It was over. Rhuna was dead. And they had killed her, Rye and Elia, together.

You have gained: Soul x50,000

You have gained: Bone shard [Common] x12, [Uncommon] x8, [Rare] x4, [Epic] x1

You have gained: Soul of Emily Watson, the 47th Rhuna of High Loften

Just reading that normal name from earth had a sobering effect on Elia. They hadn’t killed a dreg, or a beast, but a human, living, thinking, breathing. The severed head that was all that was left of Rhuna – of Emily Watson’s true body, stared out of her stone shell as if they had forever entombed her within it.

For the first time in centuries, Elia felt a little bit ill.

Elia carefully extricated herself from under the lifeless statue of Rhuna, away from the pond of pitch-black tar. Even just breathing in its fumes was making her feel violently ill and more, the effect of that stupid grail was still making her feel twice as heavy as normal. For all that she felt like lying down and taking a nap, there were still things that needed doing.

She looked out to the pond, where Zane’s mutated body was lying half-submerged. The odd spasm rang through his body.

“We need to get him out without touching the tar. Gonna need your help with this knot, Rye.” Elia unpacked a length of rope and started making a lasso. But her icy left arm was shaking, and shaking a lot. “Rye?”

Hurts. It hurts so much.

Shit. Rye must have touched some of the tar. She watched her dismiss her arm, its ice dissolving as it rejoined the sea above the sky, but the damage was still there on her ethereal mist. Small, white nubs were growing from her pores like angry arrowheads. The tar didn’t stop at the body; it was something that even infested the spirit.

“We need to get you to Kasimir. This is some serious shit.”

I… I don’t know if we can make it there. I can feel it spreading.

Elia breathed in heavily. “I’ll think of something.”

With a pop, Rye’s spirit detached from her.

“T-there. Now, if it goes past the arm, it won’t get you too. And I… I killed someone today, a talking, living person for the first time. All it took was a thought, an angry blip and” –she shivered and with a sudden motion, vomited all over the floor– “Oh gods. Gods, I feel horrible.”

The white nubs wiggled more, worming their way out further.

Elia’s heart lurched. Between Rye and Zane’s predicament, the very real possibility of losing someone she cared deeply about entered her mind. It was a frightening thought. It grasped her like a cold hand around the neck and did not let go.

This was not an issue she could stab to death.

“I… I know. We go back to the last checkpoint and solve it that way. I’ll save Zane too, what’s one more death?”

Rye shook her head. “We can’t risk it. If… if this is an affliction of the spirit, then that shard-knife is too. If going back fixes spirit damage, Rhuna might come back. We cannot risk it.”

Elia swore, kicking the ground.

“I’ll loop the rope around Zane,” she said. “I can float. And then… whatever happens, happens.”

Someone hesitantly cleared their throat.

“What about the grail?” Karla asked as she floated on by. “It can do anything, right? Then use it.”

The grail. Right. Why hadn’t Elia thought of it?

Probably blood loss. But it was their best bet.

Rhuna was still grasping the grail when Elia snatched it, breaking her hand off. She didn’t know how to use it, and there was likely no one left alive who did. It was Rhuna’s personal arts and crafts project, who would she entrust it with besides herself? She literally held it as close to her chest as possible by putting it inside her chest.

Maybe it was time for [Psychometry] to save the day.

Pretender’s grail

A cup molded after the idea of the grail of ages, crafted from dozens of greater and lesser shards. This one came from on high, a blessed tool to balance the reemergent empire under the new Rhuna. Currently, the grail is heavily unbalanced.

Throw your wish inside and see what becomes, a curse or a blessing.

Nope. Still vague and cryptic.

Elia rubbed the grail. Elia flicked it. Elia stared at it with all the anger and apprehension roiling in her stomach.

“Do something. Come on. Make Karla stop floating. Cease thy levitation.”

“She said ‘float’ last time,” Karla said. “Maybe try the opposite of that.”

“What, unfloat? Re-gravitate? Fall?”

The grail shuddered. Karla stopped floating with an eep, the road gaining a new crater. Rye finished wrapping the rope around Zane and together, Elia and Karla were enough to dredge him from the surface.

He was a quivering mess of limbs, though at least he had a normal amount of them.

“We need to fix him too,” Elia said through labored breaths. “He gave us the opening we needed and I am not explaining to the leader of the secret service why his son is a… feathered biped.”

“But the false grail only responds to certain commands.”

Karla got up, brushing crumbs of gravel off her face. “M-maybe it can only influence things related to the shards it’s made of?”

“That’s exactly it!” Elia hugged Karla, then pointed the grail at Rye. “Heal!”

The grail did nothing.

“Maybe it doesn’t have the greater shard of healing, but something related? Try synonyms,” Karla suggested.

“Revert!” Elia yelled. “Fix! Undo! Back! Make better! Gah, why is this stuff not working!?”

“We don’t know what shards it is made of,” Rye said. “We could be at this for hours.”

“Yeah, well, it better do something for us. Maybe it doesn’t count spirits as targets?” She pointed it at Zane. “Heal! Fix! Undo! Normalize! Unmutate! Cleanse!”

The grail shuddered more violently this time. Tiny chips flew off like sparks.

But it worked. The tar was flayed from Zane’s skin, revealing a dark, feathered mix of man and raven and darker things. His feet and hands were hooked; he had three eyes on one side of his head and a fly’s many lenses on the other. He had a twisted beak too, and through it he gave an audible sound of relaxation.

“Hey, buddy, Zane, you alright? Talk to me.”

Zane let out a pitiful squawk.

“He looks exhausted,” Karla commented. “That took a lot of tar from inside his lungs.”

“At least we can carry him now,” Elia said as she hefted him up. “Karla, bit of help here.”

“Do you mean that you need a hand?” Rye asked, waving her ghost stump.

Elia winced. “Rye!”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Sorry. Too soon?”

“I don’t like seeing you make self-deprecating jokes. It hurts me more than admitting that you are hurting.”

“Hypocrite.”

“Yeah, well, sorry, I just… I feel like I caused this. Zane jumped in to save me and now he’s… this.”

“If he hadn’t, we might all be like him, like my arm. Ow.”

She handed Zane off to Karla, then pointed the grail at Rye. “Cleanse.”

A trickle of black stuff was siphoned off of Rye. The white arrowheads calmed down and stopped their movements.

“Feel any better?”

Rye nodded, then paused as if something was talking into her ear.

“Um, Elia? Zippo says that the grail is approaching a critical level of imbalance. Any more might have catastrophic consequences.”

Elia looked at her, then the grail. “Well, we don’t need it to revive anybody who died. Undead perks and all that. But I do want to use it just one more time on myself.” She pointed it at herself. “Opposite of heavy is… light.”

The weight on her shoulders lessened immediately. The grail couldn’t do everything, but it sure as hell could do more than any other piece of loot they’d ever sniffed. It was the kind of weight-loss hack that would make companies around the globe kill for it.

“Do you think we could heal someone’s dregification with this?” Elia asked.

“If it has the shard of undeath in it, it could heal undeath entirely,” said Karla. “Not that I’d see why anyone would want to do that.”

“Not in this soul economy,” Elia nodded, but as she was about to stow the grail, she felt Rye’s silence weigh heavily on her.

“…what is it?” she asked.

Rye pointed to Rhuna’s corpse and that was when she saw them. Dregs and undead had come out of the woodworks, some armed with weapons, many more with chisels, carving knives, and other tools of a peaceful trade. They stared at Rhuna’s lifeless husk with quivering lips. Looking at them, anyone would have thought that they lost a parent, a son or a daughter.

“I remember the first time you put your boot on my face,” one of the undead sang. “Oh, how blessed I was for coming so close to your grace.”

“I carved your noses, mistress,” said another. “I was the best nose carver in your entire empire. Whenever you sniffed or scrunched your nose, it filled me with elation, for I knew I had crafted perfection.”

“Oh Rhuna,” went another, and then another, as they prostrated themselves, lamenting.

“Alright,” Elia whispered, “While the freaks are distracted picking up pieces of Rhuna’s corpse, we should meet up with the others, and leave.”

Once again, she felt a silence pressing down on her shoulders. This time, it was coming from Rye.

“Rhuna’s kingdom is run by slaves. She uses brainworms which are then conditioned to follow her every whim.” Rye clutched herself with her remaining arm. “I… I don’t think they should be compelled to serve a dead person. Or worship a corpse.”

“I concur,” Karla said. “Many of our people who disappeared while out scavenging were turned to Rhuna’s service. She liked to send them against us first, to break our morale. It’s what changed the general maxim from fighting a hidden war to running away at the first sound of Rhuna’s approach.”

Elia eyed the grail. It was running hot, like a computer without cooling.

“One more wish,” she said.

She held the cup above her head. “I wish for all people who are bound to Rhuna to become unbound!”

The world was suddenly run through with a crack. All around, undead fell to the ground and the air screeched like metal drawing over glass. Then, with a deafening twang, everything returned to normal, everything except the grail.

It jumped out of her hands, violently spewing shards of shards every which way. The grail gurgled, a brackish liquid bubbling upwards until it overflowed, sizzling against the ground. Wherever it touched, the stone grew soft, then tore like tissue paper. The trio watched as the grail ate its way down into the ground, until nothing was left but a circular pool of liquified stone that bubbled occasionally.

Elia was the first to raise her voice. “O-k. Let that be a lesson in not fucking with powers beyond our abilities.”

“Didn’t we do that when we challenged Rhuna to a fight?” Karla asked.

“Well, yeah, but she’s dead now, so clearly she was not beyond what we could handle.”

“Really? I vaguely recall you telling me to ‘jump on Rhuna’s head and if that doesn’t kill her, run away’. Which means you were expecting to die heroically, and you thought I wouldn’t realize until after the fact.”

“That is… I mean, yes, but… it worked out in the end,” Elia grumbled.

“You’re a meanie. Downright evil. Why would you do something so cruel?”

“Because… because I like you, and didn’t want to see you involved in me reaping what I deserved after kicking dirt into the eyes of giants.”

Karla’s smile turned into a grin.

“But I was already involved.” She skipped to Elia’s side and entwined their hands. “And between me and you, I like you too.”

“Ahem.” They turned to Rye, who was staring out among the undead who were slowly coming to their senses. “This is really cute, but can we get a move on? Rhuna was being attacked on two fronts. We can’t guarantee these people are all unwilling servants and that they won’t slow us down. In addition, while casting I kind of… didn’t have the time to make calm signs a few times. The air is full of miscast bubbles and we ought to vacate the premises before something watching us decides to poke a finger through one”

Elia nodded. “We leave now.”

And so they did, gathering everyone who wanted to come with them to the pact, or who was unable to move by themselves. Some people, like Lim, knew how to keep out of harm’s way and were only moderately injured. Other people had died multiple times.

Elia had to wave some people off from looting them. With an intimidating Karla, a flying one-armed ghost Rye at her side, and the threat of Rhuna’s troops rallying, it was not the most difficult of things.

But by the time they were ready to leave, someone had already looted most of the loot. The pittance that everyone got in shards and souls was not a pittance at all. But compared to the mountains of cool swords and armors that had been there before, well…

Elia sighed. She was rummaging through the scraps of bone shards, looking for colors that had fallen in between the cracks, when Rye floated up next to her.

“Elia. Has… has Quibbles ever talked to you?”

“No. He’s just a toad.”

“But have you tried?”

Elia had a neutral face as she found an uncommon shard. “He’s smart, so it might seem like he can answer when you talk to him. But he’s a good friend, so I don’t pry into his personal life. And so should you.”

“I didn’t mean to… actually, screw it. Elia, do you have the greater shard of time?”

“No?” she said, more of a question than an answer.

“Not even a small one? Like, the shard of time passing slowly? Or the shard of noon?”

“What’s with all the suspicion?” She stopped her scrounging and turned to Rye. “No, I haven’t bagged any reality-bending shard, and no, I don’t know why it is that I go back in time when I die. If there were anything like a full shard inside me, Kasimir would have detected it when he diagnosed you with shardbearer-ism.”

Rye sighed. “It’s just… if you had the power, and didn’t use it… I don’t know what would be worse: That I trusted you while you lied all this time, or that you willingly endangered all of us for that same secret.”

“Well, you can relax, ‘cause by my knowledge I’m innocent on both accounts,” Elia said. “If you want to do some soul-searching, we can do that after we’re back in a safe place.”

Karla jumped as the giant came back to life, his chest cavity closing in front of her eyes.

“Go home,” he mumbled. “Want home.”

Elia patted him on the back with one of Mouggen’s limbs. “Yeah, me too bud. If you want, you can come with us, Brod.”

“Brod?” Karla asked. “As in, THE Brod, son of Herculeon, Exile of Morgenthal? His name was in the prophecy of the undead. We’re prophecy buddies! And more than that, giants are great smiths, and masters of all forms of combat. They fight monsters with their bare hands. I have so much I want to ask him. Can we keep him? Please?”

“Sure.”

“Elia, don’t go around adopting random people.”

“I’m not adopting him, and even if I were, I’d feed him well. He helped us a lot, and unlike the other prisoners, he did not leave with his pockets full of loot. He deserves a reward.”

A growl rang through the building, and everyone tensed.

“Hungry,” he said, scratching his scraggly beard.

“Ok, so he’s hungry. But do you know how much a giant eats?”

“There are legends written about the amount of people that were bankrupted for offering them a feast without end.” Karla nodded wisely.

“They’re not just legends. We had to house one once, as he had slain a devious monster that had come from the dark forest, and we were the most well-off farming estate in Arvale. I saw him eat an entire grug and drink two casks – forty liters – of our heaviest ale. That was one day. Father grumbled that he was the reason we were in the red that year.”

“I like him already. But I won’t force it. So, can we keep him?” Elia smiled at her prettily. “Purrrty please?”

Rye tapped a foot which she materialized just to make a point. Karla joined in, and under their dual assault, Rye caved. She turned away with a snort.

“I can’t believe that is how I look when I want something,” she said. “Alright, I’ll trust you, barbarous lout. But in exchange, you will take care damn good of both him, and that body of mine until I find a way to get rid of this transmutation. Deal?”

“Deal.”

They shook hands, but since they were missing the wrong ones, it turned into a moderately awkward affair.

“What now?” Karla asked.

“Well, Rhuna is dead, so we aren’t in danger of being hunted down anymore. The pact can find a new home, and we can lead them to it – either Clearwater or Crossroad Temple ought to do. Once we’re lived in and have secured our boons and stuff then… then we’ll see what tomorrow brings.”

They looked out of the large old building, watched as a giant tower sunk into distant muck to the east. To the west, the sky was raining fire. In the middle, the great mountain of Gatheon rose higher than Everest, piercing the clouds that now seemed to finally start moving just a bit.

Valti enjoyed your bout.

Aurana has declared you a traitor, a murderer, and a heretic of the highest order.

You have a bounty on your head. Current bounty size: Soul x100,000

Elia winced at the writing on her haze. She did what every reasonable person would do, and dismissed it. Today had been enough strain for her tastes, and nobody else seemed to have noticed. The faint bite of smoke was in the air and even as they left, the silence in their wake felt foreboding and eerie.

Karla caught up to the crew as they waved the last ally through the bowl of respite. Elia felt their hands entwine, but Karla squeezed it just that little bit harder. “This feels like when we slew Yolon, but ten times worse. Will… will everything be alright?”

Elia and Rye looked at each other. Neither of them knew what answer to give, whether to lie with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or admit that whatever happened now, it was as much their fault as it was out of their control.

Finally, Elia settled on being the one to break the ice.

“I don’t care,” she said. “I just want a bath, some food, and a good bed to sleep in. But if the world is ending tomorrow, then I guess we’ll just have to get up early.”