Using the map Sun Lin had annotated, they popped into three other Arcana that week, taking their deans hostage and forcing them to divulge both their secrets and the warbeasts they kept at the ready in their vaults. After their first double-cross back in Raly, nobody else tried anything. She wondered idly if word had gotten to them from Rain that they’d broken out of his time-lock as easily as if it wasn’t even there.

Essence. Sleep. Death. It was the third that most interested Willow in those subbasements with the Arcanum’s decades of research. What they’d found was that upon death something did leave the body. It had a concrete weight and could be blocked by exceptionally powerful barriers for a short time before it disappeared. They’d tracked these spirits moving for several feet before disappearing altogether. The direction was never consistent, nor the time duration. The only thing that was was the fact that they all disappeared in the end.

“They could be evaporating,” Leopold said back in Bridgewater. They were taking a break at her parents’ house and batting ideas back and forth while they were gone. She suspected that speaking of such things around her parents might send them over the edge. They’d already put up with so much strangeness since her sudden return to their lives. She didn’t want to put any more pressure on them.

“It doesn’t seem like it,” Willow said while shuffling through the latest set of papers they’d retrieved. “In certain spectra there appears to be a nearly microscopic portal that opens. It seems to suck them in.”

“Does the soul do it?” Leopold asked. “Open the portal I mean?”

“If it did, I would be surprised. Why do they appear to wander shortly after death, directionless. Why don’t they go towards something? Why even move at all if they have access to portals? No, I think something else is opening the portals and sucking them in.”

She didn’t have to say what the implications were. In their second-to-last Arcanum she’d thought to ask the dean if he knew what the other Arcana were studying in their secret programs. He feigned ignorance at first, but she could tell it was an act. A few seconds of concentrated staring was all it took to make him lose his nerve and ask for a piece of paper. The results Leopold still had in his bag, and she rummaged around until she found the scrap again.

Raly – time.

Nox – essence.

Jon – death.

Durum – god.

Leopold sighed at the last entry.

“I doubt anything would be left. With all the warbeasts that arrived…”

“I know,” she said. “I know, but we have to try, don’t we?”

His face went hard and she knew what he’d like to say. He’d said it plenty of times before, but held himself back now. Neither of them wanted to go back to their old city, neither of them wanted to see what had become of it. The rumors were hurtful enough to hear. But she was driven to finish out this quest, to try to right this wrong. He knew this about her, and he didn’t speak out.

“This is the last one,” Willow said softly, her hand reaching across the table toward his. He laced his fingers with hers and held her. “After this, no more running.”

“You think we’re ready to face that thing,” Leopold asked.

Willow smiled. “No,” she said, and shook her head. “I don’t think we can fight it.”

Leopold nodded and she saw the slight smile on his lips. It killed her to lie to him like that.

🜛

From a field several dozen miles from Bridgewater Willow opened a portal into the churned no-man’s land that had surrounded Durum. Their direction was all wrong to see the city itself, but there was little reason to tread softly. The longer the portal was open, the higher the chance that something might come through.

Willow walked through first and turned right. Leopold walked through and collided with her back. She couldn’t keep moving, not after what she saw.

Durum, or what was left of it. The shield wall had crumbled in sections, looking like a broken-toothed smile on the horizon. There was no smoke, no fire, not like she’d expected. There was nothing but burnt rubble and ash rising up on the great hill of the city. The Arcanum at the top which had shone before like a beacon was almost entirely ruined, only a few free-standing walls striking up in defiance to the destruction.

Whatever had done this, it might still be here. It might try to interrupt them during their search. If it was here, they’d give it plenty of time to find them and make itself known.

Using a portal they crossed the distance to the faint delta which made up the entrance to the formerly warded tunnel. No trace of the tunnel wards remained, and great tracks showed that either the mages hadn’t gotten it back up in time to prevent the onslaught of warbeasts, or that the beasts had broken through anyway.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

The entire section of city-wall which housed the gate had been reduced to rubble. The damage wasn’t this severe when Willow had defended the city. As they passed through the place where the gate should have been, Willow realized she was going to have difficulty in recognizing anything within the city.

Giant stone blocks had fallen and shattered on the interior side of the wall, demolishing any buildings within a hundred feet of the structure. Her eyes went automatically to the staging ground where the woodsmen unloaded, but there were no trailers there. They were either out behind the guild hall or had been demolished for defensive materials. The guild hall itself should have been visible from her position, but what stood in its place was a rubble of charred wood and vitrified stone.

“Something hot came through here,” Leopold said. “Very hot. I didn’t know you could melt stone like this.”

“It might still be here,” Willow said, not bothering to lower her voice. “They might be camped out all over the city still.”

“What might?”

“The warbeasts.”

Leopold looked around. “I don’t sense anything. They always felt huge before, unmissable.”

“They might be hibernating, or sleeping,” Willow said. “Who knows.” She turned right and slid boulders out of the street with psychokinesis as she trekked down a small alley. Leopold jogged to keep up with her.

“We don’t have to do this,” he said. “You don’t have to do this. What happened wasn’t your fault. We could just go up to the Arcanum and—”

“No, it was my fault,” Willow said. “And my fault too that Bryan died. I killed him, did I not? The least I can do is discover what fate befell his wife and child.”

Leopold was silent the rest of the way down the oh-so familiar alley which was little more than a slight depression in the rubble. Willow picked stone and charred wood up as gently as she could and set them down again in the hollow skeletons of houses on either side of the alley.

Soon enough, too soon, they were at 23 Grave Street.

There was nothing left of the small house, or the houses on either side of it. In her memory the house was still here, in her nightmares the interior was splashed with blood. But neither were true. The house was just a pile of crushed rubble.

Gingerly, Willow lifted cracked stone and wooden beams off the remains of the house and tossed them away. As the rubble began to clear, she could see the floor plan once again in the lowest foundations which had escaped pulverization. A pile of splinters was where the dining room table had been. A crushed inscribed pipe dribbled water ineffectually. A pulverized icebox held rotten leftovers prepared for a day that would never come.

She shifted some masonry and a glimmer of light caught her eye. From a small cavity a faint sphere drifted out, almost too faint to see in the daylight. She gently pulled it to her and cupped it in her hand. It was one of her old magelights from when she’d first cast the spell. It must have gotten lost in the rafters when she’d swept the rest out into the night. She never would have expected to see one again.

“Oh,” Leopold said and covered his mouth. Willow looked up from the small magelight to the cavity Leopold was staring at, and the two bodies within. The desiccated corpses of a woman cradling a small child.

The world collapsed down to a point and Willow stumbled back. Stones began to tumble all around her and she knew on some level that she was unconsciously lashing out with psychokinesis, but she couldn’t help it. At that point she was barely keeping on her feet.

Then she was on her knees. Lunch came up in a gout of vomit on the cracked stone and she screamed. She screamed in anguish, she screamed in rage. She screamed in shame.

Leopold put his hand on her back but she was beyond comfort. She shook with rage, which seemed to be the only thing keeping her from collapsing down into an infinitely dense point of self-annihilation. She wanted to die because of what happened. If she’d been here then she could have saved them. If she’d just stayed then none of this would have happened.

Something in the city awoke. Willow’s head jerked at the same time Leopold’s, toward the Arcanum at the top of the hill. A tower buckled and crumbled, so far away that the sound of the crash lagged behind the sight. Something stirred the dust cloud that bloomed from the ruins.

“Willow,” Leopold warned, but she gained her feet and in a moment had opened a portal to the outer walls of the Arcanum. She strode through and he barely made it before the portal closed behind him. The air was thick with stone dust and the scent of char. A roiling pillar of cloud rose before them, impenetrable to sight, but not to her second sight. Within she saw something huge shift in the dust, then come toward them.

The warbeast drew wings wide and flapped once, dispelling the cloud of dust almost entirely. Before them stood what she could only describe as a dragon from stories—the fantastical version of a common wyrm found in the east. Those wyrms only grew to a foot or two in length, but this one was at least thirty feet tall.

“Gods,” Leopold whispered as the dragon waved its serpentine head back and forth, switching focus between the two of them. Its teeth jutted out at odd angles like a crocodile’s. Its legs were short and stumpy, but terminated with powerful claws which cracked stone as it fought for purchase. The great wings had been perforated with holes, some of which she hoped had been blasted by the battle mages in their city’s last stand.

“Where are the others,” Willow screamed the question up at the dragon. “Where are the other warbeasts?”

“All dead,” the dragon answered in a bass rumble almost too low for hearing. “They turned on each other after the slaughter. I am the last, my queen.”

Willow squirmed at the title, at this thing giving it to her. She couldn’t unsee the burnt timbers of Bryan and Margaret’s house. She couldn’t forget the shrunken bodies within.

“You killed my city,” she screamed, tears spilling down her face.

“I did not know it was your—”

Willow slashed with her arm and the dragon’s eyes went wide. It’s head slid from its serpentine neck and crashed into the rubble. The mouth worked open and closed a few times, as if it were still speaking, before it grew still and died. The body collapsed in a heap, spilling essence-enriched blood across the broken stone.

“Come on,” she said, and stomped across the rubble-strewn courtyard. “Let’s see what kind of god would allow this to happen.”