A fierce optimism flared in me as I rushed down the steps to join Zirilla for the defense below. Mirio had found our enemy.

The roots of our keep ran deep: we’d spent as much time preparing for an attack from below as from the surface, perhaps longer.

As I moved, Luthiel continued to speak through the bond. Mirio gave me a position just as he succumbed—I have a map for you here when you are ready to depart. It’s underground, but not far from here. Along the cliff’s edge, though I don’t know the elevation. It could be down in the limestone hills or much higher, in the basalt cliffs. It could be on the surface, even.

We’ll find it, I said. One moment. I contacted Larash and gave him a set of curt orders to divert one of our windcallers to scout the location visually. Then I returned to my conversation with Luthiel.

I should caution you, said Luthiel. I want to say that he overextended himself because he saw an opportunity, but there was something curious about him in the last few moments. He was asking for help.

I frowned. That didn’t sound out of the ordinary. From the healers?

Not quite, said Luthiel. To me it sounded like he was asking for help from Palimpsest.

A dark pit seemed to grow in my stomach. I see.

Mishlo will keep a close eye on him, said Luthiel. As will I.

Not for long, I told him. I want you coming with me.

Luthiel was quiet a moment. I don’t think it’s wise, Aziriel.

A flash of anger shot through me, flaring and then disappearing as fast as it had come. After everything, Luthiel was going to second-guess me?

Listen, I told him. You’re right if you think you should be staying here in case we need you to protect the colony from Palimpsest’s psychic attacks.

That’s what I think, yes, Luthiel said simply.

But even now, we need to think about the long-term success of the colony. I want you to kill this thing with me.

I understand, Luthiel said, his mental voice as impassive as ever. And I won’t argue, Aziriel. But it’s a risk.

It’s all a risk, I said. Staying, leaving—a single surprise could leave us needing you elsewhere.

As you wish.

We left unspoken one of the most important reasons I wanted him out in the field. I wanted Luthiel, [Arcane Champion], winning victory by my side in the most tangible and way possible. Just as Mirio could allay some of the criticisms of him by taming a useless behemoth, I could earn Luthiel even more consideration in the upcoming judgement by ensuring that he was with me when we struck the killing blow.

It seemed too perfect an opportunity, too good of a risk to pass up. Palimpsest was a battle, but the continued survival of my people was the war—and to win it, I had to scrape and claw for every advantage we could get.

Luthiel was an advantage.

As we’d spoken, I’d run by many side passages that led to more

Windcallers and firedancers, each with their hands against the air-tight metal plates that we’d set into the stones. They were manipulating objects in the chambers beyond them: bringing in fresh air to burn the packed blocks of condensed materials and then using the runes we’d carved on the walls and floor to sieve all the poisonous air that the burning generated through a metal apparatus and into another sealed chamber. At a command, they’d vent the unbreathable gas they’d stored downward into the caves below to suffocate our enemies.

There were only a few such chambers, though now I wished we’d had more. Earth and fire elementals didn’t breathe, and they’d been our greatest concern when designing the keep.

As such, our greatest defense had been centered around water.

The foundation of our keep had many reinforced slabs of concrete that stretched out and downward like straight-edged roots, each of them making it harder to shift by moving the rock beneath it. The biggest of these roots was a central pillar that pierced deep into the earth below us. Its outside was lined with the stairway that I’d descended, and its was center contained the air chambers, mana wells, and waterworks that we’d built for the purpose of defense.

Excavated into the bedrock both around and deep beneath this central pillar was a gridwork lattice of tunnels that were each just big enough to crawl through. They’d been carved and maintained so that any approach toward the keep, either from below or from the sides, meant intersecting our small tunnels. And that meant potential high-pressure flooding from the massive reservoir of water that we had access to above us.

I found Zirilla at the lowermost chamber in the central pillar. The concrete walls of the pillar were gone here, and magelight illuminated rough walls of bare basalt.

She was with a collection of some of strongest earthshapers and waterweavers. Seriana was there, too, her expression distant as she no doubt received communications from some of the mages on the ramparts, giving orders and taking orders in turn from Larash.

They were seated in a circle at the westward side of the chamber, runes drawn in chalk on the ground around them. I smiled as I saw them: the pillar they sat in might as well have been a high tower, granting the most distant sight over the earth below and around them. Here, then, was our council of spellcasters.

With my [Air Magick], I could reach my gaze quickly into the rough-hewn tunnels around us and see that they were empty.

“You haven’t pushed back yet?” I asked as Zirilla looked up at me.

“Not yet,” she Zirilla. “From what I’ve seen you made the attack up top come early.”

“Let’s be glad for now that it worked.”

“Heh.”

“Mirio found Palimpsest,” I said.

Zirilla took this in with a look of surprise, then smiled. “Good Mirio.”

“Once you’re done with your initial pushback here, can the earthshapers here make due without you?” I said.

“Without either of us?” she asked. “Yes. Just split some windcallers down here if you need to.”

“We need them everywhere,” I said. “We’ll be stretching them thin, but we’ll have to make it work.”

“Just a few of them can work as long as they have strong channelers,” Zirilla said.

“Good,” I said.

Then I searched about us with the psychic bond and found, to my pleasure, that Valir had returned while we’d been at work. I reached to him and Zirilla with the bond.

I need you both, I said.

I won’t be back for a few more minutes, said Valir. I can hurry if you need me to, but Larash said things were calming on the surface.

They are, I said. But we found our enemy and we need to figure who’s going and who’s staying. Luthiel and Zirilla are in. I’m thinking you and another psychic will round us out, maybe some of the first windborne and another elementalist.

Not Mirio? Valir asked.

He’s unconscious.

I see, Valir said.

Now Zirilla spoke. What exactly are we headed into, then?

We don’t know, I said. Could be above or below-ground, I sent a scout out already. I want to say that it’s unlikely to be buried deep in the rock—that if it is, it’s crafted its own tomb. But that’s only true if it fights enemies like us. Enemies who know how to collapse a cave from high above it without ever having to extend our claim into its domain, who know how to smoke it out with poisonous gas or cook it out with directed heat.

Well so what, then? Zirilla said. So what if this place has convinced it that an underground fortress is the pinnacle of safety? We do know how to do all those things: if it isn’t prepared for them, so much the better.

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Is it, though? I asked. All those things take time, and I don’t know how much of it we have. If Palimpsest has another wave of attackers on the way, all they need to do is adjust their tactics to what they’ve seen so far. Dig their tunnels further from the keep, mass their soldiers above ground at a great distance before charging, maybe even commit to fighting entirely above ground instead of below… I’ve got the scouts further out than I’m comfortable with just so that we can intercept any more aerial attacks, but we still can’t assume that their next assault will be as easy to counter, as scattered and predictable as this one. Even if they have no more tricks at all, this will only get harder—especially with a team of us away, hunting them.

Fair enough, said Zirilla. Though it’s not like we’re at wit’s end, here.

We have more than a few defenses we’ve yet to reveal, I agreed. But I don’t want to spend an hour defending magic circles that we draw on some random slope of rock a kilometer over our enemy’s stronghold. And I definitely don’t want to have to hunt them out through caves. As much a deep hiding place would normally guarantee us a victory, I’d rather find them above ground and surrounded by guards.

Zirilla made a wordless noise of assent. There was a reason we hadn’t sent anyone deep into the tunnels below to seal them off below. Cave-ins were too easy to cause, and from too many places. Even with Zirilla at my side to make sure we weren’t buried, being sealed underground was too great a risk.

And if we do end up defending some mountainside slope somewhere, it will be a handful of us with no fortifications against everything that Palimpsest has at hand. With luck, that just means more of what we’ve seen—they’ll struggle to hurt Valir and I at all.

Good, said Zirilla. That said, I hate to interrupt….

I reached out with my [Wild Bond] and sensed the many insects below us, burrowing closer. It was time.

Get acclimated and choose your people, Valir, I told him.

Lux Irovex.

I turned my attention to the earth below us, watching the burrowing insects.

Start channeling, Zirilla said. She gave me and the rest of the channelers some mental indications of who would be doing what: my high [Channel] and [Primeval Resonance] meant that I was equal to several others when it came to just moving mana around.

We began to draw mana out of the mana-rich well in the central of the room, pulling it through a thin concrete barrier and pushing it along planned avenues in our lattice of tunnels.

As we did so, I watched the beetles below us. They were remarkably efficient, just as Mirio had said. Beetles would crawl along the roof of their newly-formed tunnel, reach the mana-dense working area, then break a huge slab of stone from the wall.

From there, they would use a mouth that was set into the downward-facing portion of their head to suck up any dust and small fragments that had been made by their rock-breaking, especially those that tended to form as a consequence of the grooves in their tunnel walls. They would deposite this detritus in the same cavity that they stored their rounded earthen projectiles in.

Then they would hoist the slab with the help of their comrades, using their [Earth Magick] to balance it somewhat, and exit via the lower portion of the tunnel where gravity helped to keep them steady.

All the while, all of the bugs were channeling mana down the tunnel and toward the front.

Not yet, said Zirilla, both to me and to the elementalists around us. Palimpsest could no doubt sense that our grid of tunnels was unavoidable, and the multiple tunnels’ of oncoming insects cut into them with abandon, exposing themselves.

All our gazes were on the burrowing horned beetles carving out slabs of earth beneath us. We waited, channeling more mana into place as the tunnelers grew a few feet closer. Soon the last of the enemy tunnels had connected with our own.

Almost, said Zirilla.

Palimpsest’s minions were doing what they could to block our tunnels, collapsing them for as far up as their claims could reach. This was a struggle, however: Seriana was extending her claim deep into the stone beneath us, focusing it in one place, then another to cut them off as they tried.

I had no doubt that some of the beetles now arriving would be high-level, creatures that Palimpsest had made strong for the express purpose of contesting our claim on the earth beneath us.

But if we did things right, it wouldn’t matter.

Go.

At once, I and the other channelers pushed a wall of focused mana forward into the tunnels as the waterweavers opened up the conduits that led down from the reservoir.

Icy water began to flow through the lattice of carved tunnels that we’d made deep into the rock, pushed through not only by the enormous pressure of the reservoir above us, but by the power of the waterweavers themselves, who spent not only their own mana but the plentiful mana that we were supply them

The beetles conjured sheets of hard light to stop the flow, barriers that stretched across the whole of their tunnel-ends. For a moment it seemed as if this had stopped the flow, even if it had arrested their momentum—but this was only because Seriana was waiting for adequate pressure to build.

The archmage had weaver-enhanced [Focus] just as I had weaver-enhanced [Channel], and now she demonstrated it by forcing her claim into the tunnel-ends to grab a pinprick-sized section of their hardlight barrier.

Then she loosed her spell, and a ripple seemed to spread through the hard light barrier, disintegrating it. Icy water burst forth into the tunnel in a sudden wave, and Seriana repeated the process for the next tunnel.

One by one, the archmage snuffed out the barriers and condemned the insects inside them to drown. I watched with grim satisfaction as the same story repeated itself in each tunnel: an underground river formed, and despite their excellent grips, the beetles were washed away, soon crashing into one another to create an avalanche of bodies.

I watched with satisfaction as all of the beetles were swept away and out of sight. Our waterworks were fed by a rift lake that fed the river that fed the reservoir in the settlement. The total fluid throughput was more than enough to keep the water flowing into every tunnel. Even if Palimpsest had already prepared with good drainage further down their tunnels, their tunnels would remain underground rivers.

And even if they could fully drain the water and work past it, they would soon find the caves filling with unbreathable gas. We had none of the truly horrific poisons that we’d learned how to make from humans and goblins, but we didn’t need them. Fire alone could poison anything that breathed, if you had windcallers who knew how to sieve the smoke.

But there was no need to let our enemy know that we could do as much now. We’d let them fix the first problem before presenting them with the more difficult one.

Aziriel, Zirilla said.

I looked over at her sharply—she was speaking to me through the bond, and alone.

Yes?

I don’t think you should bring Luthiel.

Again, anger ran through me as a sudden, shocking chill.

Palimpsest has tried more than one trick, she said. And you’re worried they can still escalate even more than they already have. What if they’ve got another secret, another tactic to employ—and it’s a psychic one? He’s useful both in the psychic battleground and the physical one. One champion goes, one champion stays.

You know this is about more than just this battle, I said.

I know, she said. I saw your thoughts the moment you said he was coming. But I think you’re wrong—better to leave him here and hope that he finds something impressive to do in the meantime. This battle will do enough to further your agenda.

I rolled my shoulders, considering her words even as they agitated me. She was right, of course. There was a difference between confidence and certainty—and I was only confident in the keep’s assured safety while we were gone, not certain. We could do without Luthiel in the field, as long as we took another mage with comprehensive knowledge of the sorts of rituals we might want to cast in the field. And we had several of those, one of whom was sitting feet away from me.

For now, it seemed like we could hold out against Palimpsest’s psychic attacks for long enough that we could strike, but too many things could change. The better half of our psychic power was best left behind us. My team of handpicked fighters could deal with the unexpected better than the colony—and with less severe consequences by far.

You’re right, I told her. I widened the bond, speaking to the rest of them. Change of plan. Luthiel is remaining, and Seriana will come with us. Zirilla, pick two firedancers and two icebinders. Valir, pick six blood mages who are good with bows. We’ll send everyone who can’t fly along the cliff’s edge, then reinforce them with the windcallers once Palimpsest realizes what we’re doing. Our goal isn’t far: we’ll still catch them at least a little unawares. You have psychics, Valir?

I do. We can leave in two minutes.

Good, I said. I rose, and spoke. “You can find our replacements on our way up, Zirilla.” She and Seriana rose, and soon we were hurrying up the steps, wind at our backs.

It wasn’t long before I felt an unfamiliar touch on my mind.

Lux Irovex?

It was the windcaller that Larash had sent to scout Mirio’s marked location from the air.

I’m listening.

I’m here, but I don’t see anything. They gave me a visual impression of the terrain below them—a band of tall, foliage-covered limestone hills beneath the second mist layer, rising up on the edge of the swamp. Above the mists, more craggy, moss-streaked rock that eventually gave way to spare grasses, the occasional scraggly pine, and then rising mountainside that was too steep for vegetation.

Good, I said. Don’t look for any hidden entrance, I told them. I don’t want to risk Palimpsest knowing that we know where they are. We’ll find it when we get there—come back for now.

Aye, Lux Irovex.

I spoke to my assembled team. With any luck, we’ll get there and find out that Palimpsest is positioned in a compromise, the worst of both worlds. Under the rock, but not so deep that it will be hard to crush them. I paused, thought, then added: With worse luck, they’ll be deep underground.

And with no luck? Valir asked.

Worst case, we won’t find them at all. It sounded as if Mirio was quite addled when he gave us this information. It may not be reliable, but it’s the best chance we’ve got for now—and this is the best time to take it in.

As long as you’re worried it could be a trap, I feel secure, he said.

I let out a humorless laugh. I’m always worried, Valir. But Palimpsest has no idea what the limit of our ability to sense is, or the limits of what we can do with sophisticated spells. We’re a hard foe to trick.

Soon we’d broken back out into daylight, and soon after I’d sent Valir and the other ground forces on their way. The location was only a few minutes’ flight—which made sense, given that Palimpsest would need to be close to us to command their forces.

I had to wonder: had they moved here for this attack? If the insects I’d found beneath the earth on the first day were theirs, they must have been mobile. Ultimately, though, speculating as to their nature would only be useful for a little while longer.

We’d be meeting one another soon enough.