WHAM!

A column of heavy stone speared out from the side of the wall and crunched into Xei's side as he ran at the man, sending him flying into the opposite wall. Dei had been following right after the skeletal guard herself, and now she dropped to one knee, sliding below the outstretched stone fist that had taken Xei in the side.

The arcanist's eyes grew noticeably as he saw her appear from below the column as he backed up a couple steps while raising one hand towards her. The massive flagstone ahead of her started to rise quickly towards the ceiling, but for some reason the large stone wasn't moving quite as quick as the last strike at Xei, and she found herself rolling over the column as it threatened to crush her against the roof.

Dei contorted her body over the other side of the raised stone, and she all but fell on the man as he grasped for a weapon that was noticably absent from his hip at that moment. The skeleton threw a sword slash at the man as he finally accepted that his weapon was missing, and raised a single arm to accept her blow head on.

His chain necklace glowed softly as the arm of his robe turned to stone to block the attack with hardly a chip in his defenses as her sword bounced off pointlessly. Still, Dei had at least anticipated some sort of resistance like this so she whirled her sword in a small arc to try and reach around the man's guard. Behind her she could feel Xei sending out some type of non-verbal command that reverberated around the room, but she was too intent on the mage to really pay attention to what he was trying to do.

The arcanist wheeled his arm in place, blocking her next two or three sword strikes even as she could see the man's robes form into a strange articulated gauntlet that surrounded his arm and was slowly spreading out to the rest of his body. Thankfully, Xei finally had the chance to catch up with her and came running out from one side of the column behind her.

The man faced them both head on now, as his earthen gauntlet forced away their sword strikes with quick swipes of his arm, while his off hand started to make grabbing movements for the walls. Both the skeletons had at least seen what was coming as additional spears of rock started shooting out of the wall at them as the man manipulated his off hand.

Xei swung in a small semi-circle, cutting through one of the thinner earth spears as it shot at him, then sending a pommel strike at the arcanist that landed pointlessly on the gauntlet. Meanwhile Dei had taken the chance to duck under the spear aimed at her chest, then swung upward towards the man's groin only to ricochet off the rocky breastplate that had extended down past the man's hips at this point.

The duo exchanged a wordless agreement that all the rock based armor seemed to be weighing on the man at this point as the full chestpiece and arm seemed to be preventing him from moving very far, but that wasn't about to help them get through his defenses either. Both of them threw attack after attack at the man as he merely moved his body in small shifts and turns to match each strike with an armored piece of his body.

Unfortunately, the man's free hand was starting to do its work as he left the jutting earthen spears sticking out of the wall and slowly obstructing the movement of the two of them as he started trapping them in place. Dei's eyes burned as she soon realized that the man hadn't truly been aiming for them directly as thick stone bars started to block her in from the left and right, thick enough she could no longer swing through them with her sword.

Xei was caught in a similar situation as the two of them were now forced to back off from the Arcanist while more and more pillars of stone restricted their ability to even throw a decent sword strike at him. The man had started smiling, even as sweat worked its way down his forehead as he continued to manipulate the stones around them, and he started talking.

“So, are you two from the Southern Marches? I’m fairly certain no normal human could have survived that first punch at the start there.”

The two skeletons failed to reply from behind their wooden masks, even as they twisted back and forth to avoid the continued assault even as the man spoke from behind the earthen fence he had made in the hallway.

“But to think that you even had the gall to impersonate one of my acolytes performing a sacred right! You will not leave this temple alive!”

Dei was starting to run out of room now as her back started to press up against the massive stone column behind her. Another spear shot up at an angle this time to intersect with her even as she tried dodging a different attack, and the rock cut cleanly through the center of her spine. Somewhat surprised by the attack, she hesitated for a moment then allowed her chest to slump forward even as the man sent another two spears to pin her left shoulder and hips to the wall as well. The audible cracks of several other bones reverberated throughout the room even among the distant thuds of flying earth.

Xei lasted a couple moments later, but soon met a similar fate along one of the side walls as a particularly well placed spear jutted out from behind him to intersect with another spear coming from the front, immediately locking him in place. The arcanist seemed to deflate now that the two of them were subdued as he released the rock armor across his body to fall onto the floor.

His robe had flaked off from the man to reveal a thin cloth jerkin resting over his chest, and sleeveless arms that could be seen through the holes in his sleeves.

‘Curious, it seems like he turned the actual fabric of his clothes into rock.’

‘Yeah, but he couldn't change it back to cloth. Guess it’s got its own flaws like our magic.’ Xei replied

‘So who do you think takes him out first?’

‘Fei, for sure.’

The man had leaned over to rest with his hands on his knees as he made sure not to drop his gaze from the pair of them even as he rested for a moment. It was as though he wasn't quite sure whether they were truly dead yet as he stared over their constricted bodies, ready for them to start moving again at any moment.

Some soft footsteps finally rapped across the stone behind him and his shoulder's finally relaxed a little bit. “Glad someone else finally made it here,” the man said as he turned to face his friend only for a glowing purple spike of bone to catch him straight through his skull. The necklace at his chest finally dulled as a half desiccated corpse withdrew its sword arm and swung the weapon from the elbow down in an attempt to get the blood off.

The arcanist's body tumbled to the ground even as Dei and Xei started to perk up once more, manipulating their bones to contort their broken bodies out of whatever traps the man had thought they were forced into.

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‘Took you long enough.’ Xei shot out at the corpse as it walked over to start chopping at the thin stoney bars blocking up the passageway.

‘I was trying to find a good chance to gather some bone marrow without making too much noise in the process.’ she shrugged at them, ‘I didn't really have a chance to make it sound natural until he started catching you with the attacks.’

After Dei had formed her body back into something usable she almost swung her sword at the pillars around her before she realized that using her bare fist might work better after what happened during the fight. A couple of fused together knuckle bones mixed with some reinforcement, and suddenly she was punching her way through the pillars with minimal effort.

Xei quickly copied her method as the three of them broke through the earthen prison bars and started walking towards the entrance. Dei made a quick nod towards Fei as the temporary corpse for the girl slowly crawled into the open cubby she had come from before Dei gingerly replaced the wooden covering that closed off the hole in the stone, hiding the skeleton within. With an unspoken order to ‘STAY’, she felt the ten or so bodies in the room that had responded to Xei's earlier ‘RISE’ command go still within their crypts.

Fei, meanwhile, had traced her connection back to Dei and once again rested within their shared body as they divided up control in their usual fashion.

The two skeletal warriors quickly made their way up the flights of stairs without meeting anyone else, and snaked their way through the open pews of the church without anyone seeming to notice the open holes cut through their armor.

Far below the ground, several acolytes started yelling for help as they found a lone earth arcanist that had been murdered after what looked to have been an intense fight in the city morgue. Dei felt their cries of alarm echo within the earshot of nearly a dozen different corpses that now felt tied to her, forming an unspoken threat deep in the heart of Fort Miller, just in case she ever needed an impromptu army.

—

An alarm bell started to toll through the night as Ozwald and Felix made their way through the ornate red doors that marked the front of the local temple. Wordlessly, the two weaved their way in and out of the crowd that had stopped to look in the direction of the ringing bells echoing through the night's air. The pair had learned something today that didn't bode well for them at all.

While they had started the night following a strange pair of travelers in wooden masks as they made their way through the city, the men broke off from the duo at this point to enter a small building just around the corner from the large temple, bolting the door into place behind them. Ten seconds later or so, the heavy running cadence of a large number of armored individuals could be easily heard through the door as the undercover soldiers softly crept up the stairs to a higher floor.

As they reached the second floor of the building the two men tried their best to walk quietly past three different beds all crammed into the small attic space along with four or five bodies of a sleeping family scattered throughout the room. Sergeant Ozwald had arranged for the princedom loyalist that owned this house to conveniently leave his doorway unlocked at night on the off chance the soldier needed to lay low for a bit. The two men slowly made their way over to a small circular window looking out over the small alley of the temple as more and more soldiers ran towards the tolling bells, then rushed back the other way to begin their search.

Sergeant Ozwald was all too aware of the fact that himself and his mage had more or less fit the same exact descriptions as the pair they had been following, one obviously a larger armored man, and the other a thinner robed individual. Still, it was hard to count his blessings considering the fact that his prey had all but fallen into his lap as they stopped for the night at the very same inn that he was staying at. It had been somewhat stressful at the time as several informants filtered into the room to feed him rumors about the masked pair walking down market street, but paying for information had always been his primary plan until the shard bearer practically walked into him.

The only problem now was the fact that the masked pair had managed to not only sneak into one of the most well guarded areas on the border of the golden kingdom, but then killed an earth mage in his very home. Sure, the shard-bearers had nearly individually conquered the known kingdoms some twenty years ago, but times had changed since then. Common men had the ability to steal a fraction of that power through dedication and drive now that the shard-bearers had opened their arms to followers in their power. Despite this, Ozwald started to reflect on the fact that he hadn't really heard any stories about what happened when mages fought shard-bearer's directly.

It just didn't happen, he supposed. Most of the mages hadn't come into their full powers until long after the gods had taken their seats of power, so why would they even need to fight in person at this point, much less against their own mages?

Ozwald shook his head once again at his bad luck as his mind fell back into that other world to make his reports to higher, even as more guards streamed back and forth through the city streets below, searching for an unknown assailant.

—

Dei immersed herself into the bone sight, giving the others call outs on which alley ways to take to avoid running into anyone else as they pieced their way through the city. It was only after a good fifteen minutes of travel like this that she started to realize that it might be harder to find an unnamed inn in the middle of the city than she had been really thinking about when she left the place.

Sure, just find the market street and follow it back to the small building on the right side, but, uh, where had the market gone? She was fairly sure she was at least in the right section of town as she started to get close to one of the massive wooden gates in the wall, but now what? The temple bells continued to ring in the distance as she looked up the wooden walls at several skeletal bodies that were obviously paying more attention to what was happening inside the city than outside of it.

‘That's it, bones! I wonder whether we could trace our way back to our little birdy.’

At least armed with a plan at this point, the duo started combing through the city streets as they looked about for a small bird corpse hovering in a second floor bedroom. Funnily enough they quickly found a bird corpse at the top of a building after hardly a minute, until they walked up to the front door to find that it was actually a blacksmiths shop, and decidedly not their planned destination.

Next they started narrowing it down to searching for a small bird corpse next to the shapes of several other sleeping humans, which thankfully did the trick after they guided their way around patrolling guards for the better part of another half hour.

The bar-keep hardly gave them a glance as he recognized the twin masked figures from earlier in the day, and the two of them quickly headed upstairs as they sent silent prayers that the man wasn't about to rat them out to the guards for being, well, strange. Still, as they finally made it back up to their bedroom after a long stressful night, what concerned them far more was the fact that someone was sitting on one of their beds.

Xei slowly undid his sword, getting ready to meet another worst case scenario, but Dei suddenly had the feeling like she recognized this skeleton, even as she still chose to carefully open the doorway. Their visitor quickly got up from her seat as she noticed them entering, and with a few brisk steps she had come all the way to the door, grabbed Dei by the arm, and all but yanked her deeper into the room with a sense of urgency. Xei followed her in as quickly as he could, but stopped short halfway through the door as he realized his mistake and quickly tried to put his sword away even as Charity looked back at him over Dei's shoulder.

A short flick of her head told the man that she wanted him to close the door, which he did, after which the two gangly skeletons stood still in the center of the room in front of Charity. Several holes looked like they had been punched through the chest and shoulders of both of their outfits for the day as three different colors of burning eyes looked at the grown woman staring them down with crossed arms at the other end of the room.

“Just what have the two of you done?”

Alarm bells continued to clang in the distance as the skeleton’s shared a look at each other and Dei resisted the urge to point at the bird corpse she had stored away in her sack.