Oliver looked back at the leader of the soldiers, who shouted something up to the battlements after studying his face for a moment. Whatever he found, it had convinced him that Oliver was not to be trifled with.

After a pause, the gates opened slowly, groaning under their own weight.

Oliver then just walked out, noting that the structure of the entrance was almost like an airlock, with a second gate at the other side of the large chamber opening as well.

As he passed out of the second gate, he glanced over his shoulder to see all of the soldiers following him, tensely shifting grips on swords, adjusting armor, shifting uncomfortably. As he exited the gate he could already see them murmuring to one another; a new legend had been born this day. A new archmage walked among them.

He did not turn again.

Some time later, once he'd passed beyond the outer wards of the the Crucible, he stopped walking and began to think. They had flown here, so he was once again stranded in the wilderness, and now with the burden of dozens of unexpected refugees within his ring, not to mention Grace and the scientist.

The first thing that he did was draw his fellow Earthling from the ring, where she was still hard at work providing oxygen to the rest of the inhabitants.

"Where are they? What happened?" she asked, a dreadful knowing in her eyes.

"We gained free of the fortress at a high cost, Grace," Oliver explained gently.

"What now?" Her eyes were tearing up but her face was hard, and the resilience that had stood her such good stead so far on full display.

"We need to get back to civilization, to Sung=, and I need to rebuild my system."

"Rebuild your… system?" she asked. "What happened to it? Is that even possible?"

"I'll explain, but the short story is yes, I think," said Oliver. "I'm currently holding an enormous amount of mana, not even sure how much, but I don't have the means to use it yet. If we can restore my system and grant me the ability to use magic once more in a controlled fashion, we'll be in much better shape."

"Fair," she said. "The captives are in no shape to exit the ring, so I think I'll have to stay in there and provide them oxygen, rather than expose them to the harsh environment out here." The wind whipped at their backs as they stood in the snow on the mountaintop. In the distance the Range Perilous covered the whole horizon in every direction.

"Very well," said Oliver. "I'll draw you back into the ring shortly. But I'm going to interrogate the scientist once we find some kind of shelter. I'll want you there for that."

"Naturally," she said. "What are you thinking for shelter?"

"We need to get out of here, in case the soldiers back at the Crucible want to think better of their choice to let me walk free."

"There are more mages than just the archmage on guard," she said. "They may have let you go out of fear, but we can't hope it'll stay that way."

"Any suggestions?"

"Gideon's ring held a concealment runeset engraved on an amber tablet that should serve, if you have the mana to power it."

"Oh, I have the mana to power it," said Oliver, scanning through the ring as he spoke. Moments later, his mind's eye settled on a set of eight tablets made of amber and engraved with different runes. He still hadn't learned the written run characters, and so summoned them all out before Grace, who picked out concealment, warning, and heating runesets unerringly.

"These should do," she said. "We just need to get from here as we can before sunset in order to throw them off of our mana trail."

"Then let's go," said Oliver. "If you can just dip in and out of the ring to provide oxygen, I think it makes sense for at least two of us at a minimum to be out here."

"Not sure I can do that. There are a lot of people in there, and I'm needed to convert the carbon dioxide into oxygen on pretty much an ongoing basis. In fact, I should be getting back in there shortly," she said.

"Very well. I'll bring Tiro out, then, if you think that's a good idea?"

"Do it. That way if something happens to you he'll be able to bring us out of the ring. It would be foolishness to bring everybody out at once, but we can't just leave you out here with everybody's lives in your hands on your own."

"Sounds good," he said. "Get in the ring, I'll pull Tiro out and explain the situation and then we'll move until dusk."

She gave him a sharp nod, then stood waiting while he placed a hand on her shoulder, nodded back, and popped her in the ring. In short stead, Tiro was standing in her place, looking around in a confused fashion.

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Oliver explained the situation to him and his face fell upon hearing to of the deaths of Sindra and Galen.

"You know that we're all family," he said morosely after they had begun to walk. "I don't know what I'm going to tell my cousin, Sindra's daughter."

Oliver nodded, listening to Tiro while they walked down the mountainside. The violence of the morning fell into the past, cleared away by the visions of the mountain range they were in, sun glistening off of white snow until their eyes watered from the sheer brightness of it and the wind nibbling at their faces and ears.

They were soon forced to bundle up and draw clothes across their faces and ears to preserve what little warmth they could.

—

That night within the artificial warmth of the heating rune, within the security of the concealment and early warning runes, all of which Oliver had had to be very careful not to massively overpower, they interrogated the scientist.

The man was in his forties, weak of chin and with watery grey eyes that immediately marked him as an intellectual of no particular rebel persuasion.

His eyes widened as he reacted to being suddenly withdrawn from the ring to face Oliver, Grace, and Tiro, all of whom stared him down with stern expressions.

Oliver took the initiative to speak, opening bluntly and not giving the man a chance to catch his balance.

"The Phoenix Rite. Teach it to me."

"The—the archmage will come for—" the man began to blabber, dried tears and snot around his nose and eyes speaking little of his personal strength of character.

"The archmage is dead," said Oliver sternly, taking a step forward. "I killed him, by destroying his system."

"You—you destroyed his system?" said the man uncomprehendingly. "That's impossible!"

"It's true," said Grace, stepping forward. Beside her, Tiro only smiled, but his smile was one of an insidious menace that even Oliver who was supposedly on his side was impressed by.

"Do you want me to show you how I did it?" asked Oliver, raising a hand.

"No, no, wait, let's be reasonable here," said the man, glancing around and taking in their surroundings; a bare mountainside with nary a tree nor rock in sight, a cliff just beyond them with a sheer drop down hundreds of feet; it was quite a sight, even in the near-darkness of evening light.

Oliver's feet ached as he took another step closer, the day's walking having done them in. Without the Second Wind spell, he was not able to heal them as he would have liked to, even though he had mana to spare.

"Then why don't you yield to me the spell of the Phoenix Rite?"

The man took no more persuasion after that, readily handing over the spell reference to both Oliver, Grace, and Tiro — backups — and crouching down, with secondary shudders of fear rippling through his body.

Oliver, Tiro, and Grace looked at each other silently.

"Now what?" asked Grace. "How do we know it's the real deal?"

"Well… we could test it," suggested Tiro. "Try to summon somebody else."

"I don't think—" began Grace at the same that Oliver said "Absolutely not. We aren't going to summon anybody else to this world without being sure if we can reverse the spell. We need to get back to Sung and have him analyze the spell before we do anything else."

"Will we bring the scientist the whole way?" Grace asked, turning to Oliver.

"Of course we will, on the off-chance that he deceived us and gave us the wrong spell, or something like that."

"Is it safe to bring him?" Grace said.

"Did you see the dried snot and tears on his face?" asked Tiro. "That's not the face of a man prepared to do anything to defend his secrets. That's the face of a man terrified for his own life and willing to do anything to preserve it."

"Indeed," confirmed Oliver. "We'll see no trouble from him."

"It's decided, then," said Grace. "We'll proceed back to the city on foot as fast as we can and then decode the spell and try to reverse it once we get back to Sung and the spell analyzer."

The scientist looked up at that, glancing from face to face. "The spell analyzer?" he asked, sounding confused. "Who are you? Ephresian? Khelvan?"

They all ignored him.

"What are you planning to do with my spell?" the scientist persisted, despite the fact that they weren't paying him any attention. "What does the analyzer do? Reverse it? What does that even mean, reverse it? If you wanted to kill somebody again, wouldn't a dagger do? Please."

There was a certain heat in his voice that he hadn't even had while his life and his system were being threatened. The indignance of a master craftsman whose work was being impugned.

"What do you mean, comparing reversing the spell to killing somebody?" asked Grace finally, confused.

"Well, isn't that why you came for me? I completed the… spell?" he trailed off uncertainly.

"You completed it?" asked Tiro.

The scientist's lips compressed as he glanced around uneasily, aware that he'd possibly just given the more information than they'd already had.

"Tell me now and speak plain," said Oliver, low and fast. "What does the Phoenix Rite do?"

"Well, I'd just gotten it to work, finally," said the man after little prompting. "Brought… somebody back to life."

Tiro took a step back, shock on his features. "Gods above, man, you're joking. It works?"

The scientist straightened up, exclaiming indignantly, "I, Arcules, would not jest about my own life's work! And if you kill me, you'll — you'll never know how it's possible!"

Oliver stepped forward and put him in the ring again immediately, glancing back at Grace and Tiro. "This is a problem. The spell, it's not the one that brought us here, is it?"

"Well, it could be both," suggested the microbiologist hopefully. "Like, if you're not dead it brings you here, if you're not, it brings your body and restores it to life somehow?"

"That doesn't make any sense," said Oliver. "If it brings somebody back to life then does it require a body to work on? Or… what?"

"There's one way to find out," Tiro said, gesturing towards Oliver's ring. "Ask him."

When they summoned the scientist from the ring again he seemed more disturbed than before, pale and shaking. Upon being summoned, he immediately burst out, before they could even get a word in edgewise — "You're from Earth, aren't you?"

They didn't respond and he backed up, looking from one face to another. He paled even further. "Oh, please, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't know, they made me," — and broke down into babbling, even more terrified than before.

Oliver wasn't sure what he'd expected to feel when he found the man was responsible for plucking him from his life and depositing him in this place, but evidently the man in question expected anger to be the only response.

Indeed, as Oliver looked at Grace, he saw that eyes were narrowed in anger.

"You…" spat, venom in her voice. "You did this."