“Behold, after many months have passed, your savior has arrived. I’ve traveled halfway around the world, fought dastardly villains, learned many a vile secret, and come back changed in body and mind. Behold, no longer a crow I stand as a proper man before you at long last,” Golden crowed as he danced across the practice field to Lucius.

“Who the hell poisoned you? Do not touch me like that,” he commanded, grabbing the Divine Beast by the hair and holding him at arms length.

Golden laughed. “‘Twas our mutual friend who did so. But truthfully, I have come at your hour of need, have I not?”

“You’re drunk,” Lucius said, and he did not mean on alcohol, though the guards around him assumed as much.

“What can I say,” Golden said, spinning away from Lucius to sweep his arm across the city. “After so long in the central kingdoms, I may have picked up a thing or two from them. They do so love to pretend that wine is blood, to commune through transmogrification. A most degenerate practice which barely resembles the proper process. But all the same, I have had so very, very much… wine last night.”

Lucius narrowed his eyes and ordered, “Show me.”

The building that Golden brought him to was unassuming, of course it was. Skulks in the night always choose unassuming buildings. The patrols would have overlooked it because, simply put, the entire city was unassuming. For years and years prior, there was hardly a need to put up an advertisement for whatever establishment existed there. Signs and labels barely permeated out two streets from the docks. Most buildings got by with the mere tools of their trade. Coopers had barrels, cobblers had shoes, and popinas had smells. Many places of trinkets and cloth, of liquor or forgotten moth, opened their doors only to those that already knew what was inside. The Misty Isles’ slow economy had no need to rush about or hunt for bargain deals. There were barely even any creditors trying to scoop up property.

Thus, the building Golden went to seemed to have no purpose whatsoever. There were bags of dried foodstuffs and mismatched furniture, but the first room had a layer of sand and dust. The bodies were in the cellar, where the guttering flames of candles would not entice unwanted attention. As I mentioned, the only people who were supposed to know what went on inside this builder already did. The very first unwanted person to discover them was Golden, and that did not turn out well for them.

“I had to come in naked, I would have destroyed my clothes otherwise. So much harder to clean than feathers,” Golden said from the doorway.

“I can see that,” Lucius muttered, taking in the gore.

More than a dozen men, he couldn’t be sure of the exact body count because they were simply in too many pieces. He couldn’t even count by skulls, because several had been smashed apart, their brains missing. Rib cages had been turned into viscera platters. Legs were piled next to a firepit as if to dry out for burning. Those were the stringy bits, as far as Golden was concerned. Of all the corpses, not one liver remained, and only a few hearts. Intestines had been wrung out and used to hang the bodies for butchering.

“You had fun, didn’t you?” Lucius said.

Golden clapped his hands together. “That I did! I never quite appreciated how useful two hands could be. There’s so much more I can do, so much fun.”

“Don’t you think that if you look like a man, you should behave like one?”

“Why, that’s exactly what I did,” Golden said. “Do you have any idea what these men would have done to you? I saw it. When I pressed their brains to mash and drank off their minds, I saw so many things.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” Lucius said, trying to keep his attention on thing things of the room. Not the body parts, not the blood and gore. He looked for papers, for bags of kuku buds.

“Umbra doesn’t know how to kill you. They’ve seen you stabbed, punctured, murdered, and strangled, but always you come back. Umbra isn’t a very smart creature, not like me at all. Their imagination is as limited as the hole they live in, barely able to see out of the conceptual world and to reality. But they are determined and patient. Dealing with your stigmata doesn’t require a great wealth of wisdom, now does it?”

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Lucius closed his eyes. “Do you know where they are?”

Golden went on. “You do a wonderful job of masking the pain, of acting like you don’t feel it. Your master nurtured that well in you, but you don’t hide your emotional pain. You’re so obviously attached to the people around you and they can be killed.”

Lucius glared at the monster beside him. “Just tell me where they are. You know, don’t you?”

“They were going to poison you first, to tie you down. Then they would dissect the girls in front of you. The redhead preferably, but the little alchemist would have sufficed. It would have been like an appetizer before they cut you apart and carried you away. Bury you piece by piece on a hundred different isles and let your mind break in the time it would take to heal. The whole time, your last memory would be of screaming.”

Lucius drew his sword and put the point to Golden’s throat. He pressed it and forced the Divine Beast to stagger back. When Golden’s back hit the wall, he pushed until just before blood was drawn. “If you keep talking, I will cut your tongue out. I will hobble you and send you blind to a temple of death to live as a beggar.’

Golden smiled. “Your threats are getting creative.”

“Because I know how to threaten a thing like you.”

“Threaten perhaps, but do you know how to kill me? Do you think running that steel through my body and spilling my blood will really be the end of me? I am a daemon, life without breath.”

“I know.”

Golden clicked tutted and shook his head. “Then don’t you see the issue? The lord of this land is also a daemon. How do you plan to kill them? Going to stab them until they don’t move? You need more tricks up your sleeves than that, boy.”

“I will stab them until their magic is spent and their force of will is exhausted.”

Golden rolled his eyes. “This isn’t some mere parasite in a cave, even if their relative magic is comparable. This daemon has no physical form. It is a force and a force cannot be cut by steel alone. You need my help. That’s why I said I was your savior.”

At last, he took his sword from Golden’s throat and sheathed it once more. “Name your price.”

“Your first born–”

“I should kill you for even joking like that.”

Golden smirked. “Sorry, it’s a classic. That would be asking too much however, and I recognize that. I will settle for the heart of a beautiful woman and I’ll even accept that I will have to wait to get my payment. I have dined on the locals and found them wanting. When you are recalled from this wretched colony, then I will take my payment. Unless you’re willing to give me a visitor, but that would tarnish your reputation somewhat.”

Lucius scowled and turned back to the corpses, if they could even be called that. To the playthings of the Divine Beast. Much of them was nothing more than meat, but he could still see the fingers that would have ripped him apart. He saw the eyes that had surely watched him day after day, biding their time on the bidding of the daemon of the Misty Isles. He owed Golden already, he could feel that in his gut. “Fine,” he said, meaning to wait for a proper prisoner that would need to be executed.

Golden clapped his hands together. “Wonderful. Well then, are you ready?”

“For?”

“To go kill it. These lovely sacks of meat were so kind as to tell me exactly where Umbra’s core is, a phylactery of sorts. We can set off at once and be done by dinner, not that I’ll have much of an appetite of course. I think I’ll be quite glutted by the time we’re done.”

At this time, Lucius still had not spoken properly with Aisha. All he definitively knew was that he had been told to give her space and as yet, that had not been rescinded. There were a number of small things he could productively do with the day, treating with the merchants for instance, but making people wait to see you is a classic power play for a reason. Furthermore, Golden had just offered to help him remove the biggest threat to his future.

He agreed brusquely and marched back out, leaving orders to burn the house the next morning without going in. The town guard had to be assembled, not that they would be useful against the daemon. He needed the bodies as a perimeter, a full mustering of soldiers to march the streets and wait. He assigned some to the manor and delegated them beneath Sera Lynnfield for further instruction.

All of the men were called up, even the half-trained and the half-loyal. Squad leaders divided them up between those that could be trusted. It was a tenuous kind of strength, but the impression mattered more than the effectiveness. All that Lucius needed was that his enemies would not concentrate their forces and pierce through them. He wanted them split up and outnumbered; afraid to attack without support. The army would do exactly that, he hoped; keep them in check long enough for he and Golden to descend through the caves, through the cursed temple and down to the sanctuary of that which lived and did not breathe.

He declared that on that day, the murders would be coming to an end. The Misty Isles would be free of the violence, the tyranny. A very bold and almost silly declaration, but lies give strength to such a narrative, and he needed them to watch his back.

And so, he and Golden departed to put an end to this saga of violence.