His ears rang, drowning out the pleading words of his Keeper. The weight of his weapon felt heavy in his hands, and his legs were numb as if bonded to the stone paving of the pavilion. A creeping chill, closer to the screeching of a dull blade on glass, scuttled down his spine. His breath quickened as he unwillingly drank in the insurmountable dread above. A cold sheen of sweat formed on his brow. He wanted to scream, to warn the others, yet fear had dug its cruel talons into him.

“Clarity of mind,” whispered his blonde-haired companion in a tone tinged with desperation before a soft gasp escaped her lips.

A cold wind, more frigid than the horrors threatening to tear his sane mind to pieces, buffeted his form. Ben felt as if the dread had been pushed away an arm’s length, yet far enough that he was able to wrestle his faculties from inaction.

“Ann,” he spoke quickly, between panicked breaths. Eyes not straying from the twitching mass of terrors on the ceiling. “Touch the others. Dispel the magic.”

After an agonizingly slow heartbeat, noticing that his Keeper hadn’t complied, he glanced at the blonde woman. Ann stood frozen with her head tilted upward, wide blue eyes and mouth agape, at the domed shelter of the pavilion. He looked over to his companions at the fire, oblivious to the threat, and their doom flashed before his eyes.

In Ann’s domain, Ben and the young, fit manifestation of Ainsle had needed to combine their efforts to overcome a single one of the monsters. In the pavilion, however, the party faced hundreds upon hundreds of creatures born of the most twisted of nightmares. Although he had been in denial of the fact ever since her admission, the reality of his mentor not being as spry as she'd been in her younger years slowly dawned on him.

“Run…” he whispered to his companions, and then, with the cold realization of their inevitable deaths, his throat tightened as he screamed. “Run!”

Chaos.

The twitching mass of nightmares began to writhe under the ceiling. A pale form fell to the ground beside him with a dull thud of flesh and the cracking of bone. The horror appeared dazed for a beat before contorting, and its legs, which had bent in the wrong direction from the fall, began to straighten. It slowly pushed itself to stand with clawed feet, its faceless visage turned to Ben.

The swarm of terrors began to pour outwards, descending toward the sides of the domed shelter; they crawled with jerky, twitching movements along the stone surface to the tall, elegant pillars. A shrill keening sound assaulted his ears, and then another and another joined the wailing chorus of promised suffering.

He released one hand from his halberd and bent to tackle his Keeper swiftly; his free arm wrapped around her torso, and he lifted her onto his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. He propelled his body as fast as he could toward the path from where they came.

He shot a glance to the temporary campsite and watched as Ainsle leapt to her feet with her great mace held in a tight, two-handed grip. Her scarred face contorted in a frown; the wailing lament of the creatures seemed to indicate that whatever unnatural magic had affected their perceptions had been abandoned. Kieran and June were slow to react to the cry, and Ben grit his teeth as he saw several pale, spindly bodies fall from the ceiling to land in sickening thuds of flesh and bone on the paved floor around them.

He skidded to a halt as he approached the pathway. On the crest of the snowy trail, a crowd of the same creatures stood as still as death. Their smooth faces tracked his every movement.

A panicked cry. Ben spun on his heel to face the sound. The weight of his Keeper on his slight frame hindered his movement, and without hesitation, he called upon his first concept.

“Overwhelm.”

The beast roared, and he felt his form shiver involuntarily. The entity was furious… at him? An excruciating pain cascaded over his body. It was as if the familiar searing power in his veins had been replaced with molten steel. Ben’s eyes began to water, and his muscles screamed in agony as the power of the concept flooded his being.

Time slowed, and every heartbeat was a torturous thrum that raged against his ribcage. Ten paces in front of him, an angry, angular mass of steel whipped through the air —fast, even for his heightened senses— to impact and explode the head of a monster who had landed on the albino Evoker, pinning her to the ground. In a mist of red blood, the creature slumped to the floor, and the young woman scrambled to her feet with the aid of the old Berserker. Kieran began erecting walls of transparent bone around their position. Ben observed the terrible horde of creatures who had climbed down the pillars nearest to them, and the few who had fallen from the ceiling fixed their eyeless gazes on the bronze-skinned Caster.

The young man’s feet beat into the paving as he ran toward the least dense area of the horrors—the broad stairway to the temple. Talons whispered through the air with the promise of death in their wake, which the young man barely managed to evade —the tug on his arm holding the halberd and the cold air on his skin told him that his gambeson had done little to protect him from the blow. Ignoring the cries and protests of his Keeper on his opposite shoulder, he swung the polearm in a downward lateral arc, severing the offending creature’s grotesque hand at the wrist.

The success of his strike did not fool him, yet he couldn’t help but notice these creatures were slightly slower than the horror they had faced in his Keeper’s domain. Perhaps their movements were made observable by his heightened senses, he considered before banishing the thought. He knew that the power of his concept, granted by his Avatar, was the equalizer in the real world. Yet, neither he nor Ainsle could realistically face the sheer number of monsters and hope to survive, let alone fight to defend Casters while they concentrated on their arcane workings.

“The stairs! NOW!” Ainsle bellowed at the group; obsidian horns erupted from her forehead as she twirled her massive implement of violence above her head before eviscerating a creature mid-air.

Several monsters were blocking their path to the stairway. June hesitated for a beat before stomping her foot on the ground and balling her fists, shoulders hunched. She let out a chilling scream that spoke of terror tinged with defiance. Her purple hood fluttered on her shoulders, and her robe similarly appeared buffeted by the same unseen wind. Pure white locks of hair floated lazily as if she were underwater, and blue-white arcs of lightning danced around the woman’s small form.

In the two heartbeats it took for Ben to arrive amidst his companions, the hair on his arms stood on end, and a surge of force repelled him two steps backward —narrowly avoiding the form of a terror crouching behind him. Kieran, who had completed raising a defensive structure of bone on their flank, stumbled and fell to his hands and knees.

The Evoker roared a primal, hateful rage that shook the ground, and Ben’s vision went white for a sliver of a second.

The initial ripple of force was a deceptive precursor to the tidal wave that assaulted his temporarily enhanced form. A cone of blinding white light, crackling with azure lightning, erupted from the outstretched palms of the albino Caster in a reverberating thunderclap. The creatures caught in the blast, momentarily dazed from their fall from the ceiling, evaporated in wisps of acrid smoke. Rock and dirt were expelled from the area of effect in a devastating rain of destruction.

Ben blinked and beheld a deep smoldering furrow in the ground, extending roughly fifteen paces in front of the Evoker. The stone stairway wasn’t impervious to the destructive spell either, as a significant section of the lower steps had been destroyed —a narrow path was still traversable, yet the party would have to move in single file for the first flight before the ridge.

June collapsed to a knee, her body undoubtedly spent during the display of raw power. The young man placed the Keeper down on her feet.

“Annie, help June and make for the stairway. I’ll try to keep them off you,” he said, and the blonde woman seemed to hesitate yet nodded after seeing the grave expression on his face. She rushed to the expended Caster, all while maintaining an Aura that seemed to sharpen his focus.

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He turned to intercept a creature who lunged at his mentor. With two quick thrusts of his weapon, it fell in a tumble before scrambling away in retreat —its wounds closing before his eyes. The cold realization of an unwinnable battle truly settled on him at that moment. He stood shoulder to shoulder with the diminutive Berserker, whose presence was larger than his own, yet not substantially so.

The Champions of Illephrre frantically sliced and stabbed and battered away at the unending torrent of nightmares while their companions spearheaded an escape. A master and an apprentice weaved a ballad of desperation and defiance against the creatures spawned from the darkest of nightmares. Ben bled from light scratches from near misses and the overwhelming number of enemies that demanded his attention. A cleave and a thrust would dispatch swathes of the horrors, yet the seemingly unending tide replaced the fallen as if it were an inevitable, twisted force of nature.

The hints of fatigue heralded the waning power of Ben’s concept, and the crumbling of his mentor’s obsidian horns told him their time was running out. The pair wouldn’t be able to hold the line much longer.

In his periphery, he spotted a putrid, sickly green figure slashing its talons at the swarming mass, uncaring of its own safety. It drew the attention of the surrounding horrors and fought until its limbs had been severed, and it became no more than a faceless head attached to a thin, writhing torso.

Kieran’s latest thrall had been a boon, and the pair of fighters seized the lull in the flood of spindly bodies to retreat in earnest. They had been gradually pushed back toward the elongated crater in the ground, and the moment to disengage and create distance wouldn’t likely present itself again.

“Go!” Ainsle hollered at Ben. “Ol’ Ain has a little bit left in her. I’ll be right behind you.”

Ben frowned at the old Berserker, whose weight shifted gingerly to one leg; her other shin was painted crimson from blood that leaked out the joint at her knee. Her eye no longer shone with the crimson light of her concept, and the obsidian horns were but crumbling stumps on her forehead. He clenched his jaw and swore. Overwhelm was beginning to exact its toll, and if the extended engagement was anything to go by, the price of fatigue would be high, he thought.

“No way. You go first. I’m only getting started,” he lied.

“Listen here, you little shit,” Ainsle growled. “I'm your teacher, and you bloody do as you are told!”

Ben bared his teeth at the stubborn woman and shook his head. Her Path allowed her to exceed the limits of a normal human being —given that her blows had become more and more thunderous and devastating as the battle wore on— yet the Berserker seemed to have an upper limit as well, which she had met several moments prior. She was slowing. Her attacks had become weaker and her reactions even more so.

Give me more! He demanded of his Avatar, gaze fixed on the old Berserker. The beast rumbled defiance, and Ben felt the refusal punctuated by his steadily leadening arms.

“NOW!” he shouted aloud.

The entity roared back, conveying images of his own corpse being eviscerated by the horrors. It spoke but one word.

DEATH

Ainsle frowned at the young man, her white basilisk armor dirty and bloodied; with a tired eye, she opened her mouth to speak before Ben abruptly planted his black halberd in the snowy dirt. The creatures had dealt with the undead thrall, and their attention had returned to the pair at the bottom of the stairs.

In the span of a heartbeat, he closed his eyes.

You fucking give me more when I tell you to give me more! He commanded the entity. You belong to me. She is mine as well. And I decide WHEN. WE. STOP.

For the remainder of the fragment of that moment, the beast remained quiet. Suddenly, a roaring laughter filled his being, and approval —deep and genuine— cascaded over him. A breeze of respect earned, and a reluctant farewell caressed his mind. The entity didn't believe he would survive the last stand.

Ben winced as the intoxicating agony of his concept caused his form to tremble. His vision lost all color, and he felt the fragments of a God’s strength flood his veins once more. The pain was near unbearable —unlike anything he had experienced before, given the fact that he was lucid and there were no drugs or concoctions to dull his senses. He knew he had but a moment to act before he destroyed his body. He opened his eyes to see Ainsle’s frown; her shoulders were slumped in what he interpreted as resignation turned to confusion.

"See you soon, Miss O'Seighin," he said with a forced wink.

Without hesitation, he stepped forward and struck the old woman with a jab that screamed through the air. His fist impacted her armored forearm as his mentor watched on, eye wide and mouth agape in disbelief. He felt his knuckles shatter against the enchanted plate, yet the force was so great that he heard the snapping of bone and the loosening of her gauntleted grip on her ridiculously heavy implement of carnage.

He viewed the world as a morbid painting; a second lasted five times as long, and that was all he needed. As the old woman turned to react to the attack, he kicked the shaft of the great mace, sending it toppling down into the furrowed dirt. She stumbled, yet Ben grabbed her by the collar beneath the gorget of her armor and spun. The astonished Berserker’s body whipped through the air in a full circle before being launched toward the apex of the flight of stairs.

Ben couldn’t afford to observe his handiwork as he turned and considered retrieving his mentor’s insanely heavy weapon before committing to his own retreat. He hadn't been willing to gamble on throwing her body and the implement of chaos at the same time. The concept he had recklessly drawn from a second time had begun to wane —the consequences be damned, he told himself— and he saw a swarm of creatures flood over the crater where the great mace lay.

“Sorry. We’ll grab it on our way out,” he said to no one in particular.

He turned, leapt high into the air, and spotted Ann and a tired June helping the old Berserker to her feet before landing on the snowy ridge in an ungraceful tumble beside them. He scrambled to stand yet was met with what felt like a gigantic mallet of exhaustion to the gut. He rolled over to his back to see the concerned blue eyes of his Keeper above him. Her regenerative Aura blanketed his spent form.

“My heart, we must go,” she pleaded and bent to offer him a hand.

“Haste, please!” shouted Kieran from somewhere to his right. “I only have one of these scrolls!”

Ben grit his teeth and ambled to his feet with his Keeper’s help. He glanced at the Apprentice Necromancer, who seemed to be channeling a substantial working, a tattered scroll held aloft in one hand; the other… was missing. Kieran had lost his right arm below the elbow sometime during their retreat.

A moment later, the air around the handsome man began to oscillate, and bones of varying shapes and sizes appeared from nowhere and everywhere at once. They rolled along the snowy dirt—revealing themselves from behind bushes, around trees, and in small puffs of mud and snow from beneath the ground below. Pulled by an unseen force toward his position, the bones coalesced into an ever-growing humanoid amalgamation.

Ben took steady, deliberate steps away from the horde of horrors while leaning against his Keeper, who supported him under a shoulder; her free hand carried his black halberd. His gaze was fixed on the spell his companion was casting, yet he spared a glance toward his mentor and June, who were similarly beating a hobbled retreat ahead of them. Ainsle, nursing her broken arm, winced with each step.

“Naethorul’s Guardian,” incanted the Apprentice in words that seemed to echo in the still mountain air. The scroll erupted in a burst of green flames; its ash was cast to a wind that was not present in the plane of Aetheria.

Ben faced Kieran to see him stumble, yet maintain his balance, beside a towering warrior made of various bones of colors ranging from pure white to moldy brown. It was easily as tall as the red giant, the manifestation of Ainsle’s Avatar, and had a similarly massive club held in one hand, resting against its shoulder. A green glow shone through the crevices of cracked bones and gaps in the otherwise tight formation of parts that comprised its form.

Kieran hurriedly turned on his heel and jogged over to the retreating party. “The golem should buy us some time.”

Ben, who had somehow managed a reasonable pace, regarded the man with brows furrowed, glancing at the bloodless stump of his arm. “You sure? Those things are fast, and it’s… quite big,” he said in a tone made coarse from exhaustion.

“Master Ben,” said Kieran between breaths, voice strained. “That scroll I used… was an inscription of a spell that was beyond even the capabilities of Master Durrene to cast naturally. Trust me.”

As soon as the words left his lips, a boom was heard from behind the party, and Ben turned to see the source of the noise. The bone golem was spewing a green, fiery substance from its maw that detonated when impacting the wave of creatures that had managed to climb to the top of the ridge. The area was bathed in the sickly flame, and the young man decided that he would indeed trust the Apprentice Necromancer.

The party shuffled, stumbled up the final stone steps, and found themselves on a large paved landing overlooking the forested land far below. The dark, sickly Scar in the sky marred an otherwise scenic vista. To their right, an enormous cathedral hewn from the very mountain itself loomed imposingly high above the group. Low-hanging clouds drifted among its towering spires, contrasting against the smooth black stone of its construction.

Between the party and the large archway of the temple of Illephrre, a single, three-meter-tall statue of a nude muscled warrior, made from the same black stone, stood regally in the middle of the circular landing. The man held a pair of axes in each hand, and his long, curly beard spilled over his broad chest to his navel. Ben’s tired eyes widened as he gazed into the vandalized crevice of what had been the warrior’s face.

The sound of a clucking tongue drew their attention to the temple's entrance. A cowled figure in dirty, white robes stood in the massive doorway beneath the towering arch. The form croaked in a gritty, mature-sounding female voice.

“Foolish girl.”