“-UUUCK,” Lance concluded.

“Well that wasn’t very nice,” Gabriel said, genuinely hurt.

“This is not an uncommon reaction,” the crypt keeper informed them, “Did you happen to kill this gentleman?”

“No! No, we did not,” Gabriel was adamant.

“You cut my fucking fingers off!” Albright yelled around a mouthful of swollen tongue.

“Okay, that we did do, and we feel terrible about it, don’t we Lydia?”

Lydia shrugged.

“We didn’t kill you though!” Gabriel continued, “You did that all by yourself, remember?”

Lance clearly didn’t, “My fingers,” he sobbed as he inspected his ruined hand.

“Let’s not get caught up on the past, now,” Gabriel said with as much cheer as he could muster, “Water under the bridge?”

Albright replayed the conversation, “Wait. Killed?!”

“Try and focus on the positives, buddy,” Vish added.

“Am I dead?!”

Gabriel scratched his head, “How long does this usually take?” he asked the crypt master.

“It varies. Death can be a difficult thing to come to terms with.”

“And how long can you keep him like this?”

“As long as I choose to sustain the spell.”

“… Which is?”

The crypt keeper looked up, “My schedule is not terribly busy.”

Gabriel nodded, “That’s something, at least,” he found his throat suddenly dry but figured it was probably poor form to complain about his mortal ailments at such a time, “Lance, we’re going to need you to focus for a bit. We need to ask you about the jewelry you bought from Screamer. Knowingly or unknowingly,” he said with his palms up, “you purchased stolen property. We need those jewels back.”

“Fuck you!” Albright tried to spit at the end but just ended up hacking on… actually, it was probably best not to think about what he was choking on.

Lydia rolled her eyes, “Right, here we go again.”

The warrior whipped her hatchet out and slammed it down on another of Lance’s digits. It didn’t separate as cleanly this time, and continued to writhe like a bisected worm.

“Grim,” Vish announced.

“Lydia,” Gabriel said, only slightly disapprovingly.

“Whhhhhyy?” Lance wailed.

“It gets results,” Lydia defended.

Gabriel raised his eyes very slowly, “Does it really, Lydia? Does it really?”

The reanimated noble tried to shuffle himself off the table but his body betrayed him, leaving him flopping like a fish out of water.

“Can he move?” Figo asked with evident interest.

“Yes, just as he can speak,” the crypt keeper pointed out, “At the moment he is trying to move from memory, using blood and muscle that no longer responds. It is the aether that holds him now. He will learn how to master it soon enough. His movements may be stiff at first though… As if he has aetheritus.”

“You stop that,” Gabriel warned.

“Should I cut off his feet?” Lydia asked.

“Gods, Lydia,” Vish, Figo and Gabriel said, at exactly the same time Lance was saying, “Nooo!”

“Do not cut off this man’s feet,” Gabriel emphasised.

“Alright,” she said, clearly thinking them mad.

She cut off another finger instead.

“Stop it! Stop cutting things off!” Gabriel barked, “Go stand in the corner,” he pointed.

“Are you serious?” she asked.

“Deathly serious!”

The crypt keeper hummed, “Ah, I rather like that one.”

“And you keep quiet as well!” Gabriel was literally tearing at his hair now as Lance rolled around in agony he couldn’t actually feel, “Lance, listen. Lance? Lance can you stop trying to escape for a second. Lance! Gods.”

While the others were backing away from Albright’s flailing corpse, Bling stepped forward. With a look of pure serenity, she placed a palm on the dead man’s chest and looked directly into his puffy, milky eyes.

Lance rocked and whimpered a little longer, but slowly he began to settle. With each pendular motion, he looked into Bling’s eyes a little longer, and a little deeper.

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Her gaze was soft.

Her smile was gentle.

Lance stopped fighting, and simply stared.

“Natasha? What are you doing, Natasha?” Gabriel asked, “What’s she doing?” he asked his mind-mapper.

“I have no clue,” Vish said.

“It’s beautiful,” Lance whispered, his voice completely transformed.

“Oi, that’s my sister you decaying prick.”

“He sees the aether,” the crypt keeper explained, “It calls him.”

Gabriel stooped down so that he could also peer into Natasha’s eyes. They looked like eyes.

“Okaay, well, that’s good I suppose,” he placed a hand on his sister’s arm, “We just need him for a moment longer, Natasha, then he can go.”

Bling didn’t so much as glance as her brother, but she slowly retracted her hand, smiling all the while, and took a few deliberate steps back.

“Huh. Who would have thought that resurrected dead guy wasn’t going to be the creepiest thing we saw today,” Vish wondered, “Anyone?”

“We’ll worry about that later,” Gabriel said, literally shaking himself, “For now, though,” he exhaled and deliberately checked his tone before speaking, “Lance, we feel terrible about what happened to you, and we don’t want to keep you any longer than we have to. All you have to do to go back is answer our question.”

“Does Death look more like him,” Vish pointed at the crypt keeper, “or her?” he pointed at Bling.

Figo dutifully elbowed the mind-mapper gently in the ribs, to save Gabriel the trouble of vaulting the table and slapping the man silly.

Gabriel continued, “Where are Vagalad’s jewels?”

Lance was in a trance. He turned his head very slowly so that Gabriel was in his line of vision, but he looked through the mercenary, not at him.

“If I tell you, you have to promise not to hurt her.”

“Hurt who?” Gabriel asked, relieved to finally be getting somewhere.

“You have to promise,” he squeezed his eyes shut for a heartless heartbeat as if to dislodge the tears he expected to be there, “I couldn’t bare it if, if…”

“Okay,” Gabriel said, and couldn’t help but notice that he received a very unimpressed look from Lydia, “Okay, I promise. We don’t want anyone else to suffer. Who has the jewels?”

Lance swallowed the last of his reluctance, “My mother. I bought the jewels for my mother.”

“Your mother?” Gabriel was taken aback, “Is she going to sell them on at the Albright Empori- Is she handling their sale?”

“No,” Albright shook his head. His neck made a disconcerting squeaking noise, “You don’t understand. They were just for her.”

“For her? Are they useful to her?” Gabriel pried.

“You don’t understand,” Albright repeated.

“Help me to. Was this your way of funding them?” Gabriel was unconsciously leaning closer.

“Who?”

“Them! Them,” Gabriel said a little calmer, but not much, “The Order of the Rising Dragon. This has something to do with them, right?”

There were no muscles on the skeleton to tense, no brow to furrow, but somehow Gabriel imagined that this last question had piqued the crypt keeper’s interest.

Lance looked beyond tired, “I don’t care about them. I just bought some jewels for my mother.”

“No, no, that can’t be it,” Gabriel was shaking his head violently, “You can’t have died for that. You must have something to do with them!”

“Gabriel,” Figo said cautiously.

The mercenary captain looked to the hunter, and followed the young man’s gaze. He saw his own hands gripping Lance Albright’s shoulder’s, so tightly that his thumbs bit the rotting flesh beneath his clothing. Gabriel quickly recoiled.

“Let me go,” Lance said in a near whisper. It was clear he didn’t mean physically.

“Wait. Where can we find her? Where will we find your mother?”

“Home,” Lance said, as if from a distant place, “She’s always home.”

There was no slumping of limbs, no eyes rolling back in their sockets, but it was very clear that Lance Albright had departed once more.

“Lance? Lance! We have more questions, Lance,” Gabriel yelled into the corpse’s vapid face, “Where is he? Where did he go?” Gabriel accused the crypt keeper.

“I allowed him to pass,” the necromancer said simply.

“You said you could keep him indefinitely. You said you weren’t busy!” Gabriel laughed, and it sounded maniacal even to him.

“I am not in the business of torturing the dead, mercenary. You got what you needed from him. It was his time to pass.”

“Shit!” Gabriel shouted.

“Woah, relax!” Vish hushed his old comrade, “We found out what we needed to know. We can just ask our friend Nail-puller for the ma’s address and grab what we came here for. No need to stress! We’re almost home free, Gabe. This is great news!”

“No, Vish, this is not ‘great news’,” Gabriel spat.

“I don’t get it.”

“Of course you don’t get it, you insensitive prick!”

Vish winced slightly before correcting his expression for indignation, “What the hell has gotten into you?”

“What’s gotten into me? What’s gotten into you?” he gestured at the four of them, “We’ve tracked these jewels from one end of The Kaden Circle to the other, bodies dropping in our footprints all the while, racking up warrants in two cities on our way. Now we find that the guy we were chasing is actually a little old lady! A little old lady who’s son just wanted to buy her some nice sparkly things!” he threw up his hands.

“We don’t know that for suuure,” Vish said noncommittally.

“He’s dead, Vish. Dead. Why would he lie?”

“I can think of a few reasons…”

“The point is that there’s not some massive conspiracy. We’re not on the precipice of some world changing cataclysm, and we’re not, no matter how you spin it, on the right, fucking, side. We’re just a couple of retarded, bloody inept, fucking psychotic,” he gestured at Lydia, who scoffed back, “useless tits!”

“Hey! Hey! You take that back,” Vish said vehemently, “Tits are not useless.”

“Go join Lance, Vish,” Gabriel sneered, stalking for the door.

“Gabriel,” Figo said softly, “we couldn’t have known. We did our job, and this is where it led us. I don’t like it anymore than you do, but we are not to blame,” Figo literally dug his heels in, “We stuck by you, Gabriel, now it’s time for you to do the same.”

Gabriel’s glare did not falter, but his voice was quieter when he finally said, “Let’s just get this over with and try and get back to some semblance of a normal life.”

“Excuse me,” the crypt keeper said in his usual monotone, “but before you go, I heard you mention something,” all eyes turned to the looming skeleton, “The Order of the Rising Dragon?”

Gabriel waved a dismissive hand, “Just a bunch of loonies who have nothing to do with anything. They want to change the world, or some such shit. I think half the nutters believe some mythical dragon called Ruby told them to. Some crap like that.”

They made to leave.

“Ruby,” the crypt keeper echoed, “Ruby is not a myth.”

“Come again,” Gabriel said, utterly exasperated.

“Ruby is very real indeed. I have seen him.”

“And how the hell would you have seen him? You live in a gods’ damned tomb,” Gabriel looked around for effect.

“I didn’t always.”

“Oh, whatever. If, and I mean IF, those stories were even real, it all happened millennia ago,” Gabriel put his hands on his hips, “I’m supposed to believe you’ve actually seen a creature from ancient legend?”

Gabriel seemed to remember then that he was talking to a skeleton. A skeleton from a race he neither recognized, nor had heard of. A skeleton who was also a necromancer.

The captain faltered. You know, just a bit.

The crypt keeper straightened to his full height. He was easily a Gabriel and a half.

Gabriel was starting to regret his little rant as the keeper’s shadow engulfed him. It occurred to him then that anyone who had feasibly served Ruby in ages past, was perhaps not long since dead, but long since undead.

The mercenary edged towards the staircase but had a strong suspicion he wouldn’t ever get to try the locked gate at its top.

The skeleton seemed to sigh his next words.

“I’ll put the kettle on.”