Asche was much different than Willow had expected. On the journey here, with her dozens of executions of sentient warbeasts both sane and insane, she’d built up an idea of Asche as a sick and twisted simulacrum of a city—a place where terrible beings were born and where terrible things were done.

Both may have still been true, but it was much less the dark fortress that she’d been expecting. First of all, there was no wall surrounding the exiled city-state. At first she’d thought the outlying houses and shops were just another small town as they passed through, but at the crest of a ridge she saw the entire city laid out before her and it was revealed as much more than a small town. Thousands of people bustled along streets paved in stone.

Second, the buildings were as Annabelle, who sullenly followed behind like a chastised child, had described. Many were constructed in architectural styles which seemed alien to her, but taken as a whole the city had a strange sort of cohesion. As if it had come from another place or time.

The strangest thing she noticed about the city-state was the presence of nonhuman creatures following docilely behind their owners. Great hounds three times the size of any normal dog with bristling amethyst spines hulked along carrying packs laden with produce. In an open-air smithy she saw a salamander at least three feet long blowing gouts of flame into the coalbed where a nest of smaller salamanders writhed. The blacksmith—who’s left arm which was multisegmented and glossy held the steel directly—didn’t seem perturbed at the nearness of such a dangerous magical creature.

Perhaps it was the brass bands which encircled each and every one of their necks. Their inscriptions glowed bright enough that she could see them in the daylight, flaring when the creatures dared look Willow’s way. She caught the eye of each and every one of them, although few of the humans seemed to notice her. Furtive glances were followed by jerked heads as the inscriptions glowed and reasserted control.

“So this is what you meant,” Willow said as she followed the large main road toward the towering building at the end. The town hall where she’d finally meet this master of Professor Brandeweiss and Annabelle, who’d sent wave after wave of warbeasts to their deaths in single combat against her.

“You use the magical creatures. They’re bound to you.”

“As they should be,” Annabelle said. “They’re beasts of burden, nothing more.”

The looks in their eyes told Willow that that wasn’t true. These were no mere salamanders and rockhounds—their size alone betrayed the unspeakable things done to their ancestors. These were closer to warbeasts than their natural counterparts out in the forests and mountains. And she’d bet her staff that harbored intelligence that bordered on human.

Willow didn’t acknowledge Annabelle’s remark; she kept pace to the town hall at the center of the city between the mountains. Everything she’d been taught about Asche should have shown it as a wasteland, but apparently that was all a lie. How much of what she’d learned in her history of magic lecture was propaganda?

The doors of the hall loomed as she climbed the steps. They were made of fused stone which sparked in the sunlight, so different than the light stone that made up Durum and the sandstone they’d used in Bridgewater. Perhaps this building really was left over from an era past, as Annabelle had suggested.

Willow expected a grand gallery as she pushed through the double-high doors—a battlefield where she would pit her wits and power against this master—but what she saw instead was a carpeted lobby illuminated by buzzing lights along twin flanking lines of stone columns. As Willow walked in and past the columns, searching for any laid traps, she saw that the lights were actually some kind of luminescent insect hovering in midair. Why they wouldn’t just use magelight or inscripted lights, she had no idea.

There was what she could only describe as a secretary at the desk at the end of the hall, and with a final glance for hidden assassins Willow walked up and clicked her staff on the ground. The secretary, who’d been writing something down on a sheet of paper, looked up.

“Willow Tremont,” the woman asked.

“Y—yes,” Willow stammered. “You knew I was coming?”

“I was told to expect you,” she said, and rose from her chair. She was wearing a long dress and one of her feet ended in, not a foot, but something vaguely insectile.

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“Right this way,” she said. “The governor is expecting you.”

Every other step, the insect foot clicked against stone under the carpeted runner. Willow couldn’t stop staring at it and the secretary looked back and caught her.

“Prostheses like this aren’t common where you come from then,” she asked, and Willow jerked her head up.

“Sorry,” she said, but the secretary waved the apology away.

“It’s not strange here, no matter what you may think. I was in an accident as a child, but I’m not the only one. Some voluntarily get prostheses to enhance themselves, although having had no choice in the matter I can’t see myself giving up another limb.”

“Could they not grow it back,” Willow asked.

“We have our own expertise,” she said. “I’m sure if you’d ever been sick you’d know that it takes a lot of accumulated knowledge to treat an illness.”

That stopped Willow in her tracks. Ever been… sick? She hadn’t looked at herself in a mirror in probably a month, but she no longer limped and her muscles didn’t hurt either. If she had to guess from that remark, her sunken cheeks had filled out as well. Only the buzzed side of her head, who’s hair was already regrowing to a stiff fuzz, indicated she’d ever been seriously injured.

After going down a long hall with framed portraits lining the wooden walls, the woman knocked at a door intricately inlaid with filigreed silver. A muffled voice shouted in the affirmative, and she led the way through.

Beyond the door was an office with a high, multi-paned glass wall looking down the main street. Thick draperies bordered the window and the floor was carpeted in a sumptuous rug. An elderly man stood from behind a hulking wooden desk that reminded her of the dean’s and smiled.

“Thank you Samantha, that will be all,” he said, and the woman nodded and left, closing the door behind her. He came around the desk to stand face-to-face with Willow.

“Willow Tremont,” he said, his smile wide like he was a child at a candy store. “My oh my how you’ve grown. I can almost feel it from here.”

Willow’s resolve faltered. She’d been expecting some kind of climactic battle, not this octogenarian who looked like he could barely make it to the toilet five times a night. Though his smile was that of a much younger man and his eyes sparkled, she suddenly didn’t feel comfortable with the rage she’d built up inside her.

“You know my name,” Willow said. “What’s yours?”

“Andrew Yates,” he said, and rolled up onto the balls of his feet in excitement. “Oh how I’ve waited for this day.”

“How did you know I’d be coming,” Willow asked. Could it have been that the warbeasts had told him? From what she’d gleaned, they held little love for their former master.

“You had to come, did you not,” he said. “My tide of warbeasts made sure of that. You could have hidden behind the crumbling walls of Durum and attacked from there, but it was Annabelle’s job to get you out, and it seems as if she succeeded.”

Willow looked back, but Annabelle had shrunken away from the two of them and stood with her back pressed against the door, as if she wanted nothing more than to escape this room.

“These warbeats,” Willow said, finally back on track. “You have to stop making them. They’re in terrible pain.”

“Oh, I’ve already stopped,” he said, and the smile widened just a little further. “Why would I make any more? Oh no, no reason to do so.”

“Oh, then…,” she said, but words failed her. He’d already stopped? “But I killed them all.”

“No, miss, you certainly did not,” he said, the smile not wavering for a moment. “Did you come straight west, or hook around to the south? I suppose you might have met the corvid if you’d come west. The deathworm, I think, I sent to the south. Ah, there were so many, all for you of course. I didn’t know which way you’d come, so I had to cover all my bases, as the ancients used to say.”

South? He’d sent warbeasts south? What had happened to them?

“Where are they,” she asked, feeling the blood drain from her face. “The ones you sent… to the south.”

“Oh, they’ll have arrived at Durum by now,” he said. “Yes, certainly the first dozen or so. Leave your quarry no ground, as they say. Can’t have you going back if you lost the stomach for it, could I?”

Durum. The city might have been destroyed by the thing with the purple nimbus if she hadn’t killed it, and it was the weakest of the warbeasts she’d encountered. Some of the others had begged her for death, but over half had been too far gone to know what they were up against. Their battles were far beyond anything Durum could have matched.

“No,” she spit and dropped her staff, reaching out and grabbing the man by the lapels of his strange blouse. It was padded with great ‘v’s of fabric folded to either side. A convenient knot encircled his elderly neck. She considered pulling it tight and choking him with it.

“It’s… not… possible.”

Andrew laughed, a high laugh that was much like a child’s with no knowledge of good or evil. The laugh of a little boy who’d kicked over an anthill just because he could.

“I thought you’d be smarter than this,” he said, and shook his head. “Oh well, you’ll learn. I’ll see to it.”

Willow summoned up her psychokinesis and… nothing. Her eyes went wide as her staff refused to respond to her call. Something was blocking her, as if there were waves crashing in against her own and canceling them out. The old man reached up and touched the side of her neck.

Something folded against her skin. Something which sealed with a burning heat on the other side of her throat, and when she jerked back and reached up, she found she’d been collared.

“Good girl,” Andrew said, not once removing his bright eyes from hers.

“Now, play dead.”