Movement. Then silence. The stench of metal.

Gilbert looked down and saw a dark metal rod jutting from his chest and into his field of vision. He lay still on his side, stunned, silent, not completely certain what just happened.

Temple.

He lay on the floor. No, not Temple. Rakkos. The spear was clamped in the god’s hands but seemed to have hit him too. His icy gaze stared with absolute fury at Gilbert, who struggled to stay conscious against a cold ocean of darkness that lapped at him, compelling him to let go.

*

The pointy steel spear had hit Gilbert in the back and protruded from his chest below the clavicle. From there, it had skewered the body that no longer belonged to Temple, crushing into his shoulder and lodging in the joint.

They were locked together. Intimate in all the wrong ways.

Gilbert was dying. Although Temple wasn’t in the body that had housed him for so long, he still somehow felt it, or maybe knew it, as if what the occupying god saw with his eyes was whispered to him as well. It was a miracle Gilbert hadn’t been killed on impact. Temple still felt him struggle, fighting to stay there.

Temple had felt it when Gilbert began to back up. He had felt the madness of his decision as if he had looked into his eyes when the idea sparked. He must have known he risked death. He knew. Ever since the god had put his hand on Gilbert’s face, Temple had been screaming, begging, pleading for Gilbert’s life until the god had taken him up on the offer.

This time, though, he didn’t bother screaming. Rakkos would hear him, he knew it. “You broke the deal. You hurt him,” Temple stated quietly.

“I did nothing to him. It was your trap!” Rakkos snarled back, fury colouring his words.

“It was my trap. And you triggered it. You told me I wasn’t guilty of the woman’s murder. What you do in your temple is your burden to carry.” In the absolute darkness of the mindscape he was in, Temple began to feel present, as if there was something solid under his feet, even though he knew he was hardly more than a shapeless memory. “You harmed Gilbert,” he stated matter-of-factly and felt his awareness slowly grow. “I will never comply. I will never stop fighting you.”

“Then I will have to force you!” the Darkness roared at him in the mindscape and Temple felt it kick itself away from the spear, spending some of the power it had drawn into itself from the killing of its worshippers to heal the furiously bleeding wound to its shoulder.

Temple laughed condescendingly and the shapeless void around him began to take form. He still couldn’t see himself, but he knew he was standing on a thin rope of light that stretched into eternity on either side of him.

“If you could force me, you would have,” he said. “I know why you wanted a child. You thought an indoctrinated child would submit. Would have no choice. You don’t have any real power, do you?” he asked, realising as he spoke how true it was. The Darkness had power when it was given it by fearful or greedy people. But if you were neither, there were choices.

“You are still just a pathetic child!” Rakkos snapped. “He knew I would trigger the trap. He hurt himself! I am not to blame for the actions of others.”

“He forced you to hurt him. For my sake. And you are going to leave now,” Temple stated. “Come here. Look around.”

The rope he had been standing on was expanding, growing steadily brighter and sturdier. Although it was a completely metaphysical, mental construct, Temple felt it as something solid in his mind. His mind. Inviolable. Personal space that was only open to those he chose to let in. He didn’t have a body yet, but his senses were sharp now, and he knew the bridge he stood on was the structure that had connected the darkness with him. It had been a parasite on the only truly good thing that had happened in his life and he was tired of it now. It had been too costly. It was about to end.

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The Darkness made its presence known. It was a cold, sickly, desperate sensation in his mind, and Temple focused on the bridge that spanned his being and beyond to Gilbert.

“This is the bridge you crossed to reach me,” he said, not giving Rakkos time to speak. “You were with me every step of the way. You know the feelings it’s made of. You were there when they took shape. Do you really think you can use this against me?”

“I already did! I used your pathetic, horny excuse to hold hands and here you are, helpless!” it roared. “You disgust me. You could raise yourself high above the petty mortals, but you chose to hide and cower and now you mistake lust for love.” It condensed into a greasy stain in his mind, the oily presence he had felt so strongly in the Barlik house. “I know… I was there all the way,” it whispered.

“If that was all it was, how did you get here? You couldn’t get here on a bridge made of a tickle in my trousers. It’s over!” Temple stated. “Leave now, or I will do my best to hurt you.”

“Hurt me?” the stain in his mind spat. “You will do as you are told!”

“You built a bridge to me using my love. But it’s still there. I have just as much access as you do, and I didn’t break an agreement. You got your temple as promised and now you lose it again.” Temple didn’t have form, but he had willpower. The Darkness had shrunk, or maybe he had grown, and now he simply reached for it, willing it to be bound and immobile. It struggled but grew feebler by the second as he tested his power to make sure he was strong enough. Then he simply swatted at it, making it tumble over the side of the bridge that glowed strong and steady through the mindscape.

The Darkness dissipated, spreading itself into his mind in tiny pieces, or perhaps it simply hoped to flee, unnoticed. But its hold on him snapped and suddenly, he was free. For the first time in his memory, Temple carried only himself and no shadow loomed over him. It was such a stark change that he froze for a moment, trying to understand the sudden sense of being alone.

But then he realised that he wasn’t. The bridge was still undamaged, and it led him straight to Gilbert, who was still fighting – though not for much longer, Temple feared. He gathered all the will he could and forced himself up to the surface.

*

20 minutes later

Temple had guessed the Watcher would be fast, but she was actually forcing him to exert himself. In his heart, he thanked the angry woman hot on his heels as he sprinted up the steep incline to the Burning.

Now he could just hope the Watchers would concentrate on Gilbert and not discover his home.

Less than half an hour ago, Temple had reclaimed himself and pulled the awful metal spear from Gilbert’s body, making him howl in mindless agony and bleed and bleed as he lost all tenuous consciousness left. Then Temple had forced all the charged power left in his body from the dark god into the wound and made ruptured veins mend and bones set with a hideous cracking, tearing Gilbert away from certain death although he was still seriously wounded.

He had carried Gilbert up and carefully laid him in the sunlight. He had kicked the few Rakkos worshippers who had fled far enough to die up here back into his basement home and temporarily sealed the entrances. Then, he had to get help. He couldn’t carry Gilbert to safety, he couldn’t go on holy ground to buy a healing tincture, and he didn’t have any handy, since they had always been poisonous to him. …Because they were made by the priestesses of Merea, and her relationship with Rakkos was probably not the best. He’d wondered about the reason before. But now a lot of things made sense.

In the end, the only option left to him was to go provoke the Watchers at Eastgate. Running down there, Temple had debated with himself if he should try to reason with them or explain the situation. After all, he now knew that Watchers were not necessarily the monsters he had believed them to be. But he couldn’t wait.

So he had simply pulled on his mask and opted for, ‘Captain Armstrong of the Kaala Palisade went to the Burning to apprehend me. He is wounded. I am the Magpie King’. And then he sprinted off, a little annoyed in his mind at having to appeal to other people’s greed to get what he wanted when he had only just gotten rid of the god of greed a few minutes ago.

He barely made it, sprinting right past Gilbert on the ground, and threw a purse of several small, gold ingots, scattering them all over, before dodging behind a low wall that still held out to break the pursuing Watcher’s line of sight. He quickly slid behind a rocky outcropping and climbed around it to double back in relative safety.

Temple felt relieved when he saw the woman slide to a halt where Gilbert lay. She quickly checked if he was alive, and then found the gold scattered next to him. When two of her colleagues arrived, panting up the hill, the woman told them to send a runner to the temple to get a priest and to carry Gilbert back down to safety.

Temple wanted desperately to follow him, but he was well cared for, and he had to trust Gilbert’s colleagues to take care of him while he took care of the problem of twenty-seven dead people, including the High Merchant, crowding his home.

He was tempted to sit down in the darkness, hug his knees and hide, but he knew those days were over. There was work to do, preparations to make, and a whole lot of gold to move.