Anneliese could only bask in partial victory against Verivix and how she and Bjarke dampened his recruitment efforts. Yet among it all, she couldn’t persuade Cestmir, as their ensuring argument concluded with barely a debate. The stubborn former quartermaster would join the resistance. Whether right or wrong, he made his choice and was a man of his word, come hell or highwater. For Anneliese, it was as if fate had cursed her into a lonely existence, as those closest were one way or another destined to perish or desert her. However, there was Weddle, at the base of the temple stairs.

The patient friar procrastinated, with nothing else to do, and watched on with his magic inclinations – able to draw conclusions about each bystander’s true natures while taking stock of the varied motivations that determined if said bystander would join the resistance or commit their fate to the chance that the church would not dare venture this far from Keesh.

‘You’re about to apologize for something,’ said Weddle as Anneliese approached.

‘Bjarke’s wolf died trying to save Cestmir’s people, but it didn’t amount to anything in the end.’

‘I’m sure she didn’t die in vain,’ said Weddle before brushing the loose dirt from the step above him, to where Anneliese could sit without feeling dwarfed but his much larger size.

‘Yes, she did. Lascivious had to take over, and I was practically useless,’ said Anneliese. The damp seat gave her the chills that she withstood with mild discomfort.

‘I wouldn’t write the old girl off so soon. The guilt you feel speaks volumes about her actions. For example, tonight, the Anneliese I met in Rekinvale and the one who stood up to Verivix couldn’t have been the same person if not for the journey.’

‘And yet I’m more lost than ever,’ said Anneliese. The persistent cold pushed her to reach for some sack of sacred sands, hoping to conjure a flame great enough to breathe warmth into her weary body. However, she had to resist the temptation, knowing the scarcity of its contents after exhausting most of it in order to save Cestmir and his exiles.

‘Aren’t we all,’ said Weddle before giving out a grueling grunt as numb legs made getting up exceedingly harder than his usual impairment demanded. ‘Suppose I should get out of your way, then?’

‘Why?’

‘Oh, I don’t do stairs at the best of times. And you have somewhere to be.’

Weddle left the cold and confused Anneliese to ascend the steep stairway, which shimmered with hypnotic rhythm. Each step highlighted the next as she traversed the stairway from the damp chilly winds to the stagnant fog and eventually the ever-shifting clouds, to where the faint hypnotic outline became the only defining marker recognizable through the constant grey.

With her previous day’s journey having worn out already unconditioned legs, she opted to cheat and withdraw into her own magical realm and teleport her way to the top. Yet amid the ever-greying cloud cover, she could not activate her wizard state. No amount of frustration or attempts to spark emotional unrest through repressed childhood memories could break her funk. Instead, it left her with a prevailing lameness and questioning why she attempted the journey.

Seeing as fatigue had her legs resting and her mind wondering, she started thinking back to her first encounter with Lascivious. How she found herself trapped in the abyss, having to learn how to harness the unnatural force within her. The sense of constant improvisation and trying something new. It was then that the distant lights focused her attention on the opposite direction from which the stairs had guided her. Their orientation was held at head height, even as she ascended and descended a few steps. Like a door without a handle, she felt around the cliff face, until eventually, her foot struck the narrow ledge that otherwise went unseen through the dense grey.

By feeling her way around, she stumbled upon a hidden pathway that weaved itself from the safe and well-lit stairwell to the obscured footings of the cliff side ledge. And with every side shuffle, cloud cover thinned until finally she arrived at the fire lamp entrance of the temple’s sanctum.

Inside was a warm, well-lit room of two intersecting ovals. The further smaller elevated oval opened to an infinity fountain bubbling with blue flames, where one middle-eastern adolescent lay unconscious across a stone platform within the fountain. While at the lower level, Anneliese passed four pillars, which looked alive with fissures that broke and re-cast themselves upon their stony foundation.

‘Weddle said you’d come,’ said Ravenna. The aged wizard, bestowed by wealth and tribute, appeared from the upper platform with scented essence in hand. Her lips and eyes were painted black, and there was a steady stream of white smoke coming from her wizard’s glare. She placed the essence at the head of the fountain, upon a floating bed of leaves that drifted harmlessly through the blue flames.

‘Would he have said why?’ queried Anneliese as she approached the platform with a sixth sense for something unworldly, an invisible force that shifted between the four pillars, cutting through her like an icy chill in the increasingly temperate temple.

‘Weddle believes it’s better when people figure that out on the way up.’

‘How does that turn out?’

‘Mostly disappointing,’ said Ravenna. She then cupped the blue flame emanating from a small peddle-size rock, which she laid upon the young man’s chest. The blue flame receded into the subject and triggered jolting reflexes that sent splashing waves over the fountain’s edge.

‘Who’s he?’

‘Another troubled soul,’ said Ravenna while she applied a wet rag and whispered foreign words to calm the young man’s mind and ease his jolting reflexes.

It was then Anneliese drew eyes upon the young man’s face. ‘Kulum.’ Her initial shock was amplified by the sight of Lascivious within the fountain ripples. It spooked her into a backward step, where dragged heels had her tripping over the platform edge, before an unnatural shift in her center of gravity pulled her forward.

‘He was the chosen one. Coble’s apprentice and eventual successor. A champion of Pragian and conquer of the ancients. Yet against all advice …’ Ravenna fed tender fingers over Kulum’s bald head, with a smile caught between love and disappointment.

‘I took his place. Coble chose me,’ said Anneliese. The weight of guilt was baring down on her as she felt her shadow flicker with the passing of an unknown force.

‘Coble chose a lot of things against Burtrew’s better judgements. Now we’re left to patch together the aftermath of his incredulity. Salvage what we can before the era of magic is erased entirely,’ said Ravenna.

‘That can’t be.’

‘It most certainly is and has always been,’ said Lascivious. The young and vibrant tormentor manifested himself as a stone golem from one of the four pillars. His feet were bound to the pillar’s base, unable to walk or move. ‘From the moment humanity discovered magic, we found ourselves in an endless conflict against the ancients and our demons. The rise and fall of civilization rested on the shoulders of wizards like me.’

‘Of which we have none,’ said Ravenna. ‘We’ve been replaced by a corrupted church and an unchecked ministry of battle mages, with only this failed prodigy to protect our cause,’ said Ravenna.

‘We still have Bjarke, Weddle and—’

Ravenna snapped her fingers, transforming the remaining three pillars into golems. Each displayed Lascivious from youthful vigor to the gradual degeneration of body and mind. ‘None of which are fit enough to hold the title of wizard – you, especially. That is, unless you accept your true calling and become one with Lascivious.’

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‘I will not trade one evil for another. Especially the likes of him,’ said Anneliese. Her defiance caused the golems to crumble back into their pillars. And as their spirits thrashed and swarmed around her, they nudged her onto uneven footing until she tumbled down onto the lower platform and up against the stone pillar, which, upon contact, transformed into her likeness. The young and defiant, to the old, insecure and paranoid.

‘The spirits tell an endless story of the human condition and how it does not guide itself, nor do our morals predict our character. How the best of us believes that their better angels will save them when the disappointment accumulates. The anger builds. Their conscience hardens. Until the demons of their subconscious take hold. Like the wizard Lascivious, whose virtues surpassed that of Coble’s … and yet. He sounded so much like you,’ said Ravenna, offering a hand to the bruised and shaken Anneliese, who abstained from the offering, with dazed indifference.

Anneliese’s fragmented thoughts were drawing her attention to the younger, defiant golem. It was a version of herself, unafraid. Less constrained in both thought or action. ‘Then clearly you don’t know what you’re looking at,’ said Anneliese as she found her feet, pushing off the timid limbs of the older version of the assorted golems.

‘I’m looking at an ungrateful little girl who came here without questions and still left with answers,’ said Ravenna. Her smoky eyes receded to dry condescension, as though their encounter was a complete waste of time.

They both then vacated through the various entrances for which they came.

Ravenna – the upper platform.

Anneliese – the ridgeline stairway.

Anneliese’s journey down was almost effortlessly short compared to her ascent, the constant feeling of defeat conjuring a fire of frustration that tarnished the nearby refugees with the brush of distrust. As though their lives were nothing but a vague distraction from an uncertain future that held no hope.

‘Don’t be so hard on yourself,’ said Lascivious. His manifestation projected upon the face of strangers, who intern avoided Anneliese upon noticing the tense vibes thrown in their direction.

‘You are far stronger than I was at your age,’ he said again. This time, he appeared upon a poor boy tending to his family cow.

‘Clearly,’ said Anneliese with a menacing grown that spooked the child into hiding behind his beast of burden.

‘What is it you so desire? There is not a soul stronger than our combined might, yet you would rather throw away these people’s lives than realize your true potential?’

‘Peace of mind,’ said Anneliese under her breath as the rickety movement of sheltering bystanders came to preoccupy her realization: the streets were empty. Not even the wind dared intersect her path.

‘He’s not wrong,’ said a stranger.

Their voice was loud but low key and emanated some distance just beyond her peripheral vision and behind Lascivious’ ghost, which disappeared upon her focused mind.

It was a modest campfire, occupied by four familiar faces. Weddle was tending to the small saucepan. Gideon was wide-eyed and quiet, Bjarke’s blade firmly grasped across his lap. While Bjarke himself, tethered to a worn blanket, was staring down at his injured arm, testing what dexterity remained of the atrophying limb.

And there at the center, flickering like the campfire’s flame, was a middle-aged ghost with an enormous melon of a head and slouched demeanor. He was reclined against sacks of turnips, more akin to a lazy summer’s day than the chilly mountain nights.

‘Coble?’ said Anneliese.

‘In all but flesh.’

‘You hung around this whole time?’

‘I had unfinished business.’

‘Kulum? You’re trying to save him? Save all of us?’

Her reply brought a chuckle to the old mentor. Enough for him to stretch forward, reaching out to grab his toes over a developing beer belly before rolling out onto his feet with the nimbleness of a lumbering giant. ‘That’s what I like about you. That intuition. It’s not quite foresight, but you’ve some brains about you. More than I had, to be honest.’

‘That’s not honesty, that’s flattery,’ said Anneliese. She was unable to smile at the Grand Master Wizard’s words that rang like a cheap gift from an absent father.

‘I like to call it self-deprecation, but part of me believes it.’

‘Is that’s why you chose me?’ said Anneliese. ‘Potential? The fate of magic, Pragian, everything and still. You had to outsmart a foreteller, only it didn’t work out that way, did it?’

‘Ah … Ravenna,’ said Coble with a displeased disposition. ‘You never accepted Draconian’s apology, did you?’

‘Don’t dodge the question.’

‘It was me who persuaded Coble to ignore my father premonitions,’ said Weddle. He was quickly eased from his interruption by Coble’s waving palm as the elder statesman took back the reins of responsibility.

‘Honesty is a rare commodity, which even I fall foul of misplacing, but I can at least come clean. It was I who recommended that they send you to the orphanage. Bellamy was an old friend of mine. He, ah, introduced me to alchemy and—’ A wad of phlegm choked back his words as he recounted consequences of his misjudgments.

‘Why didn’t you send for me?’ said Anneliese. Her words were forceful, her body ridged.

Before Coble could answer, a tall woman of darkened skin appeared in ghost form. She parked herself at the rear of Bjarke, cradling the deformed demon slayer’s slouched head. Her presence was a tranquil relief to Bjarke’s endless worries, and she offered her own humbled perspective. ‘Because your welfare was but a slither of the terror we were up against.’

‘You’re the old girl. The wolf?’

‘I’m Anyata. Mother of Toto. My son was Bjarke’s predecessor several generations past.’

‘You were a wizard?’

‘I was a mother who turned to voodoo to protect my son, and through my suffrage, I chose the path of resentment. Now Toto sleeps safely in the afterlife, while his ancient and I still stalk these lands.’

‘A never-ending cycle,’ said Anneliese.

‘It was easier to hate than to forgive and move on, but through forgiveness, there’s hope, and in hope there’s purpose.’

‘If only,’ said Anneliese, her eye’s tracing the ground as the icy chill festered goosebumps, yet not the will to encroach on the communal campfire.

‘Perhaps start with Draconian?’ suggested Coble. He reverted to his all-familiar, scholarly posture: slouched gaze, and arms held loose behind his lower back.

‘What will that achieve? He’s dead,’ said Anneliese. Her shaking hands gave in to the cold, and they unconsciously pulled her towards the fire’s warmth.

While from her blind side, another strange but subconsciously haunting voice carried over her shoulder. ‘Because if you can see the humanity in me, maybe then you’ll see Lascivious as less the enemy and more the equal,’ said Draconian. His ghost wondered in with the breeze and offered little in the way of acknowledgements as he passed Anneliese en route to the vacant spot beside Coble.

‘No, a thousand times over, no,’ said Anneliese. Her foggy breath was bleeding into smoky eyes, which through her peripheral vision re-invigorated Lascivious’ image – the ghost-king gesturing with wiggly fingers as he leant against the chicken’s hen.

‘If I may?’ said Weddle as he retrieved a large red hardcover book from inside his cotton sacks, which, with his initial offering, slipped through her transient hands. The book fumbled onto the soft, dewy ground, and Weddle’s voice screeched an anxious, ‘Ew’. He then hurried to clean all moisture from the already fraying bind. His over-cautious nature drove him to flick through the pages, assessing the damage, while Anneliese gave fleeting glances to what appeared to be blank pages.

‘What am I looking at? There’s nothing there,’ said Anneliese.

Weddle’s fingers traced across in staggered motion, like reading lines of text in a manuscript. With a look of desperation, he encouraged her to take another look. But she might as well have been blind.

‘It’s okay,’ said Coble with a regretful nod as all enthusiasm drained from Weddle’s face.

The friar’s finger stalled on one particularly dirt-smudged page.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Anneliese.

‘It’s okay,’ said Weddle. He then slammed the book shut and returned to his seat. He retreated into his own smiling façade. His arms were tightly bound around the red hardcover like a hot water bottle, while his attention lingered off center, away from the conversation.

‘It takes a third of an apprentice’s life to become a wizard,’ said Draconian. His cold ghostly hand offered soft sympathies to Weddle’s scrunched upper back. ‘With what begins with the youthful minds becomes knowledge that when subjected to the rigors of life, becomes understanding. This is the roadmap of wizardry. Unfortunately, your mind is closed, and so the ways of wizardry are invisible to you.’

‘What we’re doing is a poor job of explaining that between Ravenna, Kulum, Lascivious and yourself rests the fate of magic … and Vasier,’ said Coble as he brushed through the ashes, bringing the fiery red to the transient blue and projecting an image of a winter wasteland that showed Kulum alone, perched upon the ruins of Keesh.

‘But Ravenna.’

To which Anyata replied with the tenderness of a mother’s love, ‘She is not wrong, but that does not make her right. By the law of probabilities, you will fail. But by those same laws, I would have never found my son. Coble: never the Grand Master Wizard; Bjarke: never the demon slayer; and if you have half the potential we believe you to have, never will the odds define you.’

‘But what can I do?’ said Anneliese.

‘Forget who you are, or who you were. Become that better part of yourself that you know you can be, then go back up those stairs and find a way,’ said Draconian.

‘If that’s all, then I guess, Draconian, I should—’

‘Don’t worry, child. Your sincerity speaks louder than words. Now go get them,’ said Draconian before the prevailing breeze whisked him and the other spirits into the night sky, leaving only the three mortal men to ponder their miserable existence.

Each was possessed by thoughts of their own failings, and with desperate sighs, they looked upon Anneliese.

It was a feeling that was reverberated by the disenfranchised commoners. Their heads poked out of the woodworks to see Anneliese as both the angel and the demon. Each of them prayed the former prevailed and would free them from this desperation.