Laur didn’t bleed like a normal person did. I’d had my fair share of experience with stabbing people in the throat or slitting them, and those always tended to have some sort of spurt. Even if the blood didn’t fountain out of the wound like the plays might have one believe, there would still be a steady stream of blood pumping out of the wound, especially if the attack hit an artery.

I never missed, and I wasn’t stupid enough to choose the wrong part of the neck to attack.

And despite that, when I withdrew my knife, there was only a small trickle of blood coming from the gaping hole in her neck, as if she’d suffered nothing more than a small papercut.

“You really think…” she wheezed, the stab affecting her ability to speak if nothing else. “I’ll go down… that easy?”

“You kidnapped Jasmine,” I said. “If you didn’t do it, you helped.”

She didn’t say anything, apparently deciding that conserving her breath was more important.

I closed my eyes. My mind felt like it was revolting against itself, not because I had thrown off the oathtongue but because of the mess of emotion on the inside right now.

On the one hand, relief. Seb knew where our final target was. That meant that even if I killed the veiled woman, we would be able to find Jasmine.

On the other, panic. Was Jasmine still alive? Had the actions taken by Laur ensured that she and the others would still be with us when we found them? The thought of locating the group of captured oathholders only to find that they had been sacrificed or murdered or anything made bile rise in my throat. Even thinking about the possibility that the girl I loved was dead was every bit as painful as the thought of my identity being revealed to the world had been.

And finally, permeating the entire mess and hardening my resolve, hatred blanketed everything. I’d finally started to cast off my past, learn how to live in the present and live on even knowing I was a Byron, and then this woman, this fucking vestige of a bygone time, she decided to show up? To reinforce that every single thing touched by my thrice-damned family would do its level best to mimic the Lord Byron and struggle for power like crabs in a bucket? She’d even deigned to call herself a Lady as if doing so would resurrect the traditions of our old House.

Fuck this.

I could feel magic gathering in the air, no doubt preparations for the next burst of Laur’s ridiculously powerful oathtongue.

“Stop that,” I ordered. No magic flooded my words, but they were no less powerful for it.

I reached out with my oath, found the form of the magic that Laur was gathering, and I ended it.

For the first time today, the lady looked scared, and I grinned. It wasn’t a pretty smile.

“Why can’t you just stay dead…” I muttered. I wasn’t speaking to Laur.

My past was in the past. So why couldn’t it stay there?

I had learned from it, even begun to grow from it. It had been twelve years since those events had occurred. I should’ve been long past it.

And yet it kept on insisting on rearing its ugly head in the worst ways.

“How,” Laur gasped, trying to choke out another word but failing.

Behind her, the people she’d influenced were finally realizing what had happened, and they were beginning to react, moving towards the two of us.

They weren’t going to make a difference. I cast an Adaptive Wall, and it blocked off the passageway. The oathholders Laur had gotten weren’t strong enough to break through that immediately. They’d make it eventually, but it wasn’t going to be soon enough to matter.

I stepped forward. Laur was a fair bit taller than me—nearly half a head, which wasn’t actually that much given that I was on the shorter end for my age—but when I got into her personal space, it was her that tried to back away.

“None of that,” I echoed her earlier words. “Stay here with me for a second, won’t you?”

I stabbed her again in the stomach. Once again, the amount of blood that came out was unnaturally small, but that wasn’t going to be an issue.

With my other hand, I grabbed her shoulder, keeping her from falling back into the safety of the people that she had controlled.

For a moment, my thoughts warred against themselves, images of Jasmine choosing not to kill innocents conflicting with my own history of getting rid of everything in my way.

Only for a moment, though. It faded as I remembered that not even Jasmine was the kind of person to extend mercy to every single person.

Save those who need it. End those who you must.

I didn’t know where the line came from. I hadn’t heard Jasmine say it before, but it felt like it could’ve come straight from her lips.

Despite myself, I smiled. It was a thin, hard smile, one with no humor or joy to it. An ugly smile, but a smile nonetheless.

With a flare of my oath, I burned the veil away. Nothing stopped me, none of the abhorrent mindfuckery that had limited me as a child and none of the sudden words that she used today.

Behind the veil lay a hard face. A woman that was certainly beautiful, but one whose softness had been eroded away by years upon years of killing, of desperate struggles for power.

I knew the look well. I’d worn it myself, once upon a time.

I had no sympathy for her.

Laur opened her mouth one final time, and I shut her up, punching forward with my oath covering my hand.

She’d been enhanced by a Ditas or Nacea oath at some point. Her skin was more resistant to my magic than it should’ve been.

But there was a hole in her throat where I’d stabbed her. I punched my fist into the stab wound, widening it and giving myself a conduit to push my magic into her.

Her body contorted in pain, and I was fairly sure she would’ve screamed if I hadn’t just destroyed her vocal cords.

It wasn’t just Laur’s body that I needed to end, though. I needed to ruin every remaining living part of my past, and leaving her magic intact wasn’t going to be conducive to that.

With my oath in alignment, I reached out, the connection flowing freely and easily, and I found others. Other magic, other oaths.

Laur’s oath.

Her oath was… disturbingly pretty. I couldn’t describe it in physical details, but it was almost like I was observing a dancer. She’d been in touch with whoever her god was, exemplified her connection to it. No wonder she’d been so powerful.

Laur’s oath wasn’t just connected to her, though. It was connected to me. To Kyle. To her oathholders, to the people behind her, to a thousand different places that were neither here nor there.

Just how deep did you get your tendrils entrenched?

It didn’t matter. It was never as easy to build a network as complex as this as it was to destroy it, and destroy it I did. With the [APPROVAL] of the broken god whispering in my ears, I pushed my ruin into her oath.

I’d never tried anything like this before, since it wasn’t like I had ever had any reason to. Despite that, this felt right, like this was what my oath had been made for.

I broke Laur, and I broke her oath. In the span of moments, thousands of connections became hundreds became dozens became a handful became none.

For a brief, glorious moment, I could see the horror in her eyes as she realized what I’d just done.

“You should’ve stayed buried,” I said, and I tore her apart.

With a truly massive blast of unstructured magic on my side, she stood no chance. She tried to scream once, and then the room flooded with darkness.

When it was gone, my fists were back at my side and there was nobody in front of me.

I dropped the shield. Behind it, people were rubbing their eyes, shaking their heads like they’d just woken from a bad dream. In some sense, they had.

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“She’s gone,” I said. “Return.”

“No,” an oathholder replied. “I have a duty to uphold.”

“As do I,” another said. “For Tayan.”

The others didn’t seem to share that opinion, and neither did the commoners behind them. At least nobody still claimed that they wanted to support the Church, and thankfully the oathholders—former members of the Crown’s private military, at a guess, given their words—hadn’t explicitly declared their allegiance to the Crown. I was fairly sure there would’ve been blood if either of them had.

“For fuck’s sake, it doesn’t matter,” someone shouted. “Crown, Church, what’s the difference? Come on, let’s just go home.”

They’d noticed it too, even when their conscious mind had been buried under the weight of Laur’s oath.

“Go,” I said. “Don’t hold me back.”

As a mass, they started filing out back the way that they came. Nobody thanked me. I didn’t expect them to.

The two oathholders who’d declared that they still had a duty followed us silently, acknowledging us as the leaders. I kept an eye on them. As much as I wanted to believe that they weren’t going to backstab us, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility for another noble or Church member to hold influence over them.

“Lead the way, Seb,” Kyle said, and we moved.

__________________________

The rest of the way was far easier than it had been earlier. With Kyle and I at the front and the two Crown oathholders holding the flank, none of the traps came close to taking any of us out. We made far better time on our own than we had with the force of commoners with us, and soon enough we had arrived at the location that Seb claimed was where the Church was gathering.

Thank the gods, it wasn’t empty.

“How the hell did they fit this all under the city?” I asked. “And how did none of it ever come to my attention?”

“I would imagine a commoner girl from the villages wouldn’t know about Dakheng’s underground,” Kyle said dryly.

I rolled my eyes. “Still.”

“Still,” Kyle repeated. “It’s weird.”

“Ancient ruins,” Seb said. At some point, he’d gained full consciousness. He still couldn’t walk, but he could direct us just fine now. “The underground was the location of a god’s ascent during the final departure.”

“Huh,” I said. “Just like the woods back in Yaguan. Guess that makes sense.”

“I never would’ve thought,” one of the Crown oathholders with us said. A woman. The other one was a man, so at least I had something to differentiate them by. “Something this big…”

“They must’ve known,” the man said. “The nobles. There’s no way they didn’t. We just never learned it.”

“They knew,” Seb said, coughing out a laugh. “Of course they knew. You think the nobles you love so dearly would deign to share that information with the common folk?”

The Crown oathholders let that comment pass by in silence.

I turned my attention back to the space we were observing. When the late Lady Laur had claimed that great numbers of the Church were going to be gathering here, she hadn’t been exaggerating. The cavern that our tunnel led to had to be at least fifty meters tall and thrice as long. The only light sources in this area were the Church’s own oathlights, and even with that I couldn’t fully discern the shape of the other side.

The entrance we were at wasn’t the only one. Even with the dim lighting, I could make out at least five other tunnels that led into some point in the cavern. That was good. It meant that the attention of the Church in this area wasn’t going to be focused on any one point. It meant that we had a decent shot of remaining undetected for the time being.

There were too many people here. The cavern was massive, yes, but so was the Church delegation. They didn’t quite fill up the entire space—there was what I mentally termed a no-man’s-land between us and them that had to be at least twenty meters—but there was literally at least a hundred of them. The majority of them were just sitting by and chatting, dining on whatever food they’d decided was a good idea to bring into a dank underground cave, but there were pockets of them here and there that looked like they were talking strategy.

“They’re discussing the Crown,” one of the oathholders with us said. Did he have enhanced hearing? I couldn’t make out what any of them were saying, though I could still hear the general buzz of serious conversation coming from that direction.

Well, whatever. I didn’t care about the Crown. My eyes roamed over the congregation, over makeshift tables and robed priests by the dozens, searching for any sign that my adventurers—that Jasmine—were alive and intact.

At first, I couldn’t find a single person I recognized, the crowd of Church officials so dense that I could hardly make out any individual. For a moment, my heart sank. Had Seb lied? Had he just had insufficient information?

“Lily,” Kyle whispered, poking my shoulder. “Is that Alex?”

I looked at him, unwilling to hope, and I saw him pointing.

Following people’s arms was really annoying to do when I didn’t have their point of view to look at where they were pointing, but he narrowed the general area down, and a moment later, I caught it. Half-hidden behind a raised wall of stone, I could make out the slightest glimpse of a family crest and a familiar face.

They’re here.

Now, all that we had to deal with was the hundred Church members here, each of which were probably leadership and had powers stronger than any of us individually.

Easy.

I found myself missing the support that a few dozen bodies would’ve provided. Unarmed and oathless as they were, the commoners still would’ve been a good distraction.

I shook my head. That was a noble’s way of thinking, wasn’t it?

“We need to end this,” the female oathholder said. “They plan to attack soon.”

“You can hear what they’re saying?” I asked.

“A few critical groups,” she said. “They’re going to cast a ritual.”

“How soon?”

“Ten minutes.”

Not enough time to get back through the catacombs. Seb might’ve known a way out of here, but we weren’t going to have the time to go back and get support. Rituals averaged an hour, yes, but it had taken us more than that just to get this far. An organized troop effort would never be able to hit this place in time.

“What do we do?” the male oathholder asked.

“You got no ideas?” Kyle replied with a question of his own. “Too used to following orders?”

“Yeah, kind of,” the man admitted.

“You have any?” I asked the jester.

“To be honest, I was hoping you had some,” Kyle said. “I don’t take jobs that need this much fighting, most of the time.”

“Well, let’s wait until they start,” I said. “Assuming they have a sacrificial element, that won’t be the first thing they do. We can interrupt the ritual once they begin it.”

Nobody disagreed, so we sat there in silence and waited.

_________________________

“That is a lot more guards than I thought they would put up,” I admitted.

Only half of them had gone to commit to their ritual. Their first of many, if the female Crown oathholder was to be believed.

The other half had taken up stations just past the ritual circle, ready and waiting for anyone to come their way.

Sure, half of them were gone, but the other half were going to be more than enough to overtake us. Even one Church oathholder on the level of the old man from the last place we’d attacked would be enough to kill us all, let alone fifty of them. Granted, not all of them would be at that level, but still.

“We need another way,” I muttered.

“What other way is there?” the man said. “I think this is as good a place as any to make a last stand.”

I snorted. “Sure, for you. I’d like to go on living a few more days.”

Think, think…

“Hey, Seb?” I asked, an idea popping into my mind.

“Yeah?” he replied. Kyle had set him down on the ground for the time being, and it looked like he was slowly regaining his ability to move.

“How deep underground are we?”

“I’d say ten, twenty meters. Why—oh. Oh.”

“Perceptive man,” I said. “Yeah, okay, change of plans.”

“I don’t think I like where this is going,” the Crown man said.

“Look, you were the one who said this was going to be your last stand,” I said. “Get ready to make a run for it. We’re going to disrupt the ritual, get their prisoners, and get the hell out of here.”

“Works with me,” the Crown woman said.

Her partner frowned. “Will we be able to prevent their full attack?”

“We’ll prevent the important part,” I lied. I couldn’t care less.

“It’s this or nothing,” the woman told her partner. “Come on. For Tayan.”

“For Tayan,” he agreed reluctantly.

“You’ll know when to go,” I said. “Seb, once you can walk, get out of here.”

“I can help,” Kyle said, his oddly-colored spheres flashing into existence. “The ceiling, right?”

“Yep,” I said, forming a spell of my own.

Somehow, it felt more right to do it when it wasn’t even completely my knowledge that I was drawing from. I knew the frame for the Ceretian Ballista spell, but I’d never put it into practice, never figured out the spark. Memories from another life guided my hand as I formed the spell, a projectile nearly as tall as me slowly materializing as I did.

Fuel was the easiest thing I’d ever done. Spark was the easiest thing the other memories had ever done.

My spell fired, and Kyle shot something with it.

A handful of seconds later, the ceiling cracked.

“Go!” I said, and the shouting started a heartbeat later.

Nobody screamed. That was a key difference between people like this and adventurers. They were orderly and organized, preparing a group response to it.

It was still enough of a distraction.

We sprinted forward, leaving Seb in the tunnel behind us. He wouldn’t get hit by any falling debris there, I was pretty sure. He’d be fine.

As I ran, a chunk of the ceiling chipped off and fell, a boulder at least four meters across. It didn’t even make it halfway down to the ground before some invisible force stopped it and a dozen effects hit it at once.

I didn’t bother watching the rocks. I was fairly sure I hadn’t hit it hard enough to cause a full cavern collapse, and even if I had, I wasn’t certain that any of the rocks would actually hit the ground.

Had to take advantage of the distraction as much as I could. I was through no-man’s-land now, but the guards that had been posted were scattered all over the place. They were looking up, or to the side, or actively casting, and none of them interfered with me as I got closer and closer to the ritual circle.

The captured oathholders weren’t involved in this ritual, I realized. They were set aside, and they were unbound. There was a shimmering sphere of force surrounding them, though, leaving them prisoners. No doubt for Lady Laur, who had been meant to convert them to the Church’s side.

There were more of them than I’d expected. I counted twenty before giving up, and many of them looked noble.

The Church had taken advantage of the noble infighting, I realized. Nobody had been communicating, and so nobody had realized that so many of them were missing.

I formed another Ceretian Ballista and fired it at the shield, and that was when they noticed me.

“Intruder!” someone shouted, and then not even a heartbeat later, spells were flying at me.

I couldn’t tell what the others were doing, but I was so close and gods please just let me get there and fuck these people—

I pulled on my oath blindly, unsure of what to do. I was in alignment, but it wasn’t enough. Everyone here outclassed me.

And then a boulder fell on someone, the sickening crunch audible even from here, and they didn’t outclass me anymore.

A Naan’ti spell of plague flew at me, and I ruined it as it made its way to me. Another tried to strike me in the back of the leg, but I forced it out, wreathing myself in my own magic.

It still wasn’t enough. I was powerful, gaining power by the second, but there were too many of them and too few of us and—

I felt something pulling on me. It was growing to be familiar, now. The call of my god.

I didn’t deny it, but I didn’t accept it immediately either. Instead, I reached out, an idea even more insane than the last coming to mind.

I pulled the god to me, and I screamed. Agony like never before coursed through my body, but pain was in the moment. I could deal.

A spear formed from pure energy stabbed me through the chest, my defenses down, but that was fine. For now, I was more oath than girl, and that was all I needed.

Connections. Lady Laur had made them, and so could I.

Another spell hit me, and I couldn’t tell what it was but it threw me to my knees.

Jasmine.

My mind’s eye crystallized, and I was no longer here.

A hundred million crystals that were neither here nor there but were everywhere flooded into view.

I turned, and I saw the all too familiar shape of a noble girl in here with me.

My god’s domain.

And I’d gotten Jasmine back.