged wealth.

“Whoever sealed this place was powerful,” Phiale noted, as she also spotted the dozens of shadowy figures as they began to slip into focus beneath the water unnaturally still water. “Explains why I still have a headache from the hydromancy, at least.”

“At least it means we can pass without having to beat them off with our torches, given the nature of this place,” she observed.

“Indeed,” Ianeira agreed, pulling her stola a little tighter around her shoulders. “Even by the standards of such places, this plaza is a charnel house to broken destinies and stolen fates.”

“I foresee a potential problem here, though,” Alira muttered, as they started out across the water, towards the shadowed columns of the temple-turned-church. “What if this sealing is somehow bound up with her?”

“…”

“Dealing with the shades should not prove too troublesome,” she mused. “I have a few means, and the performative nature of what we are doing also provides a great deal…”

“I meant more in terms of them becoming an inconvenient tarpit, and we do have a bit of a schedule to keep, unless you want to wait out a full day having gotten here,” Alira clarified with an eye roll.

“Oh… hmmm…” she frowned, understanding what the nymph meant now.

Their trip down here had been timed such that they would have the most auspicious hour for communing with spirits—the hour before dawn—to work with, as well as the moment of sunrise itself, to support the ritual she intended to perform. The question of dealing with vexed spirits of some of the other wandering dangers down here was one they had already factored in, but a few thousand shades bound in a confining spatial prison of largely unknown parameters, was an unforeseen variable. That those she had just released had a rather suspect grasp of the years elapsed wasn’t necessarily a good thing, either.

“They could be grateful,” Ianthe pointed out. “The slaves you liberated were…”

“However, there are plenty who perished here who have much more malignant outlooks,” she sighed. “And some of those shades were formidable mystics and controlling figures in life, whose grasp of those they oppressed in life had not lessened significantly,” she noted. “And that is just the ones from my time. This neighbourhood attracted the worst and buried many of them here, unmourned. The seal the Isla Elves and Hibric Queens put on this place did not ‘resolve’ that; it just ensured it could never ferment to something they viewed as worse.”

-Not to mention, a decent portion of those shades blame me, in one way or another, for their circumstances.

“I know I said this before, but we also don’t know what kind of mentality she might have,” Alira added with a slight grimace of her own. “I know little of how the ‘Saintess of Mana’, as they called her, perished, but I do know Saints and Heroes do not go down easy.” For emphasis, Alira waved pointedly to the still water, the scattered bodies beneath it, and the swarm of shades still slowly following their progress as they approached the temple’s steps. “And given some of their allegiances in life…”

“True,” she conceded, that thought preying a bit on her mind as well. “However, if this seal is in fact, her doing, that would simplify matters.”

“It would,” Alira acknowledged. “But returning a potentially traumatized Saintess is not without its risks…”

“…”

Stopping, she turned to stare back the way they had come, then to either side, feeling in the back of her mind that something about this was a little off. It wasn’t that Alira and Ianthe had doubts… it was just that they had hashed most of this out already, before coming down here, and concluded that the rewards significantly outweighed the risks. This conversation was almost retreading that one, but in ways her intuition suggested was trying to almost persuade them out of what they were doing.

“So, someone really doesn’t want us going in there, eh?” Alira, who had also stopped, muttered, shaking her head.

“—Or something,” Ianeira mused, looking around at the placid lake with narrowed eyes.

“It would seem so,” she agreed, also looking around carefully now; however, there was little that stood out beyond the things they had already—

“Ah, that would be it…” Phiale pointed down at the water below them, and a little off to their left.

Following her gaze, she saw the ruins of a broad, shallow bottomed boat, sunk a few paces ahead of them, the corpses of half a dozen Ur-folk forever trapped within it, including three wearing silver masks and, in the middle of the craft, a familiar magical array, in the style of those that the river-cities up north used to control access within their territories.

“That doesn’t necessarily bode well,” Alira scowled. “Those masks are in the style of the Masters of Udrasa.”

“Two of them are wearing jewellery that marks them as Grimvak’s sorcerers,” she noted, looking more carefully at the other corpses now.

“That one is from Katum,” Ianeira added, pointing to the last body. “Or at least, his weapon is—” she drew their attention to the off-greenish-silver blade and the flowing, dark-golden, Hibric-like designs that adorned it that lay beneath it.

“Agrond,” Ianthe grimaced.

“You can take the clay pots away from the sorcerer lords, but you can’t take the sorcerer lords out of the clay pots,” Phiale murmured.

“It would make sense that Grimvak—or one of her lieutenants—made some effort to explore this place,” she sighed. “And presumably recruited some help from the other major players in this region.”

“Knowing the Masters, it could be the other way around,” Alira muttered, shaking her head.

“—even we have no real idea what their game is,” Ianthe nodded. “Though if that tribulation was anything to go by, they seem to have some pact with the King in Yellow…”

Involuntarily, she found herself stepping forwards, recalling the deeply unpleasant memory of ‘dying’ to the Sar-Katush. It was hard to say if it was just her imagination, or the chthonic ambience in general, but the light of their torches had felt like they dimmed for a brief moment.

“Please don’t bring that malignancy up by name,” Ianeira muttered, giving Ianthe a playful hand-chop to the head, as if she were a naughty child.

“—Especially when we are trying to do ritual things with souls and corpses!” Phiale added archly.

“Sowwie… I’m gonna blame that stupid glyph!” Ianthe muttered, glaring at the slab in the bottom of the sunken boat.

“Hmmmm…” Narrowing her eyes, she pondered for a moment what could be done about that, because this kind of thing, while it was not especially ‘dangerous’ for them in a general sense, would be rather annoying when they needed to focus on the upcoming ritual.

-I guess the Sword of Harmony is the most expedient way, she decided, putting her hand to the broach—

At a thought, it transformed into a long lance with a broad tip, reminiscent of the kind citizen cavalry had used back when she was still ‘alive’.

Moving to stand directly above the glyph, she thrust the lance down into the two meters of water, piercing the formation through its heart—

Immediately, a subtle sense of clarity returned to her, as if a hitherto unnoticed noise that been distracting her was silenced.

For good measure, she still dragged the tip sideways, until the slab was thoroughly split and there was little chance of the formation repairing itself. Reverting the lance to the broach, before her stola could slip off her shoulder, she scanned the waters around them in case there was anything else, but nothing presented itself.

Giving the still waters a final look, she turned and made her way onwards across the plaza, the others falling in behind her. She spotted two more ruined vessels before they reached the steps up to the temple portico, along with further evidence of the Ur-folk’s expedition in the form of skeletal remains of Katum and Caeracht warriors.

“It seems a few made it all the way across,” Alira observed as they started up the steps.

“—Or stayed behind as a rearguard,” Ianeira mused, eyeing the nearest body, which had been seemingly dismembered by something that had left a deep scar in the nearest column.

“Certainly, there was a fight here,” she agreed, pausing to pick up an amulet that was lying on the top step—three leaves of blood red jade, arranged in a trefoil pattern, the veins inlaid with Kynthian gold.

As a design, it was one she was familiar with. A thing Grimvak had developed for her trusted Lieutenants to help them resist possession by shades, at least for a time. She hadn’t noticed any on the corpses in the water, but it was possible they were under their garments.

“And it might not have been between themselves?”

“Unless they had a disagreement about what they found here,” Phiale suggested. “I would not trust the Masters to tell me the sky was blue, were both they and I standing beneath it on a sunny day.”

“The Jeris group made it here as well,” Ianthe added, pointing with her torch off to the side, to one of the plinths that would have held a statue of Apollo, or later, Saint Maurice. “And… oh, that’s interesting…”

Looking where Ianthe was gesturing, she saw not only a scatter of silvery bones in a mail hauberk, but also the melted, skeletal remains of a plate-armoured knight, their sword fused upright to the paving like a macabre gravestone.

“I guess someone as famous as her would always be a source of interest,” Phiale remarked.

“There is another here, on the far side—” she glanced back over to where Alira was standing by a second slumped smear of molten metal. “It’s almost like they were thrown against the doorway while their armour melted,” Alira added, holding up her torch to better illuminate the dark portal of the doorway into the interior, exposing a silvery metal smear at chest height on the right door jamb.

“…”

“You know… even accounting for the melting, aren’t they a bit short?” Alira muttered, tilting her head and making some fairly abstract gestures with her free hand as she considered the body beside her.

“It is what it is,” she shrugged helplessly, making her way over to the doorway proper and holding up her torch carefully before it, just in case there was some weird ward or unpleasant surprise in store.

“As you said, the Saintess of Mana was not exactly a nobody, and the stories surrounding her demise were a foundational part of the ‘mythology’ first the High Kings of Abernathy, then Everkind, then the Imperial Commonwealth created,” she added, shifting her gaze to the room beyond.

What she could make out of the temple atrium seemed clear enough, though the gloom hung a little too heavy to its shadows, she couldn’t help but feel. The fate of the prior visitors to this place didn’t inspire much there, either. “This place buried as many greedy and inquisitive souls in those eras as it did earlier ones.”

“Not enough by half, as it turned out,” Ianeira muttered. “How is the doorway?”

“Lacking its famed Kynthian gold doors, but that is unsurprising,” she chuckled, waving her torch through it. “But otherwise, seems clear.”

Despite saying that, she still steeled herself a little as she stepped through.

“You know, I never actually stepped foot in the temple itself,” she remarked, holding up her torch to better illuminate the interior. “Only the priest and male citizens could venerate Apollo Invictus in his temple, and the church kept up the practice for most of the time I spent in this city before being sealed.”

“Unsurprising,” Phiale nodded, stepping through after her.

She couldn’t help but notice that the other three also rolled their eyes.

-Ah, they would have known Apollo, she mused, making her way over to the pool at the centre of the atrium, noting the scattered remnants of a Jeris priest by the left wall. Another plate-armoured figure was bent in what she could only call a ‘terminally unnatural’ position, a two-handed duramar warhammer lying near it.

“—Another shorty in plate,” Alira murmured, nodding towards it.

Indeed, giving it a second look, she found it was short, just over a pace—around five feet in the later era’s measurements—tall. It also had a… squinting, she took a few steps over towards the armoured form, and found it did, indeed have a twisted, braided beard.

“It’s a Dvari?” Ianeira raised an eyebrow.

“Mercenaries, perhaps?” she suggested, glancing through the doorway beyond the columns and finding that the room beyond was mostly buried in fallen masonry.

“Well, I got good news,” Ianthe called over to her.

“Oh?” she turned back to see Ianthe standing in the entry way to the main hall of the temple-turned-church.

Walking over to her, followed by the others, she held her own torch aloft and peered inside.

The hall within, which was lined with tall, fluted columns along both walls, was actually some two feet lower than the atrium they stood in, and as a result, flooded to about knee height.

“I give you one sacred pool—” Ianthe declared grandly, pointing to the far end of the hall, and the source of that flooding, where the raised enclosure that would have once held the statue of Apollo Invictus, stood, fronted by a white marble altar about a pace high—

“—‘overflowing’ sacred pool, you mean,” Alira chuckled.

“What an astute observation,” Phiale declared drily. “You—”

“—And one Saintess of Mana,” Ianthe added, cutting her off with an almost bullish dramatic flourish, not that they needed her to draw their eyes to the fair-haired female figure lying against it.

“Girls, just because this is a temple of Apollo, does not mean you need to be thematically dramatic,” Ianeira murmured, giving the three other nymphs a sideways look that they all chose to ignore.

Shaking her head in amusement at their exchange, she stepped through the door and made her way along the hall to the saintess’ body, leaving the others to fall in after her.

Sarah Helena ‘of Jeris’, as she had been most widely known, lay slumped against the altar, one hand clutching at a deep wound in her side, the other trailing in the water, as if she had been reaching out with it. Unlike the corpses they had seen outside, she showed no traces at all of desiccation or decomposition, beyond the unnatural pallor of her skin. Even the wounds that had likely ended her life—over her heart, through her side and through her right thigh—were still livid upon her flesh.

That, combined with lank pale-golden red hair and lack of clothing, almost gave her the appearance of a statue of a martyr of the New Faith, carved in deathless repose, staring up at the shadowed dome that would once have reflected the zodiac, set in crystal stars within a lapis and gold mosaic of the heavens.

“All she lacks is the lamenting Achilles who cut her down,” Ianeira sighed, looking down at the young woman, her eyes tracing the various wounds.

“The ones who did this had not my Lady to sear such remorse into their hearts,” she murmured, carefully touching the wound over the saintess’s heart. “These wounds were made with Illdrium blades, it seems—”

“And her body is… concerningly devoid of its foundational pneuma,” Phiale, who had also joined them now, observed.

Placing her palm over Sarah Helena’s heart, she closed her eyes and after taking a deep breath, whispered—

“Kataskopia.”

For a moment, a scene from long ago wavered before her eyes—of the Saintess, now dressed in white robes, a silver wreath adorning her hair, standing with a group of others, before the great seal placed on her, Laurentius and the others. The scene skipped, it was not hers, now, but drawn from lingering intent etched with the saintess’s body, watching as four priests anointed a dark-haired youth wearing the sigil of the Abernathy Family with various relics—

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Abruptly, what came after that, vanished, leaving her with the feeling that she had just slammed her head into a solid wall, that then tried to project that ‘abjuration’ of the memory directly into her own mind. Against someone lesser than her, the assault on the foundation of her Psychikon might well have proven lethal and certainly rendered them permanently insensible. Even having experienced her share of miserable deaths and cruel torments, it left her gasping, her vision blurred.

Still, in those moments, she had caught a glimpse of what she sought, in the relics held by the four priests as they blessed the ‘Prince of the Golden Dawn’, Edmund Abernathy, anointing him as the new Hero of Light.

A small, jewel encrusted, dark gold box in the style of a psalter; engraved with Saint Armont’s holy symbol, hanging innocuously at the waist of the officiating priest, that had no outwards aura, and almost merged into his garments as if they were one and the same.

Had she not, in the years since this memory, had several misguided fools come to the seal, seeking to use similar objects on it—either to try and remove the stygian corruption, to bind her to their command, or try to unseal or resurrect Laurentius, even she might not have drawn the connection, and known exactly what to look for.

“You okay?” Ianeira asked, putting a hand to her shoulder.

“Y-yeah,” she grimaced, pinching her nose for a moment to stop the bleeding, “They used a wish scroll on her, or something of a similar nature.”

“That could complicate things,” Alira, who having seemingly finished checking the right side of the hall and come over to join them, groaned.

“Mmmmm…” Phiale, however, just made a face.

“Aiii… I can’t say I didn’t expect something like that,” Ianeira sighed.

“Indeed,” she nodded, standing back up. “They did not sever it, and the mythology constructed after tended to take the line that she bequeathed a portion of her power to Edmund Abernathy to aid him as he underwent the ‘trials’ to be recognised as the second Hero of Light, and then heroically sacrificed herself to save him.”

“True,” Alira sighed. “But wishes are just…”

“They are,” she conceded. “However, this one seems to have been done with the power of Saint Armont and has basically just given me a bloody nose and a nasty headache. My hunch is that it was more directed at hiding…”

“Yeah,” Phiale nodded. “This would also explain the very muted and unclear results I got from the hydromancy.”

“Still, she clearly has no foundation to speak of,” Alira muttered.

“Fortunately, the ritual is not dependant on that,” Ianeira remarked, before she could. “If the five of us cannot do this, we should just become mortals and live out our lives as the failures we deserve to be called.”

“Uh-huh,” Phiale agreed. “It just means we might have to take a few extra steps, if the need arises—”

“Anything of note in the side chambers?” she asked Ianthe, who had also joined them at this point.

“Fallen walls and a bunch more corpses,” Ianthe replied with a shrug. “There appears to be a catacomb, but it is flooded.”

“Same,” Alira agreed. “Though… hmmm,” the nymph trailed off, looking around with a faint frown. “My instinct says we are being watched, somehow, but…”

“Now that you mention it,” Ianthe nodded. “The aura in this place is… unsettled, even by the standards of what has transpired here.”

“It was the temple to Apollo Invictus,” Ianeira remarked drily. “Never mind the question of what has since occurred here, I am fairly sure they did not properly deconsecrate it when it was rebuilt as a church.”

“What divination magic they used to hide this will not have helped either,” Phiale added, passing her torch to Ianthe, and putting the cloth bag she had been wearing beneath her palla on the altar so she could unpack it.

“Well, we can only keep an eye out,” she sighed, producing the jar of ambrosia and passing it to Alira, who, after passing off her own torch to Ianthe, was also starting to unpack her own satchel.

The matter of preparing the ritual materials only took a few minutes. While she considered the order of the ritual and what incantation would be necessary, Alira decanted some ambrosia into a crystal drinking vessel, before returning the jar to her. Phiale poured blood out into a shallow clay bowl and spent a long moment staring at it pensively. Ianeira, meanwhile, sorted a collection of fresh fruit—some pomegranates, grapes, a citron she had acquired from… somewhere, and a handful of fruit from the lotus trees that grew widely in the hills nearby, and spent a short minute examining each and carefully arranging them into a third bowl. Ianthe, for her part, paced out a rough perimeter around the saintess, marking the three auspicious directions of the hours where she, Alira and Ianeira would stand using the oleander wood torches.

“Okay, I am done with this,” Ianthe declared. “I guess you are Autumn and Peace, Ianeira?”

“Yep,” the elder nymph nodded.

“I guess that makes me Spring and Justice,” Ianthe chuckled.

“Summer and Order it is then,” Alira sighed wryly.

“How long do we have to wait?” she asked.

By her estimate, it should be close to the hour before dawn, but the nymphs’ natural attunement to the world made them much better judges of such things than she could ever be, in a place like this.

“I think we can start,” Ianeira replied, pulling her palla more overtly over her head and taking her bowl of fruit and moving to stand to the right of the saintess’s body.

“Yeah,” Ianthe agreed, doing the same with her own palla before recovering Phiale’s torch and taking up her position on the left side.

Alira, meanwhile, picked up the crystal drinking vessel and positioned herself to the right of the saintess’s head.

Phiale, who was not part of that outer formation, stood across from Alira on the left.

Taking up position before the Saintess, so they were arranged in a rough pentangle, with her at the bottom point, she made sure her own head was covered, then held up her own torch with two hands.

“O Goddess!” she called out, echoed by the four nymphs. “Golden Kyntheria, Illustrious Queen, who gives kindly of gifts to men and women, who as daughter of Heaven, born of ocean’s wave and with gentle smile, guards well the crossroads of our lives, we call upon thee!”

The torches around them rippled, their flames growing brighter, reflecting like stars in the waters around them.

“I offer thee, the heart of a fire.”

Ianthe skilfully snuffed a handful of the burning embers from her torch and placed them in the wound over the saintess’s heart.

“I offer thee, the water of a life.”

Stepping forward, she placed her torch by the saintess’s feet, then dipped her fingers in to the bowl of blood Phiale was holding out and smeared a little on her pale lips.

“I offer thee, the food of a god…”

With measured care, Alira carefully poured a few drops of the precious ambrosia from the crystal bowl onto the saintess’s forehead, between her eyes.

“I offer thee, the promise of a future, never told.”

Taking a Lotus fruit from the bowl Ianeira held out, she split it and placed the pulpy flesh of the fruit against the saintess’s now red lips.

“Accept my gift,” she whispered, carefully drawing the sovereign seal of Aphrodite on the saintess’s brow using the ambrosia.

“Ambologera—”

Focusing on her memories of the pale-haired young woman walking with her ‘comrades’ through the ruined streets of Solaneum, she spoke her name, not the one she had been given later in life, but the one bestowed her at birth.

“—Fionnúir Ní Rhuith”

The water pooling around the unfortunate victim of ancient greed shimmered, shadows shifting eerily in the light of the torches they had brought. Then, the pale-haired young woman’s blue eyes suddenly gained a semblance of ‘focus’ they had been lacking before.

“Whaaaee… heuk—!?” Fionnúir’s first words, unfortunately, came out as a ragged rasp, her lips barely able to move.

“I guess her body atrophied,” Ianeira observed, taking the torch she had just set down and holding it up to better illuminate their surroundings.

“Getting stabbed repeatedly by a soul-quenched Illdrium blade and left to rot in this place will do that to you,” Phiale agreed drily, eyeing the still unhealed wounds on Fionnúir’s body.

“Relax,” she told the young woman, trying her best to speak in Old Hibric. “Your body is still adjusting.”

“…”

The young woman focused on her, her irises contracting just enough to show that she was taking in her appearance, then the masked nymphs with her.

“Some greedy bastards have woken up, by the way,” Ianthe added, looking around at the now deepening shadows.

“As expected,” she sighed, standing back up and taking in the ruins of the columned hall.

“Witch of the Defiled…”

“You dare!?”

“It is the will of Lord Meltras…”

“Our Prince…”

“So tender, thy flesh…”

The sinister hate-filled words echoed around them, the torches the nymphs were holding guttering as the air within the catacomb shifted unnaturally. Moments later, fourteen figures, vivid enough that an unprepared or unknowing observer might have thought them genuinely flesh and blood, slunk out from between the columns. Most of them were armed and armoured, clad knee-length mail, their tabards stained and ruined but still showing the symbols of some of the noble families who had subjugated the Ur-folk and pushed out the Hibric tribes from these lands—Meltras, Belthorne, Jeris, Calder and Armont. The rest wore long robes akin to monks, and carried censers, maces and various symbols of their ‘faith’.

“Interloper…” one of the older, mail-clad figures from the Jeris family pointed his muck-stained blade at them.

“Just our luck. How could no one have, in all this time, looted their weapons as a service to future generations?” Phiale complained as she also noted the eerie blue sheen trapped within the exposed portions of the blade.

Sweeping the others, she noted with a sigh that most were bearing weapons made of Illdrium and Duramar, which probably meant their mail was not much worse. It certainly helped explain the deaths of those who had come later.

“Defiled Wytches!” one of the priests snarled, pointing generally at all of them. “Accept the Wrath of Armont—!”

Their surroundings immediately twisted, the shadows taking on a decidedly… blue hue as flames manifested out of nothing, surging in from every direction. With them came a faint sense of oppression and a creepy feeling that she was quite familiar with, from her various clashes with priests and holy warriors of the Solace God from long ago.

“Tcch,” Ianthe just clicked her tongue and waved her oleander torch in a broad sweep at them.

The slowly advancing attackers all paused as the blue flames of the spell the priest had invoked swirled unnaturally and then dispersed.

“So, how do you want to do this?” Ianeira asked her.

-That is the question, she mused, quickly taking stock.

Moving Fionnúir would require Aphrodite’s gift to fully take effect, which given the state her body had been in, and the time she had been down here, might take some minutes, even with her performing the Ritual of Ambologera properly, rather than just casually invoking it as she had usually done above.

The shades, of which there were well over twenty now, were all quasi-revenants as well, strong enough in life that the cursed souls of this place had not fully succeeded in sublimating their ego upon their demise, and instead dragged them down into this hell fully—

“Armont Protects…!” the old priest who had just tried to smite them hissed, holding up the symbol of Saint Armont that hung around his neck and pressing it to the holy book he carried.

“His Faith is our Shield!” the other warrior priests echoed, as ghostly halos of spiritual strength manifested around all of the shades, who started their wary advance again, weapons now raised in earnest.

“Let’s deal with the god botherers first,” she decided.

“You think your pagan sorcery will avail you here?” the revenant of the old priest called out mockingly. “Let this old man—”

“Apotrophia.”

The word she whispered settled in the dank air of the hall, drawing in the shadows like a smothering blanket to envelope all those before her. Some gasped, others staggered back, as if their armour suddenly weighted far too heavy on them. Many just slumped to their knees, their expressions… haunted and confused as all the intent to fight her was expelled from them. Only the revenants of the old priest and the old knight from Jeris resisted, and even they stopped, their expressions turning haunted and gloomy.

“They have a lot of ego for a bunch of shade-cursed corpses,” Alira observed, from where she was checking the still slumped Fionnúir’s wounds.

Indeed, despite what she had done, the strength of their Pneuma and the integrity of their Psychikon was…

“It… the strength… of my… blessing,” Fionnúir rasped, haltingly in Old Hibric. “And… Light of… Laurentius.”

“The what now?” Alira asked, tilting her head.

“I wonder is it because he is free?” Ianthe mused.

“Rest, focus on recovering your strength,” she instructed Fionnúir, who at Ianthe’s words had tried to sit up. “Leave this to us.”

“You… will not leave… here,” the revenant of the old priest sneered, laboriously pushing himself to his feet. “Lord Quintus, accept my boon, let the power of your ancestors re—”

Before the revenant could finish his incantation, Ianeira had ghosted through the malaise-oppressed shades and with a downward sweep, smashed the burning brand of her oleander torch into his face.

With a scream, he crumpled backwards, the scattering embers from her torch searing holes through his robe and then flesh as they left dancing spots in her vision. Two of the other nearby warrior priests were also touched by the sparks, their robes burning away like paper as they screamed and tried to splash the dark water—

*Krrrrrr—ack!*

—A sizzling bolt of pneuma-conjured lightning struck like a pair of entwined serpents out of the shadows of the hall, passing through Ianeira—who exploded into a cloud of flower petals—before it was blocked by Phiale, using the bowl that had held the fruit for the ritual, scattering arcs of the lightning chaotically around the hall.

“Idiots…”

The whispered word reverberated around the hall, making their torches gutter and the shadows cast from the fading luminescence of the lightning bolt blur unnaturally.

A moment later, a tall figure in a ragged purple robe, wearing a mask of a bearded man carved of white stone, stalked out of the gloom, arriving beside the still thrashing form of the old priest.

With a mere gesture, the pneuma of the flames devouring the revenant turned docile, and then actually shifted their nature, healing where they had before harmed, revealing him to be a Magus in the process.

“Ah, crows take him…” Ianeira, who had reappeared beside Alira, sighed, as the torch she had discarded when she evaded the bolt drifted up into the cloaked figure’s hand.

“Oleander…” the figure murmured, staring at them, the embers of the torch giving his pale mask a decidedly eerie manner. “Ancient magic, ancient indeed.”

Abruptly, five symbols appeared, in a circle before the figure, reading ‘Freedom’, ‘Mind’, ‘State’, ‘Void’ and ‘Truth’.

{Mind Cloak of Trismegistus}

All the shades who had been touched by her earlier shuddered, then slowly stood up as her influence over them faded.

“You claw in the mud… when salvation is right before you?” the masked magus chuckled, pointing at the bowl of ambrosia Alira was still holding. “Fools—”

Alira glanced at the bowl, then without hesitation, raised it to her lips and drank about half of it, before passing the bowl to Ianeira.

“Y-you…” the surging pneuma around the revenant magus deepened its intensity, now tinted by anger at their casual actions, as Ianeira passed it on to Ianthe, who drank the rest.

Their surroundings subtly warped, the shadows and the decay fading away, replaced by guttering lamplight. The wear of years fell away from the stonework and the walls were once again clad in saffron and burgundy drapes. The effect of the revenant magus’s warping of the moment even extended to the other shade-touched revenants, as they took on a much clearer semblance of their appearances in life.

The only ones untouched by it were the five of them and Fionnúir, lying slumped against the now restored altar of the chapel.

“You think consuming that elixir will aid your escape?” the magus sneered, stalking forward towards them, through the other revenants who were now starting to warily encircle the hall. “All you have ensured is that your fate will be that much more—”

“By Orcus, you talk too much,” Phiale sneered, dashing the shallow clay bowl of blood on the floor with force that its vessel smashed into a dozen pieces.

“…”

The revenants all stared at the splattered blood and broken pottery for a long moment, then the magus and the old priest both snorted as nothing seemed to happen.

“Enough of this,” the Magus hissed. “I have given you the opportunity, restrain them—”

As if his words had somehow reminded the others that they were part of this, the soldiers, knights-errant and warrior-priests all started to move inwards, their weapons at the ready. Taking the lead, the old knight stalked towards her, past the magus, Illdrium longsword held in a forward guard.

Before he had covered half the ground between them, the sounds of everything bar the discordant tones of the scattering sherds of bloody pottery subtly began to fade away. The revenant yelled something as he raised his blade in anticipation of striking at her… and then spun hurriedly to the right as the paved floor beneath his feet splintered, fracturing upwards in a spray of angular rock and murky stygian-touched waters.

Out of it rose a skeleton, its bones so charred by fire as to be practically iridescent amidst the haze of water and flickering torchlight. In a single, fluid motion, it ducked under the revenant knight’s descending blade and putting a hand to the ground, crouched and sent a scything kick at the legs of its attacker. The knight’s expression twisted angrily as he stepped backwards, slashing defensively through the spray of water—

The water twisted as the skeleton surged back to its feet, coalescing into a shield that it then used to deflect the incoming blow. In its other hand a spear formed, already mid thrust—

With a yell, the knight pivoted his stance and directed a vicious, two-handed upward cut at the incoming spear—

The two weapons clashed in a spray of dark water, the blow actually unbalancing the knight a touch and forcing him to retreat a pace.

Meanwhile, more skeletons had already started to burst forth from the spots where the bloody sherds of pot had come to rest. In a matter of mere moments, almost two dozen had emerged, lunging for the opponent nearest to them, kicking, punching, grappling or grasping their own weapons of stygian-touched water as they did so.

The Magus, who, likely through some art he possessed, remained untargeted by the skeletons, focused on her, his eyes narrowing—

Beside her, Ianthe took up her torch and without any preamble… spat a mouthful of the ambrosia she had just drunk directly into the flame—

A sheet of bluish-violet flames engulfed most of the hall, so bright it left dancing spots in her vision. Skeletons it touched shone, their bones peeling to reveal iridescent patterns of flower and flame ghosting against glassy black. The magus revenant had protected himself, the old knight, and two of the priests nearest him with a flickering sphere of nine golden-blue symbols, dominated by ‘Isolate’ and ‘Freedom’. Two other knights-errant were also somehow okay, as was a further warrior priest, but the remaining revenants were not so fortunate.

Half had been petrified, their flesh, exposed beneath charring cloth and armour, turned to calcined, peeling stone. Two priests… female, she could see, now that their robes were mostly incinerated, and a knight-errant were holding their heads in their hands, whispering nonsense. The remainder… were just gone, recalled only by eerie blotches that refused to leave her vision and some weapons and armour clattering to the ground.

“Apollo spawned mages,” Alira sniffed, eyeing the shimmering runes around the magus.

“It… seems that these five are not simple…” the old knight sighed, eyeing the skeletons, who had begun to methodically smash the petrified figures to pieces.

“Pagan witchcraft,” the old priest, who had been helped up by the surviving warrior priest snarled, holding up his ‘holy’ symbol again. “Lord Quintus! Accept our Saint’s—!”

Before the old priest could finish, Ianeira again appeared, behind him this time, holding a pomegranate in her hand, which she smashed against the back of his head. In the same instant, the space around both priests distorted, warping their bodies horrifically, before everything settled back to normal… leaving the two revenants now as a malformed facsimile of a leafless pomegranate tree, their faces warped in silent shock.

“…”

“Action as thought,” the magus murmured. “Will without Words. Not witchcraft—”

“YOU KILLED HIM!”

The younger of the two priestesses suddenly screamed, pointing furiously at the purple robed magus.

“Eh—?” the magus turned to her.

“HIS VOICE IS NOT WITH ME!”

The pneuma around her hand flared with devouring Intent as she cried out, becoming a blazing beam of sunlight that struck the magus’s barrier and refracted spectacularly around the hall. To her, it gave her the feeling of standing outside in too-bright sunlight. The skeletons and petrified revenants caught by it bleached visibly though, their bones and ‘flesh’ cracking and weathering.

“HE IS NOT WITH—!”

Sound vanished from the hall as the warrior priest within the magus’s barrier held up a symbol of Saint Armont in his hands—

At the same time, the old knight knelt and reversed his sword so it was pointing to the ground, pressing his forehead to the cross-guard—

The overbright ‘sunlight’ still illuminating in the room from the priestess’s attack turned… sharp—

Their clothing frayed and the skeletons bones continued to weather. What skin she and the nymphs had exposed started to weep with blood, as if thousands upon thousands of needles were slowly trying to shred their way into her flesh, to agitate the pneuma within her, to consume her breath, ignite her blood, and bake her bones with cruel-natured fire—

*—T-iiiiiiiiing*

In practically the same moment, Alira snatched up the bowl that held the remaining fruit and the drinking cup for the ambrosia and clashed the two violently together, filling the silence with a spine-tingling crescendo of non-noise that built and built until finally it broke and the artificial silence imposed by the priest was thoroughly consumed—

“Anaduomenê…”

In its aftermath, the word she whispered evoked the crashing of waves on sandy shores, of cool ocean water soothing her body, and a sense of ‘a new beginning’. All their wounds healed, while, before it, the searing heat of the old knight’s art faded, the violent, vigorous and censorious fire pneuma smothered and dispersed, returned to its natural state.

In response, the old knight grimaced, and rising to his feet, shook a golden amulet in the shape of a cross from his right gauntlet—

-As expected, they really do have a lot of means, she reflected with a resigned sigh as a faint golden-blue hue tinged with a strength of the divine enveloped first the knight, then the others…

“Whatever you are going to do, do,” the old knight growled to the Magus, as the projection of saintly strength clashed against the subtly expanding influence of ‘Anaduomenê’, unable to overcome it, but still able to check its momentum before it could fully envelop the whole hall. “These pagan priestesses’ powers are formidable. Even this relic cannot fully contend—”

The old knight stopped speaking as the pneuma within the whole hall… shivered.

“Ah,” the old knight sighed, as behind her the ritual finally ‘completed’. “It seems that—”

“So… at the end… I was right,” Fionnúir rasped as she was helped to her knees by Phiale. “You bastards… raised me like a… a…?”

She could feel the rage slowly rising within the ‘young woman’—the memories of her life and the suffering of her final days… and death bleeding through the lingering bond the ritual retained between them.

“It was… all of it… a lie?” Fionnúir whispered.

“A Lie?” the Magus repeated, his shining eyes within the mask narrowing slightly. “Simulacrum of Charodontes—”

A ghostly old man, robed and cowled identically to how the revenant magus was, appeared in the air above him, arms raised to the ceiling in supplication.

“—Boon of Artemesia.”

“—Phoebus Lance of Ten Ey—”

Ianthe’s torch scythed through the dark figure, scattering it as ten shining fissures in the form of combined ‘torch’ and ‘lance’ symbols slid into focus in the air around the revenant magus.

Even so, six of them still managed to open a sliver, emitting flares of blue-white light—

Her limbs turned sluggish as one of the fissures ‘focused’ on her, the light transforming into a striking serpent of primordial pneuma, its fanged maw opening wide as it streaked for her heart—

Just as she was wondering if she would finally have to use Harmony’s Blade to melt this attack, a dark skeleton appeared before it, its shield crashing into the serpent’s nose even as it stabbed its spear violently into the open maw—

The whole hall rang like a bell, the pneuma within recoiling as skeletons intercepted and obliterated all six in flashes of eye-searing annihilation. The magus’s barrier rippled, as if something had just struck it, then tried to wrench the mana within it away from him.

“Armont, Be Still My Blade—”

With a combined shout, other knights-errant finally displayed their true capabilities, darting like a pair of phantoms between the scattering serpents of light and dark skeletons, their silver-blue swords shining eerily as they thrust them towards the wide-eyed Fionnúir—

With a soft sigh, Phiale took half a step and, arriving beside the right-hand knight errant, trapped his sword hand, diverting his sword thrust into the path of his compatriot, before following his momentum with a graceful half-turn in front of the knight. With a grunt, the knight flipped in the air and crashed down on the ground at her feet.

“O’ Artemis—” Phiale murmured, disarming the knight and severing the second revenant’s sword arm in one fluid motion.

“Even these things they stole,” Ianthe chuckled with a wry smile that never reached her eyes, as Phiale finished by slamming the stolen sword through the first revenant’s heart, whispering “Be Red My Blade” as she did so.

“…”

“What… you think we are only good at looking pretty and dancing?” Alira giggled, picking up the second knight-errant’s Illdrium blade as she eyed the shocked reactions of the other revenants. “Truly”—without any hesitation, she stabbed the other knight-errant in the face, burying the sword halfway to the hilt in the floor in the process—“it is the shame of eras that trash like you rose to inherit these lands.”

In response, the old knight just shook his head.

“Eras change,” he sighed. “The Light replaces Darkness, just as dawn banishes night. To hunger for the cruel days of those Tyrant Sorcerers…”

“Truly, it is as Simeon proclaims,” the remaining warrior priest agreed, holding up his own holy symbol in a gesture of prayer. “You cannot see the light of Christ.”

“Funny,” Alira sneered, “because I don’t think He would condone any of what you do.”

“And ignorant,” Ianeira, now holding the torch Ianthe had thrown, murmured. “To equate Us to Them—”

“You think to try the same thing?” the Magus, who had seemingly suffered some backlash from Ianthe’s action a moment before, sneered, half glancing at her.

“I have no idea what you mean,” Ianeira replied blandly.

“Witch,” the warrior priest snarled, holding out his golden prayer symbol towards her. “Saint Armont commands—”

“Armont this, Armont that—You know Idolatry is a Sin, right?” Ianthe called out.

“That would require them to be able to read,” Alira murmured.

“—Armont Commands that you Atone!” The warrior priest declared.

“…”

“For what, exactly?” Ianeira asked… as she remained conspicuously un-sanctioned by whatever the priest had tried to do.

“Can’t listen, either, it seems,” Alira added drily as the warrior priest stared at his sacred symbol in confusion.

“Well, if its ‘Atonement’ you are after,” Ianeira chuckled, holding up the torch, “that can be arranged.” With a slight smile she released the torch, letting it fall into the shallow water.

Excepting the remaining two oleander torches, all light vanished from the hall, leaving only the sound of lapping, rippling water… and then not even that, for several stifling seconds. When the guttering luminescence bled back, the priest and the dropped torch were both gone, the only trace of his presence a few ripples emanating from where he had been standing.

“Comprehension has never been a skill widely sought amongst those drawn to take up arms for the Holy Church,” she agreed.

“It seems lacking among you pagans too,” the magus replied, snapping his fingers.

Their surroundings rippled, and the weight of years bled back into them, returning the hall to how it had been… except that Ianthe, Ianeira and Alira, who had all consumed the ambrosia were nowhere to be seen. All the knight-errant revenants and warrior priests who had previously ‘vanished’ amidst Ianthe’s fire were also standing there, arranged around the in a two-layer formation she recognised as a sealing ritual.

“Ambrosia is not so common that it should be wasted,” the magus added coolly. “So I can take my time with them, while you, Lord Quintus, clean up your trash.”

-So, in the end it comes to something like this, anyway, she reflected with a resigned sigh.

She was just about to return the broach holding her stola in place to the form of the Sword of Harmony, when she caught Phiale’s very slight shake of her head in her peripheral vision. In the same moment, the burned skeleton who had initially clashed with the old knight once again stepped between her and them, its shield set and spear levelled.

“It’s nothing personal, girl,” the old knight sighed, glancing first at the skeleton, then her, before finally focusing on Fionnúir. “It just worked out this way—”

Their surroundings occluded slightly as the old knight covered the distance to the skeleton with a single step, his sword rising and falling like a silvery-blue crescent moon.

The clash of sword and shield reverberated through the hall like a discordant bell, creating vision-blurring blue-gold ripples through the ambient pneuma. In that instant, as the skeleton was forced back several paces, she found that she wasn’t just seeing a ‘skeleton’ stagger back, but a tall, bare-chested man with curly golden hair, his shield held high, spear arm shaking from the strength of the blow.

Looming tall, the old knight—his presence blurring eerily between the two scenes—came forward again, sword rising a second time, to crash brutally into the staggering man’s shield, this time nearly forcing him to his knees. Burning buildings wavered, like a misty mirage, cast in midnight blue and fiery gold all around her, screaming figures fleeing soldiers in bloody mail.

Inexorable, the old knight raised his blade a third time, whereupon the golden-haired man, expression grim and breathing ragged, half turned, as if distracted by something behind him…

“F-f-father?”

Fionnúir’s broken whisper hung in her ears as the sword fell, the shield shattered, cleaving man and skeletons’ arm alike. The golden-haired man screamed in pain and rage, his spear hitting the old knight’s mailed side, only to turn and splinter as forged duramar mail defeated it—

A second figure, a youth, screaming with fury to cloak his fear, burst out of the fires—

The old knight didn’t even look as he flicked his blade sideways, the tip bisecting the new arrival, and snagging the severed head out of the air.

“Your son…” the old knight sighed, gazing into the shocked eyes of the golden-haired youth as the light within them faded, before turning back to the skeleton and man slumped before him. “Well, perhaps it is best. This way his death was in service to something… greater.”

“Greater?” she frowned.

The old knight looked up from the collapsed skeleton… skeletons, for a second now lay smashed nearby, where it had broken away from the others blocking the encircling knights errant.

“Yes, greater,” he affirmed, wearily. “The Destiny of our—”

-Ah, he is talking about the formation of the Conclave of Kings, she realised, partly glancing back at Fionnúir, who was staring, dazed, at the scene before them with wide, wild eyes.

The recognition of Edmund Abernathy as the second ‘Hero of Light’ had been a pivotal moment in convincing the northern powers of that time to band together—

“A-atonement…” the skeleton suddenly rasped, twisting on the ground and stabbing upwards with its spear.

The golden-haired man snarled, grasping his ruined weapon, and, with a desperate lunge, buried the blade deep in the calf of the old knight, beneath his mail.

The old knight’s expression twisted with pain and rage, then he reversed his grip on his sword and thrust it down forcefully—

“You…”

The moment froze, the old knight’s blade trembling as it fought against the sudden, vice-like shift in the pneuma of the hall. Behind her, Fionnúir was holding out a hand, as if trying to reach back, into this ancient moment—

“It… was you…” Fionnúir’s words came out as a rasp. “You took me from here…?”

“Old Man,” the Magus, who had been focusing on the demiplane they had been sealed in for the last few moments, cut in urgently. “Stop messing about…”

“You should rejoice,” the old knight replied, while slowly pushing down on his sword. “You lived your life in service to the Sceptered Destiny of our whole continent.”

“I looked up to you,” Fionnúir whispered. “And yet…”

“—A Destiny that shall not be denied,” the old knight growled, finally overwhelming the force trying to slow his blade, and driving it through the golden-haired man’s chest—

“No!”

Fionnúir’s shriek bled into the visceral sound of flesh and bone sundering—

“NO!”

The moment screamed, the knight’s sword slowly sliding backwards, out of the golden-haired man’s body. For a hair-raising half-second, she found herself wondering if the furious, sobbing young woman was actually capable of reaching back into this moment and ‘changing’, or perhaps influencing, what was playing out before them, then, with an uneasy sound like tearing cloth, the knight’s sword slammed down once more, just as it had before—

*—Crack*

The hair on her arms stood on end, as the Pneuma within the hall, recoiled, as if it has been slapped. Even the stygian strength in her own body shivered in acknowledgement, the dull ache in her breast pulsing uncomfortably, like a second heartbeat.

The old knight took a step back, grimacing.

The knights errant staggered, collapsing to their knees. The formation of the warrior priests collapsed in a chaotic surge of raw pneuma, tinged with ambrosia. Even the magus’s barrier warped under the fearful pressure now radiating out from Fionnúir.

“You. You killed my parents…” Fionnúir’s words were like blades as she glared at the old knight. “I saw you as the father I never had, Quintus.

“Was all of it a lie?” she hissed. “All… All to give me… to give my… my—” her voice caught slightly as she stared at the old knight, “—everything, to Edmund Abernathy?”

“Prince Abernathy is the Destiny of our kingdoms,” the old knight sighed, shifting his stance. “Compared to what he represents—as Hero of Light? You… you are—”

The old knight cut off as a black fissure abruptly bisected his throat, spreading to become a broad blade so black it was little more than a hole in the world—

The old knight’s revenant body spasmed as the blade became a dark spear, impaling him thoroughly and sending a shockwave of displaced stygian water sweeping through the hall. Through it and after it, black cracks spread like a shadowed spider’s web, intersecting with knights errant and warrior priests alike, impaling them on more black blades, until, in the blink of an eye, only the magus, inside his barrier, remained, holding up an amulet in an oddly familiar design—a pair of silver serpents, now ominously radiating pneuma— arranged into a circle, framing a gold capital ‘alpha’ arranged in the middle—

Fionnúir turned to the magus, tilting her head to the side, then sneered faintly—

The barrier warped before her eyes, the symbols making it up bending in on themselves and then scattering in swirls of disrupted pneuma. The revenant magus reached out with his free hand—as if trying to grasp them back—then, with a pained rasp, collapsed like a broken doll to the ground, his body completely bereft of his pneuma.

“Not bad,” Phiale, who had been silently observing all this unfold from beside Fionnúir remarked drily. “Not bad at all.”

As if reminded that she was there, Fionnúir flinched slightly and then turned to look at Phiale, then back at her, her eyes narrowing.

“Who… are you?” Fionnúir asked, guardedly. “And… what did you do to… me?”

Fionnúir trailed off, as the now extinguished oleander torch that the magus had originally picked up, started to cast a flickering purple hue around the hall, originating from its reflection in the water.

As she watched, Ianthe’s ghostly, feminine hand slowly materialized within the reflection, grasping the torch and then picking it up—

With a silent woosh, the shadows of the hall caught on fire, purple-black flames rippling across every surface, as if charring parchment—

Everything within her vision wavered faintly, then the fire faded, and Ianthe, Ianeira and Alira stood nearby, looking slightly annoyed.

“Ah, excellent,” she murmured softly, inwardly relieved that the three of them had been able to break the magus’s demi-plane on their own.

She had intended to use ‘Peitho’ to force the magus to release them, and Fionnúir using some kind of disjunction or similar means on the Magus so abruptly… was if she was honest, a bit of a buggerance.

“Fucking mages,” Alira muttered, eyeing the crumpled corpse of the magus balefully.

“I see the ritual was successful, then?” Ianeira asked, looking Fionnúir up and down.

“Nearly,” Phiale replied. “We just have to… ah—”

Phiale stopped speaking as the broken skeleton slowly sank back into the shallow water, merging into a shadowy reflection of the golden-haired man she had seen in the vision, who then stood up slowly in place of the skeleton, before them. All around the hall, the other collapsed skeletons were also standing, transforming into men and women dressed in… not much, actually. Most wore light garments, as if they had been abed, or at least indoors.

“Father…?” Fionnúir gulped, glancing between her, Phiale and the blonde-haired, middle-aged man standing there silently.

“You… know my face,” the shade whispered softly as the others silently closed in to encircle them.

“You are…” Fionnúir turned, taking in the others, her expression… a mixture of unease, sinking expectation and sadness.

“Clan Rhuith,” a white-haired, older woman whispered, softly.

“They came in the night…” a younger, dark-haired woman sighed.

“Overwhelmed the guards…” a tall, lanky man growled.

“Hidden by a veil of power,” an older man with greying hair and a plaited beard spat.

“Not even the children…” another woman murmured bitterly.

“I… I’m sorry,” Fionnúir whispered. “Because of me…”

“—No,” a reddish golden-haired young woman with a remarkable resemblance to Fionnúir stepped out to stand beside the shade that was her father, putting a ghostly hand on Fionnúir’s arm.

“You… are my mother?” Fionnúir whispered, staring at her.

“I am,” the woman confirmed, with a sad smile, before gesturing to the collapsed revenants. “It is because of them—”

“They excel at giving cruel burdens to others,” the white-haired woman scowled. “To burden the innocent—”

“—To torment the guiltless,” one of the other shades hissed.

“—To censor the pure,” the darker-haired woman sighed.

“—this is all they teach… have ever taught,” the white-haired woman finished.

“It is we, who should apologize to you,” Fionnúir’s father added sorrowfully.

“But I… I never knew you. I gave you no rites…” Fionnúir shook her head. “They…”

“All this, that bastard Quintus did,” her father sneered, gesturing to the severed head of the old knight, before waving an arm at the other shades. “Quintus and those greedy old men of Jeris.”

“But…” Fionnúir tried to speak again—

“Hush, granddaughter,” the white-haired woman murmured with a gentle yet sad smile, before turning to her, Phiale and the others.

“I know not what spirits of the land you be—angels, devils, or even elves from below the sacred stones—but your grace had given us this moment to atone. In life, we were too weak—that you would give us this moment in death, to stand together…”

Silently, all the other shades bowed their heads in gratitude.

“We could not protect you then, and you were stolen from us, your future seized by greedy hands untouched by the good Lord’s gentle grace,” Fionnúir’s mother sighed sadly, taking her daughter’s hands in her own. “Heart of my Heart, that you would not know our faces, that you had brothers… and were so loved, for the little time we shared…”

Looking on, it was hard for her not to feel a slight pang of sadness in her own heart, knowing that this was a meeting she would never get to have, in all likelihood.

Most of her own family had disowned her, even before she had returned the gesture. For others, like her mother, she had no knowledge of where their graves were, even if she was so inclined. There was not even any formal Sempronii family left anymore, except for her. Her last ‘descendant’ carrying the name had died childless, the unloved wife of a minor Meltras lordling, during an elvish raid some four hundred years before Fionnúir had ever been born.

In the end, rather than intrude onto Fionnúir’s private moment with her family, she turned her attention back to the fallen figure of the magus and the amulet still grasped in their hand.

Stepping over to it, she knelt and carefully unhinged the mask, which was cool to the touch, to reveal the sunken face of a middle-aged man—

“—Aristophus of Jeris.” She turned to the grey-haired old man, who had been among the shades just looking on silently, and who had now spoken to her. “A craven fool, obsessed with the origins of ancient magiks no man was ever destined to wield.

“To think he perished here, I guess God does judge fairly, in some things.”

“You knew him?” she asked.

“He was a member of a group who called themselves the Brotherhood of the Purple Hall,” the old man growled. “More like a cult, honestly. They gained influence after supporting that upstart bastard Raymond Jeris, when he forced his uncle out of the Dukedom, over the elvish raids from Isla Ulthriad.”

“I see,” she frowned.

Some of that was familiar to her, but only in the sense of hearing tales from afar. The ebb and flow of politics in the dukedoms and petty kingdoms had been like distant storms, occasionally sending waves of chaos to wash up on the shores of this place.

“Aristophus became one of his advisors—visited our lands several times, seeking traces, tales of the ‘Old Wars’ as they called those dark, faithless days before the provinces in the east, before, well…” the grey-bearded old man trailed off, his expression turning gloomy. “I didn’t see him that… that night, but they had the backing of powerful, strange magiks.”

“What tales?” she asked, carefully picking up the amulet, turning it over in her hands.

It was cool to her touch, especially the silver serpents, which—

The dull ache in her chest slid ominously back into focus, as if something about them resonated with it—

“Laurion, Lethe…” a voice murmured in her ears, as if half asleep.

“The Ancient Order…” another old, tired voice whispered in the back of her mind.

It had been so long since she had heard the voices of her ancestors, tied to the curse of the dagger, that she nearly dropped the amulet in the water in surprise.

“That was their symbol,” the old man added, eyeing the amulet.

“The Ancient Order?” she echoed, trying to process the strange feelings simply holding it was causing her to feel. It was unsettling, as if the shadows of this space were no longer quite as welcoming to her as they had been.

“The Brotherhood of the Purple Hall,” the old man clarified.

“…”

Before she could reply, the whispering voices in her mind all settled on one word: ‘Shrine’.

For a brief moment, she was no longer kneeling in the dark of the temple, by the magus’s body, but standing in the dimly lit hall of the Sempronii family shrine, looking at a Kynthian gold bowl, one of the many treasures her Hades-cursed relatives had absconded with.

‘—Valta…’ The scene shifted again, and she was lounging on a couch, watching Lady Valta’s husband pour out a libation at an exclusive dinner hosted for the patrician families of Portam Aurorae…

It took her a moment to realise what she was looking at, disinterested as fifteen-year-old her had been in the event she had been forced to attend, to socialise with Lucius—

-My fiancé…

For a moment, she found herself looking at him—as he laughed quietly at a joke Phaerinia had just made—at their faces, which, in truth she had all but forgotten, before re-focusing on Quintullus Valta… and the amulet he was wearing, which was almost identical to the one she now held in her hands, only made simply from gilded bronze, she somehow knew. The golden bowl in the shrine had also had that same monogram, A-O on it.

In fact, now that she thought about it, the Laurion silver chains that had held her, during her period of captivity in Solaneum… had also been anchored to a block that held a similar design…

‘Like the chains the Gods bound Prometheus with…’

It was hard to say if that thought was her own, or her ancestors still whispering in her ears… as she pushed those profoundly unpleasant recollections away.

“—of course, this would tie back to them…”

The vivid memories faded as she glanced up at Alira, who was standing beside her now, her expression as cold as the amulet she held in her hands.

“You know them?” she asked the nymph.

“Oh yeah, we know them all right,” Alira sneered. “They hunted us—sealed us away in tools and statues, or bound us to bear them half-breed children, seeking the secret to our immortality.”

“Such is the madness of mages,” the grey-bearded muttered, still not meeting Alira’s eyes. “They do not walk in Grace.”

“These ones certainly did not,” Alira agreed under her breath, ignoring the serious side-eye that Phiale was now shooting her.

“…”

“He was… one of those who tutored me, at the behest of the Duke of Jeris—when I was first learning about magiks,” Fionnúir, who had stopped talking with her parents, observed in the slightly awkward silence, eyeing the mask-less mage. “The Purple Hall also provided a lot of material support to us… to Edmund Abernathy… once he set out on his ‘errantry’ to be ordained as the new ‘Hero of Light’.”

“That sounds oddly familiar,” she murmured under her breath, as the events around Laurentius’s ascension as Hero flitted hauntingly through her memory, accenting the dull ache in her chest.

“I also saw such as them, when we were first attacked,” the tall, lanky youth muttered. “They were dressed like soldiers, but had that symbol on their armour…”

“—and in their eyes…” a young girl whispered.

“They moved like snakes in the shadows, with Intent beyond anything a mortal warrior should have had,” the dark-haired young woman whispered.

“—And even when they fell, no bodies remained,” Fionnúir’s brother hissed.

“Nothing we did could stop them,” Fionnúir’s father added softly. “No matter how many we slew, their numbers never lessened…”

“—and then Quintus and his knights came…” the grey-bearded old man sighed, shaking his head sadly.

“I see…” she frowned, because they made it sound remarkably like someone had found some way to entice some shades from one of the cursed settlements into at least a temporary alliance.

Such a thing was not… impossible, given many of those so afflicted sought ceaselessly to be free of their constraints, and the Sempronius dagger was not unique, she now knew. However, it should have been basically impossible for a clan like the Rhuith, as she understood it, to resist such shades as they seemed to have managed. True Orichalcum was beyond rare in that era and Illdrium weapons could only slow them. It required powers akin to those she possessed to do more…

“Powers such as they sought, even unto our sorry fate…” another old voice whispered in the back of her mind, even as she mulled that over, turning the amulet over in her hands. “Oh, how foolish we were…”

On the reverse side, she found the Hellenic letters Chi and Rho had been sculpted into the point where the serpents’ heads entwined. Superficially, it looked like one of the cryptic symbols of the ‘new faith’, and yet… as she examined it more closely, something about it just didn’t feel… right.

“Wait, in their eyes?” she asked, focusing on the pale-haired girl who had said that.

“Y-yes, like a-a flame,” the girl nodded. “That burned and burned… brother killed one…”

“—and it didn’t go out…” the youth beside her whispered. “I killed him… but then…” the youth trailed off, his hand involuntarily going to his neck.

“Huh… I know of a method like that,” Ianthe muttered, her eyes narrowing. “However…”

“Charodontes,” the whispering memories of her ancestors abruptly coalesced around that singular, whispered name practically drawing her eyes back, not to the amulet but the corpse of the magus. “This man spoke that name…”

The body stared back at her, seemed to stare into her, faint, flickering embers dancing like sparks in its previously empty eyes, its expression twisting, fraction by fraction, into a hungry smile—

Without breaking eye contact with it, she willed the Blade of Harmony to form in her hand, in the form of a dagger, its tip resting between the magus’s once again empty eyes, as if what she had just seen was merely a figment of her imagination.

“Well, that’s a neat trick,” Alira, murmured, staring down at the almost aggressively ‘dead’ body with a pensive expression.

Were she not so intimately linked to the energies of this land, and the powers of life and death, she might have been fooled by it, such was the profundity of the attempted transformative act on her senses. Certainly, in terms of deftness and insidiousness, it far exceeded the ‘wish’ she had just run up against.

“What… was that?” Fionnúir asked, softly, her whole manner guarded now. “You saw that, right?”

“…”

“I wonder,” Ianeira, who also had a pensive expression mused.

Interestingly, other than her and the nymphs, Fionnúir’s mother, grandmother and the old man also had uneasy, guarded expressions now, yet almost everyone else… just seemed faintly disorientated.

That, in its own right, was concerning, because the momentary ‘integrity’ of such a shade’s Psychikon was much higher than many might expect. Reflecting on her own experiences, she had the niggling feeling that something about it was familiar, but…

“—You are aware that this is a ritual, right?” Phiale cut in, drily, drawing her out of trying to unpick the dream-like tangles of those ancient memories. “And that time is something of a constraint, unless you want to stay here for a whole day?”

“I agree,” Ianeira declared, decisively, while subtly catching her eye—

“Interesting,” a cool, familiar voice murmured in her ear.

With it, came the feeling someone was standing just behind her, along with the sensation of a hand resting on her shoulder, touching the broach of the Sword of Harmony.

“I didn’t expect to see traces of this thing, here,” Harmonia continued, softly, in the now subtly dissociated moment they seemed to be sharing.

“Is it… actually?” Ianthe asked, quietly, eyeing the body warily as she realised the nymphs were also included in whatever Harmonia had done.

“Just a trace,” Phiale murmured softly.

“Just a trace,” Harmonia echoed. “I recommend you don’t tug this thread too hard…”

“Agreed,” Alira whispered.

“Yes, best leave this sleeping dog for now,” Ianeira agreed. “If this is that Book…”

All the nymphs fell silent, their expressions reflecting a degree of unease she had rarely seen in such as them, before.

“Should I bring the amulet, or not?” she asked, in this she could only trust the nymphs and Harmonia, whose vision and knowledge of such things absolutely exceeded hers in these matters.

“…”

“Bring it,” Harmonia affirmed, after falling silent for a moment. “But do not dwell overly on it. This is more complex than it looks.”

“I am shocked,” she observed drily.

“Heh…” Harmonia chuckled softly. “Still, their concern is well founded, and the Book of Changes is no friend to them, nor are those it has lifted up over the aeons, but at the same time... it is rare to get an actual lead on the fate-blinding thing, even if it is just a thread of imbued Intent from it.”

“So it is that...” she sighed, unable to hide a grimace, because that name she did know, if only by whispered reputation, and none of that reputation was good.

“As for the ritual, it was smart to seek out one such as her,” Harmonia continued. “Your plan with regard to Aphrodite’s rite is good, but the inertia regarding this girl’s demise is… perhaps greater than you realise. Her ending is more akin to what was attempted with you, and make no mistake, those powers who orchestrated this did intend it as an ‘End’.”

“Ah,” she sighed, feeling a headache coming on in Harmonia’s words.

“I am somewhat limited right now, but I can provide some help, and advice,” Harmonia added with an amused chuckle. “Ritual and form are important, but so is context. You started this rite with the Orphic Hymn; your solutions can also be found there.”

“…”

Before she could reply, Harmonia’s presence had already vanished, leaving on the echo of her words in her ears as the moment settled back as it had been, accompanied by a slightly jaded sigh from Phiale.

“I was hoping I could shortcut this a bit, but nooo…” the nymph pouted. “I guess we are playing escort after all.”

“Escort?” Fionnúir asked, frowning.

“What, you expected it to be like in the ancient stories?” Ianthe chuckled. “Where a mysterious figure from the shadows pronounces and you must perform some daring task or dreadful feat?”

“Honestly, they did that because it’s easier,” Alira muttered, her comment drawing some nervous chuckles from the surrounding shades.

“Perhaps, but form is important,” Phiale sighed, rolling her eyes.

“Certainly, in this instance,” she agreed, running back through what Harmonia had said and wondering how much could actually be explained. Even to her, the story of Orpheus leading his beloved out of the underworld, which was what she was sure Harmonia had alluded to, was just that… a story.

“In this instance, it’s fairly straightforward,” Ianeira cut in. “Basically, you need to absolve… or perhaps resolve, the tangled karma associated with your old life, before you can move on, and before your clan can move on. The simplest way to do that, is to perform a gateway ritual.”

“Basically, you have to travel up, out of this quasi-underworld, to the surface and receive the baptism of Eos at the moment that Night and Day trade places,” Phiale elaborated. “In the process, you must lead those dearest to you, and trust to your heart.”

“Like… Orpheus and Eurydice?” Fionnúir muttered.

“Yes, it’s basically that,” she nodded, relieved that the nymphs seemed quite okay with explaining things to this degree.

“And what happens if I fail?” Fionnúir asked.

“Poof,” Ianthe made a theatrical gesture of an explosion, which was met with slightly glassy looks from the shades and Fionnúir and a sideways look from Phiale. “I’d advise not failing,” the nymph added with a cough. “Basically, those you are leading will be unable to leave, and you will be forced to find a different method, because it cannot be attempted twice.”

“By unable to leave…” Fionnúir turned to her parents and the other shades.

“They will become more bound to this place than they currently are,” she explained. “Like some of these other cursed shades are. At that point, you will need direct intercession from… well, it will be difficult.”

“Does it matter… that we are not… pagan?” one of the other shades spoke up.

“No, your faith in life has exactly zero influence on this,” Ianeira clarified, with a slight smile.

“And… what happens if I don’t do the ritual?” Fionnúir asked softly.

“I will strangle you to get that ambrosia back,” Phiale muttered, ignoring the ‘oh really now’, look Ianthe shot back at her and the look Fionnúir gave her. “More seriously, you will always be somewhat bound to this place by the geas put on you back then. To give up this opportunity would be to accept what Edmund Abernathy and his compatriots did to you and relinquish any chance of ever being anything more. For you and for those tied to you in death.”

“—Not to be that person,” Alira cut in. “But if we have to do that ritual, either we need to do some interpretative re-arrangement of our surroundings or start walking quite quickly.”

“We just need Fionnúir to escort them to the surface, right?” she mused, staring up at the darkened dome above them, and doing some quick calculations as to how far underground they were, currently.

“Yep, while fulfilling all the usual requirements of the Orphic Gateway Ritual,” Phiale nodded.

“Do we have to go back the way we came?” she asked, the outline of a plan forming in her mind, with regards to what Alira had just said.

“That… is not a part of the ritual; it usually tends to be a limitation of the environs they are performed in,” Ianeira confirmed, to her relief.

“In that case, while you explain the particulars… I am going to go make our life a bit easier,” she decided, picking up her torch and then, after a moment’s thought, some of the lotus fruit and pomegranate from the bowl Ianeira had left on the altar.

“Okay,” Phiale nodded.

“Alira, Ianthe, can you come with me?” she asked.

“Sure,” Alira and Ianthe both looked a little surprised but fell in beside her as she walked back down the length of the temple-hall.

“What are you planning?” Alira added, curious.

“When you were scouting, did you see any of the Dvari with axes? Or better yet—digging tools?” she asked.

“…”

Both nymphs stared at her, and she fancied they might actually be flushing with embarrassment in the torchlight.

“Yes… there was one in the side hall over there,” Ianthe replied after a moment, gesturing towards the doorway on their left.

Chapter 128 - Solaneum, by Night.

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