Deekius’ pale form shifted as the door to his chamber opened, and the two guards watching over him turned their spears on the intruder.

The groggy eyes of the ratman opened to nothing but the dank ceiling of the castle, and his ears perked up as they heard someone cut through the guttural cries of the guards:

“Leave us.”

The guards hesitated, lowering their weapons but looking at each other in bewilderment.

“Did I stutter?” the intruder said. “No. Your Shai-Alud just gave you a command.”

One brave guardsman piped up.

“B-but King Shryk-“

“Is your King, true. But he is not your God’s champion, setting fire to His enemies. Do you wish to see what happens when you anger the Unclean One?”

Evidently the guards did not, for in the next second, they bowed and lumbered from the room, trailing their spears behind them.

Deekius smirked as he rose and looked into the glasses of his newest visitor.

“Finally,” he said. “You are making good use of your title, Sire.”

Marcus, though he forced a smile, was clearly troubled. The rat-priest didn’t need the power of the Gloomraav to see that. The human’s face was practically dripping with sweat.

“How are you?” he asked.

Deekius stiffened. “Sire, I have strength enough in me to be serving you. You must not allow yourself to worry over a lowly servant like me.”

“It’s not your usefulness that concerns me,” he replied. “It’s your candor.”

Deekius blinked.

“What you said to the King,” Marcus said. “It bordered on heresy. Something which I don’t think your people take lightly.”

Deekius craned his neck and looked down at his twisted limbs, flexing his claws that were still speckled with his blood.

“I am devoting my life to He Who Festers,” he replied, smiling through teeth that were still stained by his last episode. “I am finding you. I am performing feats beyond any Gloomraava. I am doing these things as a single rat. If I do am doing these things, can I really be called a heretic?"

Marcus smirked. “That depends entirely on whose side you truly stand on.”

“The only side that is mattering,” Deekius said. “I am serving the Unclean before any other Lord or Master.”

Yes, Marcus thought. And that’s exactly where your problem lies. There would be a time when I might have lectured you. I might have taken you by the scuff of your thin neck and told you how your beliefs mean nothing – how the voices you hear are nothing more than whispers in the wind. Who is to say that the miracles you work with your hands – miracles that have saved my skin on more than one occasion – are the results of a God working through you? As far as I’m concerned, I only see you before me, Deekius. No one else. No one behind or above you. Among rats, you are on a whole different level.

But you’ll never believe that. Because that’s not in your nature, is it? Again, there would have been a time when I would argue the night away with you in spite of that, even knowing I couldn’t change your mind. But now…what’s the point? What good would it do you or me? Right now, I need your strength – and I don’t care where you think it comes from. Does that make me a hypocrite?

Well, there are worse crimes to commit than hypocrisy.

“I am not thinking that you come here simply because you worry for my health,” the ratpriest coughed.

Marcus held his head high. “You said you had something for me. From our mutual friend.”

Deekius smiled, licking his crimson-smeared lips.

“Perhaps it is being fate,” he said. “But our little snake is finally squealing. Come, and let me show you how a rat can break a serpent.”

…

If walls could speak, the dungeons of Fleapit would have such macabre stories to tell that it would turn the stomach of even the most seasoned Green Beret.

Marcus was therefore mildly surprised to see the Yokun assassin’s form barely changed from how he remembered it. There she was, shaken, sticking to a shadowed corner of her cell, but still outwardly recognizable as a snake-humanoid.

“You are being surprised, Sire?” Deekius asked.

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“I admit it,” Marcus said. “I expected to see this creature thoroughly debased.”

The ratpriest smiled. “Do not be thinking that everything surface-level is revealing what lies underneath.”

At Marcus’ confusion the ratman raised his palm, closed his eyes, and clenched his fist.

The Yokun stirred, spittle flying from her mouth.

“Be telling the human what he wants to know,” he said, in a voice that wrang out with such power than Marcus felt his heart knock against his shaking ribs.

Yeeva writhed and the bones in her neck cracked. She fell to the floor, eyes bulging like two bulbs ready to burst, tail slapping against the wall as though in death-spasm.

“I…I…am…Yeeva…of…House…of…Whis-“

“SILENCE!” the rat screeched, throwing the serpent against the bars of her cage, her every limb shuddering and slapping against the iron painfully, giving Marcus a vision now of the places where her scales had broken apart, revealing the soft, scarred flesh beneath that was moving with every twitch of the ratman’s claws.

“Be ceasing your wails. Be dropping your walls. Be looking at him and telling him the answer to his question!”

The face slammed against the bars, sending Marcus staggering back.

“Be asking now!” the ratman commanded, his scaly marionette dancing before them. “Quick!”

“W-“ Marcus stuttered, steadying himself in the face of the blood-magic performance. “Your Lady – the Pala Matriarch. Maria. Where is she?”

The Yokun’s mouth opened in a snarl, displaying nothing but a toothless mouth, gums covered in sores where her blood was currently boiling.

“Be. Answering,” Deekius roared. “NOW!”

And with a scream that rivaled even Hannibal’s battlecry, the puppeted Yokun answered.

“P…Piper’s…Hill…” she choked through a throat filling with her own ichor, speaking through lungs consumed by pools of phlegm. “There…battle…Temple..!”

“More,” Marcus said, edging forward, ignoring Deekius as he started to sway, nose bleeding profusely again. “Tell me where this place is. What’s she doing. Where –“

“Sire!” Deekius suddenly shouted. “Seek to know no more!”

“I…I must,” he said, grabbing the bars of the cage and looking into the Yokun’s bleeding eyes. “Tell me that she’s ok. Tell me what you meant when you said she didn’t want to go home. Tell me what your people did to her!”

All at once, the Yokun’s scales were peeled away, purple liquid spilling out from behind her snout.

“May she…be…your end,” she whispered. “Let this face…be an omen of…the death…that awaits…you!”

Before his eyes, Marcus then saw the Yokun’s neck snap with a sickening crack, sending her scales splintering to the ground in a hail, evoking a cry of pain from Deekius that seemed to snap Marcus back to the real world beyond his own desires.

“Deekius!”

The ratman waved his reaching hand away, staggering to his feet and wheezing as he wiped his newest wound from his face.

“I…I am doing what I can, Sire,” he said. “I am being sorry, but she is strong in mind. It is taking much time to break her.”

Marcus wasn’t sure whether to back away or give the ratman a hearty pat on his hunched back. Looking back at the crumpled Yokun’s body beneath them, he decided on neither. Instead he faced away from the rat and coughed.

“No,” he said. “I…I have asked too much of you once again,” he said. “You gave me what I needed, Deekius. It was I who selfishly asked for more. As I always do.”

“Sire,” the Gloomraava croaked. “Do not be cursing yourself.”

“I must,” Marcus replied. “No one else around here will. Not openly, anyway.”

He looked on as the blood of the Yokun pooled under her crumpled corpse.

Did I really order this? Will this world really be nothing more than a means to an end for me? This world…and it’s people?

He then turned back to Deekius, seeing the rat snivel and wipe away clotted blood from his nasal cavities, and told him what he’d suspected since Razork itself.

“You’re dying,” he said simply.

The Gloomraava stared right back at him, saying nothing.

“You’re dying,” Marcus said again. “I’ve known it since Razork, though I wouldn’t let myself believe it. But it’s true. The power of your Incantations has overcome you. Because I’ve forced more from you than a Gloomraava can take.”

“Sire,” Deekius replied glumly. “Are you thinking I fear death?”

“I think you fear nothing, Deekius. That doesn’t mean I’m simply going to let you leave this world because of me. Whatever you might think, the man you see before you isn't worth giving up your life for.”

The ratman flashed him a smile that displayed a kind of brotherly admiration – the kind of smile that told Marcus this rat had known what his fate would be for a long time.

“Sire,” he said. “He-Who-Festers is always choosing His servants wisely. He is working throughout time, always looking ahead to place His faithful where they must be, when they must be. Once, when I was but a suckling child that could not see the world, the Unclean One is granting me a vision. I am seeing myself, fully grown and hunched over in service to the Lord, standing beside a creature at least a foot taller than me. The creature is a light in the Underkingdom, standing above us all and ushering us towards the surface – where our Empire is becoming so brilliant that it is the envy of the stars themselves. Before the march towards the light of the surface is made, however, I am seeing my form curl and expire, returning to the ooze of the Unclean from whence it came. I am seeing this and weeping, Sire Marcus, not because I am being sad to see my demise, but because I am overcome by the beauty of the moment. The smells, the sounds, the sights and the feeling of the skies above as the clouds are turning grey, and the cities of Thea as they are consumed by our chittering…it is a gift that is worth dying for, Sire. What is the life of a single rat compared to the glory of a God?”

Marcus said nothing as the rat then shuffled away, nodding only briefly to the guards as he left the dungeon with his last limping ounce of life.

What happens to a man when he has servants like this? he pondered. When other living souls tell him they are not only willing to die to help that man realize his dreams, but actually happy to do so?

Then he looked at the crumpled remains of the Yokun and realized that he already knew the answer.

“Maybe you were right all along, Steven,” he whispered in a voice that struck him with its harshness. “But I’m the one that’s still standing. And I’m not about to lay down and die just yet. If a rat with that much power at his fingertips wants to lay his life on the line for me…then so be it.”

He noticed the guards blinding nervously in his direction and barked a final order at them before he left the dungeon for good. He wouldn’t be coming back.

“Clean up this mess,” he told them. “I’ve seen enough corpses in this pit to last me a lifetime.”

###

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