Morning came reluctantly, or so it seemed, it certainly didn’t feel like a victory. Of near four hundred souls only twenty-four remained and they were in poor health, aged into decrepitude despite being in the prime of their lives. Valda was dead and the kindest thing that could be said about the efforts to save it was that the death zone would claim no further victims.
It fell to Ilvere to rally the townsfolk and to seek help for them. That proved the first bone of contention.
“What do you mean I can’t tell the Council?” The journeymage geomancer demanded, not quite stamping her foot, which admittedly was a far more imposing gesture from an earth mage, earthquakes were not unknown in a fit of pique.
Erebus rubbed at his face with the heel of his hand as he tried to figure out how to phrase things delicately. He was already missing Guardian Mill, for all the grizzled geomancer had been an obstinate and obstreperous ally he had also had his own brushes with death and had likely guessed a fair amount of what he would now have to tell Ilvere just to try and keep her on-side.
“The reason we came to Valda was that there’s a warrant for my arrest.” Erebus decided to lead with the truth, “We didn’t come here to save anyone, we came here to stay out of sight long enough for us to make a plan of action on how to prove my innocence.”
“I can just leave you all out of the report.” Ilvere said hurriedly, “My people need help!”
“They’d never buy that. The Council is not the divided and ineffective mess you recall, not anymore. There would be a full investigation if a death zone were to open up without warning. Our presence would be discovered almost instantly.”
“Then what? You want to leave the town to die?” Ilvere demanded, brandishing John’s lightning wand.
Not facepalming was probably one of the hardest things Erebus had ever done, instead opting to simply tug the wand out of her hand with telekinesis and lay it calmly down on the desk.
It wasn’t entirely her fault, that sort of posturing had worked for John but there was a vast gulf between the two. For starters a mere telekinetic tug wouldn’t have been enough to pry the wand from his fingers. The gruff geomancer had been enough of a threat that actually coming to blows with him would have been enough of a fight they could ill afford it.
Ilvere on the other hand… it was probably for the best she never learned just how easy it would have been to kill her and have done. It was the logical course of action and he was surprised just how little he was tempted. The goal afterall had been to have a safe base of operations, not to rescue the town
“No. We’re going to do what we can for them, but, frankly, there’s little left to save. The Council might arrange for the survivors to have some vitae restored to them but… they’re not critical assets and as much as we could really use a feel good story right now, pumping over a thousand years of extra life into civilians is probably more than they’re prepared to do.”
“Wait they can reverse aging now?” The geomancer spluttered, stunned at the idea.
Erebus gave her an amused look, “We’ve been able to reverse aging since well before you got trapped, it’s only proliferated recently. It’s still about as intensive as a spell gets and few can cast it without using their own vitae to power it, which rather defeats the point.”
“Surely if there’s a chance…” Ilvere tried, voice trailing off in the face of Erebus’ stony expression.
“We can’t. I’m going to be explaining the situation to my friends just after we’ve finished the funeral for Sato, you’re welcome to attend. It should clarify the stakes at least.”
“Fine.” She growled in a fairly good imitation of her boss. “But if I don’t like what I hear I’m calling for help.”
The necromancer chuckled at that, shaking his head as he turned for the door, “My dear Ilvere, I would be concerned if anyone likes what they’re about to hear.”
*
Deciding where to finally lay out the state of play had been a difficult choice. The infirmary had been the only building with much floorspace but no one particularly wanted to spend a second more there than they had to after yesterday’s events. The houses had also been ruled out, even by necromancer standards it was macabre to just cram into someone’s home within a day of them dying.
They’d settled on the graveyard, now in much need of expansion. With no bodies to bury there was no need to dig a grave for Sato and Ilvere had been kind enough to raise a headstone from the earth, a fairly grandiose column of what Erebus suspected was gneiss but he was neither geomancer nor geologist to be sure. The geomancer had managed a number of these tributes to the fallen before having to collapse against one and take a break, he could sympathise, earth magics were, perhaps naturally, very heavy work.
“I honestly thought he’d outlive all of us.” The necromancer admitted as he stared up at the column. “If you’d asked me if there was just one person I was sure would make it out of this alive it was Sato.”
“That at least addresses one of my concerns.” Natalya said from next to him, her gaze matching his.
“You thought I’d sacrificed him?” He asked gently, not so much hurt at the suggestion as merely sad, deeply and truly.
“Time was running out.” She replied with a shrug, “and I’ve seen you make cold-blooded moves before.”
“Well I didn’t. Not this time. I wasn’t even considering Evan as a suspect until we found Sato dead.” Erebus shook his head, the motion slow and weary. “I’m getting soft. I should never have taken his helpfulness at face value. I should have questioned-“
“Wait how are you the one having a crisis of faith here? I’m the one who spent the best part of a day working with that psychopath. My intuition never so much as twinged.” Natalya groused.
“I guess we’ve both started to lose it in our dotage.”
“Guess we are. Truce?” She asked, more tentative than Erebus could remember hearing in all their years. Then again she had accused him of using his friends as little more than pawns on a chess board.
“Truce.” He agreed. Of course soon he would have to tell her that she’d been right.
They weren’t the only ones mourning. Amara and Alice were locked in their own conversation. “At least he didn’t have a family, that’s a mercy.” Amara opined softly, the vampire helping to support Alice as she hobbled to the column.
“Is it?” The shapeshifter inquired, a certain flintiness in her words and her eyes.
“No. I suppose it isn’t.” The vampire admitted. “He was a very lonely man, you know? Too burdened by conscience and the curse of his ability.”
“Curse?” Alice inquired politely, as ostensibly the youngest (besides Alice and Holly of course) even if physically the oldest, she’d known Sato the least.
“His foresight. Imagine you got a second chance with every single conversation, people become very easy to manipulate, it’s why he never spoke much. I don’t think he dared ever date someone.”
“You could always just not manipulate them?” The shapeshifter suggested.
“Really? You could upset someone you like, be able to fix it and just choose not to? Every time?” Amara shrugged, “Hells the only reason I know that much is he got drunk one night, after the Anterion Debacle. Let me tell you, being able to see the future doesn’t help your balance much after eight pints.”
Alice chuckled, “I wish I’d been there to see that. What are we going to do about the practical implications?”
“Bloody hellfire Al, his body’s not even cooled yet.” Amara hissed.
“Your friend is right.” A quiet voice replied from by the vampire’s elbow, the creature of the night managing half a foot of ground clearance as she bounded away in shock before glaring at the demoness speaking.
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“You have no right being able to move that quietly in armour.” She said testily, clutching at her unbeating heart. “Actually how are you moving that quietly? I can’t even detect a heartbeat.”
“Muffling charm.” Lana said simply, unapologetic and unabashed.
“And you were eavesdropping on us because…?”
“I needed to know what you were all thinking, and if you were taking the precognizant’s loss with the seriousness it deserved. I’m glad at least one of you is.”
“Our friend just died.” Amara snapped, and it was only Alice’s sudden grip on her arm that stopped her swinging for the demon’s jaw.
“Yes. He did. And without him you are all so much more vulnerable. You just lost the most perfect early warning system that the gods, devils and sidhe could ever devise.” Lana told her flatly, “You think me unaffected by his death, I am not. I am terrified because our safety net is gone. No more second chances. No more near misses and that was closes. From now on if the opposition gets it right then you die.”
“Is that all he was to you? A safety net.” The vampire hissed, trying to pull forwards but Alice’s grip was like a thin clamp of adamantium on her forearm, the shapeshifter keeping her own council but the contempt in her glare at Lana said more for her opinion that a thousand novels ever could.
“Of course. I knew him barely a handful of days, if that, Arcadian time being what it is.” The demoness shrugged, “I think of you all in terms of your utility to my purpose. By that measure I feel Sato’s loss deeply, he was easily the most valuable of you all.”
“So which of us is the least valuable?” Amara demanded, a nearly strigoi like hiss of barely suppressed hatred.
“The daughter of oblivion.” The demoness told them without hesitation, “She’s too afraid of her own power to be useful.”
“You really are a heartless monster.” The pyromancer snapped.
“Yes.” Lana smiled, sarcasm practically dripping as she added, “I got trained by an imperator to bodyguard the necromancer because I don’t care about people. It’s not that I don’t care bloodsucker, it’s that I don’t care about you.”
Alice held her tongue until the devil had stomped over towards Erebus and Natalya, “I’m going to guess her training was unpleasant.”
“I certainly hope so.” Amara growled as they did the same.
The last few stragglers to the funeral were those who had known Sato the least, Susan for all she’d been a peer of the taciturn mage had never interacted with him much and after she’d been pulled through the shadowgate not at all. That was how she’d ended up with what she was, perhaps uncharitably, thinking of as babysitting duty.
Alec and Holly were in fairly high spirits, the duo had set up camp on the outskirts of Valda, Alec choosing to sleep the night in his tent whilst Holly had slept on the grass besides it, though it had taken the two some time to get to sleep as the dryad had caught Alec up on events. Enough time in fact that Susan had had to more or less scream to wake them up, unable to just shake them awake.
Still for all that they were groggy there were animated and not as sombre as one might expect. This was neither’s first great tragedy, not even their first this year, and much like Lana they had only known Sato a few days.
“…and Alice was stuck flailing in the air like a beetle on its back.” Holly concluded, finishing the last o the catchup as Susan did her best not to laugh. Alec was making no such effort, openly guffawing as the cemetery came within view.
“Well at least now I know what that blue flash was.” The teenager said once he’d managed to get his laughter under control.
“I wish I did.” Holly grumbled, “Erebus isn’t exactly forthcoming on the details.”
“He’s trying to keep you safe.” Alec explained, or at least thought he did, then paused as he realized why she wasn’t getting it, “Oh yeah you weren’t there for it. Even knowing about time magic carries a death sentence, he might be planning just to evade questions until the end of time.”
Susan shook her head, then realised that as a living silhouette that was barely noticeable, the body language of mortals yet to fade in her. It was a chronic problem of the undead, and Susan herself was now… undead-adjacent was perhaps the best term, the slow distancing from the habits of the living. Vampires had it easiest, as humanitarians, a joke that had apparently never gotten old, they constantly had to interact with people and thus such simple habits as breathing and slouching stayed up to date and relevant.
Liches had it perhaps hardest or at least most dramatically, it took a fairly obsessive personality to become a lich, dedication to a craft for starters, talent in spades and severe dedication. This naturally continued into undeath and it was not uncommon for a lich to disappear for several decades only to announce the success of a research project people had long forgotten had even begun; or in particularly embarrassing cases been completed by someone else thirty years ago.
Such isolation meant they soon found their perspectives almost totally alien to the mortals that surrounded them, a well meaning lich would invite an inquisitive mage into their alchemy lab only to watch in total confusion as they collapsed from the toxic gases there.
The fact it was such a well known problem was a good thing really. It meant that the Umbral Temple hadn’t been starting from scratch when trying to figure out how to handle Susan’s new post-human perspective.
They’d brought in experts, or rather sent their own people out to get trained into experts. There was no way in all the hells that they were trusting an outsider with the knowledge that a shadow now walked Reath. They barely trusted their own people with it.
Susan wished they’d trusted people more. It had been almost pure luck she’d found out Nightblades had been dispatched for Karatas and she’d had to cross almost a third of Contemnere in a single night to get there in time, flitting from shadow to shadow with a speed that only desperation could bring. She wasn’t sure she could do that again if she tried.
Partly because of how taxing it had been for the insubstantial substance that now passed for her body, mostly… now she knew she could do that it scared her, just how natural it had been to enter a shadow from one end and leave from the other, cross to the next and be gone in an instant. It had made her feel distinctly inhuman, especially as her shape had begun to deform during the journey.
That was one of those things she tried not to think about, it hadn’t taken long for her to realise the only reason the silhouette she cast on the world was human was because she desired it so. That the strange body she’d been given had a number of abilities beyond consuming any living thing it touched, abilities that she had very carefully chosen not to explore despite a lot of pressure from the Umbral Temple’s leadership – at least those sections of it that weren’t utterly terrified of her.
She was interrupted from her musings as she realized her wayward charges had gotten well ahead of her. Perhaps she wasn’t keep up appearances as well as she’d hoped if she was zoning out that easily, still as much as the opportunity to say so had passed she was still convinced that Erebus would follow through on explaining. She’d never known him not keep his word. And though she knew she was biased, being rescued from having your soul devoured by an eldritch horror that other eldritch horrors would describe as ‘unpleasant to deal with’ would do that, she trusted Erebus implicitly.
That was one of the other things that worried her, the way Natalya was treating him like a theoretically stable alchemical that had just started fizzing. She didn’t want to have to kill Nat but if the veteran necromancer actually tried to make a fight of it… well she knew who she’d choose.
She wished that decision was one she’d make out of loyalty but there was another aspect to it, a more shameful one. The spells Erebus had used to drag her out of the shadowgate he’d outright refused to share for fear that the Temple would launch a(n almost certainly doomed) crusade against the shadows that dwelled there.
That meant that, up until the moment she’d met Lana, the necromancer had been the only person physically able to touch her. She’d been a fairly tactile human being and that hadn’t changed, going years without being able to touch someone had been hard. The thought of losing Erebus, of never being held again, the pain was almost physical, though no longer totally hopeless. She needed to talk to Lana to find out just how common it was that demons could touch her if not safely then at least nonfatally.
Ahead of her Alec and Holly briskened their pace to finally draw level with the others congregated around Sato’s grave. At least the teenagers hadn’t interrogated her, according to Erebus, and Alice, they were very much in the habit. Still even that was a mixed blessing, because she had to wonder how much of that was to blame on her cursed state.
The trip through Avalon had probably been harder on her than anyone, at least in Susan’s own opinion, for the first half hour she’d tried everything in her power to be noticed. She’d screamed, she’d yelled, she’d even gone so far as to try and shake Erebus in a moment of desperation and panic only to phase right through him, even less substantial than the least of ghosts.
Worse they hadn’t even realized she was missing, that had hurt the most. Of course it hadn’t taken her long to realise there was some sort of memetic effect in place, altering the memories of those around her so that she might as well have never existed.
The relief when they’d left Arcadia had been indescribable, as had the fear that she was going to step through that portal and still be less than the least of wisps, doomed to float unnoticed through an eternity she could only observe but never partake.
Slowly Susan took her own place at the grave, hanging back so that an accidental brush with one of her companions didn’t rend them from reality, as Erebus began his eulogy, going first out of unspoken agreement.
“More than any of us I think, Sato was a good man. A kind man and a patient one. I’ve heard it said that to whom much is given much is expected, and Sato met every expectation anyone ever could have had of him. It would have been all too easy for anyone with a power such as his to become a great dictator of the age, able to manipulate those around him as if they were little more than puppets on strings but Sato chose a different path.”
Erebus pursed his lips, fighting for a few moments to keep his composure, “One of service, one of help and one of duty to others. To, in his own words, gently massage the timeline into its better self and he had a gentle touch indeed, keeping himself apart from events unless needed. It made him a very hard person to connect with even at the best of times. Too afraid of his own power and the ease with which it could be abused, how many of us, if given our chance again, would stop our squabbles before they happen? I’m not sure I could have but Sato did, every day, and I hope that whatever lies beyond the Veil it is of such superlative quality his gift is never needed again.”
There was a solemn silence, Sato’s friends remaining in stony silence as they waited for someone else to speak but no one seemed to have any other words. What was there to say afterall? That it shouldn’t have happened? That went without saying. That it had been unfair? Unfair was where their job started. That he would be avenged? Alice had already done that and damn near crippled herself in the process.
When the silence had finally moved from respectful to uncomfortable Erebus let out a sigh, allowing his shoulders to slump a little, “I suppose it’s time I told you all the truth as promised. We’ll wait a moment for Ilvere to join us and then begin.”