Viedron became known as an archmage after reappearing from the Wild years after being thought dead and slaying an ancient and famous mountain-drake with a single spell. What that spell was is unknown, but what is known is that his spells have a unique potency powered by an insight into the nature of Time. Quariss? She rose to power the old-fashioned way: by killing everybody else in line. She's a counselor to the Emperor's own mage coterie and considered one of the rising stars of this generation. She's Timberan, but that's just a chip on her shoulder.

Severin's a mage of the Old Blood. Nobody knows how old he is or where he came from; he is a fixture of the magical power of the Empire. Always has been, always will be.

Each of the archmages is a living legend. But Alloman, well, he's in a class of his own. The man is said to be literally invincible, unkillable, as immortal as they come. He's never lost a magical battle, never once backed down from a fight, never even been wounded. He once was the only one to walk away from a battle involving over three thousand soldiers and mages; pronounced himself the winner over bodies of Pillory's best. Nobody knows his secret, but not a single spell has ever reached him. It's said that Death itself can't touch him. But that's just a legend. Probably. — Field Research Journal: Volume 3, Grace, Oliver, Page 22. DECLASSIFIED BY DIRECTOR J-5 08-29-2103.*

Graves knelt down at the man's side, fingers teasing apart the fabric from the wound as best she could. He flinched as she peeled it away, then stiffened as she held her other hand over the wound and closed her eyes, concentrating.

Moments later, a golden glow of mana radiating from her hand stitched the wound closed, and color began to return to the man's face. Time accelerated healing, using resources drawn directly from the body; he would be fine and Graves would retain sufficient mana to stay in the mission.

It was a remarkable spell, one enabled solely by her experience with and knowledge of microbiology and more largely speaking human physiology. Not something that Oliver would have hoped to be able to use with much efficiency; directing it would have been beyond his understanding.

Oliver scanned the hallway quickly, seeking to see if there were any more casualties in their group. None presented themselves, so as the guide climbed back to his feet he approached him and said, "Are you still feeling well to lead us?"

The guide, shaken, responded bravely enough. "Yes, yes, I'll just need a moment. But we must hurry."

The guide leaned against the wall for a moment, catching his breath; after reaching his feet, he'd paled again visibly.

Soon though he straightened and with a glance backwards, waved them on. Oliver wondered what it was that drove the man so; a lost relative? Fear? Belief in the greater good? Revenge?

They proceeded down the hallway at a cautious yet hasty clip, Oliver up front now and clearing every passageway, multiple attack spells readied and hands raised in front of him for faster reactions. Several moments later, he noticed a foul smell in the air, a strong, yet familiar stench. It was the smell of human sweat, waste, the stink of desperation growing ever stronger as the guide led them through a mazelike labyrinth of passages.

Moments later they emerged into a new, double-wide corridor, this one poorly lit and lined with cages on either side; and in the cages, people. The source of the smell.

People wearing clothes from Earth. A handbag here, a fannypack there. T-shirts. Jeans. These were people from home, the ones who'd been summoned to this place by some spell.

He stumbled, horrified, even as their implacable guide led them inexorably onward.

He'd nearly ended up here.

The people in the cages took notice of the group as they passed by. A moment after they began to pass down the corridor, the shouting began. Captive Earthlings cried out for their help in a variety of tongues, languages and accents from all over his home planet planet, each plea impossible to make out over the others.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

A sort of mad sickness began to roil in his gut as they went, a dizziness that crept up his spine and seized him by the base of the skull until tunnel vision overtook his sight.

And yet he still could not turn away, still could not see anything but the captives in their cages.

There were people of every nationality, some four to six to each tiny cell, not enough room to stand or lay down comfortably on their own, bones protruding—starving—.

It was horror as they passed down the corridor. Perhaps Sartre was right, Oliver reflected. Perhaps hell really was other people. How humans could inflict this on their own, he did not know. Could not understand how it might be possible, for all that he was witnessing it. And yet, perhaps the most tragic fact of all was that this barbarism was not limited to magical savages in a land far, far away but mirrored experiences he'd already had on his tour, sights he'd already seen.

Nor was it any truly villainous cause like hate or a desire for revenge that put these people in these cages; like nearly all of the most horrible crimes in the world it would be simply the fact, tragic in its clinical banality, that most people could not see past their own fear and selfishness to the ruin their drive for self-preservation was visiting upon others.

Yet for all his supposed experience, it was only with the greatest of efforts that he willed himself onwards, forcing himself not to focus on any individual face amid the masses of desperate humanity from Earth, not to listen to any particular cries for help or curses made in rage and desperation.

If he stopped here, the mission would end.

They would try to free all of the captives and then get captured and killed, and then all of this would become so, so much worse, and there would be nobody left to stop it. He looked back; none of the others showed any signs of slowing down, despite all the shock writ on their faces.

Funny, the thought wended its way past thoughts suspended by shock, He was the soldier. Wasn't he the one supposed to be professional and detached?

Yet one case near the very end of the hallway, just before they reached the locked door, nearly shattered the frozen-glass brittleness of his resolve.

He passed by a cage containing a single woman who was holding a baby, attempting to shush its wailing; it had been woken by the sudden ruckus in the chamber. She looked at him and he saw the sleepless face, the bags under the eyes, the pinched skin around her eyes and protruding cheekbones speaking to malnutrition and desperate lack of sleep.

He stopped suddenly in his pacing down the chamber, causing Sindra behind him to bump into him.

"What are you stopping for? Let's go!" she exclaimed in annoyance. He glanced back, saw her gaze pass over the woman in the cage without flinching and then back at him full of only anger and impatience, no compassion and no pity, and he saw what she had become in order to make her resistance successful, the price she had paid to push back against the Empire. She had sacrificed her humanity to combat their inhumanity. It was the way of the insurrectionist.

And he couldn't do it, not without doing at least something. He turned, looked the caged woman in the eye and saw she was begging for help in English.

"Please, take my baby—" she was babbling, over and over again, "Please, you can leave me. Just take my baby."

He looked her into the eyes as she wept, forced himself to, said, "I'll be back," and then forced himself out the door. "I will come back," he whispered again to himself as they left that awful hallway one by one.

Past the hallway where he'd left something of himself behind was a scrupulously clean area, magically maintained no doubt. Mage lights illuminated every square inch of what was clearly corridors leading into research labs, into the place they'd invented the Phoenix Rite.

The sickness was still upon him, arms and legs shaking, bile in the back of his throat, horror and shame giving way to disgust and rage.

He stumbled through the laboratory, barely registering complicated sigil-circles, the conversations of the people in his group, the focused and intense orders Gideon was giving, the way the rest of the group were splitting up and beginning to systematically dismantle the magical research facilities they had reached.

Magic.

What good was magic for if you couldn't use it to do the impossible?

What good was being human if you didn't fight for the love of each other, instead of fear and greed, selfishness and self-preservation at all costs?

What was the point of it all?

And as he pondered, an idea occurred to him, and no sooner had he realized what he could do was he rushing back through the corridor, shoving Moderates aside, Gideon was yelling at him, and then he was back in that hideous corridor surrounded by screaming again.

He reached the first cell, the one with the woman and child, and reached out his arm with his ring hand through the bars, touched her—she was gone—the child too—

Then he was running down the corridor, snatching up as many people as he could into the dimensional storage space one at a time.

—

In the control room of the Crucible, a magelight connected to one of the permanent wardlines that led to the cell blocks housing the Earthlings flickered on. A moment later a quiet alarm began to blare from that terminal.

Archmage Alloman looked over, noticed the blaring alarm, and narrowed his eyes.