He had finally arrived near the warehouse where the letter They left him had directed him to go. They had left the squirming package for his ritualized set of spells which Hoab had been using to bring back Iztha, at least briefly.

One couldn’t ask for a more reasonable fee for his work than that, he consoled himself.

Hoab was feeling low.

While the excitement he had been planning to create at his benefactors’ behest was exactly the kind of fun he wanted to pursue, he was always low after summoning Iztha back to her body… summoning her back to him.

The process was wet, and incredibly messy. The volume of…offal, he guessed it would be called, that one had to pull out and chew upon to get the process moving along as the spells were wrought upon the awaiting body of his beloved Iztha, was just impressive. So many feet of innards… he thought in a mildly depressed daze of post visit joy he always felt.

And when Iztha returned to her body, she would begin her moments in the land of the waking world by saying the same thing every time. “Oh, Hoab, what have you done?” And then she would cry. Most of her “visits” didn’t last more than the time it took an old man to befoul a latrine. Sometimes her visits would be her waking up, looking at his naked, blood covered body, asking him what he had done, and then crying in his arms as he rocked with her, comforting her until she slipped away from him again. Back into the ether of wherever it was that those Talents who burn themselves out go.

They called it “asologee.” When a Talent pushed themselves beyond the range of their Talents, either in scope or category, they would kill themselves.

If they were lucky.

The magicians might make of themselves a shambling wreck of a thing, if they were unlucky. Sometimes that meant a truly mindless walking husk, like his Iztha; other times the hapless victim of their inherent limits would become a shadow of the being they had previously been. A barely intelligent thing, lacking soul and drive, fit only for simple tasks at best, and acting out a parody of the actions they had completed in life.

There was a third kind of asologee victim they had learned about in their training all those years ago in far off Velspe. The kind Hoab didn’t want to think about. THe kind his mind shied away from. Those poor asologes whose efforts shattered their mind, and lost most, but not all’ of their connection to their Talents.

…Oh, Hoab. What have you done?...

Every visit started the same. And hearing Iztha’s voice made his heart sing… but, what she always said drove pain deep into his soul.

Sometimes they would talk. They would comfort one another. They might speak of the plans they had made during the War for when the nightmare of kingdoms trying to eradicate one another ended and they could go back to their home in Velspe.

He could hear her voice. In his head for days after each visit. That plaintive “Oh, Hoab….” that almost broke his heart to hear. He knew that never hearing it again would hurt him worse than it ever did to hear the disappointment in her breaking, rasping voice.

He could see, for just a flash of a moment, the two of them. They had held hands on a battlefield as the rest of their Circle had died around the two in a conflagration of fire and ossification. He watched as the man to his left had sloughed off his skin as ashes while his organs became stone. And that boy in the Hamurian uniform had turned to Grand Mage Marius Hoabadi and his Circle’s commander, Grand Mage Iztha Lorenzi.

And then Hoab cringed in the shadowed alley of the warehouse, his breathing ragged as he curled about himself at the painful fragment of a memory. His left shoulder gathered bloodied splinters from the rough wooden planking that made up the wall of the building as his skin tore.

…Oh, Hoab. What have you done?...

Then he heard the cheers come from inside the barn-like structure. Gathering himself up, Hoab slithered back to standing, and worked at arranging his mismatched clothing. With concentration, he was able to slowly bring his breathing back under his control, and when he noticed his dripping nose and the mess it had made of his face, he paused in confusion as the slimy mess.

Wandering back down the alley, he found the sleeping drunk he had stepped over earlier. Reaching down, he reached toward the man’s jacket, but then he noticed it’s fine weave, if it’s very foreign cut. Hoab then ripped a strip of the man’s scarf that had been held in place by his hat and wrapped his head and shoulders.

Using a bit of rain water that had collected in a puddle, he used the scrap to clean his face of the crusting snot. And then he noticed the remnants of blood and… chyme… left over from his summoning rituals.

Stolen story; please report.

More scrubbing.

More scraps ripped from the sleeping man’s scarf, followed by more frantic scrubbing.

Hoab then decided to just take the man’s nice, warm coat, slowly rolling the limp body of the heavy drunkard from the finely woven, thick fabric. Between the pattern of the weave, and the scarf he had been wearing, this man could have been from Selmet. Or one of the other desert kingdoms closer to his original home of Velspe, which lay an ocean and most of a continent away.

Shaking out the coat, and fitting it to himself, Hoab noted that his lanky frame took up enough of the cut of the coat to make up for his not being as heavy and barrel-like as it’s former owner who now snored on his belly in the puddle where Hoab had just cleaned most of his filth.

With a shake of his shoulders, and a flexing of his neck that created a blissful cracking of the vertebrae along its lanky length, Hoab turned with a broad grin to the front of the building.

The two men who stood to either side of the wide entrance watched his approach with stone faced frowns.

“Private meeting tonight, Beanpole. Take a shave.” One gruff voice told him as he walked to them from the shadows.

The other man just crossed his thick arms and lowered his brows at Hoab’s approach.

“Ah, but I have been invited, sirs! They are all waiting for me inside.” With that, he took the pendant from within his shirt, and gestured at it.

The first man, obviously the more talkative of the two giants, squinted at the medallion. “What’s that supposed to be then?”

Hoab’s mouth widened painfully as his smile tugged the corners of his lips further out from his nose. “I come with joyous news from the Temple of Arluon, my friends. Can you not see the shape of the moon? The curve of the silver shining in the night air?”

A grumbling “hrrrrrm…” rumbled deep and low from the other doorman, a look of mild annoyance spiced with perplexity clouded his blocky features. The first doorman who wore a red fringed tunic, reached out a finger to not quite touch the silver of the disc that hung from the cord about Hoab’s neck.

“I thought the old priestess, Ord, wasn’t going to support us.” He said it as a statement, but Hoab treated it as a question.

“Oh, my sons! MY SONS! You know how the Temples are all tied up with the worst kind of politics! HaHA!” His voice cracked slightly at the end of the laughter. “The Beloved High Priestess Caora Ord, blessings beneath Arluon’s eternal light,” and here Hoab used both hands to make a crescent gesture in front of his chest that he raised above his head. “...she cannot be seen to publicly support you Men.”

He put extra emphasis on the word “Men.” As thorough these men meeting here tonight were far more important than any other men that may lay claim to the title.

“No, my sons…” He shook his head in sorrow now. “Until certain criteria are met, she cannot step so far outside of what the other Temples would allow her to do. To publicly give support to the Sons of Arluon, well…” Here he spread his hands, and gestured to the world at large, and let their little, angry minds fill in all the petty, vile details they might want to think apply. After all, there was no victim so apt at finding slights than the self-made victim.

The closer man smiled at the idea that their group might have official support, and that their official support may be acting on the sly. Who didn’t like a good story about spitting in the eyes of the powerful. The story of the small guy out-thinking their oppressors.

The other large man added another of his signature “...hrrrrm…” noises. The man in the red fringed tunic then asked, “And you,” and here he gestured at the scrawny, lanky, eclectically dressed figure of Hoab. “You… are a Priest of Arluon?”

Here Hoab’s eyes widened as far as comfort would allow. “Oh, my son! Please! Who else would Caora send to you in your hour of need? I am here to bring to you Arluon’s Blessings!”

At this slippery use of obfuscation, both large men fell directly where Hoab had hoped their minds might push them to land. “Come, both of you! I know you have to watch the door, but a quick prayer and a blessing for each of you!”

Both men knelt before Hoab at this, and he could feel the right side of his mouth tear slightly at the stretched corner.

From within the warehouse, none of those men who had gathered to air their grievances and look for solutions in the company of their fellows could hear Hoab’s approach.

None of those men heard the blessing that Hoab laid upon the two of their number they had trusted to watch the door.

—

The fourty or so men who stood in the torchlit center of the cavernous room were being addressed by Gillert, a dock foreman who most of those assembled respected.

As Gillet had begun speaking to the men on the topic of the injustices of having to acknowledge a mere goddess of the sun as being superior to their preferred God of the largest and most visible of the three moons, many of the men nodded along. Several shouted “YES!” in their enthusiasm.

And as Gillert had just gotten his face red with effort in egging on the crowd about the new king being crowned by the High Priest of the Goddess of the Sun, and did that mean he was “No King of theirs? No king of MEN?”

There his tirade was broken by the sound of a screeching cackle from outside of the front doors to the warehouse.

Every one of the men in attendance stopped where they stood, cocking heads to listen to the screaming sounds of joy and horrible laughter. Many turned to look at the front doors to the warehouse, then to witness those doors splintering and the shards and splinters of those same doors flying in to greet those same men.

Then the two hulking forms of…something… blocked out the light of the moon from entering through the hole where those stout doors had just stood.

There was a roar that made several of those men lose whatever had been held in their bowels. And then the two things entered the warehouse.