Our path opened up on the headquarters of our hideout, a place we’d only ever referenced in metaphor so that Fizzbarren wouldn’t know where it was. We had our own underground palace, a place we’d furnished by emptying our inventories of a huge supply of furniture from our dungeon crawling days. If some of it was a little gaudy for my taste, it was little enough to put up with. Twenty versions of the Eroomtsim mansion held more than enough furniture for our above-ground mansion and two or three underground palaces. One might think you were in a stone fortress if not for the lack of windows, though we’d dressed up some landscape paintings with curtains to make it feel a bit less claustrophobic.

“Only if I can teach him the spell,” Kat responded to my comment, flopping down into a plush chair.

“I’m not sure there’s anyone else I’d trust,” I worried. To survive, I finished the thought, but kept that part mental. We’d brought our conversation to a verbal level and caught the king up.

“Thank you, dear,” the king, not being a person to be waited upon when servants were not around, bent to light a fire in the fireplace. I’d worried about the smoke and where it would escape, but it was a game and game mechanics didn’t stretch that far. We also didn’t have to worry about dank moisture leaking into our living quarters in the rain or mildew in the walls.

Kat pulled out some parchment and had to try three times to get the Resurrection spell to scribe out. She kept at it until she had four copies of the spell.

“Do you have any priest abilities?” Kat asked the king, who was casting Spark at the kindling.

“Not that I know of,” he shook his head and retreated from the fire to sit near Kat.

“Can you understand any of this?” Kat handed one of the scrolls to the king.

The king cocked his head at the scroll, nodded and laid a hand on the paper. Nothing happened. In the meantime, Kat was focusing on another stone until it glowed. It was obvious that she was getting the hang of it because it glowed the first time this time. It took two tries for her to get one more stone to glow.

“Dad?” Kat handed a scroll to Dom. I thought that was a longshot, but Dom gave it a try and the scroll disappeared.

“Really?” I protested weakly, my pride hurt that Dom had managed to memorize a spell that I couldn’t.

“Serial Killer, control of death and life,” Dom shrugged, but I glared playfully at his arrogant smirk.

“Okay,” I let my mind flip on the mental gymnastics that a 137 intelligence could provide. “If Dom has Kat’s stone and Kat has Dom’s stone, then either of them can die and bring the other one back. That works, but it doesn’t answer who keeps my stone.”

“It doesn’t matter, so I’ll keep it.” Kat tossed her own stone to Dom and tucked his into her inventory. “If he dies, I resurrect you both. If I die, Dad resurrects me, and I resurrect you.”

“And if you both die?” My mind jumped to the worst scenario.

“Then you need to hit the button,” Dom told me.

“And if I’m dead?” I protested.

“Then none of this matters,” Dom stated plainly in a way that dropped my stomach out. In a bad way. If I could think it and I didn’t have a plan for it, it would happen. That was my life. Dread settled on me, but my brain worked the problem.

Intelligence +1

“Can you make two stones for one person?” I asked.

“No,” Kat admitted. “At least not at the level of the spell right now.”

“I don’t suppose you’d consider hiding out down here while we take on Fizzie, would you?” I asked Kat, who glared at me in return. “You could practice the spell on the priests and if it levels up to a point that you can make more than one stone for a person, you could join us up top.”

“You might as well be asking me to write sentences on the blackboard,” Kat snarled, but I could tell that she was considering it.

Persuasion +2

Exp +20 (3,156,121/5,985,462)

“You could keep me company and maybe teach me the spell the hard way,” the king suggested, but Kat knew it was likely a futile chore. We were asking her to sit out the fight. Again. She was hurt and I got that, but this wasn’t just a game. If we died here, we died everywhere. My heart clenched at the thought of Cliff waiting for us to call him forever. It would break the big man’s heart, slowly over time. While it wouldn’t matter to us anymore, it would devastate him.

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“I’m going to the dungeon,” she turned, but I could see the glint of tears on her face, and my heart ached. “I’ll practice there.”

“Don’t take any chances,” I called to her. “Summon the weak ones.”

“Got it, stay safe,” she called back over her shoulder.

“Kat,” I sent her a message through our Telepathy spell. I wrapped her in a hug mentally.

Telepathy +2

Exp +20 (3,156,141/5,985,462)

“I’m not mad at you,” she admitted. “You’re right. At least you are right until I have a better idea and the sooner I level up that spell, the better.”

“Should I let her be or join her?” the king asked.

“Let her be,” Dom suggested with a sigh.

“Give her a few minutes then she would probably like your company,” I disagreed with Dom.

“It never hurts to get my skills or levels up,” the king nodded, but I saw a shudder wrack through his body.

“Your majesty?” I put my hand on his arm.

“Not anymore,” he admitted, and it was like a light dimmed around him. “You may call me Doug. I’m not king anymore.”

Fizzbarren had played his first god card. At the very least, we were outlaws in our own land. We had dozens of our loyal followers out there watching for news and they or their familiars would arrive with messages shortly. Dom tossed a few low-level spells into the fireplace. We waited for news. I ate. I would have cooked, but I didn’t have the heart for it, so I settled for eating half my inventory of sweets. Not really, but it was close, and I shared.

“The theocracy has been declared,” Dom announced, dusting donut crumbs off his vest. “Spite is watching the ceremony. He says that Fizzbarren is level twenty-five.”

“How?” I asked, passing the information to Terra, who passed it back to Kat’s Shadow somehow.

“We must have missed a priest somewhere,” Dom shrugged.

“It could have been worse,” the king commented, and I would continue to call him the king no matter his actual status.

“He’s not even as high as those cardinals and we took two of them at once,” Dom scoffed at my worried look.

“But he has the smite staff?” I asked.

Dom nodded, his mouth thinning grimly.

“Where the hell was it that we didn’t find it?” I groused. We’d searched the High Priest’s chambers and every inch of the cathedral and not found the stupid staff.

“Maybe it was soulbound, like our spell books,” Dom suggested. “He could have inherited it automatically upon becoming High Priest.”

“Kat has a spell like that, doesn’t she?” I considered sending Kat the question but thought better of it. “One that summons a weapon of some sort?”

“I think so,” Dom considered.

“Don’t ask her while she’s sulking,” I warned him.

“Too late,” he frowned. “She’s going to work on that spell.”

“At least she talked to you,” I shrugged, offering Dom another cookie.

“That’s a good thing?” Dom took the cookie, though how he could see it with his eyes on the ceiling, I don’t know.

“I’m not mad at you,” Kat told me mentally. “I’m trying to concentrate! Unless the fortress is being stormed by space aliens, will you let me study?!”

“Sorry,” I winced visibly as I answered her and then I sent Dom a glare. “You didn’t have to tell her I thought she was mad at me.”

“I just told her to talk to you,” Dom protested around a mouthful of cookie that I regretted giving him.

“Thanks,” I used my sarcasm voice.

“You’re welcome,” he used his ignore-the-sarcasm retort.

“I should have performed the marriage ceremony while I was still king,” Douglas chuckled, grabbing a cookie from the plate and sauntering toward where Kat had gone.

“I’d do a reboot just for that,” Dom told me, a hopeful look on his face.

I didn’t. We sat and took in reports as they came in. Malice gave us a blow-by-blow on the takeover of the king’s castle, which was bloodless and anticlimactic enough to have Fizzie in fits. Terra informed us that notices were placed on our bulletin boards disbanding the Magic Academy and the King’s nobility. Only those who would swear fealty to the new and improved theocratic government would be allowed to keep their positions in government or businesses. One hour later, our bakery was closed, all our assets seized for activity against High Priest Fizzbarren. The Merchant Guild was given an ultimatum to turn over Dom, Kat, Douglas and I or be disbanded in favor of church-run businesses. Our names and faces were plastered all over the city as outlaws. Our mansion was set aflame, something I considered a bit over the top, but I supposed that Fizzie had to get his temper out somehow.

Maybe we should have confronted him in the center square right then and there, but we were cautiously watching from a safe place and had no need to interfere. We were halfway through the night when the pyres began to arise in front of the castle. People swarmed into the Underground in droves, most content to be cared for by lower-level thieves we’d tasked with taking them in. Rather than let a spy amidst us, we dedicated a section of the Underground for their care. All the beds from the medical coma ward came in handy, as did the wine we’d pilfered from the cellars of the church. As our merchant holdings were seized, we collapsed the tunnels behind our escaping employees. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to make finding our tunneling system unfeasible. We had ample food, clean water, beds, and wine for half the city, and we were full by the time the full moon reached mid sky.

It was like we were all holed up for Covid only without the toilet paper shortages. The insane people were all up top trying to deal with a crazy government of delusional people while the rest of us dutifully cozied up with a good book until things ran their course. Bards sang songs while we layered some soundproofing Silence spells along our ceilings. People happily cleaned toilets in return for the Clean spell scrolls and took up mending in return for Mend spell scrolls. Books ransacked from the Mage’s Guild and castle libraries were passed around and shared. Food was passed out generously with the wine and ale. The sane people stayed sane, and the troublemakers were told they’d be killed, resurrected and returned to the surface with a week’s worth of twisted memories that could never give us away.

Technically, we could have supported this system for months, at least. Realistically, we had no intention of letting it go that long. Cliff was waiting for me, and I had a life to rebuild. And those pyres bothered me. Fizzie didn’t have us, so who was he going to put up there on the pyres?

Intelligence +1