“The spell I cast to obscure our path was a glamour,” Khani said over the silence. They had not heard signs of the templars in some time.

Alonne looked up from his lap. He had been thinking quietly for what felt like hours. “What’s that?”

“It’s one of the rudimentary types of spellcraft—an illusion.”

Alonne’s eyes grew wide, “so you’re saying that wall was fake? They could’ve just walked right at us?” If he could have been paler, then he would have been.

“Yes.”

“And,” he choked on his words, “and you’re just mentioning that now?”

“It may as well be real if they fall for it.” Khani chuckled, crossed his arms.

“I am seriously not comforted by that.”

“Perhaps you could have raised a wall of stone on your own,” Khani’s gaze was trained on Alonne, his eyes glowing amber in the low light.

Alonne grew very quiet. “Why are you so hung up on this?”

“You didn’t ‘just find’ that sword; I can smell the magic on you.” His pupils had narrowed even further to slits, perhaps to adjust to the darkness.

“Your nose is just shot from how much it reeks down here,” Alonne shook his head. “I don’t know anything about this shit. It’s all forbidden—they would’ve burned me at the bloody stake if they’d known I could so much as bend a spoon with my mind. I’ve seen that happen, by the way.”

Khani grimaced. The Blessed Lands so often displayed a barbarism that displayed their self-aggrandizing, sanctimonious label. “I am not mistaken.”

Alonne flinched.

“It is fine.” With a sigh, Khani shrugged and looked off to the side for a moment. Then he closed his eyes, resting. “I understand that it is not safe to declare oneself a mage here.”

Alonne sat up. “You’re not from here?”

“Can’t you tell?” he asked.

“I don’t know the first thing about geography. Or politics, or nations—any of that shite. I clean bedpans and kill possums for a living.”

“I thought everyone from here was,” Khani paused, “very pale, with white hair.”

Alonne shook his head, “maybe at some point in history, but you’d hardly stick out where I’m from. The accent’s the only thing that’s a bit odd.” He added, “not bad—just different. Like you grew up reading books and such without becoming all stuck up and fancy ‘bout it.”

“Interesting. That is a good thing to know,” Khani crossed his arms, deep in thought.

A question came to Alonne: “Are you glad to know you won’t immediately get caught if you break out?”

There was a brief moment of silence. Khani opened his mouth to say something and closed it. “Perhaps.”

“Knew it.” Alonne closed his eyes, and sleep took him in seconds, the pleasantness of darkness welcoming him away from this hell. He slumped back against the rocky wall, unconscious and snoring.

Khani stood and turned away from him.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Each other time he had spied a fellow inmate, he had made himself scarce, melded into the shadows to observe. The Blessed People regarded anyone with the gift for magic with scorn and suspicion, mistook healers and seers and warriors for dangerous abominations. They seemed as vicious to him as they were foreign, as barbaric as they were superstitious. While Khani now knew he would not stand out physically, somehow he felt that if he stood too long in the gaze of the Blessed, they would know—that they would sense the faithless demon in their midst and descend upon him, tear him apart.

With a sigh, he walked silently down the dark halls, leaving Alonne to sleep shrouded by his glamours. The paladins were searching for a pale, blonde man, and not a foreigner. With Alonne asleep, he had some time to scout the deeper recesses of the Palisades without suffering the well-meaning man’s constant inquiries.

Khani stuck to the shadows, tracing a path through the underground until finally, the tunnels broke into another cavern with high ceilings, vast and expansive. Every falling rock echoed through the chamber, glimmering dust falling from the mushrooms overhead. Khani snuck along a rocky path that ran parallel to a torchlit one, the latter leading to another camp of inmates sitting around an open flame. He stopped just short of the encampment, a story or so above it, and hid behind a stalagmite.

Yet another tobacco-addled voice carried through the open chamber, “You lot see those paladins running around the prison?”

“Aye,” a prisoner with teardrop tattoos and a mullet was chomping down on a leg of meat. It smelled of pork; he was smacking his lips loudly, gnawing through cooked flesh with a singular hunger, “wouldn’t say what they were lookin’ for, though.”

“Prolly that blondie. The one that hid—looked like a woman. What a shame no one’s found ‘im. We all gotta get our rocks off, and it ain’t like you lot are that pretty. Most of us look like fuckin’ Greg over there.” Everyone, save for Greg—a balding man with an eyepatch and a grand total of two teeth—erupted in raucous laughter.

These prisoners were hunkered around several sacks; it smelled of pork, enchanted bread, and blood. They were turning a hunk of still-raw flesh over their campfire, sipping ale and ribbing one another playfully.

“I heard one of them say something about a Banshee.” The man with the teardrop tattoos was finishing his meal. Khani peered from behind his cover and locked eyes with the decapitated head of a young man, upon which a prisoner’s dirty feet were resting.

Khani’s eyes widened, and without another breath, he let loose the coiled darkness within him. The lithe frame of his human body grew, elongated, like a shadow cast by a bright light. He had glowing amber eyes and a pair of obsidian horns growing out of his temples, a pair of bladed, spiked tails growing from the small of his back. He was at least a foot taller, with claws where his nails had been—retractible and sharp enough to cut steel. This form was not something he’d wanted to let loose before these foreigners, all these superstitious fools who could not appreciate the grace and power of a Conclave shifter. But it would be fine so long as there were no surviors to witness the coming carnage.

Khani had heard legends of the desperation that came over those that lived in the dark for too long, without light and without hope—knew too well of the horrors that befell those scrounging for the basic things needed to survive. So long he had believed the worst fate in the world would be to rot underneath this fortress, where humans forgot everything that separated man from beast.

It had been a foolish thought. These cannibals could not frighten him any more than war: than the battles he’d won and the battles he’d lost. And the worst fate in the world was not, as it turned out, to reside in this hell. It was far worse to be an unrepentant cannibal.

There were five prisoners in total. In this form, he could hear their hearts beating, feel the rush of blood through their veins. Without a sound he circled the stalactite and lunged for the party, preferring an ambush to fair combat. His bladed tails sang through the air and pierced through the back of one of the prisoners, blood spurting from his open mouth as he clutched impotently at his wounds. Before his target’s body even hit the floor, Khani was reaching for the throat of another, and with a simple tear he ripped out his jugular vein. The man fell to the ground without so much as a struggle and dropped his drumstick.

The remaining three were reaching for their weapons, crude clubs and shivs they’d put together out of desperation. Khani leapt into the air and pounced on top of a prisoner—held his face in the palm of his hand as he easily smashed it into the stone. Then he whipped his tail across the chest of the next to rush at him, sent him flying into a deep gorge. He made a sickening crunch at the bottom.

That left the man with the teardrop tattoos.

“You aren’t lying about the Banshee?” Khani’s voice rumbled, distorted in an unearthly, ethereal tone. Something within him was not at all human.

The man had dropped the cleaned bone, which clattered to the ground at his feet, and had kicked aside the head upon which his feet had been resting. A stream of urine pooled between his legs as he backed away from the monster that had felled four hardened criminals in no time at all.

Khani crept towards him. “Tell me everything.”