The first light of dawn had begun to peek through the thick windows of the guild hall while Merigold and Reese spoke, and the sounds of waking came with it. Carts trundled through the streets outside, more frequent due to the lack of train service. A rumble of noise issued down from the upstairs as the multitude of guild members sleeping the hall woke, and were joined by those arriving off the street to fulfill their morning tasks. Merigold ordered Ughvac to sleep, wrapped the cat in one of the scratchy blankets from upstairs, and headed out with her sister, Alecia, and Garret to claim their breakfast in the crowded foyer. It consisted of hard bread and thick chunks of poultry, and melons from a cart parked just outside the guild.

They spilled out into the humid morning while they ate, glancing at the thin strips of cloud that scuttled across an otherwise unimpeded sky. Over the mountains, the sun was not yet visible. There was only a hazy glow, silhouetting the tall buildings of Hakarth, and blazing through the smaller, fainter cloud of steam that still rose over the destroyed steamworks. Little could be heard over the hubbub of the crowd, so they wound their way towards a shaded alcove beneath a thorny acacia, within easy sight of the foyer entrance.

They spoke little. Alecia had fallen to carefully arranging her gear for the day, strapping together a series of wooden tiles about one foot across, decorated with various runes, and Garret to massaging muscles still sore from the night before. Neither of them remarked on the bundle of cloth Merigold carried, likely assuming it was something dead that would disturb their breakfast. Reese, too, was uncharacteristically silent, peering upward through the twisted boughs of the acacia as if she could see something of the future written in them.

When Ilf bellowed for her unit to come together, they all rose immediately. Alecia gave Reese a quick hug, Garret thanked her for wishing them luck, and then Merigold and Reese stood alone, staring at each other.

“I’m sorry about that cake, Meri,” Reese said somberly.

Merigold snorted. “It doesn’t matter now,” she said factually. “What matters is that you, mother, and father prepare to evacuate. If something happens, I want to at least know you won’t be in the path of whatever comes through that Rift.”

Reese nodded, looking unconvinced. Merigold hugged her as Reese had done the night before, and then thrust her back, hands on both shoulders. “Reese,” she declared, “I spent my life training to be a Drafter. I now have a contract with an erowist to protect me, so stop worrying and get home.”

Reese stared at her for a moment, rolled her eyes, and then said, “Be safe, Meri.” They parted beneath the acacia tree, and Merigold joined Alecia and the others. She noticed Ilf’s eyes move to the blanket she carried, but like the others, Ilf asked no questions. For a necromancer to lug a corpse along with them was nothing unexpected.

They headed into the mountains just as the sun crested the distant eastern peaks. Bugs swarmed around them, humming pleasantly in the early morning air. If not for the grim faces and hushed voices of the various guild members, they might have been out for an early morning hike rather than embarking on an expedition to close The Rift before Hakarth was destroyed. It was difficult, in fact, to imagine any such danger lurking in the mountains. Marauders, bandits, wild animals, maybe…but erowist? A hole in the Astral Plane? Here among the scrubby mountain growth, the harsh, iron-rich rock, the tumbling scree fields full of snakes?

As they advanced farther from the city, the guilds and their units took different forks in their path. The number of amassed people around Merigold began to dwindle, until eventually only a portion of the Radvik guild remained. Eros and his unit were with them. Ilf, Nihil, Adri, Adarak…only Derek was nowhere to be seen, and there were two more Organics with them in his place; one was a burly woman named Harriet, the other a willowy man by the name of Alister. There was no time wasted on introductions, so their names were all Merigold knew.

It took them three hours to come within view of the Cloud Abyss. Merigold had seen it only twice, both on excursions with the university into the surrounding mountainside. Just as it had both times previous, the ravine made her stomach flip uncomfortably. A sheer plummet from the heights of the mountains, it dropped away into a twisting river far below. That river was a part of the Gilda, but being distant from the city, and largely rapids, it was hard to think of the silver ribbon of water far below as familiar in any way. Scraggly trees had rooted into the banks of that distant river, but they were largely obscured by the famous white mist that gave the Cloud Abyss its name. Though there was a falls somewhere in the ravine, it was impossible to see them. They could be heard, however, a roaring echo carried by the sinuous ravine far into the distance.

Their destination, at any rate, was not the ravine, but the sloping hillside nearby. They were lucky, perhaps, that The Rift had not appeared in one of the scree fields, or atop one of the many mountains surrounding Hakarth. Rather, it had appeared in a great depression where magma had pooled some centuries before, leaving behind reddish earth thick with minerals and scrub.

Eros called a halt several hundred yards from the depression, peering speculatively around them.

“No welcoming party,” he said stiffly. Merigold followed his gaze around the depression, which was utterly unremarkable. She could see the distant movement of people, their guild unknowable at such a distance.

“Only a few erowist attacked Bertlith before it was destroyed,” Ilf said, “maybe the two that came after Hakarth were supposed to be enough.”

“Now that we know the erowist are intelligent enough to disguise themselves in corpses on attempted rescue missions,” Eros said, shading his eyes with his hand, “we have to assume they are likewise intelligent enough to lay ambushes.”

“Out here, in a wide-open depression?” Another of the guild Seniors asked. He stood on Ero’s other side – Merigold had no idea who he was. She knew only that there were seven Seniors in the Radvik Guild, and just two present at the moment.

Merigold knelt, unwrapping the cat from her blanket and whispering the command for it to wake. Ughvac snapped to attention, no longer unsteady the way it had been when she first forced it into the cat’s body.

“Ughvac, this is the location of The Rift, correct? You can see it,” Merigold asked.

“I can see it,” the creature responded, stretching its jaws around the unfamiliar words. No matter how it tried to speak, it always sounded slightly drunk. At the sound of the cat’s words, those nearest her quickly stepped back. Eros, Ilf, and the unknown Senior turned sharply to see what had spoken.

“Gods, what is that?” Ilf asked reflexively.

“That wouldn’t be the missing class-four erowist, would it?” Eros asked astutely, at nearly the same time. Ilf glanced at him. “Of course I knew it wasn’t recovered, Ilf. I assumed you had uses for it. I didn’t think they would look like this.”

Eros sounded intrigued. He gestured for Ilf and the other Senior to keep a lookout, and came to kneel in the dirt next to Merigold.

“Am I to assume we can speak to it now?” he asked.

“I can only guarantee truthful answers to questions I ask,” Merigold asserted. Eros smiled grimly at her.

“And you have complete control over it, unlike last time?” He was watching her knowingly, and Merigold sniffed, sitting up a little straighter.

“I do. Binding it to flesh means I can control its movements completely,” she said.

Eros rubbed his hands together, seeming pleased. “Well then,” he said, “we had better find out if it knows anything about an ambush.”

The erowist, however displeased it might have been with their line of questioning, answered each question they asked. Merigold faithfully translated, her eyes occasionally moving back to the magma field. There were distant figures encroaching on it now, picking their way between scrubby plants and loose rock. They fanned out methodically as she watched, likely beginning to arrange the psychics and psychometers in such a way that they could make The Rift visible to everyone. Ilf was doing the same, planning her route into the depression with their other Senior, and occasionally gesturing sharply at their psychometer, Adri.

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In the end, there was not much to be learned. They had captured Ughvac days before, and the other erowist to attack Hakarth had been destroyed long before it would have shared any plans with anyone. As Eros suggested, it had likely been too clever to share any of them with Ughvac, since it had clearly known the terms of the contract Ughvac had entered into. Ten minutes after waking the cat, Merigold stood, stretched her stiff back, and joined the rest of her unit as they forayed into the depression. Adri took the lead with Eros, stopping periodically to ‘see’ the Astral Plane, a task that did not seem to be nearly so simple as Aron Hart made it sound.

They had not made it far into the depression before Adri yelped and Nihil shouted, bringing his lightning to bear. His slammed his hands together and then thrust them out, sending bolts of electricity – which no longer impressed Merigold as much as they once had now that she had seen the frightening power of the class-four erowist’s lightning – to tear up the earth in front of them. Unexpectedly, the earth came alive. All around them, hazy gobs of static and light shot from underneath the loose soil and magma, or from the cover of the scrub. A rising din suggested to Merigold that the same was happening all around the great depression. Their enemies were small, much smaller than Ughvac had been, but Merigold did not have the patience to wonder what class they might be. Lower, she guessed, because the one Nihil had tried to fry with his electricity had one nothing to block, dodge, or absorb the blast, and had simply been thrown back with a roar of displeasure.

“Defend Adri while she finds The Rift!” Eros barked, already moving into position. Ilf, unable to raise her shield for fear of disrupting Adri’s abilities, was folded into the center with her and Alecia, protected by a bristling wall of Elementals and Organics. Merigold found herself incorporated into the chaos, reliant on Ughvac’s terrorizing blasts of energy to protect herself. How strange it was to watch Ughvac in the form of a cat, leaping and yowling as it shot bolts of raw Astral Energy from its paws and dodged the strikes of the attacking erowist. She was sure it pulled the Astral Plane around itself and her like a psychic might do on more than one occasion, but feared to object, whatever the effect on Adri’s search.

“I found it! “Adri shouted within seconds, pointing sharply towards a large rock around eighty yards from where they stood. Erowist swarmed around it, several of them taking on hazy, humanoid shapes and dispersing around The Rift. Even without Adri, Merigold thought, the presence of those humanoid erowist would have directed them towards their destination.

Eros barked more orders, raising one hand to the sky over the point Adri had marked and sending up a flare of crimson fire that hovered there, bright as a small sun even in the daylight. The other guilds and units could begin go converge on that point, drawn by his marker. One of the humanoid erowist looked at the marker, and then at Eros, and charged suddenly into their midst.

There was no time to react. Merigold was protected only by the appearance of the cat in front of her eyes, stopping the erowist from smashing into her with its ectoplasmic bulk. Garret and Nihil were not so lucky, and were thrown from their feet as the creature spun and shot static. Eros had managed to protect himself at the last possible moment by hurling two flaming spheres at roughly the center of the erowist – the general location where the core was expected to be.

“Ilf,” he shouted, “get Adri and Merigold in position. Mein, to me.” Mein, Merigold determined in the heat of battle, must be the name of the other Senior. He and Organics had moved to Ero’s side. One of them was probably responsible for the faintly glowing green vine that split the soft earth under the erowist’s feet, forming a sort of woody snake that stabbed at the rapidly moving creature. That vine gave Garret time to haul himself to his feet and get out of the path of the erowist’s next strike.

In the chaos, Merigold somehow managed to fall into step behind Ilf, Adri, and Alecia. Garret and Adarak stuck close to them, hurling shards of ice and blazing balls of fire at any erowist that drew too close. They came within twenty yards of Eros’s marker before Ilf called a halt and threw up her arms to start focusing her power. Without direction, Alecia ripped the tiles she had been carrying throughout their journey from her back and began to hastily arrange them around their tiny group. Garret and Adarak watched her with wild eyes, shouting every time they saw another monster coming closer.

“Protect all five of us, Ughvac!” Merigold demanded. She ignored the cat’s seething yowl when it was forced to tear into the creature that had been about to set upon Adarak.

The din around them was growing. Fire had broken out among the thick scrub in some parts of the depression, billowing thick, oily smoke. Erowist were charging over Alecia’s tiles and either being paralyzed – and subsequently destroyed – or flying back several yards into the scrub. The other class-four erowist had joined the fray with the various guild units now swarming the site of the Rift. Like Ilf, Merigold, and Adri, psychics, psychometers, and necromancers dotted the fray, immediately noticeable by their stillness in the face of the storm around them. They had to be still, silent, and focused. Already, a strange, multihued light was beginning to appear beneath Eros’s marker. It looked like an undulating gash in the sky. Light poured through it, turning a steadily darker shade of red. The longest wavelength, Merigold thought. She had no idea what that meant. All she knew was that something was beginning to obstruct that light; something massive.

As she stared in horror, momentarily distracted from the battle that could take her life in an instant, the tear seemed to be growing. Something was thrusting its nebulous, arcing golden snout through. The snout was followed by an indistinct shape that grew more solid the farther it extended. A lizard? A lion? Her knees had begun to shake. It was as tall as the buildings in Hakarth, as long two or three of the steam engines that towed their trains.

“Gods,” she heard herself say.

“What is that?” Alecia shouted.

“Seal The Rift!” someone was shouting. Their voice was joined by others. Shouts, screams, yelps, and the yowling of Ughvac fed the chaos. A roar went up somewhere to their left – a victorious sound that made her think not everyone had seen what was emerging from The Rift. They seemed to have destroyed one of the class-four erowists.

“We can’t seal it with something in it,” Merigold yelled, unsure who exactly she was yelling at.

“Lure it out!”

“Lure it!”

The shout was picked up and carried by the people nearest The Rift. Hearing it, perhaps, the monstrous erowist, which really could have been some sort of deity, swept its gaze across the clots of humans all across the depression. It tore one of its rear legs from The Rift as it looked to the heavens. Immediately, the skies began to darken. Thick, steely clouds knotted together overhead, darkening and darkening until it appeared that night itself had wedged itself into the sky above The Rift. With a roar of thunder, lightning began to shoot down from the darkened clouds. Screams erupted all around them. A sea of fire sprung up where the lightning had struck, and the air filled with the scent of burning.

“We can’t fight that thing,” Ilf cried.

“There’s no other way.”

Merigold was surprised by the sound of Eros’s booming voice. He had appeared behind Ilf with a battered-looking group of people that included only one of the Organics. “We’re trying to regain some semblance of order. The Elementals will lure that monster into battle. Everyone else is to stay behind and close The Rift. It’s the only way to stop more of the erowist from coming through.”

“Eros, you’re going to need us with you!” Ilf argued.

Eros fixed her with his coal-black eyes, shook his head, and gestured in the direction of the deity-class erowist. He did not say anything else, likely because he did not have time. The massive creature emerging from The Rift had not fully extracted itself, except for the ectoplasmic trail of light and lightning that trailed in its wake. Every step it took made the earth shake. Long dried magma shattered beneath its weight. Unlike the class-four erowist, it did not spout obscenities or anything that might even resemble words.

“Wait,” Merigold called as Eros turned towards the monster. She cast around until her eyes found Ughvac, cat claws dug into the core of an unfortunate erowist that pulsed diffusely beneath the cat’s paws. “Ughvac,” she said urgently, “will that thing be destroyed if we destroy its core?”

“Of course,” Ughvac spat. “Not that you’ll be able to.”

“Where is it and how can we destroy it?” she demanded. Eros came closer, peering down at the cat with interest. Ugvhac was seething yet again, shaking with rage. The fur had risen all along the body of the cat, making it look like an angry feline that had swallowed a hedgehog.

“In the part you would consider the head, vermin. It can be destroyed just as any of our cores are…by physically destroying it.”

As if to emphasize this point, or possibly just to vent its rage, Ughvac raised the paw that held the core of the erowist it had defeated, smashing it into dust. The fallen erowist dissipated immediately.

“Even if the core is at the very center of that thing’s head, I don’t know how you would get to it,” Merigold said, looking desperately in the direction of the deity-class erowist.

“You focus on sealing The Rift,” Eros said, abruptly turning towards the monster. “That’s your priority. At least that thing seems to have no interest in defending it.”

He turned to shout to the people behind him, directing some of them to spread the word about the monstrous erowist’s core. When it suddenly lurched back and spewed fire down over the battlefield, Merigold lost sight of him. Ughvac had raised a barrier to protect them. Not everyone was so lucky, but everyone around Merigold was safe.

“It’s now or never, Merigold Lee,” Ilf growled, wiping the sweat from her eyes by rubbing her head on her shoulder. Her hands were still raised towards The Rift, casting the magic required to make it visible.

Merigold nodded, turning her full attention on The Rift. She could see the strands of Astral Energy. She could feel them. She could move them.

And she was not alone.

There was at least one other necromancer somewhere around her. Maybe, she thought, it was Jayce. Maybe it was a necromancer she had never met. Whatever the case, the two of them began to weave the threads of the Astral Plane together, just as Aron Hart had suggested. It was not hard. It felt natural, even easy. It only took time…long minutes in a battle that they simply did not have. Long, focused minutes…

And then it was done.

The Rift was sealed.