Viktor traded blows with the final [Nameless Vanguard] — the regiment’s leader, judging by her prowess. In one final exchange, the half-gold woman managed to cut off Viktor’s lame arm while only receiving a whip crack on her side in return.

The woman ostensibly came out ahead as Viktor signaled Sylph — his griffin — to retreat, but Viktor’s blow caused her to recoil in pain. She was frozen in the air for but a second, but in that brief window of vulnerability, half a dozen arrows found their mark and delivered the fool unto death.

An arrow through the base of her neck and out her forehead forced [Dying Breath] to consume her flesh entirely. Now a statue of pure gold, she plummeted from the air toward the cobbles of Kingsblood Square far, far below. Her [Arms of the Seraphic Host] dissipated into motes of light trailing her form like the tail of a falling star.

She crashed into the square with all the force of a meteor. Her impact caused a kinetic explosion of gold and stone shrapnel, and several of Viktor’s soldiers couldn’t get out of the way in time, but Viktor paid them no mind. Their deaths were the result of their own ineptitude.

Cleaning up was always Viktor’s least favorite part of a battle. He knew his soldiers assumed that as a [Steward of Pain] he would enjoy sampling the despair of an enemy who knew that all was lost, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Viktor didn’t love pain for its own sake. No, his passion lay in causing pain. To take a man filled with hope and crush him, to be the cause of the light in his eyes to die out… There wasn’t a better feeling in all the world.

Dealing with soldiers who already knew they’d lost, on the other hand, was boring. What was the point of adding misery to the miserable? It was akin to ‘hunting’ a caged animal. There was no challenge to it, no sport.

Viktor had already had his fun with Gregory. Snuffing out the last flames of hope in that ancient man’s heart had been the greatest ecstasy of Viktor’s life, and he would be riding that high for weeks to come. The rest of this, however, was just work.

Now that Kingsblood Square was empty of enemy combatants, Viktor began formulating orders for his troops to reinforce the other battles going on throughout the city.

Before he could speak a word, however, the atmosphere changed.

The sky shifted from black to polychromatic swirls. Was this an attack from the [Aurorae Sylvas]?

Viktor tried signaling Sylph to dive, but something was wrong.

It wasn’t just the sky. The entire world was warped with maddening light.

No, it wasn’t the world. It was his own eyes. Something was wrong with him.

Viktor again tried to signal a dive, but he had no legs. He looked down to see both his armor and his flesh were falling apart and merging into Sylph. His only friend’s avian eyes were filled with fear as she too was becoming similarly undone.

Viktor’s very last thought was that he needed to comfort her. He tried reaching out his hand to scratch her feathers in that way she liked, but he no longer had any arms.

His self-awareness disappeared. ‘Viktor’ and ‘Sylph’ were gone, and all that remained was an amorphous ball of living flesh, organs, feathers, and metal falling from the sky.

All throughout the city, the same scene was repeating itself over and over again.

The divinity in the air shifted. The pulses that had been radiating from the tower reversed into a flow, at first a trickle, and then a torrent. The fell ritual somewhere within the Torr Royale was repaired, and the spirits of all beholden to the [Couronne Solaire] were ripped from their bodies and pulled into the city’s center by the flood of magic.

Every one of the [Hollow King]’s soldiers collapsed and discorporated into their base visceral components. The undead citizenry had no spirits left to yield, but they too shivered with such force that their bodies fell apart. From without the city were pulled a plethora of ordinary citizens’ spirits, but only for several hundred miles in every direction.

The forces of the [Nameless Revolt] managed to remain themselves, but even they felt their rescinded oaths stirring — ethereal string tugging at their hearts, coaxing them to submit their souls to their rightful [King]. Only their allies, the [Aurorae Sylvas], were left wholly unaffected.

SPLAT!

The mush that had been Viktor and Sylph splattered onto the ground, but no one was around to hear it.

For a moment, save for the crackle of flames, the city was silent. The scattered soldiers of the [Aurorae Sylvas] and the [Nameless Revolt] could only stare in confusion, weapons at the ready as they eyed their disassembled foes.

Then, all at once, the flesh moved.

Tendons, ligaments, bones, muscles, eyes, and teeth surged into irregular piles. Some pounced on soldiers who stood too close and consumed them. Other piles launched themselves at each other to pool their masses together. Still others split themselves apart, turning singular corpses into swarms of ankle-height fleshlings of every shape and description.

Unbeknownst to all, this sudden reformation of the [Hollow King]’s forces were caused by the [Hollow King] itself. Somewhere deep within the [Torr Royale], it spent stolen power to reforge its form, and as it became changed, so too did its army.

The ankle-high fleshlings congregated into [Tier I] [Penitent Swarms]. Hand bones wrapped in membranous skin attached themselves to eyeballs, becoming [Tier I] [Cherubim Voyeuristes] that gathered information from the skies. The shapeless fleshpiles undulating toward their enemies were [Tier II] [Vacuous Amalgams], hole-ridden aberrations seeking only to consume and replicate.

Perhaps the least terrifying creatures of the [Hollow King]’s reformed army were the [Tier III] [Osseum Missilaries]. Their forms were the most uniform, and their silhouettes were the closest to Human if one ignored their lack of heads and lower backs. They were the desecrated corpses of [Sunlit Archers] stripped of everything unnecessary to wield their bows. Their shoulders were placed directly above their hips, and their single eyes were sewn above the knuckles of their right hands for simpler aiming. Their left elbows were fused straight, and the large back muscles usually required to draw their bows were replaced by pairs of winches made of spinal gearwheels. Some notched regular arrows while others used sharpened bones fletched with cartilage-stiffened hair.

Lower-tiered corpses were subsumed by the corpses of [Solar Knights] to become [Tier IV] [Gluttonous Templars], headless horse-shaped things with eyes upon their shoulders. From tip to tail, their undersides were replaced with body-spanning maws lined with whirring teeth ready to grind flesh into paste.

[Solar Cannons] were repurposed into [Tier IV] [Sinew-Limbed Cannoneers], bones and connective tissue wrapping around the artillery pieces to become spike-lined tentacles useful for attaching themselves to walls.

The blood splattered all about the streets pooled together into [Tier IV] [Sanguine Vespers]. Their specific forms were varied, but each of the glistening blood constructs out-massed the average Solarian by at least a factor of four.

Meanwhile, the blood spilled nearer to fallen [Luminous Titans] invaded the golems’ inert shells, wearing them like armor. Their trims were dyed red, and every gap in their plating revealed deeper shades of the same hue. A number of [Sanguine Vespers] took the form of enormous blades and hammers, and they launched themselves into the hands of the former [Luminous Titans] to be wielded as weapons. And so the [Tier V] [Scarlet Cardinals] stood and brandished armaments composed of their subordinates, bloodthirsty and ready to wreak havoc.

At the center of it all, upon the broken ground of Kingsblood Square, lay the desecrated flesh of Viktor, Sylph, and a sizable portion of the [Hollow King]’s elite forces. Most became troops similar to those spread throughout the rest of the city, but the [Steward of Pain]’s corpse was destined for something more grotesque.

Like iron filings to a lodestone, every corpse in an area tens of meters wide flew into Viktor’s. Dozens of equine legs attached themselves in series to create a centipede of horseflesh. Erupting from the head of the train was a grotesque patchwork of meat that could generously be called a “torso.”

It towered over a dozen feet tall. Five limbs were attached to the creature’s left, and three to its right, and all eight were tipped not with hands but with a motley assortment of swords, spears, and lances jutting from each arm’s end like the spikes of a morningstar.

A pair of griffin wings — haphazardly enlarged with the addition of Human hands — unfurled themselves at the creature’s back. Abandoned bits of armor slid up its body, borne upon waves of undulating flesh, and were knit together with tendons to form a mosaic carapace.

In the center of the creature’s torso, a pair of pustules swelled into existence and burst apart to leave behind a pair of eyes. The eyes looked as if they wanted to scream, but the creature hadn’t a mouth.

Filled with nothing but pain and hate, the [Tier V] [Centaurion Pontifex Aberrant] charged away from Kingsblood Square in search of any upon whom it could vent its rage. Its hooves were thunder against the ground, its flesh roiling waves, its hearts a storm.

Woe — and a prolonged end — unto any who crossed its path.

The [Hollow King], somewhere within the Torr Royale, donned the [Couronne Solaire], and a final pulse of mana and divinity spread throughout the city. Like a perfumed rot, every one of its horrid troops became shrouded in a miasma of gold.

The [Solarian Courts] were no more.

The [Profane Fleshtide] surged throughout Soleil.

----------------------------------------

“Reincarnation, transmigration, or annihilation?”

Gregory heard the words, and for some reason he instantly knew what they meant, but he was far too distracted to form an answer.

Before him lay a memory.

It was an early autumn evening with just the barest hint of a chill in the air, and Gregory was sat on a bench atop a hill overlooking the splendor of a familiar city.

Hundreds of glistening roads meandering in harmony along the curves of hills, wide boulevards where merchants would set their carts and children would play their games, climbing vines and twisting trees preparing for winter and filling the air with the aroma of their calm, resplendent feats of architecture that gave each district its own unique character, the Grand Colosseum at the center of it all…

Arcadia. The city looked exactly as he remembered it did from all those years ago…

The only difference was that it was empty. Not a soul was there.

“Take your time. It’s a difficult choice to make.”

Well, not a soul save for himself and the angel standing at his side.

Gregory looked over to regard the man who’d just spoke. He wore the stereotypical white robes of his kind, and his spectacles and wrinkled face made him look like a grandfather.

“So I’m dead?” Gregory asked, surprised with how calm he was. In all likelihood, his serenity was due mostly to his surroundings, but it galled him to think that the angel at his side had constructed this scene specifically for that purpose. It galled him even more to admit that it was working. “Without the gods, I didn’t think there could be an afterlife.”

“Technically, there can’t, but that’s why I’m here,” the grandfatherly angel said with a shrug. “Doing a favor for an old friend, you see.”

“Reincarnation, transmigration, or annihilation. Are those really my only options?” Gregory asked.

“Well, they should be…” the angel trailed off leadingly, “but since I’m a fan of yours, allow me to show some favoritism. I’ll let you say one last goodbye to an old friend, and then I’ll whisk you away to whatever comes next. What do you say?”

Gregory snorted. “Say goodbye to an old friend? My death didn’t come as a surprise, and I’ve already said my goodbyes. I don’t have any ‘old friends’ left. Who are you talking about?”

“Oh, I think you know,” the angel said with a smirk.

Before Gregory could respond that he didn’t — even though he knew he did — the angel raised his hand. Time sped forward. Evening became night in an instant, and Gregory knew exactly when he was.

Gregory looked beside him, to the empty seat of his two-person bench. Resting there was a tray with two steaming wooden bowls of cauillum, a hot alcoholic drink made from the root of a plant Gregory assumed went extinct millennia ago.

Cautiously, he brought a bowl up to his nose and sniffed. It was heady and sour, just like he remembered. The last time he’d had this drink was—

Familiar fingers glide gently through his hair to rest upon the nape of his neck.

“I’ll never let you go, Gregory. I promise.”

Another’s lips, achingly sweet, brush up against his own—

Gregory threw the bowl away from his face before he could remember any more. The memory was a happy one, but that only made it sting all the more.

The bowl crashed into a nearby tree, splashing its contents all over the bark. The bowl cracked but stayed in one piece. With a hollow thuk thuk thuk, it bounced a few times against the alabaster-white cobbles of a footpath, rolled, and finally settled bottom-up in a patch of grass by the angel’s feet.

“I’m… I’m sorry,” Gregory wheezed, suddenly short of breath. “I just—”

“No need to apologize, young man,” the angel said with a reassuring pat against Gregory’s shoulder. “I should have better taken your feelings into account. This was my fault.”

Gregory nodded slowly, surprised at the genuine contrition in the old angel’s voice, but his eyes were still on the bowl in the grass. He looked down at the tray on the bench, but it was gone. He looked up, and it was day again.

He had so many questions he could ask, but ultimately, one thing mattered to him more than anything else.

“Can I really see him again? Can I really say goodbye?”

“You can,” the angel said, giving Gregory’s shoulder a light squeeze.

Gregory took a deep, shuddering breath. Something wet was running down his cheeks.

“Then please, make it so.”

----------------------------------------

Gregory awoke to chaos.

His nostrils were filled with death, his throat with stone, and his ears with the distant sounds of battle. He tried to cough, but he hadn’t the air. For a moment, he panicked, but then his discipline reasserted itself and he realized he didn’t need to breathe.

He got to work. Luckily, he wasn’t buried too deep, and he was pleasantly surprised to find that he still had both his arms too.

He clawed his way up through layers of dirt and rubble, but something about the process felt strange. He managed to exhume the majority of his body in under a minute, and the endeavor ended up taking much less effort than he expected. Other than his left foot — which was still stuck exactly where it’d been when he woke up — his body flowed slowly but smoothly through the rubble, almost as if he were surfacing from a pool of molasses.

The first thing he noticed when he reached open air was the sky. It was flooded with Human souls of every shape, size, and description being pulled into the Torr Royale like ships drawn to the eye of a vortex, and attached to every soul was a similar-looking spirit dyed gold.

Gregory squinted. Upon closer inspection, it appeared as if it weren’t souls themselves being sucked into the Torr Royale, but the spirits attached to them. The souls were just being dragged along. As he watched, he noticed some souls managing to separate themselves from their spirits, at which point the spirits continued on as if nothing happened and the souls faded away, but those instances were rare.

Wait a moment, how was Gregory able to see souls? And why was he able to distinguish them from their spirits? As far he knew, no living person had ever been able to directly observe the soul.

Ah, no living person, Gregory realized.

He took stock of himself, and as it turned out, he did not still have both his arms. The tips of his fingers were transparent, and perhaps the rest of him was too, but it was difficult to tell because the entirety of his form — even his clothes — was crisscrossed with millions of micro-fractures leaking purple-gold light.

Wait, where did he get these clothes?

He was wearing neither the [Armaments of the Seraphic Host], nor even the cloth armor he’d had underneath. In their place, he now wore a simple autumn tunic with matching pants. The clothing’s only embellishments were the deceptively simple swirling patterns woven directly into the fabric near their hems, the trademark pattern of a certain city’s fashion industry six thousand years dead.

These were the same clothes he’d worn that night in Arcadia, a time that felt like yesterday and a hundred lifetimes ago all at once.

He hadn’t a heart in his ethereal chest, but he felt something tremble there nonetheless.

He flexed his right hand, and the cracks there widened to further reveal the amethyst-gold hues of a soul set aflame — his soul. He could feel himself burning away from the inside out. It wasn’t natural for him to be awake, and he intuitively knew that if he persisted for more than a handful of minutes, his soul — the only part of him he had left — would be burned away forever.

Nearly his entire body must have been vaporized in the explosion that killed him. The only corporeal part of him left seemed to be the left foot trapped beneath a chunk of granite.

He tried lifting the rock, but his hands just phased through without budging it an inch. It seemed he was stuck.

Gregory took in his surroundings. Kingsblood Square was in shambles. He couldn’t spy a single living person. This wasn’t too odd in and of itself, but what bothered him more was the lack of corpses. The only ones he could spy were the solid-gold bits of the [Nameless Vanguard] mixed in among the debris and shattered festival decorations, but there wasn’t a single enemy corpse to be seen. There wasn’t even any blood.

The [Hollow King]’s troops must have sallied from the square to reinforce other battlegrounds throughout the city, but why send everyone? And why take corpses with them?

Gregory shook the questions from his head. He didn’t have any time to waste speculating.

He tried spreading his awareness through the city, but the attempt caused the burning of his soul to intensify. His skin threatened to fly away in every direction, and he was forced to cut off his perception before he burst apart.

He collapsed to his knees and wretched, but nothing came out. When he finally got ahold of himself, he looked at his hands. The cracks there were larger than before.

What in the realms was that?

Gregory had no idea what’d just happened, but he wasn’t keen on attempting to use his signature perception skill a second time.

Incapable of gathering more information, Gregory’s first instinct was to charge into the Torr Royale and aid Percival, but he shoved the urge away. His left foot was still trapped, but even if he were capable of teleporting to Percival’s side right that instant, what could he accomplish? He was intangible, immobile, and effectively useless.

He vaguely remembered that an angel had sent him back to Terra for a reason, but his memories from beyond the veil were jumbled and incoherent. He couldn’t for the life of him — or the death of him — remember what the reason could be.

Frustrated, Gregory yelled at the sky.

Why was he still here? Just to suffer?

Quickly regaining control of his emotions, he squeezed his eyes shut and redoubled his efforts to remember his purpose.

Was is something… something about… saying goodbye…?

“You alright, old man?”

Gregory froze. He knew that voice. It was different from what he remembered — deeper, gravelly, aged — but the underlying timbre was unmistakable.

Gregory turned, and there he saw the love of his life.

“Thanatos?”

The cheap black robes he always wore because he hated cleaning stains, the farming scythe he’d learned to use as a weapon because of a dare, the silver hair he’d kept short ever since Gregory said it made him look ruggedly handsome, the blue-grey eyes and delicate features scrawled into a familar expression of worry — he couldn’t be anyone else.

Sure, he had a few more wrinkles than he did millennia ago, but who was Gregory to judge?

“Thanatos?” the black-robed man repeated, parroting Gregory’s question. He looked himself up and down, as if just now noticing how he looked. He flashed Gregory a winning smile and winked. “Yeah, I suppose I am.”

Gregory’s jaw dropped. “Oh, you smarmy ass! I knew it was you! I knew it! It’s so good to—hic! It’s so good to see you!” In no time at all, Gregory went from stunned silence to a sobbing, sniffling, hiccuping mess with the biggest smile he’d ever had stretched across his face.

Gregory tried taking a step toward Thanatos, completely forgetting that he still had a corporeal foot stuck in the rubble. He stumbled and fell, a mere moment away from crashing into the ground, but Thanatos launched himself forward and slid on his knees to catch him. Gregory’s threw his own arms out on reflex, and the two of them landed chest-to-chest in a kneeling embrace.

Thanatos’ arms were just as strong, warm, and gentle as Gregory remembered.

“Careful, you ol’ geezer!” Thanatos chastised playfully. “You could’ve broken a hip!”

As the dust from Thanatos knee-slide settled around them, Gregory’s breath caught. He simultaneously made two realizations.

The first — and more important of the two — was that Thanatos’ face was only a few scant inches away from his own.

The second was that Thanatos could interact with both souls and the physical world. Thanatos had caught him, a being made of pure soul, and yet he’d been able to kick up dust. That could only mean one thing.

Six millennia ago during the [Shattering of Aolyn], Gregory heard that Thanatos had tried and failed to become a god… but perhaps he’d succeeded at becoming something else.

Suddenly it all made sense. Percival had only been able to see Thanatos while on the verge of death, but as soon as he cleared his heart of the Voxwraith’s venom, his vision of Thanatos disappeared. Gregory too, despite his countless years spent searching, could only find Thanatos now that he was dead.

Gregory didn’t understand it all perfectly, but he didn’t need to. The only thing that mattered was that Thanatos was here, right in front of him, right now.

“One last goodbye, love.”

Gregory didn’t hesitate for another second. He closed the distance between them, and they kissed.

Thanatos was at first shocked, perhaps unused to Gregory being the aggressor, but he soon relaxed and returned Gregory’s enthusiasm in kind.

It wasn’t chaste. It was desperate and longing and cathartic and beautiful and euphoric and more than everything Gregory remembered and dreamed it could be, but most of all, it was far, far too short.

Gregory pulled away first. The taste of his greatest friend and greatest love still fresh in his mouth, still dripping from his teeth. He wanted more, but there wasn’t the time.

The cracks all across his body were widening, and his soul was burning away faster and faster. He needed to leave immediately, but there was still one last thing he needed to say.

“Please, love. It’s Percival. He’s up there, somewhere high in the tower,” Gregory pointed up to the Torr Royale, tears running down his face because he knew he’d never see Thanatos again. “I’ve-I’ve failed. I’ve got to go, but… You’ll take care of him for me, won’t you? Percival, he needs—”

“Consider it done,” Thanatos said.

Coming from any other man, the words would be a figure of speech, but to hear them coming from Thanatos, Gregory couldn’t help but take the phrase at face value.

Gregory relaxed, completely at ease. He quite literally considered the whole affair over and done with for no other reason than because Thanatos said so.

With no worries left to anchor him to Terra, Gregory began to fade.

He smiled, and Thanatos smiled back.

“May the Beyond treat you well, old man,” Thanatos said.

Gregory chuckled at his lover’s playful teasing. As he felt his body dissolve into motes of light, he realized this would really be their final goodbye.

“Don’t be in a rush to catch up, love. Be well, and be happy.”

The held each other right up until the end.

Gregory stole one last kiss — nothing more than a brush against the lips — and then he was gone forever.

----------------------------------------

The whistle of a blade through air.

The squelch of parting of flesh.

The snap of bone.

The wet burble of a head sliding from its neck and falling to the ground…

But the head that fell to the ground was not his own.

“Your [Liegeliness], we’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

Wait, I know that voice.

Slowly, Percival opened his eyes.

Ah. That’s right. Percival. That’s my name. How could I forget?

“That’s twice now that I’ve swooped in at the last moment to save your life. Once more and it’ll start to feel cliché.”

Blinking away his tears, Percival’s vision cleared, and he locked eyes with the stranger who’d once again saved his life.

No, not a stranger.

“So you are real. It’s good to see you, friend,” Percival said. His voice had returned to him, but he was still dying. Glancing down at himself, he saw [Dying Breath] exacting its toll on his body. The spell had paused during the brief time he’d lost his name, but now everything below his neck was regenerating in gold, more and more of his flesh was being consumed by the second. “But there’s no need to worry. I don’t think there’ll be a third time.”

Death chortled. “This might sound odd coming from me, but don’t be so morose.” He flicked the ichor off his scythe and bent down to offer Percival a hand.

Numbly, Percival accepted. Death helped him up, but no sooner had he found his feet than he stumbled again. He nearly fell back onto his ass, but Death was there to catch him and set him right once more.

There on the floor, split neatly into three pieces, lay the corpse of the [Hollow King]. Its crown was nowhere to be seen. Its body, steaming and shrinking as if being boiled by the air, rested on its side. Its right arm was a full pace away from its body. Its head lay askew, half facing the ceiling and half staring Percival down with its glassy, teeth-filled eyes.

“I know who you are, and I’m fairly certain I know why you’re here too,” Percival said with a smile. “I only wish it were possible we could meet under better circumstances.”

Death favored him with an odd look, something between relief, surprise, and vindication.

“The victims’ souls…” Percival went on, glancing down at the corpse that’d shrunk down to its original size. “Are they…?”

“Don’t worry. It takes more than a novice’s borrowed ritual to destroy so many souls,” said Death. “I doubt more than a few thousand were truly annihilated. At worst, the rest suffered only the destruction of their spirits.” He gave a helpless shrug. “They will feel somewhat removed from themselves for a few days, months, or even years depending on a number of factors, but so long as the soul and the body remain, the spirit will recover, or if needed, be born anew.”

“Oh…” Percival replied. He’d hoped that his earlier intuitions about souls being destroyed were wrong, but he was sadly unmistaken. It was some consolation to know that ‘only’ a few thousand souls were gone forever, but that was still a level of loss beyond his comprehension.

“I have something to give you,” said Death, interrupting Percival’s line of thought.

He pulled open a hidden slit at the hip of his robe to retrieve something, but as he did, Percival thought he spied the night sky through the gap. It was like a band of a million stars set against the black, blue, and pink of a twilight sky, but his glance was so brief that he couldn’t be sure if what he saw beneath the ancient man’s robes was real.

When his eyes refocused, he saw that Death was holding a crown. Not just any crown, but a crown of gems, gold, and fire. It greatly resembled the crown the [Hollow King] had worn, but its every aspect was made more.

“The [Couronne Solaire], the [Sun Crown] — whatever you want to call it really,” said Death. He held out the flaming crown for Percival to take. “It’s yours. This whole region too, if you want it. You could rule it all.”

Percival was stunned silent by the offer.

Him? Rule the [Solarian Courts]? As the leader of a revolution, perhaps he should’ve been more prepared for the possibility, but he wasn’t. He was dying, and he’d known he would be dying this night for quite a while.

“After this chaos, the people will need someone to lead them, to tie them together, to keep them whole,” Death went on. “This realm’s people — all its people, Fae and Human alike — will need a leader they can believe in. I can think of no one better to fill that role than you.”

Death was offering him a chance to rule. Percival was dying, but a dead man couldn’t rule. Was Death offering him what he thought he was?

“I’m… not sure I understand,” Percival said lamely.

“I am saying that I shall guide you, and you in turn shall guide [Solaria]. Say the word, and the crown is yours.” Death raised the crown Percival’s eye level. Its metal glimmered in tempting shades of yellow-gold, the gems encrusted on its band shining with every color of the rainbow as the light of its own white flames reflected off of them.

“What say you, my student?”

Percival considered the offer seriously. A thousand thoughts crossed his mind in an instant, but ultimately, one piece of advice rose to the top.

Seek first to know thyself.

Percival gave a bittersweet smile. “I say that thrice now you’ve helped me defy fate, and I worry Fate might never forgive me if I scorn her a fourth time. Forgive me, teacher, but I must reject your offer, and further, I must say that you are wrong.”

“I am wrong?” Death asked, his tone full of curiosity.

Seek second to know thine enemy.

“We are at the precipice of peace. The enemy is no longer an external threat, but internal strife. You were right to say my people need someone to tie them together, but you are wrong to think they need me as a leader.”

Ask not what you have the strength do. Ask what must be done, and find the strength to do it.

Percival could feel it within himself, the potential to reject [Dying Breath] and stretch out his life. All he needed to do was accept the crown, and that potential would catalyze into a power great enough to sustain him for centuries… but he knew that wouldn’t be the right thing to do.

“It is weakness to cling to that which is no longer yours. It is strength to let it go,” Percival said, glancing down at the dismembered corpse of the [Hollow King]. “My people have already seen one corpse upon the throne, and I doubt they’d be eager for another.”

He looked back up to Death.

“My lot is with the dead, and though it tempts me to reject their company, I have found the strength to accept my place among them. I am ready to die.”

“You don’t have a spell to get rid of… all this?” Death asked, gesturing vaguely to Percival’s golden body.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t,” Percival replied with a smile. His face was the only part of him left that wasn’t yet entirely gold, but he could feel thickening veins of the metal running through every one of his features. He’d be dead in mere moments, but strangely enough, he felt no dread. He felt… calm.

“You have no reason to apologize to anyone,” said Death, a hint of melancholy in his voice. “If these are to be you last breaths, do you have any final words?”

“A request, if you would.”

“If it’s within my power,” Death replied with a nod.

“My soldiers,” Percival began. One of his hands placed on Death’s shoulder, and the other he placed over his own heart. “It might be my time, but it’s not theirs. Please, accept their strings and bring them back.”

He clenched the hand over his heart into a fist, and with a grunt of effort, he ripped.

Nothing visible came away, but he could vaguely feel the result of what he’d done through his spirit. It was a subtle thing, like a thousand distant lights in his peripheral vision slowly dimming before they disappeared. If he hadn’t been paying attention, he wouldn’t have noticed.

He held them out to Death, the thousands of intangible strings connecting him to the souls of his subordinates. It was also in that moment that he realized that there were roughly twice as many stings in his hand as there should have been, which meant Gregory was already dead and had passed his burden onto Percival.

Sadly, there was no time to mourn. Percival could already feels his eyes — the first place the gold had appeared, and the last place it would consume — turning wholly into metal.

“I know it’s a lot to ask, but—”

“They shall live. You have my word.”

Percival stared at Death in shock. His mouth silently worked through the beginnings of a dozen different questions left unasked, but ultimately, he just settled on a smile.

Death grasped the thousands of invisible threads from Percival’s hand and pressed them into his own heart, tethering to him each and every remaining soul of the [Nameless Revolt].

A single tear rolled down Death’s face, and Percival felt more than a few roll down his own.

Thank you, he mouthed silently.

Thanks to Death, the lives of his subordinates were secure, and Percival could die without too many regrets. Only he, Gregory, and the [Nameless Vanguard] would remain permanently fallen, but that was a sacrifice they’d been willing to make from the beginning.

With the [Hollow King] slain, the [Solarian Courts] — No, [Solaria] — had a chance to be rebuilt better than it ever was.

All of the [Nameless Revolt]’s remaining lieutenants had long ago been made aware of the false origins of [Solaria]’s eternal war with the [Despoiled Legion], and they’d been given instructions to seek reconciliation with their ancient allies come spring. Beyond that, he trusted his subordinates to guide the land in the right direction.

There were too many unknowns for Percival to predict what a tomorrow without him might hold, but he held hope that the future might finally be one of peace.

His golden eyes locked onto Death’s orbs of storm grey. He spoke his last words, and he died with a smile on his face.

“Best of luck, Thanatos.”

----------------------------------------

“They shall live. You have my word.”

Melpomene, still disguised in her scythe-wielding ‘kooky old man’ persona, accepted the soul tethers from her former student’s hand.

It looked like he had a lot — way more than a new [Liege] should be able to handle — but the way individual [Lieges] bound soldiers to their souls were always at least a little idiosyncratic. Maybe this young man was the type to create two dozen tethers for each of his soldiers just to make sure he really got it right — a completely unnecessary precaution, but if it assuaged his anxieties, who was Melpomene to judge?

Melpomene briefly examined the bundle of tethers in her hand. She expected the vast majority of them to be redundant connections that wouldn’t add much ‘weight’ to her soul, so she saw no problem in accepting them. She pressed the connections into her own heart, and then—

AAAAH! OW OW OW! WHAT IN THE UNHOLY FUCK—!?!

Melpomene felt like her eyes were trying to shoot out of her skull, but she managed to retain her outward composure.

An entire army, thousands upon thousands of souls, all latched onto Melpomene in an instant. As a [Tier V] [Liege], she should’ve been able to deal with the burden in isolation. The only problem was that she already had an army of her own.

Melpomene’s army was already about eighty percent of what her soul could handle. She’d expected the other [Liege] to only have relatively few connections in comparison, but this—

It felt like she’d been doing weighted back-squats, and instead of throwing on a few more pounds, her student had added enough weight to break her knees.

Melpomene felt a single tear of pain roll down her cheek, but she sealed her tear ducts through sheer willpower before another could escape.

She was vaguely aware of her former student saying their last words or something. Maybe she should’ve been listening, but it took all of her concentration not to collapse into a blubbering mess.

She’d spent all that time and effort to make this persona look cool and mysterious, godsdamnit! She wasn’t going to ruin it now!

----------------------------------------

Earlier…

“”SECRET TUNNEL!””

Their cheering complete, Melpomene and Eurymedon got to work.

While Eurymedon began casting various scouting spells on the tunnel, Melpomene went to share the good news with her troops and to provide them with new orders. Everyone was already roused by the earlier avalanche that had definitely come out of nowhere, so her task didn’t take very long to accomplish. Logistical accommodations for the impromptu expedition would take longer to complete, but there was enough flex in the existing system to begin without delay.

By dawn, every soldier was rested, ready, and raring to march.

There was only one problem.

It was in that liminal band of time when Night’s fingers still wove through Day’s first amber rays of dawn, both hesitant to let go — one of Melpomene’s favorite times of day, though she’d never admit it — that Melpomene furled her wings and landed at Eurymedon’s side.

Her darksteel boots crunched into snow as she landed, but so focused was Eurymedon on their task that their eyes did not stray from the tunnel’s entrance. Despite the cold, sweat dripped from each of their myriad brows, and all six of their arms continued tracing intricate patterns through the air as the purple light of their magic danced in befuddling patterns. Their mouths, which had each been chanting independently, suddenly unified, and with one last push, Eurymedon sent her spell in the shape of a giant purple eye rocketing toward the secret tunnel.

The spell splattered against an invisible wall beneath in entrance’s archway. A lone spark of Eurymedon’s spell made it a few feet into the tunnel, and then died.

Eurymedon visibly deflated, becoming six inches shorter as their central column sagged and crumpled in on itself.

“Eurymedon, are you okay?”

“Ah, my [Liege]!” Eurymedon popped back up the full height and hastily bowed, obviously embarrassed that they’d been caught unawares in the midst of failure.

“Please, none of that,” Melpomene said, gesturing for her lieutenant to rise. She looked down the tunnel that been giving her second-in-command so much trouble and saw that it stretched for at least a hundred meters through the mountain in a perfectly straight line. Beyond that, it was difficult to make anything out without more light. “Tunnel’s giving you trouble?”

“…Yes, my [Liege],” Eurymedon said, obviously embarrassed. “The construction of this spell is based off a framework I’m completely unfamiliar with. Much to my shame, I must admit that I have no idea how long it will take for me to decipher this enchantment’s full effects — let alone how to dismantle it without collapsing the whole tunnel.”

Eurymedon shifted uncomfortably. “As you’ve just seen, my frustrations caused me to stoop so low as to try overwhelming the spell through brute force, and much to my chagrin, it seems I’m incapable of even that.”

Eurymedon shook their head in frustration and glared balefully at the archway. “Whatever this spell is, it must have been absorbing power and reinforcing itself for millennia. I apologize, my [Liege], but unravelling this spell might be the work of years, if not decades. Come spring, I would consider it an accomplishment if I’ve dispelled even ten meters of this preternatural darkness.”

Melpomene looked back down the tunnel toward the natural-looking darkness a hundred meters away. It didn’t appear especially magical to her, but she wasn’t the expert.

“Would it help if we get closer?” she asked.

Eurymedon scrunched their eyes. “I would caution against stepping through the archway until we better understand the tunnel’s enchantment, but for now, I believe we’re close enough. The darkness is only a few feet away, after all.”

Melpomene paused. She reexamined the darkness deeper into the tunnel, but no matter how much she squinted, tilted her head, or rubbed her eyes, the darkness didn’t move. “A few feet?” she asked. “It looks like a hundred meters to me.”

“A hundred meters, my [Liege]?”

“Yes, a hundred meters, give or take,” Melpomene said, a hint of confusion entering her voice. “Why do you ask?”

“My [Liege], if you don’t mind my asking, could I borrow your eyes for a moment?”

“Of course.”

Eurymedon casted a quick spell and touched Melpomene’s shoulder. Melpomene felt her eyes glow, so she looked toward the tunnel, knowing that Eurymedon was seeing through her eyes. A moment later, Eurymedon cut off the spell, each of their myriad mouths puckered in bafflement.

“Even through your eyes, I can see naught but a shroud of darkness beyond the first few feet,” they said. “My [Liege], could you please describe exactly what you see? I ask that you spare no detail.”

Melpomene shrugged and obliged. It took half an hour, but she described the darkness, the tunnel, the archway, and a bit of the surrounding rock in excruciating detail. She described exactly how the early morning light played against every facet of stone, the patterns dust particles wove as they wove through the air, even how particular rocks made her feel. Melpomene knew from experience that when Eurymedon asked for every detail, they meant every detail.

Melpomene was just about to launch into an explanation about why a particularly angular arrangement of striations reminded her of her Terpsichore when Eurymedon raised a hand to stop her. “I think I’m finally beginning to see…”

“I never doubted that you would!” Melpomene beamed. “Seeing is what you do best.”

The frustration from their earlier shortcoming now gone, Eurymedon gracefully accepted the praise with a nod and a few dozen smiles. “With approximately ninety-five percent confidence, I can rule out the possibility that what you see is an illusion. No illusion magic I am aware of could produce a scene that is both self-consistent and environmentally-reactive enough to withstand a full half-hour of your observation without contradiction.”

“Any ideas on why I’m able to see then?”

“Too many to list, my [Liege], but I now see a path toward understanding.”

The following hour was consumed with further experimentation. Eurymedon casted more spells while Melpomene summoned the leaders of each regiment to observe the archway with their own eyes. From what Melpomene could tell, they all saw the exact same thing as Eurymedon — a stone archway, an open stone gate, and an absolute, all-consuming dark. It seemed that Melpomene was the only one who saw anything different.

Eurymedon’s final experiment was to enchant a small array of objects — a knife, a potted herb, a piece of tarp, a chunk of meat, some animal feed, four different coins, a deer’s eye, a number of stones with different runes carved into them — with a variety of spells that made them glow different colors. They affixed the objects to a wooden board with some twine, and then they carefully tossed the board into the tunnel. Ninety-one seconds later, they pulled the wooden board out of the tunnel with an attached rope and took note of the results.

Melpomene watched as Eurymedon took meticulous notes on each object, most of which were now glowing in different colors, vibrating, or cracked. “I have yet to uncover this magic’s true nature, but I’ve eliminated enough possibilities to devise a workaround,” they said while pulling out a half-dozen different spell reagents from a nearby chest.

“It’s an altered version of [Nightmare Realm],” Eurymedon went on as they began drawing a ritual circle using green dust Melpomene didn’t recognize. “If I invert a few runes and replace a few components, I should be able to reverse the spell’s effect in exactly the right way to superimpose your vision of the tunnel onto reality, in effect subverting whatever protections are placed on the tunnel without needing to fully understand them.”

“[Nightmare Realm]?” Melpomene asked. She was familiar with the spell. As the name implied, it was a perception-altering spell that trapped a single target’s mind within a nightmarish illusory world. It was one of Eurymedon’s favorites, the same spell they’d used on Morgan in their battle a year ago. “Why use a heavily altered version of that spell instead of one that’s already closer to what you need?”

“A variety of factors, my [Liege], chief among them being the spell’s precise mechanics, its high [Tier], and my familiarity with it,” the [Daemon of Eyes] responded as they continued their preparations. “There definitely exist spells that wouldn’t need so much alteration to achieve the ends we desire — likely spells in my own repertoire — but I am simply not adequately familiar with them to guarantee similar results with the same level of confidence.”

Finished with drawing their ritual circle, Eurymedon began arranging their other reagents within it. Half of their mouths started a cacophony of chants to prime different sections of the circle while the other half continued their conversation with Melpomene. “If you’re interested, I could explain the spell theory while I work?”

Melpomene smiled. “I’d love that.”

The vast majority of Eurymedon’s explanation went over Melpomene’s head. She’d never had a personal interest in learning magic — too godsdamned confusing! — but her second-in-command’s passion for the subject was so infectious that she couldn’t help but enjoy the one-sided discussion.

Did Melpomene know what it meant to ‘collapse a fifth-order manifold into a third-order projection?’ Of course not, but neither did she need to understand every facet of a smith’s profession to appreciate a well-forged blade.

Fifteen minutes later, the spell was nearly complete, and Melpomene had an important decision to make.

As they’d explained earlier, Eurymedon’s modified ritual-cast [Nightmare Realm] would enchant one of Melpomene’s weapons with the power to impose her perception onto reality. The problem was that she could only pick one weapon.

Arrayed on a table before her were her three favorite tools of war: [Audacity], her darksteel flamberge, and her matching gold-plated handcannons, [Subtlety] and [Discretion].

“Don’t look at me like that!” she whispered to the inanimate objects. “I can only pick one of you.”

The inanimate objects didn’t respond because they were inanimate objects.

“I already told you!,” Melpomene went on, frustration entering her voice. “I would pick all three of you if I could, but we only need one cast! Any more would be a waste of time and reagents.”

The inanimate objects didn’t respond because they were—

“Oh, you know that’s not what I meant!” Melpomene snapped, glaring at [Subtlety]. “I wasn’t implying anything!”

The inanimate objects didn’t respond because—

“It’s so like you to bring up old shit, [Audacity]. I swear, the only reason I didn’t notice that smudge on your pommel was because—”

The inanimate objects didn’t—

“You know what? This discussion is over!” Melpomene snatched [Discretion] up from the table with a dazzling flourish of spins. She held the handcannon up above her head and admired the way the daylight played against its sharp lines and gentle curves. “As a reward for good behavior, I choose you!”

The inanimate objects didn’t respond because they were inanimate objects, but Melpomene still occasionally liked to imagine what they’d say if they could talk.

She looked at [Audacity] and [Subtlety] still lying on the table, and she couldn’t help but smile.

“I love you too. Now let’s get to work.”

----------------------------------------

Eurymedon’s ritual went off without a hitch, and [Discretion] was soon shrouded in a faint purple sheen that should last for over a month.

Her army arrayed behind her, Melpomene loaded a blank into her handcannon and fired into the tunnel.

BANG!

She would use specially prepared low-charge ammunition later in the tunnel so that everyone could keep their hearing, but it felt properly Evil™ for the inaugural shot to be loud.

To her eyes, nothing about the tunnel changed, but when she looked to Eurymedon, her second-in-command gave her a nod. The spell was working.

Melpomene turned to address her troops. “Soldiers!” she boomed. “Listen, for today I address you not only as your [Liege], but as a fellow Daemon hungry to claim what is rightfully ours. Judge my words by their own merits, and know them to be true.”

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She launched into her speech with gusto, performing an adapted version of one of her ready-to-go speeches she kept loosely memorized for occasions like this. She’d had this particular speech in her pocket for over a decade. She knew it so well that it only took half her attention to recite, so as she spoke, she allowed the other half to wander.

Another faction’s [Lieges] might assume Melpomene greatest accomplishment was her empire — as [Daemon Autarch] she had, after all, more than doubled the landholdings of the Daemonic realm in the past year alone — but that assumption was wrong.

Melpomene’s greatest accomplishment was here, standing before her, arranged in a marching column atop a ramp constructed just that morning, and ready to go to war.

They were fierce. They were beautiful. They were disciplined. They were hers.

Melpomene had spent decades forging her troops into the greatest force they could be, and in that, she’d succeeded.

Her only problem was that she’d apparently succeeded too well to keep things interesting, because as of late, conquest had become dreadfully boring.

More often than not, the mere threat of her army was more than enough for the enemy to surrender. Failing that, those few who were dumb enough to face her army head-on were also dumb enough to fall for every one of her traps.

Melpomene wasn’t usually one to complain when a plan worked, but for plan A to work every time? Ugh. It almost made plans B through H feel like a waste of time.

Millennia of peace and plenty had turned the [Solarian Courts]’ [Lieges] into a corpulent pack of politicking ninnies. According to Dux Heartless, they’d never even trained for war, only tournaments and mock battles.

No enemy force had been able to challenge Melpomene and her army this past year, but with any luck, that was all about to change. If this tunnel led all the way through to the other side of the [Titan’s Fingers], perhaps even somewhere near Soleil, her boredom was about to be alleviated.

Their latest intelligence painted the enemy capital as an order of magnitude better defended than any of the Duchies Melpomene had encountered thus far. Better yet, there were a pair of guerrilla revolutionaries named Gregory and Percival who sounded like they might actually be half-competent leaders.

Melpomene had trouble admitting it to herself, but she still wanted an epic final battle. She didn’t want to die, of course. She just wanted death to be on the table.

A true kill-or-be-killed clash of mind and might that’d force Melpomene to use every ounce of skill and effort she had, a battle whose legend would resound through the ages!

With any luck, that’d be exactly what she’d find beyond these mountain.

“They call us a ravening tide! They call us a wildfire tearing through the plains! They call us a tempest fierce enough to bring down the sky!”

Her musings complete, Melpomene refocused her attention back to her speech. Her troops, cheering at her every word, deserved nothing less than her best.

“They are right to fear us, but I tell you this: They do not fear us enough! I ask, are we a mere force of nature?”

Guided by nothing other than the tone of their [Liege]’s voice, the soldiers quieted, hanging onto her every word. Anticipation hung in the air, a quiet so taut it could snap.

“No, my soldiers. We! Are! LEGION!”

“““ALALÉ! ALALÉ! ALALÉ!””” The soldiers thundered their war cry, clanged their arms, and stomped their boots, the sound of it all so loud that Melpomene would’ve feared an avalanche if the last one hadn’t been so recent.

“Terra’s wrath is nothing compared to the wrath of a Daemon spurned! Tides recede, fires burn out, and storms clear. But we? We! Are! FOREVER!”

“““ALALÉ! ALALÉ! ALALÉ!”””

“Once called Deathless, now Despoiled, we have come to wrong the rights of the past! For six millennia we have sharpened our blades and honed our cunning!

“Do you feel it, my soldiers? Do you feel the gaze of histories made and histories yet to come? The past gazes upon us with pride, and the future shall stare at us in awe!

“Feel it, my soldiers! Feel the ice in your veins! Feel the steel in your hearts! Feel the fear in our enemies eyes as we strike from the dark!

“We are inexorable! We are inexhaustible! We! Are! DEATH!”

“““ALALÉ! ALALÉ! ALALÉ!”””

“Soldiers! At the ready!”

“““HO!””” More than a thousand heels clicked together in perfect unison. Melpomene turned toward the tunnel, eyes locked on the glory that lay beyond.

“MARCH!”

----------------------------------------

“As far as we can tell, it’s only a local collapse caused by the fissure. Barring other factors, the tunnel should be intact on the other side, your Vilenesses.”

“Very good,” Melpomene said to Theo, her chief [Surveyor] and head of her army’s Engineering Corps auxiliaries. “Any estimates on how long it would take to clear?”

“And keep in mind the need for subtlety,” Eurymedon chimed in. “We may be distant from the nearest Solarian settlement, but we are directly underneath the realm of the [Aurorae Sylvas]. Though they are not on amicable terms with the [Solarian Courts], rumors may spread if Terra suddenly shakes beneath their feet.”

Theo scratched his head with one hand while his other two furiously hashed out numbers on his clipboard. He spent a full minute doing this, and after double checking his work, he presented his findings. “Two weeks, give or take three days.”

Melpomene wasn’t thrilled at the delay, but she had to admit that it would be a welcomed reprieve for her troops. They’d been marching through a dark tunnel for five days, and even though no one had complained, Melpomene predicted they’d appreciate a change of pace.

Some time in the past few thousand years, a fissure had collapsed part of the tunnel and created a ravine. The ravine wasn’t deep enough to penetrate the tunnel, but it did compromise the arched ceiling for a stretch over a hundred meters long. It would take time to clear, but her soldiers could use that time to breathe fresh air.

Serendipitously, the rock had collapsed in such a way that it created a small passage connecting Melpomene’s side of the tunnel and the ravine. After Eurymedon spent some time creating illusory barriers, everyone besides the [Darksteel Golems] and the [Drake Berserkers]’ mounts would be able to enjoy the open sky without fear of discovery — and once Theo’s engineers widened that passage enough, so too would the larger members of the army.

On the morning on the second day of the excavation, the seventh day of the overall expedition, Melpomene was above ground rereading a dossier on the local wildlife while sitting on a waist-high rock. There were tents and collapsible seats available, but today just felt like a rock-sitting day. She looked to the sky and saw that it was relatively calm, but for those who knew where to look, there were signs that a blizzard was coming in.

Melpomene kicked her legs excitedly.

“Eurymedon, do you think we’ll see any [Avalancers] today?”

The nearby [Daemon of Eyes], who’d been reinforcing their illusion magic, paused in their work. “[Avalancers], my [Liege]?”

Melpomene held up the twine-bound dossier. “[Avalancers]! They’re a native monster with a novel hunting method.” She turned to a page in the dossier filled with illustrations and presented it to her friend.

“They’re like scorpions, but with more limbs and a rocky exterior,” she went on, gesticulating to different parts of the dossier’s anatomical diagrams as she spoke. “They hide high up in the mountains in a constant state of torpor, curled up in balls to look like boulders. And when a storm rolls in, they plough downhill, knocking through as much snow and rock as they can in hopes of causing an avalanche.”

“How does causing avalanches help them hunt, my [Liege]?” Eurymedon asked, genuine interest in their multitudinous voice.

“That’s the most interesting part!” Melpomene said as she turned the page to a new set of diagrams. “The avalanche is a lure, filter, and snare all wrapped up into one! The perfect trap!

“Look up there,” Melpomene said, pointing up to the towering mountainsides lining the ravine. “Do you see how much vegetation there is? I admit it’s not much, but considering the time of year and where we are, don’t you find it odd that anything is growing here?”

Eurymedon looked up and considered the sight.

“I am beginning to understand,” Eurymedon said. A few of their eyes studied the diagrams in Melpomene’s hands while the rest surveyed their surroundings. “The semi-frequent avalanches clear the snow and soften the ground, improving the odds that native flora to take root.” They crafted a miniature illusion of falling rocks and growing plants as they spoke. “The flora in turn lures the [Avalancers]’ prey, the [Rammoths].” A small group of giant wooly quadrupeds with curled horns lumbered into existence from the edge of the illusion. They wandered over to the freshly grown plants, their hoofed feet striding confidently atop the steep incline, and began to graze.

“Juvenile [Rammoths] to be precise,” Melpomene added, flipping to a new page. “The fully grown ones apparently put up too much of a fight.” A few of Eurymedon’s illusory pachyderms shrunk in size.

“Ah. This must be where the ‘filter’ you were speaking of comes into play, my [Liege]. It says here that fully matured [Rammoths] are more surefooted than their young. If the [Avalancers] manage to create avalanches of just the right intensity, they could separate the young from the old, filtering out their preferred prey with simultaneously pushing them right into…”

A torrent of snow and rock rolled through Eurymedon’s illusion, carrying away the smaller [Rammoths] while leaving behind the large. The illusion remained centered on the falling [Rammoths], following them as they plummeted into a ravine. Most died on impact, and those that survived were too injured to escape.

““The snare.”” The two friends spoke in unison, giddiness clear on their faces.

The rocks in Eurymedon’s illusion unfurled into [Avalancers], and they began dancing. The mangled corpses of the young [Rammoths] followed soon after, picking themselves up to shimmy alongside their killers. With one last hurrah, the dancing illusions exploded into fireworks to spell out the word ‘MURDER!’ in a swooping, glittery font.

“Ingenious! Inspired! Elegantly simple and needlessly complex in all the right ways! My [Liege], thank you for enlightening me!”

“Of course, Eurymedon. What are friends for?”

The two of them spent several more minutes poring over the dossier together. After they gleaned all they could about the local ecosystem, Eurymedon drew themself up to their full height and continued marveling at their surroundings.

“They are truly admirable, these [Avalancers]. If everything within this dossier is true, they’ve spent generations carving this stone to their purpose. Every furrow and gulley for kilometers around must lead to this ravine! Who can tell how many other ravines betwixt these mountains have been thus tamed?”

Eurymedon turned the majority of their eyes towards Melpomene, anticipation writ across their features. “Amazing! Simply amazing! But if I know you, my [Liege], then I know that your excitement stems from more than mere admiration at another’s techniques. Tell me, how have you incorporated these methods into a trap of your own?”

Melpomene faltered. A look of confusion flashed across her face, but it was quickly replaced by one of concern.

Mistaking the cause of Melpomene’s expression, Eurymedon continued speaking. “Apologies, my [Liege]. Have you not created a trap? Have you instead formulated an entirely new grand strategy? Sincerely, I am a fool for underestimating you! Please share with me the details!”

Melpomene’s concern morphed into embarrassment.

“My… My [Liege] Melpomene? Are you feeling unwell?”

Melpomene took what she hoped was an inconspicuous look around them. The area Eurymedon had shielded in illusions wasn’t overly large, just over a hundred meters across. The nearest soldiers were a score of her notoriously perceptive [Hex Rangers] barely ten meters away, but they were preoccupied with tossing Human head shaped balls for their mounts to fetch.

From her position still sat atop a rock, Melpomene leaned closer to Eurymedon and raised a hand to cover the side of her mouth. Eurymedon, taking the hint, leaned in closer to listen.

Melpomene whispered, “I uh… I hadn’t though about coming up with a new trap.”

Eurymedon froze, but Melpomene kept talking.

“I just thought it was interesting… so I got excited. Incorporating it into a new tactic hadn’t even crossed my mind.”

Eurymedon still wasn’t moving.

“Eurymedon? Eurymedon? Hello?” Melpomene waved a hand in front of a few of their eyes, but they didn’t react. Melpomene felt her cheeks flush.

“Eurymedon!”

“Ah? Huh? Wha-?”

A few of the [Hex Rangers] looked over, but Melpomene waved them away.

“Eurymedon, please calm down.”

“Oh, uh, yes-Yes, my [Liege]! I was just… concerned.” One of Eurymedon’s lips drew tight, and their voice grew quieter. “For you to become interested in a piece of information without considering how it might be used to shatter the hearts and minds of your enemies… It’s… It’s unlike you, my [Liege].”

“I know, I know, but please don’t worry about it. I’m alright.”

“Are you, my [Liege]?” Eurymedon’s gaze bore right through her, and Melpomene resisted the urge to look away. “There exists an unpleasant truth about your mental wellbeing that we must both acknowledge. I noticed it several months ago, but I refrained from speaking it aloud because I know you well enough to know that you know yourself. I see now that my silence was a mistake. In my capacity as both your [Vassal] and your confidant, I believe it best for you to speak the truth aloud yourself, though I know it will cause you discomfort. Will you trust me in this, my [Liege]?”

“Eurymedon, I trust you with my life.”

The words came out without needing to think, but they were far from thoughtless.

The two shared a bittersweet smile, and Melpomene gathered her courage to speak.

“I’ve been…” She slumped her shoulders and looked away from her lieutenant’s eyes. “I’ve been off my game. For a while now. My mind’s been scattered ever since we killed that [Hero], if I’m being honest with myself. It’s as if…” Melpomene cast her hands about, trying to fish out the right words.

“It’s as if my whole life were leading up to that point, and it was… It just wasn’t what I thought it would be? It was— I was… I was disappointed. And I know how that sounds! We won. We un-shattered that useless god of ours, and we’ve been on a tear ever since! I should be proud or hungry for more or something… but I just can’t bring myself to feel that way.”

Melpomene took a deep breath and lightly slapped her cheeks. She turned her head to the east. Somewhere in that direction lay the ravine’s end, and beyond that, the rest of the [Solarian Courts].

“I can’t shake the feeling that Terra is out of worthy challengers for us to face. It feels like we’ve done all the difficult parts, and the rest of this is just formality.

“I’m no slouch, Eurymedon. We both know I don’t deal in half-efforts, but that just makes it worse. I’ve been trying to try my best, but without an overpowered nemesis anywhere in sight, my heart just hasn’t been in it.

“I’ve been letting things fall through the cracks, and that’s not fair to you, Eurymedon.” Melpomene looked down at her hands. “I apologize. I’ll snap myself out of this sooner or later, but until then, I hope you can forgive me.”

A small cheer went up from the nearby [Hex Rangers]. Melpomene wasn’t looking, but one of their mounts must have pulled off a difficult catch. Eurymedon’s voice brought her attention back to the matter at hand.

“My [Liege], there is nothing to forgive.”

Melpomene listened, but she didn’t turn around. “I thank you for the sentiment, old friend. If it’s alright with you, I’d like some time to reflect.”

She thought the conversation was over, but Eurymedon didn’t leave.

“Chapter seven, final remark nine,” said the [Daemon of Eyes].

Melpomene blinked. “What?”

“The Tactics of Thanatos, Autarch Melpomene. Chapter seven, final remark nine. We both know you know the words.”

Melpomene finally turned around. “I know you’re talking about The Tactics of Thanatos, but what does that have to do with—?”

“My [Liege], you’ve had months to reflect on your own. A few more hours won’t do you any good. Please, say the words.”

Melpomene scrunched her face, but begrudgingly obliged. “Chapter seven, final remark nine,” she said. “‘The blade needs oil. The mind needs rest.’ But I’m already resting Eurymedon. I’m stuck here sitting on a rock while you and the Engineering Corps do all the actual work. I fail to see how the words apply.”

“And seeing, my [Liege], is exactly what I do best,” Eurymedon said with a knowing grin. “To rest does not mean to be ’stuck’ in place with nothing better to do than stew in your anxieties. To rest means to do that which replenishes you.”

Eurymedon looked up to the clear sky, observing it closely. “As you earlier implied, there will be a storm today, and it will come from nowhere — the perfect opportunity to see the [Avalancers] at work.”

They refocused their eyes onto Melpomene, and soft smiles played across their many mouths. “As second-in-command of the [Despoiled Legion]’s Army Protos, I recommend that we organize a scouting mission to explore the ravine. In the dual interests of subtlety and security, I further recommend that the mission be undertaken by a single Daemon proficient in both disguise and battle. Preferably, we should send someone who is currently idle… perhaps someone who’s just ‘sitting on a rock.’”

The two of them shared a look, and Melpomene couldn’t help but smile back. “I know just the person. Thank you, Eurymedon”

She hopped off her rock and made to leave, but Eurymedon stopped her.

“If I may add one more thing…”

“Yes, Eurymedon?” Melpomene turned back around to give the Daemon her full attention.

“I feel the need to emphasize one of my earlier points. I must tell you, my [Liege], that…” Eurymedon trailed off, taking the time to pick out her next words carefully. “Allow me to rephrase. I must tell you, my friend, that there is truly nothing to forgive.”

Melpomene felt her lips part in amazement, and something warm bubbled up in her chest. She knew that Eurymedon considered her a friend, but to state it so openly just wasn’t in their nature.

“Eurymedon, you don’t have to—”

“No, please, I must. Melpomene,” they spoke the name deliberately, enunciating every syllable, “standing beside you has been the greatest pleasure of my life. You have enriched my existence in ways I can’t begin to describe. Even if we had to start over, even if you were half the Daemon I know you to be, I would gladly do it all over again.

“I say this not to flatter, nor to assuage. I say this so that you might know my sincerity when I speak these words for the third and final time: There is nothing to forgive.

“It is no mere sentiment, so I ask that you do not do me the disrespect of labeling it as such. With you, I only ever have, and only ever will, deal in nothing but the absolute truth.”

Melpomene felt some moisture coming to her eyes, but she blinked it away. She could not, however, stop a foolish smile from spreading across her face, and neither could she keep her voice from shaking when next she spoke.

“My first instinct was to apologize for not taking you seriously enough the first time, but I don’t think you’d accept that. Instead, I say this: You are my greatest friend, Eurymedon. You are the greatest friend a Daemon could ask for.”

Eurymedon straightened. “I appreciate your words, my [Liege], but you’d better get going. The storm is coming from the east, and I would hate for you to miss the beginning.”

----------------------------------------

Melpomene flew east along the southern lip of the ravine. She wore a generic black robe she found in a supply crate. In lieu of her usual weapons, she wielded a decrepit old farming scythe she’d dug out from a pile of miscellaneous tools.

As for why Melpomene dared to fly brazenly out in the open despite not wanting to be recognized, it was because she looked almost nothing like her regular self. Deathly pale skin, silver hair, solid bluish-grey eyes, just wrinkly enough to sit in that ambiguous place between ‘finely aged’ and ‘godsdamned ancient’ — Melpomene was in what she like to call her ‘kooky old man’ form.

It was one of Melpomene’s three forms that only she and Eurymedon knew about, so being recognized wasn’t a concern. Running into another intelligent creature out there in the mountains was unlikely in the first place, but even if someone did see her and realized she was a Daemon, what were they more likely to believe? That the half-mad hermit in front of them was secretly a foreign [Liege] that decided to do some sightseeing before launching a surprise offensive on the [Solarian Courts]? Or that he was the normal kind of half-mad hermit that adventurers ran into all the time?

The blizzard from nowhere. In one moment, the sky was clear, and in the next, it was before her, swift, solid, and stark like the alabaster hand of an ancient god sweeping away the world.

A smile on her face, Melpomene dove right in and let the wind carry her away. Visibility within the blizzard was nonexistent, so she didn’t bother to keep her eyes open. She kept her bearings solely through keeping track of her momentum.

The storm buffeted her every which way, forcing her to constantly adjust the angle of her wings to keep herself roughly over where the center of the ravine should be — but other than that, she allowed herself to enjoy the thrill of being a leaf in the wind.

For a few blessed minutes, Melpomene spun, twisted, barreled, and banked through the air without a care in the world. She cheered, whooped, and screamed through the howling winds with all the might her lungs could muster, but the sound couldn’t even reach her own ears.

When she was done cutting loose, Melpomene angled her wings to throw herself back into the ravine. Just as she’d predicted, due to the wind’s speed and direction, the storm skimmed right across the top of the ravine without stirring up too much of the air below.

Hands behind her head, Melpomene plummeted leisurely down the ravine, enjoying the weightlessness that came with falling. Her eyes lazed over her surroundings.

“They should be… Ah, there.”

Juvenile [Rammoths] and boulders began raining down from above and either side of the ravine. Shifting her wings to glide along the chasm’s centerline, Melpomene was able to take it all in without worrying too much about dodging.

Thanks to their preternatural hardiness, most of the [Rammoths] survived the fall. They were battered, bruised, and likely had more than a few broken bones each, but hey, survival was survival.

But then came the [Avalancers].

The ‘boulders’ landed on top of the living [Rammoths] with uncanny accuracy, smashing them into puddles of hairy meat-paste. The rocks then unfurled themselves into ox-sized decapod scorpions that each had a venomous stinger, six needle-point legs, and four pincered forelimbs.

Largely unscathed by the fall, the [Avalancers] utilized hit and run tactics — They stung at the [Rammoths] by out-ranging them them with their tails, and they retreated up the ravine’s sheer walls with their needle-point legs whenever a member of their quarry tried to retaliate.

Melpomene stared in wonder, wishing she’d brought along something to take notes with. She’d already studied all the information she could find on the [Avalancers] and [Rammoths], but there was no substitute for witnessing the monsters in person.

There were quite a few details missing from the dossier she’d read, and dozens of questions popped into her head.

For one thing, Melpomene had assumed the smaller [Rammoths] would have been would have been more likely to survive their fall thanks to the square-cube law, but for some reason, it was the larger [Rammoths] who more often than not left standing after hitting the ground. How was that possible?

For another, how did the falling [Avalancer] boulders land on the living [Rammoths] with such accuracy? Their hit rate wasn’t anywhere near one hundred percent, but Melpomene had already witnessed over a dozen of the things curving mid-fall to land on their prey. Did the [Avalancers] have small external fins she couldn’t see? Did they alter their spin some other way? How did they even know where to land?

Perhaps her most gruesome — and exciting — observation was witnessing the [Avalancers]’ method of hunting the largest juvenile [Rammoths], the ones the size of a small cottage. Twice Melpomene saw an [Avalancers] jump onto a [Rammoth]’s back and latch onto it by stabbing their needle-point legs into their prey’s flesh like the predatory version of a clawed hair clip. From there, safely out of reach of other [Rammoths]’ horns, the [Avalancer] was free to stab, pincer, and bite until the [Rammoth] collapsed.

Melpomene was busy committing the scene to memory when she caught a new scent in the air.

Hm? A divine caster?

Intrigued, Melpomene dove for speed and flew east..

Could it be a Fae? I don’t see why a Human would be all the way out here…

A year ago, Melpomene could safely assume that any divine caster she sensed was a [Priest of Sol] or something similar, but things weren’t so simple now that there weren’t any gods to monopolize Terra’s divinity. After studying some antedeum records, Eurymedon hypothesized that other forms of divine casters would become more common over time, but they didn’t have any hard data to work with yet.

The only divine caster that comes to mind is Percival, but that doesn’t make any sense. Must be someone I haven’t heard of. Maybe someone who just got their first [Class]?

It wasn’t long before Melpomene found what was left of the person, and godsdamn, she was surprised they were even alive. Bits of them were strewn about everywhere, and they weren’t even breathing. If it weren’t for the unmistakable spark of life still in their eyes, Melpomene would assume they were dead.

A rather large [Avalancer] was rearing back to finish off whoever-it-was, but Melpomene was curious as to who the person could be. Allowing that curiosity to get the better of her, she dove down and cut the monster in half before it could strike.

It was a bit awkward to slice through such a sturdy monster with an unfamiliar farming implement, but she managed.

She turned around and waited for the person to heal themselves so that they could have a conversation, but the person was just staring at her. Melpomene looked from the person’s brown eyes to their growing puddle of blood and then back to their eyes, her face scrunched in confusion.

“You have healing magic. I can smell it,” she said. “Why don’t you use it? If you haven’t noticed, you’re dying.”

The dying person has no way of responding, but from reading their eyes, Melpomene got the impression that they were thinking something foolish like ‘Hey asshole! I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but both my arms are broken! I can’t cast a spell!’

“Of course you can,” Melpomene responded, hiding her exasperation. “Just don’t use your hands.”

Belatedly, Melpomene remembers one of her initial suspicions. Oh yeah, they might be new to their class. They probably don’t know how non-somatic casting works yet.

From the sheer magnitude of divinity radiating from the person in her, Melpomene guessed that the person’s class had to be [Tier IV] or maybe even [Tier V]. That normally implied a certain level of mastery over their powers, but it was impossible to tell with divine casters nowadays. Thanks to Aolyn’s — may that deadbeat bastard die and rot in heaven for eternity — [Divine Apocalypse], it was entirely possible that the divine caster dying in front of her awoke to their power yesterday. Such ‘jumps’ in power seemed to be getting rarer as time went on, but for now, Melpomene couldn’t rule it out.

“It’s entirely possible. Watch. First with hands…”

Taking pity on the poor thing, Melpomene decided to give them a demonstration. She was absolutely ass at magic, but the dying person didn’t need to know that, right?

Projecting confidence to make the process seem easy, Melpomene began casting the only spell she knew, the tier zero cantrip called Spark — a spell so simple and weak that the [System] didn’t even recognize it as a spell.

Melpomene was casting as quickly as she could since the sad sap in front of her might croak any second now, but a sprinting slug was still a slug. Once she finally got the spell to work and create a tiny blue spark, she looked back to the mangled soon-to-be corpse and expected them to already be dead from blood loss or boredom, but contrary to expectation, they were still alive and staring at her.

Huh. Honestly didn’t expect to get this far.

“Now with less hands…” If Melpomene were a spellcasting genius like Eurymedon or Morgan, she could come up with a quick explanation that would save the prehumous cadaver’s life, but she most decidedly wasn’t a spellcasting genius. It took decades of on-and-off practice for her to master her single, useless cantrip, so the best she could do was provide a nonsensical set of demonstrations in hopes that her impromptu student could figure it out before they became worm food.

A second spark finally fluttered out from Melpomene’s ‘less hands’ casting like an anemic butterfly missing one of its wings, and before she could second-guess herself, Melpomene began her final demonstration.

“And now,” she said, adding more than a little flourish to her voice in order to mask her embarrassment, “no hands at all.”

Melpomene dropped her hands to her side, snuck a glance at the spellcaster to make sure they were still alive, and then began to cast her cantrip without her hands. Hoping not to come across as a complete buffoon, she spent her casting time trying to come up with a mystical-ish, pseudo-intellectual explanation for what she was doing.

Blue lines of Melpomene’s meager mana traced themselves upon the air with all the blistering speed of a sleeping turtle, and when she at last created a spark, Melpomene opened her mouth to speak.

“To cast a spell is to imprint its shape upon the world with your hands, and to call forth its name with your voice,” she said in her best approximation of a sagacious tone, fully confident that her explanation was already wrong in half a dozen ways she didn’t understand. “Most take it for granted that you can forgo a spell’s name by expending some extra mana and force of will, so who’s to say you can’t do the same for the—”

Fuck fuck fuck! What’s the technical term for ‘finger waggling’ again?

“—finger waggling?”

…Did I really say that out loud?

Melpomene nodded her head and pretended that she didn’t want to curl up into a ball and die. “Now you try.”

Somatic component, she remembered, a tad too late for it to matter. The correct term for ‘finger waggling’ is ’somatic component.’ This person must think I’m an idiot.

Her student began their attempts, but it wasn’t going so well. Over the course of a couple minutes, they tried to cast their healing spell nearly a dozen times, but each attempt failed miserably. Most of the time, they managed to draw a couple lines of beautiful green divinity upon the air, but their magic was tainted by disgusting shades of gaudy gold.

Voxwraith venom, Melpomene realized.

From the dossier she read about the local ecology, she knew that the Voxwraith was a rare creature — perhaps one-of-a-kind. Sightings were scarce and hard facts even scarcer, but according to the stories of the [Aurorae Sylvas], the creature had an adaptive venom capable of disrupting its victim’s magic by becoming something exactly opposite.

Assuming that what she was seeing was indeed Voxwraith venom, Melpomene came up with a different idea on how it worked. If the venom and the victim’s magic were true opposites, they should’ve annihilate each other into nothing. Instead, the two of them were merely interfering with each other, meaning that while they were incompatible, they weren’t true opposites.

Thinking about it another way, it were as if the victim was trying to paint a picture, but all their arms wanted to do was punch each other.

“You’re a [Liege], aren’t you?” Melpomene asked. “I can tell by the fact you’re still alive.”

The other’s slowly dimming eyes regained a spark of life and refocused onto her.

From the moment she’d laid eyes on them, Melpomene expected every moment to be this person’s last. The fact that they’d managed nearly a dozen attempts at a non-somatic cast in the state they were in was beyond impressive.

At first, Melpomene had tried helping only to sate her own curiosity, but the sheer determination they displayed in the face of an impossible task made her feel like they deserved a bit more effort on her part. Since her lacking explanation on magical theory had been unsuccessful — no surprises there — she decided to take a different tack.

“You have an army to lead,” she said. “If you can’t live for your own sake, live for theirs.”

It was theorized that the Voxwraith subsisted solely off of spirits, so its venom — technically an extension of the monster itself — was purpose built to shape its victims to the monster’s tastes. Assuming her dossier’s recounting of the [Aurorae Sylvas]’ stories was accurate, Voxwraith’s venom slowly dissolved its victim’s mind and magic from the inside out — It methodically beat everything around the spirit into submission whilst avoiding irrevocable damage to the spirit itself.

If all went according to plan, the venom tethered the victim’s spirit to the monster, and so when the victim finally breathed their last, the Voxwraith would reap its reward.

A tear rolled down the victim’s face.

Melpomene could roughly guess at their thoughts. The desperation, the futility, the despair… The certainty that no matter their effort, no matter their struggle, no matter their wit, their fate had already been writ unto the stars.

Poisoned, helpless, and hapless, they were destined to fail. They were destined to die.

Melpomene couldn’t help but feel an ounce of kinship for the poor thing. They reminded her so much of herself — or rather, the person she used to be.

She remembered all too well that night she realized she was destined to die. She remembered her head in her hands, the nothing in her heart, the temptation not to try.

And she remembered the words that brought her back from the brink.

“Just not strong enough?” she asked aloud.

The other’s eyes widened in surprise.

“No, I can’t read your mind. I’ve just lived long enough to recognize the face of self-pity when I see it — even if half that face happens to be missing.

“In all likelihood, your next attempt will be your last, so you need to make it count. I’m going to give you a piece of advice, and you only have the time to hear it once, so I need you to listen. Ready?”

The Tactics of Thanatos, Melpomene thought to herself, chapter five, first rebuke.

“‘Ask not what you have the strength do. Ask what must be done, and find the strength to do it.’”

Whether or not the dying lump of flesh could make use of the words on such short notice, Melpomene had no idea, but she hoped beyond hope that they could.

A moment passed, and the light retreated from their eyes.

They’d failed, and by extension, so had Melpomene.

Another soul had succumb to their fate, and Melpomene had been powerless to stop it.

Would defying fate even done them any good?

Melpomene looked up to white winds howling overhead. The cold bit at her skin, but she didn’t care. A nearby [Rammoth] crunched on the upper half of the bisected [Avalancer].

Melpomene looked over to see the giant creature casually chowing down on one of its predator’s meaty pincers.

“Can’t you see I’m having a moment here?” Melpomene asked.

The [Rammoth] looked to her with intelligent eyes, but it kept up its loud chewing.

“Shouldn’t you be looking for your herd or something?”

The [Rammoth] let out a puff of air that almost sounded like a scoff, shrugged its massive shoulders, and began wandering away with apathetic, lumbering steps. It dragged the upper half of Melpomene’s slain [Avalancer] along with it, but it left the venomous bottom half behind.

“Omnivores. Noted.” She would need to update the dossier when she got back to camp.

What was I brooding about again…? Oh yeah.

Would defying fate even done them any good?

She looked back to the person’s corpse.

“I defied my fate, and look at all the good it’s done me…”

Melpomene trailed off, scrunching her eyebrows together as a new question came to mind.

I have defied my fate, haven’t I?

The sudden doubt confused her. Where did that thought come from? She’d obviously defied her fate, hadn’t she?

Seek first to know thyself.

The familiar words came to the fore of her mind and dashed away her unease.

I’m confused. I’m scatterbrained. The entire point of this excursion is to clear my head. I’ve had an unexpected thought, and now I must examine it. Have I defied my fate?

For decades, her greatest want in life had been to defeat the [Solarian Courts] and revive her god.

But that’s not what I wanted at the end, was it? The [Curse of Heart’s Desire] — I could never get what I want.

The only reason she could put Aolyn — that stinky pile of dung — back together was because it was no longer her greatest desire. In fact, it prevented her from having the epic final battle she’d spent her whole life working toward.

She’d wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, and for glory, there were no thieves greater than the gods.

So I never did defy fate, did I?

Thus far, nothing in Melpomene’s line of reasoning was new to her, but now it was time to review the facts from a different perspective.

My fate was to never get what I want, and that’s exactly what happened, she thought. I wanted a chance to give it my all, but all I received was victory served on a platter.

I never defied fate. I played right into its hand.

This realization, while morose, brought Melpomene a measure of peace. To put a name on the nameless, faceless anxiety she’d been feeling as of late did little to lessen it, but it did give her a place to start.

Seek second to know thine enemy.

Her enemy had never been Arthur, nor Sol, nor even the [Solarian Courts]. Her enemy was Fate itself.

Fate, Destiny, the Inevitable, whatever Melpomene wanted to call it. The thing now had a name, and to be given a name was to be given form.

Melpomene was no longer grabbing at smoke. She now had an enemy standing before her, and she would strike it down.

My greatest obstacle, the [Curse of Heart’s Desire], has already been dealt with. Aolyn told me so, and even though he’s a duplicitous bastard — in the rude way, not the Evil™ way —he wouldn’t lie to me about that, would he?

All I need to do is find a worthy foe and have an epic final battle, and then my greatest desire will be fulfilled. One last all-out struggle to cement my legend, and then I can finally put my worries to rest.

Melpomene clenched her fist in anticipation, and a smile unconsciously spread across her face. Already her mind began whirling with ideas to improve her five-phase final battle.

I’m going to defy my fate, and it’ll feel so godsdamned good.

Melpomene once again regarded the mutilated corpse she’d failed to save.

“I’m sorry that you had to die, but if it’s any consolation, you’ve shown me what must be done. I’m off to defy my fate, whoever you are. I only wish you could’ve defied yours.”

She turned to leave, but her instincts warned her that a spell was being cast behind her. She rounded back again, scythe poised to defend, but what she saw nearly made her choke on her tongue.

The corpse — no, the living person — was casting a spell, carving its very shape upon the air in lines of green and gold.

They drew no breath, their eyes shed no light, and their blood held no life… and despite it all, they completed their spell, and with a burst of light, they made themself whole.

The Human — a man? — took a deep, shuddering breath, and immediately passed out.

Interesting, Melpomene thought, looking the Human up and down as she relaxed her posture.

“I’m free for a few more days,” she said aloud, addressing the man who couldn’t hear her. “Before I defy my fate, I’ll help you with yours.”

----------------------------------------

Melpomene’s next few days and nights were pleasantly uneventful.

“The claw is perfectly safe to eat,” she said as the Human eyed their roasted meat suspiciously.

“Are you not eating?” they asked, looking up at her from across the cookfire.

“Don’t worry about me. I’m not the one who lost the contents of their pack falling down a mountain.”

The Human’s face screwed up with embarrassment in a way Melpomene found most amusing. Amazingly, the bag they’d been traveling with was found near their body, but everything inside it had been gone.

Reluctantly, the Human took a tiny nibble from the [Avalancer]’s claw, and their eyes lit up with stars. It didn’t take long for the rest of the morsel to disappear.

The dying person she’d helped turned out to be a Solarian Human who’d defected to the [Aurorae Sylvas]. They verbally denied it — because of course had to, considering their new faction’s penchant for secrecy — but they provided plenty of evidence to inform Melpomene of their true allegiance.

Despite being a [Liege], the Human was naked and out in the wilderness all alone. In addition, they hadn’t healed the ‘tears of blood’ cut beneath each of their eyes, meaning that subconsciously, they didn’t consider them wounds in need of healing. Taken all together, that could only mean that they were undergoing a ’Trial of Atonement,’ either to prove their loyalty or to make up for past crimes.

But perhaps the biggest hint they’d given her was their roundabout way of saying they were undecided about their gender identity. The [Solarian Courts] were much too rigid when it came to such matters, so the Human had to belong to the [Aurorae Sylvas]. Perhaps it was the reason they defected in the first place.

Ha! Amateur nouns! Simply hilarious.

“How do you know which way to go?” they asked the next morning.

Melpomene glanced over her shoulder to look the other [Liege] in the eye, but she didn’t break her stride. When she unfocused her eyes in that way she was sure most [Lieges] could, she could feel the other person’s very existence leaning ever so slightly in the direction they were walking.

“I’m surprised you can’t,” she replied. Must be because they’re a new [Liege]. “The Voxwraith is tugging at you, even now. Feel the pull, and you’ll know the way.”

The Human took her words seriously — a quality of theirs she appreciated — and closed their eyes. They stopped walking, so Melpomene did too.

A minute later, they raised their hand and pointed in a direction fifteen degrees to the right of current heading.

“Faster than I expected,” Melpomene said, genuinely impressed, “but unless you can walk through stone or wish to brave the storm, I think it best we continue walking through the ravine.”

Melpomene sincerely enjoyed mentoring the young [Liege], and doing so provided the additional benefit of strengthening a prospective asset.

After she killed the [Hollow King], Gregory, and Percival, she’d need to find someone to govern the area. She would prefer someone native to the region but disloyal to the [Solarian Courts] be in charge, so she and Eurymedon had already drawn up plans to peacefully incorporate the [Aurorae Sylvas] as a semi-autonomous protectorate faction. If the [Aurorae Sylvas] happened to have a Human [Liege] who could run the Human parts of the territory — and if that Human [Liege] just so happened to owe Melpomene their life — even better.

For now, however, Melpomene preferred not to give her mentee her name. As far as anyone this side of the [Titan’s Fingers] should know, she and her army wouldn’t be here until spring, and she preferred to keep it that way for as long as possible. Her student knew her only as ‘the stranger,’ and until it was time for her dramatic reveal, ‘the stranger’ she would remain.

For three days Melpomene and the young [Liege] made their way toward the Voxwraith at a leisurely pace. Every moment not spent resting was filled to the brim with training, both mental and physical. Even when they were walking or eating, Melpomene crammed as much wisdom into her student’s head as she could, most of it courtesy of The Tactics of Thanatos.

They could’ve made it there sooner, of course, but Melpomene was having too much fun, and so long as they made it there before the Human died, it wasn’t exactly urgent, right?

But ultimately, their time spent peacefully traveling had to come to an end.

“I believe it’s time for me to tell you I’ve been lying,” she said on what she knew would be their last night together. “You can kill the Voxwraith, and it won’t even be close. You were capable of killing it before our first day of this training was even over, but I never told you.”

“Ah. Okay.”

“…”

A moment of silence passed.

“‘…Okay?’” she repeated, incredulous. “Just… ‘okay?’ You’re not going to ask why I lied?”

“You already told me why,” her student said while cracking a gap-toothed grin. “It’s because you’re here, and because you felt like it. Do you need any other reason?”

Melpomene opened her mouth to respond, but then she closed it when she remembers why the words sounded familiar.

I forgot I said that. They’re throwing my words back at me, she realized. Cheeky little bastard. I’ve taught them well.

Melpomene opened and closed her mouth twice more, unable to form a rebuttal. Ultimately, she just burst into laughter, and her student laughed along with her. In the morning, she’d be gone so that her student could face the Voxwraith on their own, but until then, she would enjoy their company.

Between cackles, she took another look at her student’s gap-toothed smile.

The brown hair, the brown eyes, the plain face, the missing teeth… she mused to herself. They really do look a lot like Percival.

Comparing the Human before her with the sketches she’d seen of Percival, the two Humans bore quite a resemblance, but Melpomene easily dismissed the similarities.

Ha! As if this person could be Percival!

I thought I was pretty good at differentiating Humans, but apparently I need more practice to get away from the ‘they all look the same’ stereotype. I’ve almost misgendered them once already. If I confuse them for an entirely different Human — and a male Human at that — they’ll think I’m speciesist for the rest of their life!

----------------------------------------

As expected, the Voxwraith hunt went off without a hitch. Melpomene watched, hidden at the edge of the blizzard, as her student casted a speed-enhancing spell she didn’t recognize and slayed the monster in a single blow.

Their green nature-y, poison-y magic looks pretty cool. Can’t wait to see what it’s like when all that gold disappears.

Upon its death, the Voxwraith released the spirits of all its past victims into the air. As her dossier had predicted, there were no souls attached to the spirits, but the colorful apparitions nonetheless had more than enough power to blow back the storm. High up in the sky, the spirits began to dance.

Interesting. I’ll need to remember as much of this as I can. Eurymedon will find it interesting.

There were no written accounts of a Voxwraith’s death, and if the creature truly was one-of-a-kind, this would be the only chance Melpomene had to witness the phenomena. Intent on committing as much as she could to memory, she leapt out from cover to join her student in observing the light show the [Aurorae Sylvas]’ spirits were putting on.

She alighted soundlessly upon the ground beside the largest pile of the Voxwraith’s rapidly disintegrating corpse-bits. She planned on only sparing it a quick glance so that she could later detail how it was dissolving into the air— bubbling, melting, smoking, something else? — but much to her delight, she discovered a masked-shaped natural treasure peeking out from behind one of the creature’s dissipating faces.

“Beautiful…” she heard her student mutter.

She looked up, and indeed, the sight was beautiful. Why hadn’t she noticed that before?

“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” she agreed.

She retrieved from the monster’s corpse the mask-shaped magical item. It appeared to simply be a frowning theatre mask carved from old, knotted wood, but Melpomene knew better than most that appearances could be deceiving.

“A mask?” her student asked.

“Eyes up,” she deflected. “This might be out only chance to see such a sight.”

And what a beautiful sight it was. Melpomene had originally been intent on mentally recording as many individual points of data as she could — the composition of colors, the number of spirits, the timing of it all — but her student was right.

Melpomene knew she was prone to missing the forest for the trees, so perhaps it was time to let her mind relax. She took it all in without a care in the world, and for the first time in a long while, she felt at peace.

Lots of colors. Pretty neat. I like it.

Despite the shallow nature of her observations, Melpomene had the distinct feeling that she would be able to remember how this moment made her feel her whole life long.

After the show came to an end, it was time for her to go. She’d had her fun, and it was time for her to return to her army and get back to work.

She and her student shared some parting quips, and then they argued a while over who should keep the unidentified magical mask, each insisting the other should have it.

The inexperienced young [Liege] insisted that they owed Melpomene a debt for all she’d done, but that wasn’t how she saw it. As far as she was concerned, she’d helped them for her own selfish reasons, and they’d killed the Voxwraith on their own. The spoils were by right all their own.

She threw them the mask and tried to make a dramatic exit by disappearing into the storm, but her student stopped her with an interesting offer.

They gave her the mask, and all they wanted in return was—

“…to tell you I’m real?” she asked.

Apparently her student’s mind was so addled that they couldn’t discern fact from fiction.

Such being the case, she responded, “I fail to see how that could help. Whether I’m a dream or not, I’ll insist that I exist.”

“That’s the thing,” her student replied, a dumb grin on their face. “I don’t think you will. I think that you’ll tell me the truth no matter what, but I can’t explain why. Do you ever have that feeling in a dream where you just suddenly know something to be true, no questions asked? It’s like that. You’re going to tell me the truth, because there’s simply nothing else you could possibly do. Call me a fool, but I’m certain of it.”

Melpomene took some time to seriously consider what to say next. She could’ve just said she was real and left, but that felt too perfunctory. If her student wanted to gift her with their hard-earned loot, she wanted to reciprocate with more than the bare minimum.

But what should I say?

While Melpomene pondered, the storm slowly closed in around the two of them, forcing them to step-by-step get closer together. One brief contemplation later, they were standing so close they could count the pores on the other’s nose.

Melpomene came up with two dozen different things she could say, but ultimately, she could think of nothing more dramatic than revealing one particular piece of information.

She smiled, and for some reason, her student smiled too.

“Very well then, your [Liegeliness],” she said. “Allow me to do you one better. Allow me to share with you my name.”

Name sharing among the [Aurorae Sylvas] was the height of taboo, but taboos, when used correctly, could form the strongest of covenants. If she could pull off sharing her name in just the right way, her student — the [Liege] she was already planning on elevating to Dux of the region — would stay loyal to her forever.

The storm’s winds howled louder and louder as they continued to close in tight.

“I!” Melpomene roared.

Fwheuwph! Behind her, her bat-liked spiked wings slipped out from the strategic slits in her robes and snapped taut. She didn’t need them at the moment, but she knew that expanding her silhouette would make her appear more powerful and worthy of devotion.

“AM!”

She allowed a mad gleam to enter her eyes as she paused for another beat. Sure, she was dragging out the reveal, but she only had one shot at this! It had to be dramatic!

She took a deep breath, getting ready to really thunder out her name, but before she could say anything, the eye of the storm collapsed and the storm’s winds were upon them.

Her student got thrown to the ground, but since Melpomene had her wings fully extended, she got flung into the distance at the speed of sound.

“MELPOMENEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

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Disheveled and windbeaten, it took Melpomene the rest of the day to get back to her army’s camp, but she wasn’t disheartened in the slightest.

“But right as I told them my name, the winds fell upon us and blew me away. Firing!”

BANG!

At Eurymedon’s hand signal, Melpomene fired another shot down the tunnel. Not bothering to break her stride, Melpomene loaded another low-charge blank into [Discretion] and holstered the handcannon with a well-practiced series of one-handed spins and flips. She had a giddy expression on her face.

“Oh, you should have seen their face, Eurymedon! The buildup, the circumstance, the atmosphere! Everything was perfect for a [Villainous] reveal! And then when I disappeared into the wind just as I revealed my identity? Oooh! Couldn’t have been better! So mysterious! So ominous! I could scarcely time it better if I’d tried.”

For now, it was just her, Eurymedon, a score of [Daemon Ancients], Theo, and a few other Engineering Corps auxiliaries preparing the way for the rest of the army to march through. Eurymedon had suggested that this work could wait until Melpomene got some rest, but Melpomene insisted on both beginning her debrief and clearing the tunnels as soon as possible. The engineers had finished clearing the blockage ahead of schedule, and Melpomene didn’t want her troops to be further delayed on her account.

“My [Liege], are you sure the Human heard you?”

“Of course they did. Why do you ask? Firing!”

BANG!

“I ask because of the way you described the scene, my [Liege]. Opaque white winds strong and swift enough to launch you kilometers away would have a significant impact on the audibility of your words, even at close range. If the winds whisked you away as you proclaimed your name, I find it entirely possible that your final word never reached the Human’s ears, especially when taking into account how poor the average Human’s hearing is.”

Melpomene considered her lieutenant’s words carefully, as she always did, but it wasn’t difficult for her to find a reason to put the other Daemon’s doubts to rest. “You must also remember that they were able to sense the presence of Fae so far-off that I never noticed them myself. I admit there are other explanations for this ability of theirs, but I find the simplest explanation to be that their powers of perception are far greater than mine. Assuming that to be true, I find no problem in believing that the heard my name.”

It was now Eurymedon’s turn to consider Melpomene’s words. “Could it also be that you’ve lowered your bar for evidence because you want the Human to have heard you? Because that would make for a more dramatic reveal?”

Melpomene smiled, thoroughly chagrined. “You know me so well, Eurymedon. Firing!”

----------------------------------------

“Anomaly ahead, Eurymedon. Looks like… a brick wall?”

The second leg of the army’s subterranean journey was much more eventful than the first. Forgotten ruins, a few Underland aberrations, a small warband of hostile [Mycenoid Anthroforms]… They ran into a new random encounter every few days.

Any one of the incidents would have been a worthy quest for a new [Adventuring Party], but Melpomene’s army was of such a caliber that such events were barely worth a footnote. They were each dealt with in a matter of hours before being sealed away or trampled underfoot.

Perhaps another millennia-old tunnel would’ve been more heavily infested with interesting roadblocks, but the mysterious darkness ubiquitous in this particular tunnel kept such things to a minimum. Wherever the tunnel was breached, the locals tended to stay away for fear of the unknown. Such being the case, it was a simple enough task to deal with nearby threats, repair the tunnel’s walls, and move on whenever they came across a problem.

As time went on, however, they noticed the tunnel getting rougher and rougher.

Now, weeks of marching later, the army hit a literal brick wall.

Eurymedon placed a hand upon the obstruction, mumbled a spell under their breath, and released a pulse of magic into the stone. “Just as we expected, it seems we’ve reached the catacombs beneath Soleil.”

Though neither Melpomene nor Eurymedon had yet to discern the who, why, or how of their secret tunnel’s construction, they did notice that it was heading in the exact direction they wanted to go, directly towards the [Solarian Courts]’ capital city of Soleil.

This was suspiciously lucky to say the least, but they’d yet to notice any sort of trap awaiting them despite their vigilance, and Melpomene wasn’t one to let the fear of the unknown hold her back.

“The brick wall makes sense given the historical context,” Melpomene responded. “Solarian construction contracts for the last few millennia have tended to incentivize paving over problems rather than fixing them. If I were an underpaid tunnel jockey and I came across an impenetrable wall of darkness, I’d probably cover it up without telling the higher ups too. How thick is this wall?”

“Half a meter, my [Liege]. I can sense enough of the other side to recognize where we are, but it’s difficult for me to see much farther.”

Eurymedon turned a few of their eyes upward to peer at the ceiling. “There seems to be some sort of arcano-divine storm going on above ground. I didn’t notice earlier because the tunnel’s magic is insulating us from the storm’s effects, but that protection is also making it more difficult for me to sense what is happening beyond. Please, allow me a moment to cast a more powerful spell.”

“Proceed,” Melpomene allowed, straightening her posture.

“At once, my [Liege].”

Eurymedon began casting another spell, this time using all six of their hands to weave through mind-bending shapes while their mouths loosed a cacophony of discordant chants. All twelve of their eyes glowed brilliant purple, and hundreds of miniature phantom eyes began forming all around them before shooting out in every direction.

“It is just as I feared,” they declared a minute later, the glow slowly fading from their eyes.

“First point of interest, my [Liege]: Some imbecile is conducting a ritual they don’t understand. The vast majority of the interference is originating from a single point several kilometers north of here in what is likely the city’s center. That point should be the ritual’s primary node, and it’s leaking enough mana and divinity to prove a nuisance. Without knowing more about the particular ritual being attempted, however, I cannot predict what effects this malformed casting will have. It might fizzle without effect, but it also might create an explosion capable of leveling half the city.

“Second point of interest: There is a battle going on throughout the city. I cannot discern too many particulars due to the aforementioned interference, but the belligerents seem to be the [Aurorae Sylvas], the [Hollow King]’s [Solarian Courts], and Percival’s [Nameless Revolt]. All battling seems to be going on above ground, and battle lines are indistinct.”

“Above ground?” Melpomene asked. “Why is no one using the catacombs to move their troops?”

“Third and final point of interest, my [Liege],“ Eurymedon replied with an array of smiles. “As we’ve discussed, no complete map of the catacombs has ever existed. The closest to central planning this tunnel system ever come was six centuries ago when [King] Phillip VII demanded it be made more confusing for fear of the network’s use during a rebellion.

“Our mistake is that we underestimated the extent to which the catacombs were altered. The passages beyond this wall seem to be maze-like, collapsed at irregular intervals, and riddled with all manner of traps. Practically speaking, it is unnavigable and useless to all…”

Eurymedon trailed off leadingly. A flicker of purple light flashed through their eyes, and their thousand smiles turned deliciously wicked.

Melpomene felt a smirk of her own cross her lips.

She clenched her gauntleted hand into a fist, and twisting her body to add her full weight to the blow, she punched a head-sized hole into the cheap, shoddily constructed wall. The gap was just large enough to see into the gloomy bone-lined hall beyond.

“But not to us.”

----------------------------------------

Maneuvering through the danger-fraught catacombs at a measured pace, it took Melpomene’s army over an hour to position themselves at advantageous egress points spread about the city center. Thanks to Eurymedon’s scouting magic, every trap they came across was either disabled or triggered from a safe distance. There were false floors, falling spikes, suffocating gases, poison darts, and even a fiery rolling bone-boulder trap — too ill maintained to trigger properly, much to Melpomene’s disappointment — but the worst injuries anyone sustained were scrapes and bruises from having to squeeze through too-tight stone passageways.

The most troublesome part of the process was finding routes the girthier troops could traverse. It was similarly difficult to find an exit they could fit through, but that problem was solved when they discovered a chamber with a relatively thin ceiling.

When the time came, the troops could make their own exit point, because really, what was a wall if not a door waiting to happen?

After ensuring all of their troops were in position, Melpomene and Eurymedon found themselves alone at the bottom of an exit they’d determined must lead to Kingsblood Square, the epicenter of the ongoing ritual.

They felt a rather large explosion go off somewhere overhead as another pulse of divinity passed through them, but neither event was enough to cause them to worry.

“My [Liege], I can confirm that given this rate of magic leakage, the ritual is unlikely to explode, but the interference is getting worse. I am still unable to discern the ritual’s intended purpose, nor can I see what is happening in the area surrounding the Torr Royale. Do you still wish to continue with ambush-reconnaissance pattern two?”

“You should know better than anyone that I’ve been wanting to use pattern two for a long time, old friend,” Melpomene said, attaching her helmet to her belt. “Hit me.”

“Yes, my [Liege]. [Command Relay]!”

Melpomene felt the overcasted spell sink into her bones, and she could suddenly feel the approximate positions of her troops. She also intuitively knew that she could give any of them simple commands, and they would hear her. She could feel her nearby troops more clearly than those further away, but the spell’s area of influence was large enough that she could account for her entire army.

The spell was always nice to have active, but given the amount of mana it consumed, it was usually unnecessary for field battles where signal flags would work nearly as well. For situations such as the one Melpomene found herself in now, however, the spell was invaluable.

“Thank you, Eurymedon,” Melpomene said, throwing on a black robe over her armor and weapons. “I appreciate you more than any other Daemon on all of Terra, but I still sometimes feel like I don’t appreciate you enough.”

“My [Liege], I will be loyal to you until my final breath. On an unrelated note, might I ask why you’re altering your form?”

“You said the [Aurorae Sylvas] are here, correct?” Melpomene asked, her voice growing gravelly as her skin grew paler and her face more wizened. She gave the farming scythe she’d set aside a spin, and smiled. “I’m just readying myself in case I happen to run into a certain fresh-faced [Liege].”

----------------------------------------

Melpomene covertly made her way up through a half-collapsed passage to what remained of Kingsblood Square. In the sky she could see a host of spirits — many with souls, some without — flying toward the Torr Royale at the square’s center, but the square itself seemed completely devoid of anything save for debris, scattered loot, and a screaming old man’s soul.

I’ve never seen a soul like that, all cracked and burning, Melpomene thought. Is this a Solarian thing?

“You alright, old man?” she called.

The old man turned to her and froze. “Thanatos?” he asked.

“Thanatos?” Melpomene repeated. She looked down at herself with fresh eyes, and she had to admit that her ‘kooky old man’ form did somewhat resemble a few of the ancient descriptions of the man in question, if only older and scruffier.

In Melpomene’s opinion, the resemblance was only superficial. If she were wielding a weapon other than a scythe — a weapon the real Thanatos hardly ever used, though Solarian art always depicted him with it — the old Human in front of her likely wouldn’t have noticed the surface-level similarities.

Melpomene remembered that the Solarians had a myth about Thanatos being the one to reap unbelievers’ souls. Since this man was dead, it was natural for him to assume any Daemon he saw was Thanatos, and it wasn’t like the old man could have met enough Daemons in his time to be able to tell similar looking ones apart.

Not that Melpomene could begrudge the old Human for his lack of exposure, of course. She apparently still needed more practice differentiating Humans herself, because to her, the old man looked like Gregory Kingsblood II, so who was she to judge?

The real Gregory Kingsblood II — if Percival’s second in command even was the real Gregory Kingsblood II — would probably fly into a zealous rage the second he saw a Daemon, so this old man couldn’t be him.

All that considered, being mistaken for a Daemon as great as Thanatos put Melpomene in a good mood, so she decided to play along with the dead Human’s misconception. He asked if she was Thanatos, and she would give him an answer.

“Yeah,” she said, flashing him a smile and a wink, “I suppose I am.”

Melpomene wasn’t sure what sort of reaction she expected. Perhaps fear, perhaps awe, perhaps a bit of both. What she hadn’t expected was for the old man become an incoherent glob of sobbing and smiles. “Oh, you smarmy ass! I knew it was you! I knew it! It’s so good to—hic! It’s so good to see you!”

The old man tried to step toward her, and miracle of miracles, the clumsy bastard somehow got his foot caught on something and tripped despite being made entirely intangible of soul-stuff.

Melpomene knee-slid over to catch him without thinking.

“Careful, you ol’ geezer!” she chastised, carefully observing the soul resting in her arms. “You could’ve broken a hip!”

She was on a scouting mission so she really should be getting a move on, but then again, she’d never seen a loose and cognizant soul before. Interacting with the soul would likely reveal something about the nature of the ongoing ritual since the two were likely related.

Objectives aside, some small part of Melpomene felt the need to comfort the old man’s soul for no other reason than because she wanted to. As for why she wanted to, she rationalized the urge as being caused by pity for an old soul burning away into oblivion.

Perhaps if given more time, she would realize there was something else there.

“One last goodbye, love,” said the old man.

Before Melpomene could realize what he was doing, the old man kissed her on the lips. At first she was shocked, but then she remembered some of the more esoteric bits of her Human research.

First of all, the old man had called her ‘love.’ An untrained mind might assume this meant he’d mistaken her for his lover, but Melpomene knew better!

‘Love’ could also be an informal mode of address used my old-timey folks when talking to strangers or loose acquaintances. For example, ‘Would you mind holding the door, love?’ or, ‘I’m only two pence short! Can’t you let an old man slide, love?’

Such being the case — because why else would a Solarian address an ancient Daemon as ‘love?’ — this meant that the old man had a penchant for old-timey customs.

And what else did old-timey Humans have weird hang-ups about? That’s right! Kissing!

Solarians tended to be too prudish when it came to kissing, and yet they also did it at the weirdest times and in the weirdest ways. For example, why were enemy captives always so eager to kiss her feet, and yet none of them ever took her literally when she told them to kiss her ass?

As part of knowing her enemy, Melpomene had spent many long hours studying human customs, so that’s why she knew Humans also kissed when performing death rites! Since Solarian culture treated Thanatos as a psychopomp for unbelievers, it made perfect sense that the old man wanted to kiss her before passing on.

But why is he using so much tongue? Eh, must be a regional difference.

Subconsciously, that small part of her that had wanted to comfort the old man shrieked in victory at the kiss, but her conscious mind ignored that part of herself in favor of trading spit in a purely professional manner.

But of course she had to match the old man’s intensity. She wouldn’t want to raise any suspicion, after all!

The old man pulled away first.

“Please, love,” he said. “It’s Percival. He’s up there, somewhere high in the tower.”

Oh? Melpomene thought, shooting a quick glance at the Torr Royale. Percival’s up there? Is he the one running this shit-show of a ritual?

“I’ve-I’ve failed. I’ve got to go, but… You’ll take care of him for me, won’t you? Percival, he needs—”

“Consider it done,” Melpomene interrupted. The soul’s last few sentences told her everything she needed to know, so as repayment, she’d help him pass on as soon as possible. “May the Beyond treat you well, old man.”

The old man began dissolving into motes of light with a smile on his face, apparently at peace thanks to Melpomene’s promise to ‘take care’ of Percival.

“Don’t be in a rush to catch up, love. Be well, and be happy.”

Melpomene had witnessed quite a few people die in her time, and as far as last words went, the old man’s were rather nice. She didn’t know what she might use them for, but she filed them away for later.

The old man leaned in to kiss her one last time, and Melpomene obliged without thinking.

At last he disappeared, and Melpomene was left alone in the ruined square.

A smile on her face, she extended her wings and made her way up to a hole blasted into the side of the Torr Royale. Perching there, she looked out over the city, and what she saw confirmed her suspicions.

“So the old man was right. This is all Percival’s doing.”

Spread throughout Soleil, there were hordes of monstrous undead creatures wreathed in the disgusting golds of holy divine magic. According to her army’s latest intelligence, the only one in all of the [Solarian Courts] capable of this kind of magic at scale would be Percival, so barring any unforeseen factors, this magic had to be his.

Fighting against the undead were the [Aurorae Sylvas] and a host of poorly equipped Human troops. At a glance, Melpomene couldn’t determine who the Humans swore allegiance to, but they were fighting alongside the Fae against Percival’s horde.

Melpomene briefly wondered where the [Hollow King]’s forces were, but then she noticed that many of Percival’s zombies bore arms and armor far more exquisite than the rebel [Liege] should be able to afford.

Ah. Percival must’ve already destroyed the [Hollow King]’s army and equipped his troops with the spoils. These surviving Humans must be the remnants of the [Hollow King]’s peasant levies. That would explain how shit their equipment is.

Having reason to believe the [Hollow King] was dead, Melpomene stifled a sigh, but her disappointment soon turned into anticipation.

I’d hoped the [Hollow King] might be fun to fight… but if Percival beat him so easily, perhaps that means Percival will be an even better challenge?

“Prepare to strike,” she intoned, speaking through the [Command Relay] spell Eurymedon had given her. “Primary foe: Undead horde enhanced by holy magic. Sweep-breach protocol, then pull back and engage using slow bulwark advance at unit leader’s discretion. Be ready to employ anti-large, anti-many, and anti-air tactics as needed.

“Be advised: Human and Fae troops in area. Dispositions unknown. Do not engage unless attacked first, but be wary.”

Melpomene turned away from the city to peer into the tower where the ritual was being held. “At the ready. Autarch set to engage with enemy [Liege]. We strike on my mark.”

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“LIAR! LIAR! LIAR-LIAR-LIARLIARLIARLIAAAAAAR!”

Melpomene arrived just in time to witness something interesting.

“Let us see how you tell lies without a neck.”

There was a weird, fleshy monster with eyes, teeth, and gold in all the wrong places. It had an oversized golden sword in its hands, and Melpomene spied it just as it was rearing back to strike down a helpless looking Human getting eaten alive by gold.

Wait, the Human from the valley? Melpomene realized. No! They can’t die yet! They’re supposed to be my in with the [Aurorae Sylvas]!

“Mark,” she whispered, signaling her troops to strike. In the interest of protecting her asset, she charged in through the hole in the chamber’s door.

Instead of blocking the monster’s blow directly, she went for the kill. She attacked Percival — for who else could this holy-looking flesh horror be? — from behind, slicing through his neck and his shoulder in a single fluid motion.

The former monk’s goldsteel blade dissolved into light. His head and his arm fell away from his body with an odd slowness, as if underwater.

When his severed bits finally hit the ground, they did so with an unsettling plop, squishing and deflating with a bonelessness that disgusted and fascinated Melpomene in equal measure.

Without further fanfare, the man died. His malformed corpse began steaming and shrinking back down to the size of normal Human as the trapped spirits within him faded into the air. The flesh-crown on his head receded, revealing an actual crown underneath.

The [Couronne Solaire]? Melpomene marveled silently. It seems fancier than expected, but I shouldn’t be surprised that millennia-old intelligence is a tad imprecise. And it’s literally on fire? That wasn’t mentioned anywhere, but it doesn’t seem to be letting off any heat. A new enchantment perhaps?

Seeing that her former student still had their eyes closed, Melpomene had an idea.

Oh, this is the perfect opportunity.

Quick as a shadow, she swiped the artifact from Percival’s corpse. Only after she had it hidden beneath the folds of her robe did she address her student.

“Your [Liegeliness], we’ve got to stop meeting like this,” she said nonchalantly. “That’s twice now that I’ve swooped in at the last moment to save your life. Once more and it’ll start to feel cliché.”

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One conversation later…

AAAAH! OW OW OW! WHAT IN THE UNHOLY FUCK—!?!

Despite it feeling like ten thousand [Drake Berserkers] were tap dancing on her soul, Melpomene managed to keep her composure until her student died. Sure, she didn’t have the mental capacity to comprehend their final words, but she’d heard them. She could worry about what they’d said after she unburdened her soul.

Her student — now solid gold thanks to whatever curse the monstrous-looking Percival had cast on them — tipped over and clattered to the ground, but Melpomene was already out the door.