Tag Archives: Toby

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The silence hung, a teetering weight that threatened to crush them all when it finally toppled. But only for a moment.

“Child,” Elilial finally said, her voice at once quiet and projecting with an unearthly power that fairly rattled skeletons, “there is a lot going on here that you don’t understand.”

Vadrieny half-turned and lifted one wing to glance over her shoulder at the two elves behind her. “Natchua and Kuriwa did something to piss you off. I’m guessing deliberately.” She turned back, fixing the goddess with her stare and baring her fangs. “I’m also guessing in retaliation for things you did to them. So now you plan to retaliate right back, yet again. I gather you’re not aware that Natchua is Shaeine’s cousin?”

Elilial had opened her mouth to interrupt, but hesitated at that, a flicker of unguarded emotion crossing her face for a bare instant before it closed down again. “In the very broad strokes, sure. It’s the details of—”

“The details are where you drag the truth to be executed by a thousand tiny cuts without saying anything that can be called out as a lie.”

Again, the goddess looked momentarily startled. “What did you say to me?”

“They tell me I was always something of a thug,” Vadrieny growled, flexing her claws. “I get the impression you’re not used to me understanding things, or calling out your bullshit. But I’ve been at a school the last few years, mother—a good one, run by someone who can physically push me around and has zero patience for bullshit in any form except her own. Two years and change, mother, that’s what it took to make a thinker of Vadrieny the brute. And that just makes me wonder why you apparently never tried.”

“Think we should give them some privacy?” Natchua murmured to Kuriwa. The elder gave her a sidelong glance, then returned her attention to the unfolding drama, saying nothing.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Elilial stated, her body language shifting subtly to convey a silent threat, though her tone remained starkly even. “You have never been easy to handle, child, but I did better than anyone else could have. And I will not have the entirety of our relationship casually dismissed by someone who doesn’t even remember it.”

“And whose fault is that?” Vadrieny snarled, snapping her wings once.

Elilial took one step forward, her hoof impacting the marble floor with a sound that echoed through the cathedral. “I am pursuing answers to that right now, child. Whoever interfered with—”

“Oh, someone else is always to blame, aren’t they?” the archdemon spat in disgust. “No responsibility for the one who put us all in that position in the first place.”

“How dare you?” the goddess thundered, taking another step. This one hit the ground hard enough to send cracks radiating out through the marble. “I am the very reason you—”

“YOU ARE THE REASON I DON’T HAVE SISTERS!” Vadrieny screamed back.

Elilial froze, her whole face a mask of shock and rage. The two locked eyes, glaring with an infernal intensity that seemed to hum physically in the air.

“You’re unraveling right in front of us, Lily-chan,” a new voice said far more calmly.

Everyone present looked up at the black shape which floated serenely in through the window Vadrieny had just smashed. She circled down to the floor like a falling leaf, scythe dangling almost casually from one hand.

“Go away, little vulture,” Elilial snapped. “This is family business, and none of yours.”

“The business of death always follows your footsteps, Lily-chan,” Yngrid said lightly as she lit on the ground.

“Desist calling me that,” the goddess exclaimed. “Which one are you, even? I’m fairly certain your master won’t be pleased to find you on this plane.”

“You know why she’s the goddess of cunning?” Yngrid inquired, turning to face the other three and directing a cold shoulder to the deity. “With the ascension, their aspects formed out of whatever concept was foremost in their personal identities. This one started out as a petty thief. She used to break into Naiya’s laboratories, looking for drugs.”

“…drugs,” Kuriwa repeated in a complex tone that hovered between amusement and disbelief.

“Mother caught her, of course,” Ygrid said with a grin. “Every time. And then made her play shogi until she won a game, and let her go. It wasn’t until later when she recommended Lily-chan to Avei’s little resistance group that we realized Naiya had been training her to circumvent Infinite Order security systems.”

“Enough!” Elilial exclaimed, bending forward to reach for Yngrid. “Be silent or be silenced, you little pest!”

In the next moment she had jerked back with an audible gasp, clutching the hand which the valkyrie had just raked with her scythe. The gash it left wasn’t like the marks of Vadrieny’s claws; it blazed with golden light and didn’t close up nearly as quickly.

“Impetuous, violent, aggressive,” Yngrid lectured, wagging the scythe at the goddess. “You are not acting like yourself at all. The Lily I remember would never have confused me with a twenty-year-old boy playing with a hand-me-down weapon. My sisters have reaped scarier things than you. Or did you forget why Rauzon cast us out in the first place?”

“Are you following any of this?” Natchua muttered to Kuriwa.

“It would be easier if you’d hush,” the shaman hissed back.

“This kind of ambush is well beyond Natchua’s extremely limited intellect,” the goddess sneered, still cradling her hand. The cut was healing, gradually but visibly, though it continued to blaze with loose divine magic. “My own daughter, Kuriwa? Even Scyllith would be impressed by the sadistic streak you’ve developed.”

“Imagine,” Kuriwa replied evenly, “to have offended the vast swath of people you have and still assume I am behind every measure of retribution levered against you. Flattery will not spare you my further vengeance, you hateful old thing.”

“She didn’t bring us,” Vadrieny agreed.

“I brought them,” a new voice added, its owner popping into existence alongside the others with no further fanfare.

“What next?” Elilial exclaimed. “Who do you…”

She trailed off into silence, staring quizzically down at the new arrival, who was covered from crown to toes in a suit of gnarled, glossy black armor that looked like demon chitin; it clung close enough to display a very feminine figure, also adding segmented links to protect her tail and cover its tip in an oversized stinger, though it left her spiny wings bare.

Then it faded, seeming to melt back into her milky skin to reveal her true features, and the grim stare she leveled up at the goddess.

Natchua gasped. “Mel?! You were supposed to go somewhere safe!”

“I couldn’t, though,” Melaxyna said, giving her an apologetic little smile before resuming her flat glare at Elilial. “I’ve remembered some things, in the course of trying to dissuade you from this idiot, lunatic crusade of yours. Making yourself the enemy of a deity is every bit as bad an idea as I kept trying to persuade you, Natchua. And it forced me to recall the days when I, as nothing but a feeble mortal woman and then a disembodied spirit, spat in the faces of Izara, Avei, and Vidius in that order, for no better reason than that they were fucking wrong. And I had to ask: when did I become such a pitiful coward?”

“Is that so much worse than a pitiful ingrate?” Elilial retorted. “Everything you have, everything you are, is thanks to me! You should be dead, but because of my generosity, you survive to pursue your revenge. I even granted you freedom to do so in your own manner, when it would have been so very easy to keep you and all of your brethren on a tight leash. Most of my advisors and generals continually urge me to do just that, and yet…”

“And yet,” said Vadrieny, “your generosity always takes the form of using someone else as a disposable tool in your own schemes.”

“You were supposed to be better!” Melaxyna shouted before the goddess could respond. “All your talk about standing up to the gods and their injustice, and what are you? For millennia you’ve cut a swath of destruction across the mortal plane, slaughtering who knows how many innocents in the name of your glorious revenge. You’ve not even tried to alleviate the suffering of all the demons—that is, the people who are native to your own home, because they’re ever so much more useful in their current state! The Pantheon are murdering, hypocritical tyrants, but you are not different. If you can’t clear even that bar, you and your whole rebellion are just pointless. And you’ve never even really tried.”

“I will tolerate a lot from my last daughter,” Elilial breathed, her soft voice at odds with the oppressive darkness which coalesced in the dome above her. Smoky night descended on the cathedral’s open space, leaving her towering form a stark shadow limned by the faintest haze of hellfire and her luminous eyes blazing high above. “But not from a recalcitrant creature of my own creation with delusions of significance. I hope you enjoyed your little outburst, Melaxyna. It was your last.”

“Then fucking do it!” Melaxyna spat, flaring her wings aggressively. “That’s the other thing I learned from Natchua: you don’t need to be a god to wound a god, you just need to hit unexpectedly at the right moment, and be willing to face the consequences. It seems like you would’ve known that, when you were fighting the Elder Gods! Well, you may have forgotten, but I haven’t. Do your worst. I am done bending my neck to gods that just betray me.”

“Before you do your worst,” Vadrieny said evenly, moving to plant herself between Elilial and Melaxyna, “I will warn you once: you don’t touch anyone here, unless you want to find out exactly how much damage I can do to you. Maybe I can’t finish you off, but I swear I will never stop until I either find a way or you do it to me.”

The darkness receded somewhat, and the shape of Elilial’s burning eyes shifted, hinting at consternation. “Vadrieny… No matter what you do to me, I will never harm you. You have to believe that.”

Vadrieny snorted, and then faded, flames and claws receding to nothing.

Teal Falconer adjusted the lapels of her suit and the Talisman of Absolution pinned there. “Yeah, she doesn’t wanna talk to you anymore. But let me just add a point of argument: Vadrieny was wrong about one thing. We do have sisters. Heral and Nahil don’t replace anyone who’s lost, but they have the advantage of a mother who requires them to do their familial duty without spending their lives like pennies at a carnival.”

She arched one eyebrow superciliously as a collective indrawing of breath sounded from the others present. Natchua let out a low whistle.

Elilial’s expression reverted straight to fury, and the oppressive darkness gathered in intensity once more. “Teal,” she hissed. “Of all those from whom I would expect a little gratitude.”

“Thank you for the puppy,” Teal said solemnly. “I love him. And especially, thank you for bringing my Shaeine back to me. With that established, you are being a colossal prick right now, and playing the guilt card when I’ve literally just caught you about to murder one of my friends and another of my friends’ annoying grandmother is a really cheap move.”

With ponderous speed, the giant shape of the goddess bent forward through the looming darkness, bringing her face down closer to peer at Teal through narrowed eyes as if seeing her for the first time.

“You,” Elilial said slowly, “are sassing me.”

“Would you rather go back to the clawing?” Teal asked wryly. “Because that’s not off the table.”

“You,” Elilial repeated. “Sweet little Teal, the perennially passive, who makes a full-time career of taking Vesk’s name in vain. All these years you’ve idolized bards while never living up to the trope, and now this… This is the moment you pick to start acting like one?!”

Teal tucked her thumbs into her pockets, shifting to a cocky, lopsided stance, and grinned. “Well what, I ask you, is more bardic than being a pain in the villain’s ass at the most inconvenient possible moment?”

Elilial straightened back up far more quickly. “I have just about had enough of you mortals and your nonsense. I won’t see any harm done to my daughters, but—”

“Don’t even finish that threat,” Yngrid said scornfully. “There’s nothing you can do to me, and Vadrieny and I can hurt you enough to put a stop to whatever else you might try. You’ve lost this one, Lil.”

“Honestly,” Natchua added, “flying into such a rage over people rightly pointing out what an asshole you are. Your options here are to back the fuck off or embarrass yourself with more sheer pettiness.”

“Begone, creature,” Kuriwa said with withering disdain. “You are beaten. Take it with some grace, for once.”

“Well, if I am so beaten,” Elilial hissed from within her cloud of pitch darkness, glaring fiery rage down at them, “I will just have to deliver a last lesson to several of you on why I am not to be trifled with by presumptuous ticks.”

A single ray of light pierced the darkness, a scintillating beam that shimmered with every hue of the rainbow within a fierce glow of pure white, and impacted the goddess square in the face. It erupted in a cloud of sparkling glitter which banished her unnatural darkness as neatly as if someone had flipped the switch on a fairy lamp.

Elilial staggered backward, actually coughing and waving sparkling clouds away from her face, causing the million tiny motes of light to swirl around her. She was now covered from her horns to her waist in a glimmering coating of pixie dust.

“REALLY?” the goddess roared in sheer exasperation.

“Hey, is this her?” inquired a new voice, belonging to the creature which had just zipped in through the broken window and now hovered in midair right in front of Elilial. Garbed in a resplendent gown of pastel hues, she might have passed for an elf, if not for her exceptionally long ears, purple hair, and the buzzing dragonfly wings which held her aloft. “Sure looks like her. Are we fighting her, or what?”

“Oh, I also rounded up some more help,” Melaxyna said innocently.

“Uh, actually,” Natchua answered, “I think we’re mostly just telling her off at this point.”

“Oh, well, okay then,” the fairy said agreeably, then buzzed closer to Elilial’s face, leveling an accusing finger at her. “Hey, you, are those your demons out there? What’s the big idea with that? Have you seen the mess they made? This is a city, you jackass! People live here!”

Elilial blinked once, then snorted loudly, causing a puff of glitter to shoot out from her face. She snapped her fingers and abruptly the mess coating her vanished. “What the hell are you supposed to be?”

“My friends call me Jackie,” the fairy said haughtily, “but to you, I’m the fuckin’ Pixie Queen. I don’t know what you’re eeeeyaaaaugh what is that?!”

She suddenly buzzed away from Elilial, circling higher in the dome and pointing a finger at Yngrid.

“It’s okay!” Melaxyna called. “She’s on our side!”

“Actually, Jacaranda,” Yngrid added, “I’m your older sister.”

“The nuts you are!”

“It’s a long story,” the valkyrie said soothingly. “I’ll explain it when we have more time.”

“ENOUGH!” Elilial shouted. “What is with you people!? I am the goddamn goddess of hellfire, and I can’t even finish a sentence in here!”

“No, you’re the goddess of cunning,” Yngrid said more soberly, “and like I said, you are doing a very poor job of that right now. You don’t act at all like yourself, Lily.”

“What part of this perfidy is out of character?” Kuriwa sneered.

“All of it,” the valkyrie replied. “The shouting, the magical theatrics. She was always so composed, always pointedly pleasant even to her foes. Playful, and fond as a bard of wisecracks. Not to downplay the very real enmity here, but… She is not well. Not at all.”

“Want me to zap her again?” Jacaranda offered.

“Better to take the opportunity to finish her off,” Natchua added.

“You think it’s so easy to kill a god, you arrogant speck?” Elilial spat.

“It’s not,” said Yngrid. “Destroying a god means severing them from whatever empowers their aspect. Exactly how to do that depends on the aspect; speaking as the resident expert on death, even I wouldn’t know where to begin killing cunning.”

“But if, as you say, she is trapped in a pattern of behavior that is anything but cunning,” Kuriwa said softly, “perhaps this is an opportunity.”

“Oh, just try it, Kuriwa,” the goddess hissed. “I would love nothing more.”

“Does seem odd she’s letting us talk at her instead of attacking or retreating,” Melaxyna murmured. “You’re right. Something is wrong here.”

“I’m not the only one standing here talking,” Elilial retorted, spreading her arms wide. “Well? Since my dear offspring is so adamant that I not destroy you, the ball is in your court. Care to try your luck, any of you? Or am I not the only one who needs to cease posturing and walk away?”

The cathedral’s doors burst open, and the first thing that came through was the towering shape of a woman in silver armor astride a barrel-chested horse.

“Oh, yes,” Melaxyna said pleasantly. “When I said I gathered more help, I wasn’t talking about the fairy.”

Trissiny rode her steed straight toward the confrontation at the center of the open space. Ninkabi’s cathedral was laid out in a circular, open plan unlike the long rows of benches common in Tiraan churches; there was ample room for the crowd of people who followed her in to spread out, quickly positioning themselves to cover almost half the chamber. They had all come: students, enforcers, hunters, wolves, elves, miscellaneous adventurers, and now a sizable contingent of Imperial soldiers, local police, the members of three strike teams, and even a smattering of hastily-armed citizens of Ninkabi.

“If I heard that offer right,” Trissiny called, her voice ringing through the chamber as she stood at the head of her army, “I will take you up on it.”

“Of course you would,” Elilial replied with heavy condescension.

“Even gods cannot flit between the planes willy-nilly,” said Yngrid. “Hell is sealed; she requires a gate to escape there. I don’t know what keeps her in this corporal form, aside from possible simple stubbornness, but as long as she holds it…”

“One does not simply slay a goddess,” said Khadizroth the Green, stepping up alongside Trissiny. “But with a sufficient force, one can perhaps…”

“Beat the living hell out of her?” the paladin finished with a grim smile.

He quirked one corner of his lips in agreement. “At least until she has had enough.”

Elilial clenched her fingers into fists, setting her face in a snarl of barely-contained rage. Again, the darkness gathered, like a storm cloud forming in the cathedral’s dome, this time accompanied by an unsettling sound like claws across the fabric of reality just outside the range of hearing, a noise that was more sensation than noise. Within the blackness, her glaring eyes blazed with increasing intensity until they were too bright to face directly.

Khadizroth shifted aside as Gabriel and Toby moved up alongside Trissiny, both mounted; Roiyary stood as placid as a daisy against the sheer weight of evil pressing down on them, while Whisper pranced and pawed, eager to charge. Golden light rose from all three paladins, expanding until it pressed the darkness back.

Behind them, weapons and spells were readied, wolves bared teeth, and over a hundred mortals positioned themselves to have the clearest line of fire at the dark goddess. Not one person moved to retreat.

Then, unexpected, it all began to fade.

The darkness receded, the fiery light of Elilial’s gaze dimmed, and even her clenched posture slowly relaxed while it became more visible out of the disappearing shadows. Trissiny narrowed her eyes in suspicion, not relaxing in turn, but the goddess just continued to draw down her display of menace until there was nothing left of it.

Just the towering form of the Queen of Demons, staring down at her would-be attackers with a slight frown of contemplation, her horned head tilted quizzically to one side.

Then, just as suddenly, she smiled, and shifted her arms.

A stir of preparation rippled through those assembled as shields ignited and weapons were raised further, but still Elilial did not attack.

In fact, moving with deliberate slowness, she raised both her hands into the air alongside her head.

“All right,” said Elilial. “I surrender.”

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“Why the hell are we losing now?” Taka shouted immediately upon flashing back into human form, pausing to grimace and wipe at the acrid stains around her mouth. Seconds prior, in the shape of a wolf, she had just torn out the throat of a khaladesh demon armed with notably better weapons than most of them, likely some kind of officer. “We killed the big one! That always works in stories!”

“We?” McGraw muttered, his attention on the next wave of khaladesh which he was pelting with arcane bolts.

“Don’t swallow,” Khadizroth ordered, pausing in his own work to lay a hand on Taka’s forehead. She scowled at the sparks of drifting green magic which momentarily swirled around her, but made no complaint. Nobody sensible turned down a free cleansing after getting a mouthful of demon. “It is the difference between an army and a rabble,” the dragon continued, releasing her and resuming his previous task; he was rapidly summoning more light creatures to attack the demons still trying to swarm them. “Our forces charged in no order, with no plan and without leadership, at an organized counter-force which deftly split us off to be defeated in detail. This is why Hands of Avei are important, even in the presence of allies who can objectively hit harder. While we had a plan and they did not, we were winning. The tables have turned.”

“There’s a lot o’ things I doubt about you, Khadizroth, but your intellect ain’t one,” said Joe, also facing forward and firing his wands as steadily as he could without overheating them. “If you got a plan, I’m all ears.”

“Plans are one thing; most of those here will not listen to me as readily as they would Avelea,” Khadizroth replied. “What we need to do is regroup, and have an orderly force ready for her to direct when she gets back.”

“How sure are we that she’s coming back?” Taka asked pointedly. “I mean, the other two paladins are still here and she got—”

“I have seen Avei’s champions fall in battle,” the dragon said with a thin smile, still conjuring magic against the demons. “Never to anything as prosaic as a great big explosion. And this one was trained by Arachne; she will have numerous tricks up her sleeve.”

“I can’t say I’m not worried about Trissiny,” Toby added, “but I’m not panicked yet. She’s survived worse, and come back to yell at us for falling out of formation.”

“That has also been my experience,” Khadizroth said gravely. “If you will all take my advice, then…?”

“Of course, Lord Khadizroth,” Vannae said quickly and predictably. Beside him, Rainwood rolled his eyes.

Gabriel brought Whisper cantering back up to them after another sweep; he and his scythe had been keeping the khaladesh in the vicinity from forming up, and also taking potshots at any khelminash flyers who got too close with the beams of black light it produced. The khelminash, though generally fearless, had failed to come up with anything that countered that, and were keeping their distance from the upper plaza, where Khadizroth and the much smaller group with them had been pushed back to the magic tree.

“Joe, you trust this dragon?” Gabe asked.

Joe glanced sidelong at Khadizroth, grunted, then nodded. “Here an’ now? He’s smart an’ no friend o’ demons. This is a good time for listenin’ to our elders.”

“I shall try not to disappoint,” the dragon acknowledged. “As I said, we must regroup. I see no bodies on the street from here, so hopefully everyone has taken shelter, but they are now scattered around this city block and beyond. The largest concentration are over there in the trading hall with the civilians and soldiers; being closest and most fortified, that is the least concern. We must gather the isolated groups and individuals, and protect them while bringing them back here. It’s Taka, yes?”

“I don’t recall telling you that,” she said suspiciously.

“Forgive me, but you are teeming with some of the most talkative fae spirits I have ever encountered,” Khadizroth said, pausing in his casting to nod deeply to her. “I need you to call your family, please.”

“My family are—oh, right. I see what you mean.”

With a flash of moonlight, she was gone and a huge, luminous wolf in her place. Taka raised her head and let out a long, warbling howl; immediately, the two spirit wolves which had gathered together with them followed suit.

Within seconds, more howls answered them from the nearby structures. Also, as if at the same cue, several squadrons of flying khelminash switched their maneuvers from sweeping the outlying streets to heading toward them in formation.

“Mr. Arquin,” Khadizroth continued, “how do you feel about antagonizing a large number of incredibly dangerous women into making you the main target of their ire?”

Gabriel barked a sardonic laugh. “Like I’ve been training for this moment my whole life!” Whisper whinnied a challenge and the pair of them charged off, Gabriel immediately disrupting the nearest khelminash formation with several well-placed scythe beams.

“Longshot, break off attacking and conserve your energy, please,” said the dragon. “I want you to watch for stragglers coming in; if they are pressed by demons, teleport them to us.”

“Can do,” McGraw agreed, bringing his staff up to a vertical position and tipping his hat. “For a while, anyway. Porting takes it out of a man.”

“I shall bolster you as best I can. Vannae, Rainwood, please prioritize healing any wounded we gather here, and otherwise continue defending this spot. Mr. Caine, can you sweep the surrounding structures and escort survivors back to us?”

“I can,” Toby said, “though I don’t move as fast as Gabe or Triss, obviously.”

Khadizroth opened his mouth to reply, but before he could a column of sunlight plunged down from the sky straight above to illuminate a wide circle next to them, just outside the radius of the tree’s branches. Golden light intensified in the place where it met the pavement, and in the next moment a horse stepped out of it.

She was a palomino, her coat a shade of golden blonde that shimmered as if literally gilded, with a contrasting black mane and tail. The creature might well have been made of sunlight, by her appearance. She wore a plan, well-weathered saddle over a woven blanket of warm brown with green embroidered designs and thread-of-gold Omnist sunbursts in each corner.

“Roiyary!” Rainwood practically squealed, rushing forward to throw his arms around the horse’s neck. “There’s my girl! How’ve you been?”

The mare whickered affectionately at him before gently pulling away and stepping over to an awestruck Toby.

“Good timing,” Khadizroth remarked. “But then, your performance a few minutes ago was just the kind of achievement that often earns a paladin their mount.”

“I have to warn you,” Toby said, gingerly stroking Roiyary’s nose, “I’m not the most experienced rider.”

“Don’t you worry about that,” Rainwood said, grinning. “She’s taught worse. Just trust her and let her do the work.”

Roiyary nickered in agreement, turning to present her left side to Toby. He reached up and placed one hand on the saddle horn, and then smoothly flowed upward to land in the saddle as if he’d been doing so his entire life, somewhat spoiling the effect by looking comically startled that it had worked.

The sunlit mare whinnied, reared once, and then charged down the nearest side street, Toby balancing smoothly astride her; one would never guess from watching them that he was a less than expert horseman.

“The gods are with us,” Khadizroth commented. “Good, we’ll need them. Joseph, you know your business well; I caution you to prioritize dealing with ground forces as they approach. Your wands have proved very effective against the khelminash, but for that very reason the more of them you shoot, the faster they will develop a counter to your skill. Try to save those shots for a pressing need. You can judge such for yourself.”

Joe made no reply except to keep shooting.

“We have a solid defense on the ground, but those flyers are going to become a major problem as soon as we have people trying to rejoin us. Kuriwa… Do something.”

She had not been obviously in evidence, but at his demand, the little black crow landed right in Khadizroth’s green hair and pecked him twice on the forehead before fluttering off again.

Before it could become apparent what Mary planned to do, the enormous silver-armored bulk of Arjen burst out of a side street on the lower square, Trissiny astride him and blazing with light. Alongside them ran the lion-sized form of Meesie. They bowled right into a mass of khaladesh who were trying to form up for a charge, creating immediate disarray and ensuing slaughter.

“As I said,” Khadizroth murmured with a vindicated smile, conjuring up another spectral stag to join the fray. “They don’t fall that easily.”

Their campaign grew progressively more difficult the longer it went on, as the encroaching demons began to realize what was happening—or at least, the Elilinist ones, who had some kind of command structure and communication system in place. By the time they arrived at the final portal site on the south bank, there was no question of a swift ambush such as they’d been able to execute at the first few sites. Now, the resistance was fierce.

For Natchua and Xyraadi, massacring khaladesh foot soldiers was not an imposition, and they even had little to fear from the three khelminash sorceresses with the group. Xyraadi observed that these were probably still in training, or they’d be on a flying platform; at any rate, they had nothing to throw at the attackers but a barrage of shadowbolts, which the two warlocks easily deflected. Jonathan and Hesthri focused their staff fire on the khelminash, and they went down in minutes.

Matters became more difficult as, apparently, a warning was passed through the portal and a hulking baerzurg charged out of it. Then more difficult still as a shockwave of fire hurled the already-disintegrating bodies of demons and sheer infernal energy out at them. This, clearly, was one of the rare high-caste baerzurgs who were quite intelligent and able to cast spells.

Xyraadi grimaced in concentration, barely managing to gather the loose infernal magic into a single point, which she sent hurtling right back at its caster. The blast of pure entropic destruction rocked the baerzurg back a few steps, but not for nothing were those creatures considered to be impervious.

“Incoming flyers, twelve o’clock!” Jonathan barked, raising his staff to fire at the flying disc which topped the roof just beyond the portal to charge at them.

Two more followed, and they were entirely unimpressed by his lightning bolt, which one of the sorceresses swatted contemptuously to the side.

“Take out the portal,” Natchua growled. He and Hesthri both repositioned themselves, firing rapidly at the portal altar which was being physically blocked from their view by the armored baerzurg, with whom Xyraadi was rapidly exchanging spells.

Natchua was almost pleased by the intervention, having an idea she had developed a few portals ago by watching the flying discs. Reaching out with her mind, she could feel the complex infernal spells powering those devices. Complex, fully self-contained, and warded against meddling—by lesser warlocks than she, that was. There weren’t many gaps in the coverage that could be exploited, but there was a relatively open entry point in the spell lattice where they had to draw power from their pilots.

She simply poured an uncontained blast of pure, unfocused infernomancy into the networks, and the three platforms immediately continued doing what they were doing, but about five times as hard. As they were currently swooping down on the mortals below, this sent them accelerating well beyond the ability of their pilots to control. Two slammed into buildings to either side, the third overshooting them and impacting the ground behind in a deafening explosion.

Then either Hesthri or Jonathan scored a lucky hit, and with the last altar’s destruction, the portal winked out.

With a bellow of rage, the baerzurg caster charged bodily forward, shrugging off the bolts of viridian fire with which Xyraadi pelted it, and stepped right into the invisible spell circled the sorceress had been surreptitiously creating on the ground while keeping the other demon busy with spellfire.

The baerzurg was abruptly crushed like a tin can in the depths of the ocean, its impervious biological armor crumpling inward to a ball the size of a pumpkin, which landed on the ground, oozing black ichor.

A gurgle from behind in the sudden quiet was all the warning Natchua got; she turned just in time to see one khelminash sorceress, a survivor from the final crash, crumple to the ground, clutching her bleeding throat. Behind her, Kheshiri faded into visibility, holding an evil-looking dagger carved from something’s claw, which she had clearly looted from one of their foes.

“You have no idea how satisfying it is to murder these smug bitches,” the succubus commented.

“Au contraire, I have seldom felt anything so therapeutic,” Xyraadi rejoined.

“Yeah, no offense,” added Jonathan, “but are you just…better than all of these others? ‘Cause I notice we’ve been burning through ‘em pretty rapidly, and you don’t even look winded.”

“These are soldiers,” Xyraadi said contemptuously. “Trained and drilled to fire a prescribed sequence of spells in unison. Very dangerous in large numbers, but not individually impressive warlocks. I am a specialist, an artist.”

“Kheshiri,” Natchua ordered, “get aloft and double-check we don’t have another target.”

“I told you that was the last one, mistress,” Kheshiri said petulantly.

“You also told me these portals weren’t going to be opened,” Natchua snapped. “Do it!”

It was hard to perceive the succubus’s emotions directly with all the infernal magic flowing about, but this one time Kheshiri wore her petulance openly on her face. But she did, after a cursory bow, shoot upward with a powerful flap of her wings while fading back to invisibility.

“I think she is right, though,” Xyraadi murmured, stepping over closer to Natchua. “I can feel no more portals nearby.”

“Me, either,” Natchua admitted. “I just like making her jump.”

“Ah, yes,” the other warlock said, grinning. “It is good for her character, n’est-ce pas?”

“If that was the last one, what next?” Hesthri asked, also stepping closer and transferring her staff to one hand so she could slip her other arm around Natchua’s waist.

“Back to square one,” Natchua said, squeezing her back. Jonathan approached them from behind, tucking his staff into his elbow to rest a hand on each of their shoulders. It had been non-stop fighting for who knew how long, since they had set out from the square at the other end of the city. This moment to breathe was very much needed. “The cathedral and the ancient hellgate secured under it is still our main target, and it’ll also be the focus of the Elilinist demons coming in. Assuming the other teams have been doing their jobs, they’ll be low on reinforcements, but…”

A whoosh of air passed over their heads, and Kheshiri popped back into view as she landed nearby.

“Yes, about that,” the succubus said, folding her wings back. “I still see five pillars of fire, but none on our bank of the city. The strike team and Vadrieny are clearly faring well—we’re just better. The hellgates should all be cut off within minutes. But there’s more trouble, mistress. All the khelminash who’d been converging on the cathedral have moved away; they’re attacking the square inside the gates, up where we started from. I can’t see details from this far but it looks like a pitched fight.”

“That’s not good,” Jonathan stated, frowning. “Avelea’s plan was to push forward through the city. If the fighting’s still concentrated at the starting point, it’s all gone wrong.”

Natchua drew in a deep breath and let it out in a long hiss through her teeth. She was so close to something important to Elilial she could taste it.

“It sounds like an opening,” Hesthri said, looking at her inquisitively. “If the forces are being drawn away, the cathedral site is vulnerable.”

They were all looking at her, with varying expressions. It was true; this was exactly the opportunity for which she’d assembled them here.

Scowling, Natchua shook her head once. “Not while we have friends and family under attack. I’m not going to sacrifice anyone who hasn’t signed up for it specifically. We’d better go help them. Xyraadi, you’re better than I at jumping; find us a landing spot.”

Another baerzurg charged in through the broken gap in the wall, and Juniper punched it square in the chest.

The massive demon staggered backward, a fractured dent in its chest armor, and fell right into the gap in the stones through which it had come. Juniper brushed back the charred remains of her hair, planting her feet in a balanced stance and waiting for the next one, which did not come. She was severely singed and soaking wet, due to the demons discovering that setting fire to her was the only thing that worked, and Fross constantly dousing her in a freezing mist to compensate.

Ruda stabbed the last of the fallen baerzurgs behind her which was still twitching, causing it to fall still. The slender mithril blade of her rapier pierced their hide as easily as if it were paper; she had been finishing them off after Juniper brought them down. “Is that the last of ‘em?”

“There are no more large footsteps outside,” Shaeine reported. “I would not call this over, but I believe we have earned a breather. Juniper, we have never tried this, but if you are willing to risk Themynra’s judgment, I believe she would deem you more than worthy of healing, fairy or not.”

Juniper shook her head, eyes still on the tumbled gap in which the last baerzurg slouched, still twitching. Ruda stalked past her, rapier at the ready. “I don’t need it yet, Shaeine, but thanks. I’m more pissed off than hurt.”

Ruda speared the creature directly through the eye, causing it to emit an incongruously high-pitched squeal as it died. She yanked the blade out and turned to rejoin them, absently wiping acrid ichor off on the hem of her coat. “I dunno what this place was supposed to be, before, but it was not built with a siege in mind. We got way too many fuckin’ entrances to guard already without these assholes making more!”

“This is the main trading hub,” said the police captain who’d joined them, looking haggard but still unbent. He had wands in each hand, but had stepped back to let the students cover the baerzurgs coming in through the wall after they’d lost two soldiers learning that lightning weapons did absolutely nothing to them. “You’re right, it was designed for accessibility, not defense. Ninkabi’s outer walls have never been breached, for all the good that does us now.”

“City’s got lots of natural choke points, with all those stairs and bridges,” Ruda said, giving him a grin, “but yeah, that’s no fuckin’ help to us in here.”

“Hey, guys!” Fross zipped back over to them. “The dragon is trying to rally everybody out in the square.”

“More baerzurgs,” Shaeine said tersely. “Heading this way. They’ll be here in minutes.”

“Those fuckers need a hobby,” Ruda complained.

“They’ve got one,” Juniper said with a sigh. “Us. Guys, the soldiers can’t hold off baerzurgs. I’m glad things are going better out there, but I don’t think we can afford to regroup with the others while we’ve got those things coming in and civilians to protect in—uh, hello?”

To her amazement, as well as that of the others, one of the beleaguered refugees had scampered forward out of the crowd to wrap her arms around Juniper in a hug. She was a filthy, underfed, and generally ragged-looking young woman with bare feet, garbed in threadbare castoffs and clutching an ax handle with which she had nearly clonked Juniper on the head.

“Excuse me,” the dryad said in annoyance, gently but inexorably pushing her off, “but I’m kind of busy, here. Please step back with the others and concentrate on not dying. Hey!”

The woman surged forward again as soon as she was pushed away, giving Juniper another hug, this time accompanied by a kiss on the cheek, but then retreated of her own volition without having to be moved a second time.

“I think she is just grateful,” Shaeine suggested. “She is right, though, miss. It’s about to be very dangerous here.”

“Whoah!” Fross had to dart higher in the air as the ragged girl began hopping about in excitement, apparently trying to catch her. “What are you doing? Please don’t grab!”

“Oh, this one,” said the officer distractedly. “Mute beggar. She’s a little nuts, homeless people usually are. Lady, do you need to be restrained?”

The homeless woman turned and brandished her ax handle menacingly at him.

“That’s a yes, then,” he said in clear annoyance. “Ontu, Disrimi, get this—”

“Wait!” Fross chimed, descending again. “Wait a second, please…”

She fluttered down to hover right in front of the woman, who raised her hands again, gazing at the pixie with a rapturous expression. This time, though, she did not snatch, finally dropping the handle to cup her hands gently around Fross’s buzzing form without touching her. She brought her face forward till her nose was nearly touching Fross, smiling with a joy so intense it looked nearly painful. A tear cut a swath through the dirt staining one of her cheeks.

“Yeah, pixie shiny,” said Ruda. “Fross, you may wanna lead your friend back over there with the other civvies if you don’t wanna lose her.”

“They’re coming,” Shaeine said, expression intent as she faced the broken wall. The others still could not hear the approaching baerzurgs, but took her at her word. “Do you see any way we can seal up that wall in the next…sixty seconds?”

“Nope,” Juniper said tersely, rolling her shoulders. “Same song, new verse, just like the first. Should go a little smoother now we’ve had some practice.”

“Hey, guys,” Fross chimed softly, still cradled in the homeless woman’s grip. “Um. How much do you trust me?”

All three of them turned to study her curiously.

“It is not a question of how much,” Shaeine answered. “We trust you.”

“Yeah, jinglebell, you got more brains an’ heart than any of us,” Ruda agreed, grinning. “If you got an idea, we got faith.”

“Okay,” Fross said, emitting a descending arpeggio of chimes like a sigh. “All right. I’m gonna play a…a hunch, here. If this all goes horribly wrong, you can take turns kicking my ass later.”

“How,” Juniper asked sardonically. “Do you know a spell to enlarge it?”

All joking ended as Fross fluttered upward out of her new acquaintance’s cupped hands, producing the small flicker of light that accompanied her withdrawal of something from her aura storage.

The Mask of the Adventurer dropped down to land in the ragged girl’s hands.

“Whoah!” Ruda said in alarm. “I, uh… Fross?!”

“Okay, having said all that, I guess we can’t complain now,” Juniper added, “but what are you doing?”

“It’s gonna be okay,” Fross chimed, addressing both them and the woman now curiously turning the mask over in her hands.

“Time’s up,” Shaeine stated, and in the next second, the stomping of enormous feet sounded just outside the broken wall. Moments later, the dead baerzurg tumbled forward, knocked inward by a blow from without.

Juniper dashed forward, meeting the next demon to push in through the gap with a haymaker that sent it spinning right back out. Then the dryad herself was knocked backward by a counter-punch more than hard enough to fell a tree. She stumbled back, regaining her footing, but in her moment of distraction another baerzurg pushed its way into the building. A wall of silver light immediately slammed into it, halting its advance only momentarily but giving Juniper time to gather herself and attack again.

“Don’t worry about that,” Fross said to the woman now frowning at the artifact in her grasp. She raised her eyes to look inquisitively at the pixie. “Just…clear your mind. Whatever you’ve been through, try to put it aside. Remember who you are. We need the real you.”

Her expression grew more pensive. She adjusted her grip on the Mask, raising it toward her face, then hesitated again, looking uncertainly at the pixie.

“It’s okay,” Fross chimed soothingly. “Remember. It’s gonna be okay.”

She blinked once, then nodded slowly, and finally pressed the Mask against her face.

Light roared through the old hall, fanning out in a shockwave that washed harmlessly over all of them and smashed the three baerzurgs which had just forced their way in backward against the wall.

The thrum of her wings was a much more powerful counterpoint to Fross’s as she surged forward, her violet hair and diaphanous gown streaming behind her. The three baerzurgs barely had time to get back to their feet before she threw her hands forward, and streams of sparkling dust poured out with the force of geysers. One nailed each hulking demon right in the chest, and they each exploded in harmless showers of glitter.

A fourth tried to push in through the wall, and met the same fate.

Ruda lowered her sword. “…huh.”

The graceful woman held aloft on dragonfly wings descended to the ground, then turned around to grin at them.

“Jacaranda!” Juniper shrieked. This time it was she who dashed forward, and the Pixie Queen caught her in a hug, laughing as the two of them spun around.

A moment later they parted, and Jacaranda raised a hand for Fross to flutter forward and settle down in her palm.

“Oh, Fross,” she whispered, tears glittering in her eyes. “Can you ever forgive me?”

“I’m just so glad to see you’re okay,” the pixie squeaked. “I was really worried. I didn’t feel good about…y’know, leaving you in that place, but Kaisa said… I mean, Kaisa’s kind of insufferable, but she’s usually right, which just makes it worse but also I’ve found it’s best to do as she says even when it doesn’t seem to make sense because it mostly works out all right.”

“Yes…that tower was no fun,” Jacaranda agreed, gently drawing her hand forward so Fross could hug her cheek. “But it was just the no fun I needed. Thank you. And you, too, Juniper. You saved me.”

“Aspen’s here, too,” Juniper said. “Well, uh…somewhere. It’s kind of a mess out there.”

“Yes, so I see,” Jacaranda said archly. “Demons. Ick, they’re everywhere. I do not like demons.”

“That is a commonly held opinion,” Shaeine said gravely.

“Here.” Jacaranda buzzed off the ground again, swooping over to pick up the fallen ax handle and hand it solemnly to Juniper. “Look after my stick, please. It’s a really good stick. I want it back.”

“Uh…okay?” the dryad said, nonplussed.

Jacaranda winked at her, gave Fross a final smile, then turned and shot out through the open front doors of the training hall, leaving behind a faint trail of glitter which slowly dissipated in the air.

“Okay, so,” Ruda said pleasantly, “is anybody gonna explain to me what the fuck?!”

She tore right through the closest formation of khelminash flyers, sending them spinning away in all directions. The Pixie Queen turned to pirouette in midair, spraying mocking streamers of fairy glitter at the warlocks, before shooting straight upward with a whole squadron of enraged sorceresses in pursuit.

As she rapidly gained altitude, she turned this way and that, pointing her fingers and blasting long sprays of sparkling pixie dust in the general direction of wherever she could see any concentration of demons in the air. The pure fairy magic did not agree with them at all; being demons, those who weren’t smashed outright from the air by her attacks turned and came straight at her in a vindictive fury.

She climbed ever higher, and the ripples of attention spread outward, demonic aggression compelling them out of formation to face this new threat. Glittering and giggling, Jacaranda made for a very obvious target.

Being faster than they, she quickly put space between them, so that when she finally came to an abrupt halt to hover in the sky above the city, there was a great deal of distance between her and her nearest pursuers. Shadowbolts and other infernal spells reached her long before they did; the Pixie Queen yawned contemptuously as the magic fizzled out just from coming too close to her.

Only when they were almost upon her did she suddenly fold in upon herself, pressing her wings flat against her back, wrapping arms around her torso and hunching her legs in a midair fetal position. Before she’d even had time to begin falling, she exploded.

Jacaranda went off like one of Billie’s fireworks, spraying a massive ball of shooting streamers of multicolored flame in all directions, vaporizing the approaching demons and continuing downward, while she herself remained completely unharmed at the epicenter of the blast. Each of these streaks of light exploded in turn, setting off chain reactions that caused an ever-spreading shower of sparks to drift downward over the city.

Except that unlike actual fireworks, they did not dissipate. Every one of those tiny points of light carried on floating downward, and as they grew closer to the ground, a vast chorus of tiny chimes could be heard. This was followed shortly by gouts of fire, water, lightning, ice, air, and other elemental spells when they descended within range of the nearest demons.

Jacaranda hovered in place, gazing smugly down at her handiwork.

Demons began to perish in droves as thousands of furious pixies streamed down into the streets of Ninkabi.

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Both mounted paladins did the best thing they could do in that situation: attack.

Whisper, nimble as a mountain goat, bounded down the steps and Gabriel went right for Kelvreth’s hand, as Khadizroth had instructed. Trissiny, however, went straight forward.

Arjen launched himself off the top of the stairs in a far more powerful leap than it seemed he should have been able to perform, arcing through the air right at Kelvreth’s enormous bulk. Even with his preternatural strength, it didn’t carry him all the way, but at the apex Trissiny leaped free from the saddle, golden wings flaring as she hurtled sword-first right at the gigantic demon’s face.

Kelvreth had already twitched visibly as Gabriel’s scythe raked a gash in his wrist, but clearly one did not become arch-general of Hell without being made of stronger stuff than the average being; even the valkyrie weapon did not destroy him outright, nor even his hand. Instead, Gabriel flung himself from his saddle and, on foot, brought the scythe down in an overhead swing to impale the great clawed hand and nail it right to the pavement below, into which the blade sunk with no apparent resistance.

What Kelvreth thought about this was not immediately clear, as that was also the moment Trissiny landed on his face, driving her sword up to half its length in the spot between his eyes.

The demon emitted a non-verbal bellow of pain that made the very air around them shiver, rearing backward. His eyes were still open, and pouring their maddening effect out onto the world, but with them no longer gazing directly at the group atop the stairs the impact was lessened.

Toby chanced a quick look around at the chaos in which he now stood.

Khadizroth was visibly struggling with the effects, his teeth bared and emerald eyes narrowed in focus, but the dragon stood firm and was casting something which he presumably believed would help. He and Toby were the last two in front of Kuriwa’s hedge; the glimpses Toby could gather through it of what was happening behind were appalling.

The Bishops were still together, Bishop Snowe’s face streaked with blood where she had clawed at her eyes. Darling was thrashing and snarling, being held down by his two elven apprentices, who for some reason were still lucid. They had Guild training in grappling and Darling was too far gone to remember his, but they were still elves and also having to fend off the other thrashing bodies in the vicinity; they looked constantly on the verge of losing their grasp on him.

Evidently the dryads were also immune, to judge by Juniper, who was trying to keep herself physically between Ruda and a huge spirit wolf who clearly wanted to fight each other and was taking physical abuse from both in the process. Fortunately Ruda had lost her rapier, so neither had any power to physically hurt the dryad, but that left Juniper with her hands full trying to protect one person in a mass melee.

The entire plaza was a discordant choir of screams, both of pain and rage, and unhinged laughter. Weapons were being fired—a stray wandshot sparked off Toby’s divine shield even as he glanced around—and the sounds of more mundane violence were borne out by passing glimpses of people struggling through gaps in the hedge. There were bodies on the ground, and already puddles of blood.

Icy mist and sleet pounded down on the whole crowd as Fross tried to pacify them the only way she could. It wasn’t a bad idea, given the effect cold had on living bodies, but in the short term the slickened ground was going to make things even worse. At least Fross apparently shared the fairy immunity to Kelvreth’s power.

All this Toby took in with one sweep of his eyes before turning back to look again at the great demon and his two fellow paladins, just in time to see Kelvreth dislodge Trissiny and toss her aside. He couldn’t see Arjen at all; a leap like that probably would have killed a mortal horse or broken his legs, but at worst Arjen would just return to the divine plane, ready to be re-summoned. Gabriel, concluding that holding the demon’s hand down was not helping, ripped his scythe free and began to hack at it wildly, while Kelvreth ponderously reached for him with the other hand, now that he was done swatting Trissiny away.

Khadizroth grated something in a strained voice that Toby couldn’t quite make out, but at that moment he was in no state to answer the dragon’s orders anyway.

He was about to lose close friends, if he had not already, and this utter smashing of the defenders signaled the probable end of Ninkabi, especially on the heels of the revelation that Elilial did have a plan in play here, and a goal for the city. If ever there was a moment for panic, this was it. And so, having trained in the meditative arts since he could talk, Toby emptied his mind purely by well-practiced instinct. He did not struggle against the emotions that pounded at him, or acknowledge them at all, simply letting them flow by. Because this time, he also knew what was coming next.

And there it came.

The by-now-familiar torrent of power rose, like standing in the middle of a sunrise, as Omnu responded to his paladin’s intense peril with his own direct touch. Toby had lived through this holy nova enough times now to know that it was more than just a wild blast of divine light; it could be sophisticated and subtle, carefully healing some even as it annihilated others, and all the while protecting himself from the normal consequences of channeling that much power. And why not? With the mind and will of a god at work so directly, what would be impossible?

But this time, in addition to knowing the nova well enough not to be taken by surprise, Toby knew a lot more about the nature of gods. He emptied himself of distraction and emotion, but not of will or purpose. As the monks had taught him back home, making himself the bed of a river—immutable and serene even as it channeled incredible currents, not a thing to be struggled against, but providing a shape to the flows of thought and of magic. He opened himself to accept the god’s presence, mindful of what a god was: an imprisoned intelligence, bound by its aspects and by the will of those who believed in it. Especially of that god’s paladin.

And this time, Tobias Caine decided what would be the will of Omnu.

Light poured across the upper part of the city, searing away the infernal effect of Kelvreth’s gaze in its first burst and burning against even that titanic demon. Trissiny, Gabriel, and now Khadizroth were all hacking away at him, though the struggle had been turning against them until Omnu’s direct touch pushed it into a stalemate, Kelvreth clearly weakened and trying to protect himself from the glare while also fending them off. The madness was also burned away from the onlookers, leaving them amid the wreckage they’d just made of themselves and each other.

In a way, it was like a microcosm of magic itself: subjective physics, a vast and intricate mechanism by which one person’s idea was crafted into reality, one sub-atomic reaction at a time. With the direct presence of a god as an intermediary, Toby could both sense the situation around him and direct the power with a sophistication that normally would have been utterly beyond his capabilities.

First, he directed the light to avoid harming any of the fairies present despite Circle effects, which was fiendishly complicated work if you were crafting a spell by hand but quite easy for the mind of a god. It would have been nice if Omnu had shown such consideration for Fross and Juniper back in Puna Dara, though. Toby let that thought drift away; it was unimportant, and resentment was good for exactly nothing.

Then, most important, he healed.

The injuries were already both widespread and considerable, many beyond the ordinary means of medicine either magical or mundane. They were washed away in a second, bodies repaired and bolstered beyond their original state to a condition of maximum possible health. Then, a generous—but not excessive, it would not do to addle anyone—touch of the peace of Omnu upon minds that had just been through trauma enough to scar anyone. They were going to need that peace, starting immediately.

But there were others beyond healing.

Several wolves lay dead, and many others Toby did not know, archers and soldiers and police. There was no spark of life in Longshot McGraw, or November. Or Shaeine.

He breathed, letting the power flow through him in the rhythm of his own breath. In, out, bringing calm, balance. Emotions of an intensity that should have buckled him to his knees floated away, disregarded.

Making himself a bastion of serenity, Toby reached deeper into the power. What could a god not do?

Repairing mortal bodies was simplicity itself, even if the spark had left them. The Light did not restore them in quite the same way in this condition, it required deliberate and specific manipulations of matter, but that was well within Omnu’s power.

He pressed further, finding within the god’s presence all the knowledge he needed to do what he meant to. The dimensional barriers thinned, and Toby was examining, through Omnu’s consciousness, the flows of data that made up magic itself—and beneath them, the more primal morass of numbers and forces that was physical reality. He pulled back from that; what he sought wasn’t quite at that level. People who perished within a transcension field did not instantly or completely cease to exist, for a mind was information, and the field was made to recognize and respond to it. The impressions were still there.

It was just a matter of restoring their connections to the physical shell.

At this, finally, Omnu stirred against him. As always, the god communicated only in vague impressions, feelings. This was too far. Loss must be accepted; death was part of life. This was breaching fundamental truths that even the gods knew to respect. For trespassing on Vidius’s domain in this way, the consequences could be dire.

The anger that welled up rivaled the preceding grief in its intensity. After all Toby had been through trying to understand and form a relationship with his god, usually being brushed off, this was what finally made Omnu talk to him? To try to thwart him when he needed that power the most?

That emotion also flowed away, barely noticed. He had no use for it. The process was, in fact, easier in this state, as he could clinically see the role emotion played in human cognition. Separating one strand of mental activity out from another became as simple as sorting beads by color.

Instead, Toby met the god’s resistance, accepted and embraced it. Made it part of himself, of what he was doing. He was the riverbed; he was the serenity which determined the shape of that power. In perfect calm, without resistance or engagement, he overcame the reluctance of the god and continued right on with what he was doing.

And Omnu, mechanistic old thing that he was, fell silent. In the serene and absolute confidence of his paladin acting in an ascended state of mind, his will became what Toby decided it should be.

This shed some light on what had happened to Shaath, as well as why Naphthene feared and hated the idea of being worshiped, but Toby had no time for such introspection. He was here to work.

With his consciousness thus expanded, he noted two black-winged shapes shouting imprecations at him in Esperanto as they fled from the blaze that now leaked into their space between spaces, seizing the shapes of mortal souls before they could dissipate further.

It had only been seconds, all of this intricacy transpiring in eyeblinks thanks to the entirely different relationship Toby had to time itself while in this state, but seconds mattered. He could see there had been some degradation. Very slight, though. Probably, as they were, they would be fine.

He decided there was no reason to settle for “fine.”

Some of the restoration could be done by gleaning data straight from the transcension fields into which those souls were trying to dissipate, but there were elements that did not yield to such reconstruction. Instead, he had to walk them backward through time itself, just for a few heartbeats.

No Scions of Vemnesthis appeared to chastise him. Evidently they could tell when even they were outmatched.

Gently, in meticulous detail, he re-ignited the biological processes of each body, every chemical reaction in each brain, and stitched every consciousness right back into place, bonded to their mortal forms in exactly the manner they had been previously.

Eyes opened, hearts beat, and breaths were gasped.

Toby finally gave them all a tender but firm dose of Omnu’s peace. They were definitely going to need it.

Less than ten seconds had passed while he unmade the worst the general of Hell could do. Now, Toby was still in the grip of Omnu’s power, and free to deal with Kelvreth directly.

He stepped forward, descending the stairs in a serene glide with his hands folded before him, eyes wide open and blazing with pure divine light. Kelvreth glared down at him.

Toby’s golden gaze met the torrent of unfiltered insanity, and pushed it back.

“Paladins,” Kelvreth growled, and under the overwhelming pressure of Omnu’s presence, all the power had been stolen from his voice; it seemed all he could do to project words. “You wield magic tricks you cannot hope to understand. You do not impress any more than she, Tobias Caine!”

Toby paced slowly to the foot of the stairs and stopped, staring up at Kelvreth. Khadizroth had snared one of the demon’s arms in a thorny vine seemingly made from green light, which was trying to pry it up and loose from its grip on the ground. Trissiny and Gabriel were slashing away at his other. Gradually but surely, the demon’s grasp on this plane was slipping.

“You achieve nothing,” Kelvreth grated at him. “It is the wont of mortals to struggle against inevitability. I have come to bring my Lady’s plans to fruition. You will not—”

“I have come to bring peace.”

Tobias and Omnu spoke as one, and Kelvreth of the Eyes was struck down by the force of it.

With an ephemeral roar of pain, he fully lost his grip, and was immediately pulled deep into the half-stable portal. Still determined to maintain what hold he had on the mortal plane, Kelvreth managed to grab the edges of his summoning circle with the fingertips of one hand, bracing the forearm of the other on the ground even as the rest of him slipped deeper. Only his head and one shoulder still emerged from the portal.

“Can you ward me against being pulled into that portal?” Trissiny asked, striding up to Khadizroth.

The dragon finally looked somewhat disheveled by these exertions, but even under such circumstances his equilibrium was already restoring itself.

“If necessary,” he said, his tone asking a question. “A variant of a craft I know to temporarily bar hellgates should secure you for longer than that portal can sustain itself.”

“Good. Please do so.”

“Even with protection, General, you propose a risk. Is this important?”

“I made a promise,” Trissiny said grimly. “Promises must be kept.”

Khadizroth nodded immediately at that. “Exceedingly true; we are nothing without our honor. Very well, General, proceed and I shall guard you.”

She nodded back in thanks, then strode right toward the circle, breaking into a run as she crossed the last few yards. For the second time, Trissiny leaped forward to land bodily on Kelvreth’s face.

Kelvreth growled, shifting his head and almost knocking her loose. Trissiny planted her boots in the slits that made up his nose, actually grabbing the edge of his eye socket with her free hand for support as he tried to tip her off. At some point she had dropped her shield, but still had her sword in hand and was blazing with enough of power to easily protect her from whatever of his gaze managed to eke out past Omnu’s light.

Examined up close, it was difficult to tell what his eyes were, exactly. They might have been swirling portals, or flat stretches of glowing surface. Even protected by the light of the gods, that intensity of infernally powered pure insanity did not easily yield itself to analysis.

Trissiny let go, rearing back and raising her sword in her right hand. In her left, a second sword appeared, identical in shape to the original but formed out of hardened divine light.

“I warned you,” she stated, and plunged both blades straight into Kelvreth’s eyes.

The demon’s scream seemed to be trying to tear at reality itself, and likely would have been almost as maddening as his gaze if not for the constant pressure of all three Trinity gods having their attention fixed here. Kelvreth tried to toss his head to dislodge his attacker, but Trissiny had immediately twisted her swords inside his eye sockets and was now using them to hold herself in place and hang on despite his efforts.

Whatever magic animated him was incredibly complex, and surely capable of restoring itself—up to a point. That point did not extend to combating Avei’s direct touch. Kelvreth twitched and thrashed involuntarily in addition to his struggles as ancient spells inside him unraveled, the magic animated his dread gaze being permanently seared away one layer at a time, causing an internal torrent of explosions that made him heave in agony. Trissiny snarled at him, clinging on and pouring Avei’s power into his shattered eyes. Already the light of them had given away to smoke.

“You’ll need a new name,” she grated. “Kelvreth the Blind. Now go tell Elilial she’s next!”

He finally relented, raising his hands to try to grab her, and with the loss of his grip, the incomplete summoning collapsed. Kelvreth was sucked straight down into what was suddenly a flat stretch of pavement, vanishing from view and from their plane of existence. The final disintegration of such a powerful summoning produced an explosive shockwave that sent Trissiny hurtling away and bodily knocked down everyone present, even Khadizroth. Everyone except Toby, who did not even close his eyes in the face of it.

Only when the demon’s departure was final did Omnu’s grace begin to recede. Toby closed his eyes, then opened them again with their golden glow gone. It was…heady. Even in the aftermath of riding that towering current of divine power, he felt as if he’d been dosed with coffee, or something stronger.

A hand took his, and he turned to meet Shaeine’s garnet eyes. Heedless of the crowd now approaching them from behind, she wrapped her arms around Toby in a hug. He just held her back.

It was good to be alive.

“Yeah, so,” Ruda’s voice came out of the sea of murmurs now rising, “first question that springs to my mind: why the fuck did none of you wise old ancients warn us about that guy’s fuckin’ eyeballs? I coulda really used some advance fucking notice of that!”

“To my knowledge, that creature has never been on the mortal plane before,” Kuriwa replied, pacing forward to inspect the remnants of the summoning circle. “Everything known about Kelvreth of the Eyes was hearsay brought by demons, which are notoriously unreliable. Even so… His gaze was said to pacify and compel demons, rendering them lucid despite the infernal corruption and forcing them to obey his commands. Kelvreth’s eyes, according to what little I knew, were a leading reason Elilial has been able to turn rabbles of demons into armies. I was not expecting…that.”

“Nor I,” Khadizroth agreed. “Else I most certainly would have given warning.”

“Huh,” Ruda grunted, seeming at least somewhat mollified. She strode up out of he approaching crowd, cocking her head to give the dragon a skeptical look. “So how come you shouted not to look when he opened ‘em?”

“Yes, please forgive me if I gave offense,” Khadizroth replied, bowing to her. “Many long years of experience with adventurers have left me with the habit of shouting obvious common sense.”

“Oh, up yours,” she said without rancor, grinning. Khadizroth, evidently familiar with Punaji, smiled back rather than taking insult.

“Hand of Omnu,” the dragon said, turning to Toby with a more serious expression, “first of all, my deepest thanks. That was a thing the likes of which I have never seen. Can you do that…at will?”

“No,” Toby said immediately. “No, that is not something I can do except in very severe circumstances. And even so… I’m not sure it’s a good idea to exercise that much power even when it’s possible.”

“Look alive, folks,” Joe called, striding forward and pointing at the sky ahead of them. “We seem to’ve gone an’ made ourselves popular.”

Where they had previously been swarming around the distant spire of the cathedral, a large force of flying khelminash warlocks had peeled away and was heading right for them. Evidently, as Joe had pointed out, they took the defeat of their feared general with the utmost seriousness.

“Wait,” Schwartz called out suddenly. “Where’s Trissiny?”

She had likely been out only a few seconds, Trissiny concluded as her vision swam back into focus. Brief unconsciousness aside, she was disoriented; her last clear memory had been of tumbling through the air, and then…

Right now she was slumped against a large wooden desk which had evidently been smashed by the impact of…well, her, apparently. In front of her was a set of double doors, likewise burst open by the blow. Beyond them was a street, and beyond that another wall of buildings, not the square.

Apparently, she’d been launched over a city block and into the next street, where she and her bubble of divine protection had bowled straight into this structure and come to rest here. That was enough of a calamity to have killed even a paladin, had she not at the time been deep in the grip of Avei’s power, both protected behind an invulnerable shield and pumped to the gills with healing magic.

Thank the goddess for survival, but even so, she felt like she’d been beaten all over.

Wincing, Trissiny started to struggling upright, then fell back with a grunt of pain. Instead, she fell back on lessons taught by Professor Ezzaniel, Taowi Sunrunner, and Shaeine. Check for injuries before moving… Shaeine’s instruction in divine diagnosis greatly expedited the process; Trissiny wasn’t yet good enough to sweep others with any great accuracy, but she could scan her own body using the spell.

Nothing was broken, aside from a few cracked ribs. She was bruised…basically all over. Mild concussion. All in all, nothing a little more divine magic wouldn’t fix.

She channeled it slowly and carefully, directing the flows of power to where they were needed and being careful to avoid either divine burnout or mana fatigue. Thanks to Avei’s grace and her elven heritage, neither seemed to be looming close. Good, she could be back in fighting shape in a few minutes. Regrouping with the others was of the utmost importance.

Trissiny stood again, still wincing in pain, but managing this time. It would take a few more minutes to fully heal all this, healing not being her specialty, but with her ribs and skull seen to she could at least stand up and look around. Actually, she appeared to be in some kind of museum. Hopefully all she’d broken was the reception desk and not an exhibit…

Instinct and Avei’s continued attention slammed her divine shield into place at full strength, causing her already-bruised brain a moment of disorientation which cost her dearly. That shield had just withstood a duel with a lord of Hell and a subsequent fall from the sky, but what hit it now smashed it utterly, the backlash snuffing out her divine magic entirely and sending her hurtling ten feet.

Trissiny’s already bruised body impacted a pillar and bounced off; she couldn’t do anything but lay there, stunned and struggling to regain her breath. At least now she could see what had snuck up on her, though.

On one hand she wore a golden gauntlet that glittered with jewels, some cracked, and others spitting intermittent sparks and tiny arcs of arcane energy. In the other she held an Avenic shortsword with an elaborate golden hilt. On her face was the wild, sadistic grin of someone who presently saw no reason to put up a pretense of sanity.

“Why, hello, Trissiny,” Basra Syrinx purred, striding forward and raising her sword. “Oh, you can’t imagine how much I’ve been looking forward to this.”

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The dazzling glare of the explosion faded, finally revealing the enormous form of Kelvreth of the Eyes.

He seemed to be humanoid in shape, though only his upper body protruded from the great summoning circle below. Even that rose above the buildings flanking the square; had he emerged fully and stood upright, he could have crossed the length of Ninkabi in a handful of strides. The demon was skeletal but not a skeleton, an emaciated figure with iron-like bone protruding here and there where patches of rusty jade colored skin was missing. In some spots, like on his arms, his outer covering seemed entirely gone, leaving just dark bones and strands of greenish tendon holding them together. His chest was thin as if mummified, though seemed almost carved of one piece, with no suggestion of individual ribs revealed by the skin stretched over it. Likewise, his bald head suggested a skull without exactly being one. The great demon’s eyes were shut, the lids oddly clenched as though it took effort to keep them that way. He had two vertical slits for a nose, revealing a flickering green light within as if his skull were full of katzil flame. Kelvreth’s lower face was a single, triangular shape coming to a prominent point at the chin, with no suggestion of a mouth at all.

“It is just a demon,” Trissiny stated, raising her voice enough to be heard by those on the upper plaza but not shouting. “It’s bigger than the others, that’s all. We are a greater threat than Hell came here prepared to face. Stand firm, and charge on my signal.”

Kelvreth moved ponderously slowly, which was probably for the best; given his size, a hasty twitch could have caused untold damage. While lowering the hand with which he’d caught the shatterstone, he raised his skull as if sniffing the air. His other hand remained firmly planted on the ground outside the summoning circle, the position of that arm and his shoulders suggesting he was using it to push himself up and out of the portal.

“He cannot be allowed to fully emerge,” Khadizroth stated. “At all costs, General.”

“Agreed.” Trissiny raised her sword. “Archers—”

Kelvreth had been slowly lifting his other hand again, and now opened it, palm facing them. His lack of a visible mouth did not prevent him from speaking.

“I would parley.”

All of them leaned backward; the demon lord’s voice was projected like a magical force, resonating in the air and, it felt, in their very bones. Those who could conjure divine shields did so, purely by instinct.

Arjen snorted and pawed one heavy hoof against the broken pavement. Trissiny kept her sword pointed at Kelvreth, drawing back her lips in a snarl as she opened her mouth to reply.

Then Gabriel edged Whisper closer to her, and reached out to lightly touch her shoulder.

Trissiny paused, looking over at him, and he silently shifted his eyes for one instant toward the defenders behind them. She glanced back, taking stock.

By the favor of the gods or simply the overwhelming concentration of powerful magic users present, they had avoided taking any fatalities during the preceding battle, but it had not been bloodless. Branwen, Toby, Shaeine, and most of the fae casters were busy healing wounded hunters and wolves, as well as Merry, Ruda, and Grip. No one appeared to need hospitalization but quite a few of their forces were not ready to spring back into a brawl. More people than otherwise were visibly exhausted, though Khadizroth and Shiraki were both directing surreptitious blessings against weariness at people one at a time.

In fact, their numbers were growing rather than the reverse; the nearby civilians had been gathered into the old trading guild hall at one side of the square, where Imperial soldiers and city police were keeping an active presence around the entrances, most of which were also surrounded by drifts of charcoal where demons had been blasted to death. Now, a single squad of troops had marched over to join them, accompanied by a less orderly cluster of Ninkabi police. It wasn’t much, but they were disciplined professionals wielding modern firearms, and made of stern enough stuff that they had stepped forward to fight despite being visibly terrified by the sight of Kelvreth.

Kuriwa was quickly restoring those of her thorn bushes which had been damaged in the battle, and calling forth more; at a glance it was plain she was assembling a defensive line of them across the top of the stairs. Archers, soldiers, and spellcasters were picking themselves up, and half a dozen whispered conversations were taking place as strategies were quickly hammered out.

Trissiny took all this in with a glance, then met Gabriel’s eyes again and nodded once in acknowledgment, whereupon he eased back again. As they were, most of the defenders could still fight, after a fashion, but every second they could buy to get back into fighting order would make a difference. Finally, she lowered her sword.

“Speak, then,” Trissiny called out to the demon lord.

“Where is the Lady Vadrieny?”

“If you have something to say,” she retorted, “you can say it to me.”

“Trissiny Avelea,” Kelvreth said, his voice still like a physical force bearing down on them all. “Already you show more wisdom than most of your elder sisters. I have personal memory of Sharai, who was called the Hammer.” He shifted the upheld hand forward, holding his index finger close enough to reveal that its protruding black claw was broken off, and the edge of its remaining piece deeply marked with a carved symbol that looked like the upper half of an Avenist golden eagle. “Perhaps the only being I have ever encountered who was too stubborn to be manipulated.”

Gabriel grimaced, shaking his head when the demon stopped speaking. “I don’t suppose the term ‘inside voice’ means anything to you?”

“Did you really come all this way to gossip about ancient history?” Trissiny demanded. Arjen snorted again.

“Even if more careful than most, I see a Hand of Avei is still not a creature of patience,” Kelvreth boomed, slowly shifting his skull in a gesture that his closed eyes and lack of mouth made inscrutable. “Very well. I am called here by a desperate plea to the Dark Lady by her Wreath in this realm. They have labored…ineffectually…to prevent this breach. Alongside mortal defenders, is it not so?”

While Kelvreth had been speaking, so had Khadizroth the Green, though in a bare whisper and with his back turned to the demon, seemingly addressing no one as he poured magic from his spread hands to bolster and heal the rapidly organizing defenders. “That is an active summoning, not a portal, and the summoners on this plane are all dead. We needn’t destroy him, simply weaken him enough that he cannot keep holding himself through it. Target his hands. Spread the word.”

Kuriwa, of course, ignored him, being fully occupied with assembling her hedge into a veritable rampart which bristled with thorny vines poised to lash out on one side and blossoms producing puffs of healing pollen on the other. Shiraki, Rainwood, Vannae, Principia, Flora, and Fauna all glanced at him and then spread out, bending close to others to murmur the message. Fross had also been hovering near the dragon, and at his signal zipped over to land on Trissiny’s shoulder, chiming softly.

At Kelvreth’s final word, Khadizroth turned, striding forward through one of the gaps Kuriwa had left in her hedge to stand on Trissiny’s other side from Gabriel.

“The Wreath have indeed been active here,” the dragon informed her. “It was they who first alerted us to the severity of the threat and sought alliance in addressing it. With the Wreath, though, nothing can be assumed. I would not attest that this was not their goal all along.”

“Yes,” Trissiny agreed, nodding to him, “I’ve also cooperated with the Black Wreath. I am well aware how it always ends up.” The dragon gave her the ghost of a smile.

“The Dark Lady does not seek this invasion,” Kelvreth stated. “She does not seek your deaths. The Black Wreath’s incompetence in failing to avert this shall be punished. Now, I and the Lady’s forces have come here to return our kith and kin to where they belong. Our aims coincide. I seek alliance.”

Trissiny drew in a short breath as a hiss.

“Need me to play demon’s advocate, here?” Gabriel murmured.

She shook her head. “No…the benefit is obvious. Everything in me wants to spit in his face, but… You know the effect demons have on me.”

Toby had emerged from the hedge while they spoke, and now stepped up between the other paladins’ mounts, patting Arjen’s shoulder. “We also know you’re in control of yourself, Triss. You worked hard to get that way; don’t discount it.”

“Deliberate as you must,” said Kelvreth, finally planting his other hand on the ground to help hold himself in place. “Time is not on our side, however.”

Trissiny swept her eyes around the skyline of the city as it stretched out before them from the main gates. About a third of the columns of fire which signified an open hellgate had gone dark; clearly the teams she’d sent were still about their work, or at least some of them. Vadrieny and Yngrid were both functionally invincible, and demons would flee from them anyway. In the worst case scenario, they could finish the task alone at the expense of it taking longer. But Ninkabi’s suffering was already obvious. Dozens of plumes of smoke rose in all directions, and the sounds of screams, explosions, and firearms were a distant but constant discordant music. Even once all the gates were shut, there would still be countless demons to round up and put down, and many would escape to spread across N’Jendo. Some would make it beyond; never mind Thakar, who knew what would happen when they got into Athan’Khar?

Barring another direct intervention by a major god, this was already an absolute catastrophe. Could they afford to turn down any help?

“I welcome opinions,” she muttered.

The crow squawked insistently as she descended to stand right in front of Khadizroth.

“I have made bargain with worse monsters than that in the face of lesser disasters,” Kuriwa said, meeting Trissiny’s gaze. “About such dark deals I can tell you this: even when I got exactly what I wanted, I was left to regret it bitterly, for a very long time if not forever. The need is dire, granddaughter, but think carefully about what ends justify what means.”

“Yeah, like she said, we’ve worked with the Wreath,” Gabriel muttered, staring through narrowed eyes at Kelvreth. “They can’t not screw you over, can they?”

“In the worst case scenario,” Khadizroth added softly, “he and his mistress will turn on us at the most inopportune moment they can arrange. That is not baseless conjecture; you know well, General Avelea, that Elilial and her get are noted for doing exactly that. In the best, they will perform faithfully and use the situation to gain a significant foothold in our world. She would never pass up such an opportunity. The goddess of cunning is constrained by her aspect; I am not certain she can refrain from clawing for advantage.”

“If you try to form an alliance with that thing, Trissiny Avelea, you will be remembered as the biggest fool ever to blunder into Avei’s service.”

Gabriel sighed. “Shut up, Ariel.”

“No. I am correct. She doesn’t have to do anything I say, but for such stakes I will give my advice.”

“She’s always at her most annoying when she’s got a point, isn’t she?” Trissiny murmured, half turning her head to chance a split-second glance behind. In just a few minutes, the assembled adventurers and their backup had regrouped, and now a mix of staves, wands, and arrows were being aimed through convenient holes in the hedge, with spellcasters behind them and both wolves and melee fighters standing at the ready in the gaps large enough for a person to walk through. The formation was still assembling; they just needed a few minutes more to get the last fighters healed and bolstered and in position.

It was a defensive posture, she recognized, but it was well-arranged to lay down covering fire while such as paladins, dragons, and dryads lit into Kelvreth.

If it came to that.

“Elilial has repeatedly invaded this plane in force,” Trissiny called to the demon lord. “Your claim that she didn’t direct this latest incursion lacks credibility.”

“My lady acts with purpose, and favors the subtle maneuver,” he replied. “Her invasions were all in the distant past, in a different time. Do you think either world is as it was three thousand years ago? This carnage does nothing to advance the Dark Lady’s plots, and poses risk to them.”

“And as for those plots,” she shot back, “you represent the single least trustworthy individual in existence, monster. Unless you can offer some very compelling reason otherwise, I have to assume you intend to betray and destroy us.”

“Do you?” His tone as not a tone, exactly, as much as it was a force upon the air. It was hard to detect irony, or any emotion. The question might have been sincere.

“That is not a denial.”

“You will believe what you believe, paladin. The question is whether you can afford to fight two foes, when one could have been your ally.”

She clenched her jaw. “Toby, you’re quiet. Not going to advocate for peace?”

“Always,” he said, pressing his own mouth into a bitter line. “Always for peace. And the ugly truth is that peace only exists where it’s enforced. Ideally through subtler and gentler means, but I can’t think of a single one of those that could work here, Triss. Sometimes… Sometimes, you only get peace by silencing those who want war. And he wants war. Even if he’s on our side here and now, helping him will just give credibility and a physical foothold to Elilial. You know what she’ll do with that.”

“This city burns and dies while we dither,” Kelvreth observed, his bony shoulders twisting as he shifted his weight where both hands supported it. The strain was evident in his posture, as if it took constant pressure to keep himself from being sucked back into the other dimension.

“Khelminash are converging on the cathedral site,” Trissiny shouted. “What do they intend to do there?”

There was a momentary pause, the most expressive breach of composure the great demon’s mouthless, eyeless face had betrayed.

“Nothing that will affect you, or our business here.”

“Pretty much tells us what we wanna know, doesn’t it?” Gabriel commented.

She bared her teeth in what was not a smile. “And why would you want to make a pact with us? Your kind always prefer aggression. Unless you’re afraid of the force we represent.”

“You yap at the heels of gods, child. The most ancient among you are but stalks of wheat in a field. You will be a momentary use, or momentary nuisance, to my lady. She has cause to fear nothing.”

“Consider this,” Khadizroth said quietly. “There are two dryads in our ranks, General. In the worst event, if this goes badly enough that Ninkabi is an unsavlageable loss anyway… Elilial is in no way prepared to contend with Naiya in person.”

“I would really prefer not to think about that,” Trissiny muttered, wincing. Naiya’s rage at the loss of one of her daughters could annihilate a city more thoroughly than even demons.

“Think about it,” he urged. “Please don’t aim for that end, but…it is worth being aware of.”

“Eh,” Gabriel said lightly. “I think we can take him.”

“You were right,” Toby added. “He wouldn’t bother talking to us if we weren’t a threat to his plans. And he was also right, Triss: there’s not a lot of time.”

“They are as ready as can be expected,” Kuriwa stated, then fluttered aloft again, winging her way back behind the hedge.

A few more columns of fire had gone out while they talked. That task was underway; once it was done there would only be cleanup. Only two things represented a concentrated threat at this point: Kelvreth himself, and the increasing Elilinist forces converging on the hidden hellgate beneath the Cathedral.

Trissiny raised her chin, and then her voice. “Very well, Kelvreth. If you are truly here to end this invasion, then be advised that the matter is in hand and your assistance is not required. The Tiraan Empire thanks you for the offer, but reminds you that your armed incursion into its territory is not acceptable. In the name of the Pantheon and the Emperor, you and your forces are required to immediately depart this plane of existence. These are the only terms you will be offered.”

“You believe your allies have sufficiently prepared themselves to assault me, then.” It was still impossible to discern humor in his voice itself, but she couldn’t interpret that anyway except with a sardonic touch.

“We have nothing else to discuss, Kelvreth,” she replied. “Go home.”

“Or in Avei’s name, I will face justice?” Again, he raised his hand from the ground, shifting position to brace himself against the other one, to show her his broken, eagle-marked claw. “You do not impress, paladin.”

“No,” she said more quietly, “I guess you’ve heard that one before, haven’t you?”

Trissiny urged Arjen forward until he stood at the very edge of the steps, stomping the ground and clearly eager to charge.

“Then how about this?” she called. “In Eserion’s name, take your goons and get the hell off my planet, or I’m gonna fuck you up so bad everyone in Hell will take one look at you and know better than to try this again!”

The short silence following this pronouncement was broken by Grip’s voice from behind the lines. “I taught her that!”

“It matters not. I have delayed you long enough for my Lady’s ends. This farce is no longer necessary.”

And then Kelvreth opened his eyes.

“Don’t look at—” Khadizroth shouted, too late.

They were not eyes, but windows into sheer madness. To meet Kelvreth’s gaze was like staring at the inhabitants of chaos space, like looking into a place where the very rules of reality were so insane and counter to those of the mortal world that simply being aware of them began to peel away layers of the viewer’s sanity.

Even the cavernous sockets in his enormous skull did not contain them. One could not evade Kelvreth’s gaze. Once his eyes were open, they filled the view, filled the sky, filled all of perception, and blasted away all semblance of order.

The three paladins lit up with a furious intensity of divine light, immediately protected by their gods from the psychic onslaught. Khadizroth, Kuriwa, and Shiraki all maintained a semblance of control under the pressure, due to a combination of age, sheer magical strength and familiarity with the emotionally charged nature of fairy craft. All three acted swiftly to propel that calm outward to the others, but it was too late and simply too little.

The carefully rebuilt defensive line of adventurers and soldiers disintegrated within seconds into a massacre as they all turned spells and weapons on one another.

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The swell of darkness deposited her at the very edge of the plateau, and she immediately dropped to a crouch, grimacing and trying to get her bearings despite the unpleasant prickle of magic. It was everywhere here, the divine and fae—both the schools of power that sought to erase her just by existing.

Xyraadi instinctively wove a net about herself to push back against the forces gnawing at her, igniting a barely visible corona of light in her vicinity. The plateau ahead of her was dotted with old structures that looked to be on the verge of falling apart. Apparently Mortimer had been right; the Order of the Light in this century must be teetering on its last legs if it allowed one of its most sacred sites to look like this. It actually didn’t look as if anyone was here, or had been in decades.

But there was the Great Tree, rising in the near distance from the spot where the Maw itself had once been opened. She had never been here before, obviously, but the Tree had been ancient even in her time, famously grown from a sprig of the World Tree found deep within Naiya’s domain of the Deep Wild. Even at this distance, the wind in its leaves seemed to whisper. Xyraadi had the very distinct impression that the Tree was unhappy to see her here.

“As it ever was,” she murmured, raising her hands with fingers spread to cast a spell circle around herself. “Let’s all kill the nice demon who’s trying to help, can’t let any of the rest of them get the idea they might be able to turn against the Dark Lady. That would be just awful.”

Three concentric rings of light solidified about her at waist level, marked with indicator arrows; they shifted and swayed like the needle of a jostled compass before settling down to point in the general direction of the Tree, helping her home in on what she had come here to find.

“All right, then,” Xyraadi murmured to herself, taking two cautious steps forward.

That was when a streak of orange fire burst upward from behind one of the structures ahead, and she froze. The fireball ascended straight up before spreading her wings and slowing.

“Zut alors,” Xyraadi whispered, staring up at the archdemon who was now staring at her. “Why did it have to be that one?”

Vadrieny let out a piercing shriek that echoed from the mountains all around and hurled herself forward in a dive.

“Wait!” Xyraadi shouted, waving her hands overhead. “Truce! I’m a fr—”

She didn’t take the risk of waiting to see whether the force of fire and claws shooting at her planned to break off at the last second, instead shadow-jumping a few feet away. She still felt the hot breeze stirred up by the archdemon’s passing.

Vadrieny banked skillfully on one fiery wingtip, pivoting back around for another pass.

“My name is Xyraadi! I know—”

This time she jumped a good twenty feet distant to evade the next diving attack.

“Would you cut that out?” she exclaimed as Vadrieny recovered and swooped widely around for another pass. “I want to talk! In the name of Avei, truce!”

Arcane magic prickled nearby and by sheer instinct she reached out with one hand and clawed it away.

“Rude!” exclaimed a shrill little voice, followed by a swell of nauseating fae energy and then a barrage of icicles.

Xyraadi melted them before being shredded by their wicked points, shadow-jumped again to evade another swooping attack by Vadrieny, and sourly reflected that this was going about as well as she’d dared hope. On the one hand, her reflexive dismantling of whatever that arcane spell had been might have saved her life, but on the other it probably counterindicated her claims to have come here in peace.

She still couldn’t see who had cast either that or the fae ice spell, either. Nor could she detect any invisibility nearby.

Then a white ball of light darted past, momentarily more visible against an old stone wall than it had been against the daylit sky, and she narrowed her eyes.

A pixie?

“Truce!” she shouted again. “Would you please listen—”

Vadrieny’s screech cut her off, and Xyraadi thought very seriously about just knocking the archdemon out of the sky. She could definitely do that; it wouldn’t even harm her. Damaging a creature like that was beyond her power, but messing up her flight path wouldn’t be difficult. But that would be the unequivocal end of any conversation.

“I DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR THIS!” she shrieked, jumping yet again to evade a wide-area blast of ice. “I NEED YOUR HELP!”

Hoofbeats approached with astonishing speed, and she resignedly whirled to face whatever the new threat was.

The new threat looped around her, though, waving his scythe in the air and not at her. Between the scythe, that green coat and especially the shadow-wrought mare on which he rode, Xyraadi had to admit that Gabriel Arquin cut a dashing figure.

“Stop! It’s okay!” he yelled. “She’s a friend, we know her!”

More hoofbeats, and she took the risk of stopping her evasive maneuvers to turn and see. Trissiny’s silver-armored steed was not as fleet or nimble as Gabriel’s, leaving her a few seconds behind.

“This is Xyraadi, we met her over the summer!” Trissiny shouted at the sky, as both paladins guided their mounts closer to hover protectively around her. “She’s a long-standing ally of the Sisterhood.”

“And she saved my butt,” Gabriel added. “Plus all my other parts.”

“Well, okay,” squeaked the tiny ball of light, drifting over to hover near Gabriel. “But she messed up my barrier spell pretty hard. That did not feel good! Have you ever had a a spell you were shaping torn apart mid-invocation? That crap stings!”

“Well, if you were doing magic at her, what do you expect?” Gabriel asked, grinning.

“Wait a moment,” Xyraadi exclaimed. “Was that pixie doing arcane magic?”

Then Vadrieny hit the ground right in front of her, talons sinking into the ancient stone with an unsettling crunch. The archdemon folded her arms but not her wings, staring mistrustfully.

“I suppose it really shouldn’t surprise me that you two managed to befriend a khelminash sorceress,” she said, her voice like a choir. “Are you absolutely sure she’s trustworthy? Her people are among my mother’s staunchest allies.”

“She’s earned my trust,” Trissiny said firmly. “Xyraadi, are you all right?”

“I haven’t been incinerated, thank you for asking,” she replied, straightening her robe. “So this has already gone better than I anticipated.”

“I assume something seriously urgent is happening if you came looking for us here, of all places,” Gabriel said, soothingly patting his mount’s neck. The shadow-maned mare was clearly not pleased by Xyraadi’s presence, turning to snort angrily at her with ears laid flat back.

“Yes, exactly,” Xyraadi agreed quickly. “I will explain as much as I can, but we have not the luxury of time. Ninkabi is under severe threat and we urgently need the aid of paladins…” She looked quickly between Vadrieny and the pixie. “…plus whoever else you trust to help.”

More figures were approaching, led by, of all things, an elven woman with black hair wearing bronze Avenic armor. And, to Xyraadi’s surprise, a crow, which lit on the ground nearby and suddenly wasn’t a crow anymore.

“Xyraadi,” she said, tilting her head. “I confess, I never expected to see you again.”

“Kuriwa,” she answered warily. “Still alive, then? Well…good. The more help, the better.”

“Help for Ninkabi,” said the other elf, coming to a stop beside the Crow. “Just out of curiosity, have you been spending any time in Veilgrad recently?”

Xyraadi blinked twice in surprise. “Now, how in the world did you know that?”

Trissiny heaved such a heavy sigh that her armor rasped softly. “Locke, I have a feeling we may be about to break the terms of our field trip and leave the area.”

“I am struggling to contain my astonishment,” Locke answered with a grimace that did not look surprised in the least.

Toby pushed forward out of the gathering crowd, giving Xyraadi a welcoming smile that quickly faded into a more serious expression. “Let’s let her speak, everyone, she took a serious risk by coming here. Xyraadi, how bad is it?”

She set them down in the same nondescript alley where they had originally confiscated Kheshiri’s reliquary from Shook, and immediately it was clear that things were already worse than expected.

The first sounds to greet them were screams and wandshots, prompting Hesthri and Jonathan to raise weapons and shift into a triangular formation with their backs against Natchua’s.

“Oh, this is bad,” Natchua muttered, raising her head and narrowing her eyes in concentration. “I can feel… Kheshiri, get a look at the immediate area.”

The succubus shifted to invisibility even as she unfurled her wings, shooting upward and ruffling their clothes with the backdraft.

“No organized resistance near here,” Jonathan muttered, squinting at the mouth of the alley. “I hear staff and wand fire, but just piecemeal. Soldiers would fire in a volley. Natch?”

“There are demons everywhere,” she whispered, her eyes now closed in concentration. “Plus… Fuck. We were right. Multiple open hellgates. Omnu’s breath, there are so many I can’t focus enough to count them. Plus…”

She opened her eyes and turned, the others instinctively pivoting to keep their formation intact. That left all of them looking directly at blank walls, but no one relaxed.

“There’s something big happening in that direction,” Natchua stated. “I think… It’s not a hellgate, exactly, but it’s putting off energy that’s similar enough but distinct. I think someone is trying to summon something. Something large, and powerful.”

Kheshiri popped back into view, hitting the ground just behind them. “This is bad, mistress. This city is under a full-scale invasion. It’s not just randos fleeing from Hell through the gates, either, I saw khelminash in formation on those flying discs of theirs.”

“Flying discs?” Jonathan exclaimed.

“Battlefield superiority,” Hesthri murmured. “Three warlocks on a mobile platform, raining spells from above.”

“Plus,” Kheshiri continued, “khaladesh troops, also marching in formation rather than rampaging around. These are Elilinist forces, and they’re organized. But, there are also some of the other kind; just in this area I saw khaladesh fighting with ikthroi and shadowlords.”

“They brought their feuding here?” Natchua breathed. “Oh, no, I do not think so. Well, Kheshiri, seems your big idea about this all being a trick was way off the mark.”

“I maintain my reasoning was sound,” the succubus said, scowling, “but yep, I obviously called that one wrong. Mistress, there is just plain nothing we can do about this mess. No matter how big and bad a warlock you are, this will require organized forces to clean up, lots of them. We need to get out of here.”

“You will shut your mouth and do as you’re told,” Natchua snapped. “Did you get a look at the cathedral?”

“Yes, the spire’s visible from here,” Kheshiri said, her tail lashing in agitation. “That’s going to be an even tougher nut to crack than we thought, because the Dark Lady’s followers had the same idea. The biggest concentrations of them are converging on that area.”

“Typical,” Natchua muttered. “Well… I guess I owe you two yet another apology. After all that, instead of going after Elilial herself… I’m sorry, but I have to do something here. I have to.”

“Natchua, you might just be the most ridiculous person I’ve ever met,” Hesthri said fondly, looking over her shoulder. “Imagine, apologizing to us for dropping your crazy revenge to protect people.”

“It does seem like a sudden waste of a lot of preparation,” Kheshiri commented.

“Oh, shut up,” all three of them chorused.

“Right, that’s enough standing around,” Natchua added. “Charms on, weapons up. Kheshiri, stay invisible and reconnoiter; kill any demons you have an opportunity to assassinate without risking yourself, but focus on watching our perimeter and bring me any new information that comes up.”

“That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” Kheshiri said sourly, then shot upward and faded out again.

Natchua strode boldly out of the alley into an ongoing firefight, the others flanking her.

Immediately, arcs of lightning flashed across the street in front of her as one woman in a police uniform rapidly retreated, firing her service wand fast enough to risk overheating it. The gnarled, sinewy black shapes of shadowlords already lay smoking on the street, thanks to her and a man with a battlestaff leaning out the door of a nearby pawn shop, but at least a dozen more were still upright and charging forward, their attention grabbed by the show of resistance.

As the trio emerged from their landing alley, a squad of khaladesh demons, graceful and deceptively dainty humanoid figures with clawed feet, thick tails, and curling horns, charged out of a side street and right into the rabble of shadowlords.

Both armed humans, and now a third from a second-story window, continued firing indiscriminately into the ensuing melee, at least until Natchua put a decisive stop to it.

She gestured upward in a lifting motion with both hands, fingers clenched into rigid claws, and an entire forest of bruise-colored energy tendrils sprang out of the very pavement, entangling every brawling demon on the street. Natchua lifted them twenty feet into the air and then slammed the lot back down so hard their bones shattered. The shadow tentacles didn’t stop there, ripping straight through their victims as they vanished back into the ground and leaving them strewn about in pieces, which immediately began to disintegrate into charcoal.

“Holy shit,” exclaimed the policewoman, turning to point her wand at Natchua.

“You need to get people inside,” Natchua barked. “Gather up whoever you can and retreat to a defensible position. Fight only if you must! Demons are pathologically aggressive, and will be drawn to attack anybody who’s violent. Try to hide as many people as you can rescue.”

“Who the hell are you?” the officer shouted back, not lowering her wand.

“The lesser evil,” Natchua said, and turned her back to look down the street in the other direction. “I gather that’s where the cathedral is.”

She could see flying platforms like Hesthri had described, each with three slender figures balanced atop it. They seemed to move in triangular wedges of three platforms each, and dozens were converging on the spire of Ninkabi’s cathedral from the air. Down the street right in front of her, another small company of khaladesh rounded a corner and began moving in their direction. In addition to the khelminash warlocks, the sky was cluttered with the sinuous forms of katzil demons, diving into clusters of buzzing hiszilisks and scorching them to char with gouts of green fire.

“The succubus called it: that’s a much bigger mess to wade into than we were expecting,” Jonathan noted, raising his staff to point at the khaladesh now loping toward them. “Still wanna try for it?”

“Yes…just not yet,” Natchua decided. “It’s not impossible, it’s still the primary target, but we need Xyraadi and the paladins. And the rest of their group; that entire class are serious heavyweights. Let’s hope she can find them quickly.”

She moved her hands in front of her body as if shaping a globe out of clay, and in the space between them a single point of light sparked into being. Natchua abruptly jerked her arms to both sides and it shot forward, bursting alight and casting off beams of white light in all directions as it sped right at the oncoming demons. They tried to break ranks and dodge, but not fast or far enough; it struck the street amid their formation in an explosion that left a crater and seared fragments of khaladesh strewn about the street.

Natchua turned and pointed in the opposite direction. “That way, toward the front gates of the city. See those flying khelminash? I don’t know what they’re trying to conjure up, but I’ll bet putting a stop to it is a good use of our time.”

“We’re right behind you,” Hesthri promised.

They set off up the street at a run, cutting down stray demons with lightning and shadowbolts on their way toward whatever the greater evil was.

Branwen, to the surprise of the rest of them, was the first to step out into the square.

She paused, the others clustering behind her, to take in the scene. Pillars of fire decorated the skyline in ever direction, and from all of them demons were emerging, either swarms of wasp-like hiszilisks or sinuous katzils. There were no other portal altars within view, denying them the sight of whatever land-bound demons were coming out, but even those had already made it into the square.

Ninkabi had been on high alert, which was the only reason the carnage was not a complete massacre. Even the heavier-than-usual police presence was quickly being overwhelmed by ikthroi and shadowlords streaming out of several side streets piecemeal. Fortunately, the two types of demons seemed to pause and attack each other as often as not, but even so, there were already bodies lying on the pavement, and swooping katzils were making it difficult for the police to organize.

Branwen threw out her hand, and a streamer of golden light flew forth, lashing out to wrap around the neck of a passing katzil. It hissed and bucked as she hauled it down to the ground, but stilled upon being drawn into arm’s reach.

“Shhh, shh,” Branwen soothed, actually patting the demon on its beak. She continued to stroke the infernal animal’s scales as the loop of holy magic shifted, forming a collar that hovered about its neck without touching. Then she took one step to the side and gestured again, and her snared katzil shot upward, where it began making wide passes around the front of the historic trading guild hall, where beleaguered officers were trying to herd civilians inside. Bursts of green fire incinerated any other demons trying to get too close.

“Did you ever get around to more than the basic holy summoner training, Antonio?” she asked.

“Not to the point of actually summoning, but I think I remember how that trick goes,” he said, throwing out another tendril of light and seizing a katzil that was in the process of fleeing from Branwen’s thrall. This one struggled more as he reeled it downward. “Vanessa, get out of here.”

“You want to send the warlock away?” Khadizroth asked pointedly.

“Now’s a good time for the Wreath to do what they do,” Darling grunted, still struggling with his quarry. “We’d best stay here and help, but they need to be hunting down and closing those damn gates! Unless you can shadow-jump, K, that’s a job of the highly mobile casters who can sense demon magic directly.”

“You’re right,” Vanessa said bitterly. “I don’t know how much we can do about this, but Embras will have more information. You three… Try not to die.”

Shadows gathered and whisked her away.

“Demons will be drawn to whatever resists them the most fiercely,” Khadizroth stated, striding forward into the square. “The trading hall seems a serviceable place to hide the civilians, as the police have already discovered. Therefore, we shall draw attention elsewhere. Come.”

“Yes, sir,” Darling drawled, finally getting his demon under control. He hadn’t done this since the attack on Tiraas, but the divine spell worked just as well as it had then. Unfortunately, a katzil was about the most potent type of demon he was able to control, and the holy summoner who had instructed him had warned that a skilled warlock or spellcasting demon would be able to disrupt his link, and if he lost control of a thrall it was likely to immediately attack him with near-suicidal rage.

He and Branwen flanked the dragon, directing their katzils to sweep the surrounding area clear of shadowlords and ikthroi, while Khadizroth casually hurled glowing leaf-pods to the ground which caused the spectral shapes of animals to burst into being. Though they looked fragile, they were constructs of pure fae magic, and the stag, bear, and lion he summoned immediately tore into the nearest demons with devastating effectiveness.

Unfortunately, the three of them were drawing more attention. The western edge of the square was a broad flight of steps down to another, lower square on the next level of the city as it descended toward the first waterfalls. Something was clearly happening there; flying discs carrying khelminash sorceresses were moving in a slow circle, their warlocks directing streams of orange spellfire into some working they were creating on the paved area below. They clearly did not welcome the kind of intrusion a dragon and two priests represented, as a whole company of khaladesh demons immediately surged up the stairs and charged at them.

Khadizroth continued calling up spirit animals to harry the miscellaneous demons on the upper square as he led the way further from the trading hall. As he had predicted, most of the demons already up there were now following them.

Unfortunately.

There was a sufficient concentration that even the fae workings he’d left were beginning to vanish; despite being an excellent counter for demons, they clearly were as fragile as they appeared, and the infernal-addled beings now on the attack did not hesitate to throw their lives away piling onto the translucent shapes. The sheer numbers were overwhelming them.

“Not to overwork you, Khaddy,” Darling grated, guiding his katzil to strafe the front line of khelminash closing on them, “but we could use something bigger…”

“Try to buy me time,” the dragon ordered.

They managed to decimate the first line of the attackers with aerial fire before the next rank harpooned both katzils to the ground. Their golden chains flashed out of being upon the demons’ death. Darling and Branwen exchanged a flat look, and both of them lit up with divine shields. All around them, the last four remaining spirit animals trampled the last of the loose ikthroi; their cousins had managed to deplete a good five times their number, but now both sides of the melee were almost exhausted.

Khadizroth was busy drawing a spell circle on the pavement with a leafy branch he had pulled out of nowhere. Branwen planted herself in front of him; Darling drew his wand and fired shot after shot into the khaladesh, which only seemed to make them madder.

A bare three yards before the charging demons piled into the priests’ shields, Khadizroth paused in his work to gesture. Cold wind rose around them, suddenly carrying with it bladelike autumn leaves, and ripped into the phalanx. The fae-driven leaves tore through flesh and armor alike, slaughtering the demons even as the wind bowled them bodily over backward.

In seconds, the entire force was decimated.

“I feel like we’re redundant here,” Darling commented to Branwen.

“You are not,” Khadizroth replied before she could, already back at work on his circle. “Every second I am distracted from this is precious. Damn Kuriwa and her curse, but I cannot work as fast as I should.”

“We’ll be…oh, bollocks,” Branwen cursed uncharacteristically.

The next wave to charge at them was only five demons, but these were a good eight feet tall, writhing masses of tentacles and heavy pincers stomping forward on heavy legs.

“Well, hey, smaller numbers’ll be easier for us to block, as long as the shields hold,” Darling said lightly, shooting one of the things twice. The wandshots slowed it, but that was all. He couldn’t even see its face, if it had one. “I don’t suppose you can command this particular caliber of ugly?”

“Khroshkrids,” she said curtly, “and no. Try to burn that one down before they get here; I think we can stop four with our shields alone. They hit hard but are not very durable.”

Indeed, the fifth wandshot made the targeted khroshkrid stumble to one knee, and two more caused it to slump over, twitching. Unfortunately, even before the rest reached them, another squad of khaladesh topped the stairs at a run.

Darling gritted his teeth, pouring energy into his shield in anticipation of the impact of tentacles and claws. Even with the intermittent pace of reinforcements from the khelminash up ahead, they were soon going to be overwhelmed just by sheer numbers. “K, may need to interrupt you again—”

Of all things, a white wolf dashed past him. Then another, and suddenly there were over a dozen of them swarming forward, great glowing beasts which charged fearlessly at the hulking demons.

“Oh…kaaay,” Darling said, blinking. “I don’t get it, but I’ll take it.”

He had never actually seen wolves take down large prey in the wild, but these clearly fae beasts showed how the power of the pack was more than a match for a moose or bear. They snarled and lunged, distracting and infuriating the demons while others dashed in behind to hamstring and bring them down.

Then one of the wolves about to be trampled flashed white and became a slim young woman with short dark hair, planting herself in a kneeling position with one arm upraised. A divine shield flashed into place around her, as well as a hardlight construct in the shape of an Avenic shield in her grasp. Both shields soaked up the blow of the descending pincer; she didn’t even flinch. It created the opportunity for two more wolves to flank the khroshkrid, savaging its legs to pull it down, and then another wolf flashed as it approached at a run, changing to the shape of a woman with pale green hair who rammed into it with her shoulder.

Under the dryad’s onslaught, the demon was utterly pulverized, its fragments already drying to charcoal as they sprayed the oncoming khaladesh behind.

Then more people were darting past Darling from the city’s open gates, a mixed group of cloaked Rangers and Huntsmen of Shaath, skidding to a halt to draw bows.

The first volley of arrows ripped the oncoming khaladesh apart. By the time they’d fired a second volley, the attackers were done.

One particularly large white wolf loped up, changing to human form as it approached. A form Darling recognized.

“Antonio,” Ingvar said with a grim smile. “I am surprised at how unsurprised I am to find you in the middle of this.”

“I get blamed for everything,” Darling complained. “Ingvar, I’ve got a rousing chorus of ‘what the fuck’ I wanna sing you later, but for now I am just damn glad to see you and all the rest of this…I don’t even wanna know, do I?”

“What exactly is the situation here?” Ingvar asked, turning to scowl at the flying khelminash sorceresses.

Two wood elves, one with a goatee and the other with short black hair, had also approached; the bearded one spoke. “Lord Khadizroth, if we might assist?”

“Please,” the dragon said fervently. Both stepped up beside him, raising hands and adding streams of pure fae energy into the glyphs he was embossing on the pavement.

An arcane sparkle in the air heralded the arrival of an Imperial strike team, led by a mage who took one look at the situation and shouted, “What in shit’s name?!”

“Hellgates,” Branwen reported. “Lots of them.”

“Well, that explains it, all right,” said Tholi. “This looks to be a challenging hunt, Brother.”

Everyone whirled, the various hunters raising weapons, as the shadows swelled out of nowhere right next to them, but what materialized was Vanessa, along with Grip, Thumper, Vannae, Schwartz, Jenell, Flora, and Fauna.

“Omnu’s balls, you were not kidding,” Thumper stated, drawing his wands and staring at the nearby demons. Vannae immediately scurried over to join Khadizroth and the other elves, followed a moment later by Schwartz.

“Young lady, I thought I told you to go find your fellow warlocks,” Darling said severely to Vanessa.

“Luckily for you, old man, you’re not the boss of me,” she replied with a thin smile. “I told you three not to die, and as I expected, you were doing a piss poor job of it. Here are your buddies; try to manage a little longer this time, cos this is all the reinforcements you’re getting.”

She sketched a mocking salute and shadow-jumped out.

“I like her,” Grip remarked. “Prolly gonna end up punching her teeth out before all this is settled, of course.”

“Incoming,” the warlock attached to the strike team reported in a clipped tone. Another phalanx of khaladesh was topping the stairs, this one much larger. Hunters drew arrows again and the four Imperials readied spells.

Before they could attack, the demons were hit from the rear by something which exploded with the force of a mag cannon burst. Khaladesh were hurled into the air like dolls, those who weren’t incinerated outright in the initial impact. Only those at the edges of the formation survived, but as quickly as they regained their footing and tried to turn on their attackers, they were felled by a barrage of staff fire and shadowbolts.

Whatever had dared to skirt their formation finally drew the full attention of the khelminash sorceresses, and one platform broke from the group, the warlocks turning to pelt the area with fireballs.

Their platform was seized by a single giant tentacle of shadow-magic which sprang up from the ground below and yanked it out from under them, then while all three plummeted screaming to the ground, whipped about to smack it against the next in the formation.

While the warlocks were forced to turn and subdue that, three figures dashed up the stairs, hesitating only momentarily before making a beeline for the group assembling around Khadizroth.

“Hold,” Ingvar called, raising one hand. “These don’t smell of enmity.”

“Excuse me, they don’t fuckin’ what?” Thumper demanded.

The drow woman in the lead waved frantically at them as she approached, the staff-carrying man and woman behind her half-turning as they ran to take potshots at the khelminash.

“We have to stop them!” Natchua shouted. “Whatever fairy magic you’re doing here, pour it into the middle of—”

She broke off, whirled, and reached out with both hands, just in time. One of the khelminash trios had just conjured up a carriage-sized ball of fire and hurled it in their direction. Natchua swept her hands to one side, and it veered off course to slam into the unoccupied middle of the upper square.

“What?” Captain Antevid demanded. “What are they trying to do?”

It seemed the khelminash had decided to suspend their operations, though, and most of the flying discs broke off, coming in their direction. A dozen points of multicolored light appeared around them as infernal spells were gathered.

“Khad, now would be a good time!” Darling shouted.

“Yes,” Khadizroth agreed, striding into the center of his meticulously-arranged spell circle while Schwartz and the elves backed hastily away. The dragon stomped one foot upon the spiraling central rune.

Seven tree trunks of luminous white wood sprang from the ground all around him, shooting upward and bending in the middle to twine into a single colossal tree. It shot skyward, branching out in all directions and spreading its canopy over the entire square. Pale green light shone from the white tree’s fern-like leaves, filling the air with a healing, floral scent and the soft sound of whispers.

At the sheer intensity of fae magic which roiled out across the square, the incipient attacks of the warlocks fizzled, the foremost disc wobbling and then careening drunkenly to the ground to crash against an abandoned carriage. The woman with Natchua gasped and buckled to her knees, clutching her chest, and as the drow and Jonathan whirled to catch her, a flickering outline of another person intermittently betrayed itself behind them.

“Hey, is she okay?” Branwen asked, raising one hand. “I can—”

“No!” Natchua and Jonathan shouted in unison.

“That is a demon, wearing an arcane disguise charm,” Khadizroth stated. “Hethelax, I believe. Hello, Kheshiri.”

Shook’s head snapped around. He clenched his fingers on his wands, but pressed his lips together into a line and said nothing.

“Excuse me,” said Schwartz, “but at this point I’d say we’ve worked with enough friendly warlocks—well, maybe not friendly, but clearly allied…”

“Yes, I concur,” Khadizroth said, nodding and raising a hand. Immediately Kheshiri’s outline vanished again and Hesthri straightened up, gasping for breath. “My apologies. We are in no position to turn away any potential allies, I fear. This tree will buy us a moment of sanctuary, but by the same token it makes this spot a target, and I cannot say with certainty how long it will last against a prolonged assault. We must use this time to formulate a plan.”

“Hey, you guys should really see this,” called Jenell, the only one among the growing group clustered under the dragon’s tree who was turned to face Ninkabi’s front gates instead of the beleaguered city beyond them.

Being mounted, Trissiny and Gabriel were the first to arrive, with Vadrieny and Yngrid swooping in above while Fross darted about the paladins. Behind them came the rest of their class at a run, accompanied by Principia and Merry in full armor, lances at the ready.

“As I live and breathe,” Darling cackled. “Hey! I thought you lot were on vacation!”

“Dunno whatcher talkin’ about,” Billie called back, riding on McGraw’s shoulders as their group brought up the rear. “This here’s where the demon invasion is! What the hell did ye think was my idea o’ fun?”

Mary fluttered down to settle on Darling’s shoulder, where she ruffled her feathers and croaked in irritation.

“You said it,” he replied sympathetically.

“Somehow, your Grace, it just ain’t a surprise to find you here,” McGraw drawled. “Really seems like it should be, but it is not.”

“Why do people keep saying that to me?”

“People have met you,” Grip replied.

“General!” Khadizroth called, striding forward out of the group toward the new arrivals, ignoring Juniper and Aspen as they ran squealing right past him to hug.

“Holy shit, is that guy a dragon?” Ruda asked.

“These hellgates are conjured through some highly improvised combination of necromancy and modern enchanting equipment,” Khadizroth said, ignoring her and fixing his attention on Trissiny. “Each is beneath one of those columns of fire. They are numerous, but fragile, and highly unstable. We’ve found that destroying the altars to which they are synced on this plane will cause a backlash that destroys the other side as well. So long as we reach them all before they stabilize and become permanent, we can shut all of this down.”

“Thank you,” Trissiny said, nodding to him. “That’s the best news I could hope for. Natchua! Xyraadi says you know something about the source of this?”

“There’s an ancient facility under Ninkabi’s central cathedral,” Natchua called, striding forward through the crowd. “Apparently there’s some kind of sealed hellgate there. We think that’s where the Tide cult that created this mess is concentrated. So do the demons; a lot of them are heading in that direction.”

“Will shutting that down shut all of this down?”

“It is far too late for that,” Khadizroth said gravely. “There are too many gates, and not all under Elilinist control. Before we can even begin cleaning up the demons, every one of these portals must be destroyed.”

“There are both Elilinist demons and various other factions coming through,” Natchua added. “Don’t get me wrong, there are no allies here. They all need to die. But they’re working on culling each other, which helps a little bit.”

“All right,” Trissiny said, turning Arjen to face the city and the stairs down to the lower plaza. “First things first…”

Before she could go further, the assembled flying khelminash began to chant, loudly enough to be clearly audible to those clustered under the tree. They spoke in alternating groups, one syllable each.

“KEL!”

“VRETH!”

“KEL!”

“VRETH!”

“Mes dieux, non,” Xyraadi groaned, pressing one hand against her forehead crest.

“Wait a second,” Branwen exclaimed. “They’re not saying—”

The chant rose, the assembled masses of khaladesh demons gathered below the flying sorceresses adding their voices. Around them, a sullen red glow had begun to rise from whatever the warlocks had been crafting upon the square.

“KEL!”

“VRETH!”

“KEL!”

“VRETH!”

“Kelvreth of the Eyes,” Vadrieny stated. “Elilial’s chief general. One of the greatest demons in existence.”

“Oh, good, that’s all,” said Weaver, deadpan. “For a sec I was worried.”

“ALL RIGHT!” Trissiny roared, raising her sword into the air and projecting above the noise. “I want three groups of highly mobile fighters to destroy those portals! Vadrieny and Yngrid take the north bank, strike team take the central island, Natchua’s group the south bank. You will move as quickly as you can from one portal site to the next. Shut them down, and only fight as much as you must to protect yourselves.

“We do not have the forces to contain the city or even gather up civilians—the best thing we can do is draw attention from them. Demons are compelled to attack anything which attacks them, so you will demand their attention! Hit every infernal thing you see with everything you have. No quarter, no hesitation, and maximum destruction! We will press west till we reach the cathedral, slaughtering every invader in our way, and drawing the rest to face us. The best thing we can do to protect the city is to buy the defenders time by forcing every demon to turn and face the most destructive force here: US.”

A tremendous pulse burst out from the lower plaza, sending a gust of wind and sheer kinetic energy across the city, pushing all of them bodily backward a half-step. The branches and leaves of the dragon’s tree rustled, whispering in protest.

Below them, a single, skeletal arm rose, by itself twenty feet in length, formed seemingly of gigantic iron bones bound together by pulsing green sinews. Its clawed hand came to rest upon the top of the stairs between the plazas, and the assembled demons’ chanting rose to a frantic pitch as they chorused Kelvreth’s name over and over.

“Tall fella, ain’t he?” McGraw said laconically, puffing on a cigarillo.

“Pushing ourselves against that will definitely suffice to gather their attention,” Shaeine observed, her expression eerily serene.

Hunters drew arrows, soldiers and enforcers readied weapons, casters of all four schools began charging spells, and a dozen wolves raised their melodic voices to howl a fierce counterpoint to the demonic chanting.

“We are not going to charge at the warlord of Hell,” Trissiny thundered, drawing her lips back in an animal snarl. She brandished her blade and burst alight, golden wings flaring. “WE GO THROUGH HIM!”

Arjen trumpeted as they galloped forward, and with a combined roar, the assembled forces with her hurled themselves into motion, charging into Ninkabi and straight into the teeth of Hell.

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“How much do you remember?”

Principia paused while taking a slow sip of the tea she’d been handed, narrowing her eyes slightly as she considered Trissiny’s question.

“I…think almost everything?” she finally offered after swallowing. “The whole sequence of events is pretty much intact in my mind, including me making a big levitating spectacle of myself and you reacquainting me with basic sense, Triss. That part has a hazy quality, though, not unlike the first and last time I tried peyote.” She grimaced as if pained and raised the teacup in both hands to partially obscure the lower part of her face. “If you held a wand to my head I couldn’t explain why I thought any of that was a good idea.”

“A sudden glut of raw data has that effect on people,” Mary stated, outwardly calm. After checking Principia’s vitals she had retreated a few paces, so as not to compete with Trissiny and Merry, who were both hovering protectively closer to the younger elf. “Many of the most foolish actions I have ever witnessed resulted from the combination of abundant information and insufficient emotional maturity.”

“Kuriwa, please,” Trissiny said with a soft sigh. “Locke, is there anything of the information you absorbed that you still have?”

“Hm. Like what, specifically?”

Trissiny scowled. “Can’t you for once just answer a question without being difficult?”

“That isn’t really how brains work, Trissiny,” Mary interjected in a gentle tone. “She’s not a machine, even if she was uncomfortably similar to one while under the Mask’s effect. Information recall follows organic pathways; if there is anything still there, she did not acquire it through the normal means, and it will need connections to follow if it is to resurface. Ask specific questions, and we shall see if anything connects.”

“I see,” Trissiny murmured, frowning pensively now. “Sorry, Locke.”

“Thank you, Kuriwa,” Principia said, giving her elder a careful sidelong look.

“You are welcome,” Mary said in a tone layered with meaning. Principia heaved a sigh and buried her nose in her tea again.

“While you were in that Archon fugue, you were saying vague things about plans,” Trissiny prompted. “More people you wanted to recruit and things about to happen that required urgent intervention. And you said both those categories applied to something happening in N’Jendo. Ring any bells?”

Principia squinted again, staring into the distance through the steam of her tea. “N’Jendo… Yes. I remember saying that. But the data…damn, I’m coming up blank. Gods, this is a weird feeling. I do recall talking about that and I sure made it sound important, didn’t I? But the reason for it is just gone. I’m sorry, Trissiny, I don’t know.” She lowered her cup, turning her head to look seriously at Trissiny. “I think the information was probably accurate and not something we should just forget about. I don’t have the details anymore, though.”

“N’Jendo’s a big place,” Merry murmured. “That’s not much to go on.”

Trissiny sighed softly. “I have a couple of friends in Ninkabi, but that’s it. Also, we’re on a class assignment for Tellwyrn. Which is not to say I’m firmly opposed to haring off on our own if the needs is sufficient; gods know we’ve done it before. But this time she’ll be really mad. That might have worse consequences for you than anyone, Prin.”

“Oh, Arachne loves to bluster,” Principia said lightly. “She banks on people always taking it seriously because of all the shit she’s blown up over the years. But nah, her dirty little secret is she’s annoyingly reasonable under all the chest-thumping. If she didn’t vaporize me for breaking into your dorm and drugging your friends that one time, she’s probably not gonna.”

“You,” Mary said very evenly, “Did. What.”

Principia grinned at her, and fortunately, that was the moment Toby entered the room, carrying a steaming bowl.

“Good to see you up and about, Lieutenant,” he said pleasantly, stepping right into the clearly tense atmosphere without hesitation and kneeling to offer Principia the bowl. She was sitting upright with the blanket still over her legs, but otherwise hadn’t moved from where she’d been laid after collapsing. “Juniper suggested I bring you a little something to recharge the ol’ crystals. Sorry, I know hot soup is traditional for recuperating, but we’re on a barren mountaintop with travel rations. Best I could do is porridge with dried fruit.”

“Oh, bless you, young Master Caine,” Principia said, setting aside her mug to accept the bowl with a grateful nod. “You are too pure for this world.”

“Nah, just too pure for the people he hangs around with,” Trissiny said, smiling up at Toby.

He winked and backed away a few steps. “Sing out if there’s anything else you need.”

“We will,” she promised, and he nodded, turned, and departed to the open plaza outside.

“So…” Principia paused in blowing across her porridge. “I wasn’t hallucinating, right? I did stick Kuriwa in a cage?” Merry sighed, shook her head, and rolled her eyes.

The Crow’s shoulders tensed up in a tiny gesture that was oddly reminiscent of a bird ruffling its feathers. “Yes, Principia, you did. I had set that aside while the more urgent matter of your well-being was attended to, but I see you are now feeling up to discussing it.”

Principia grinned at her. “Worth it.”

“Seriously?” Trissiny demanded.

“I have deliberately left you at liberty, child,” Kuriwa said ominously, “because you have, I assumed purposefully, kept yourself at a level of activity that falls below the threshold of impacting the course of world events. And so, unlike most of the rest of our extended family, I reasoned that it would harm little to let you work out your various issues on your own. It appears, now, you intend to insert yourself into important matters with no more maturity than you had a century ago. So I suppose I no longer have the luxury of letting you run around unattended.”

Principia’s grin sharpened until it looked painful. “Even more worth it.”

“Enough!” Trissiny exclaimed. “For the love of—just stop it, both of you.”

“Young woman,” Kuriwa began.

“Don’t you ‘young woman’ me!” Trissiny barked, pointing imperiously at her. “Based on my conversations with every single one of them so far, Kuriwa, I may be your only descendant who actually likes you! Consider that before you decide to try shoving your beak up my nose. I know how you’re accustomed to relating you kin, so let me assure you up front that if you try to push me around I will not hesitate to bring Avei into it in person. Principia knows the error she made. We have established that she wasn’t in her right mind when she briefly inconvenienced you. You’re fine now, so drop it. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to hold you to the same standard of behavior you ham-fistedly demand of the rest of your family. And you!”

Principia had opened her mouth to speak around a smug smile, but now visibly quailed as Trissiny turned on her.

“What the hell is your problem?” Trissiny shouted. “I do not care how affronted your free-spirited sensibilities are by being lectured, why would you try to pick a fight with someone who can wring you like a dishcloth? Do you want her to smack you around like she does Zanzayed? We just established that you weren’t on her list of people who needed that treatment, and there you go, campaigning for it! Locke, if I hadn’t just seen you clowning around with that mask you made such a production about being too dangerous to touch, I’d have assumed you were smarter than that. And yet, here we are!”

They both stared at her, blinking. Merry held herself rigidly still, hardly breathing.

“Honestly,” Trissiny said, rubbing her face with both hands. “You’re a pair of immortals; I am twenty years old. Why am I the adult in this room?”

“You,” Principia said at last, “are starting to sound eerily like my mother. It is…really disturbing.”

“Eat your porridge,” Trissiny snapped. “I can tell you one difference between us: Lanaera told me most of your arguments were her fault, because she just wasn’t cut out for motherhood. All the problems in our relationship are your doing, Principia.”

Principia hesitated with a spoonful of porridge almost to her mouth, staring at her. “…she said that?”

Trissiny sighed deeply. “Corporal, if you wouldn’t mind…”

“Oh, hey, I just remembered,” Merry muttered, standing upright, “I urgently needed to talk to, uh, one of those weirdos outside about…I dunno, I’ll think of something.”

The room was quiet while she hustled out, and then for a few more seconds thereafter.

“I hate to admit it,” Kuriwa said at last, “but I begin to suspect she gets that level head from the human side.”

“Anton was good people,” Principia agreed after swallowing a bite of porridge. “He deserved better friends than me.”

“Young Herschel impresses me favorably, as well,” the Crow agreed with a faint smile.

Trissiny shook her head and shifted, adjusting her seat to draw her knees up to her chest and wrap her arms around them. “What is Avei’s strategy?”

Principia paused with another spoonful almost to her mouth, staring at her. “You’re asking me?”

“Don’t get cute,” Trissiny ordered. “When you were high on Mask, you said you were acting in accordance with your orders, and with Avei’s strategy. I know nothing of this. What is it?”

“Ah.” She lowered the spoon back to the bowl, glancing sidelong at Kuriwa. “That…was an exaggeration. The orders are Avei’s; the strategy is mine. It’s part of that thing I told you about when we met at Last Rock. On the mountainside, remember?”

“The part you said was classified,” Trissiny said. “Even to me.”

“And as I told you then, I would rather bring you into the loop,” Principia said frankly. “Not just because I don’t care for keeping secrets from you; I think that you specifically would be an important asset to the whole thing. If for no other reason than because I would really like to verify with Avei that I’m doing what she wants. I can’t see any other way to go about the task she set for me, and it’s been my assumption that this is why she wanted me in the Legions in the first place, but… It’s not like we’re on first name terms. I get my orders from Rouvad, who in her warmest and kindest moments deigns to tolerate me and has made no secret that she resents Avei shoving me down her throat.” She grimaced, ducking her head to stare at her porridge. “It’s not like I’m generally very big on authority, as you well know. But…this is important. I wish I could be sure I was doing it right.”

Trissiny watched her in silence for a few more seconds. Principia met her eyes, then sighed and went back to eating.

“Kuriwa,” Trissiny said at last, “would you please give us a few minutes?”

The Crow rose smoothly, nodding at her. “I think it for the best. Call for me if there is anything I can do to help.”

She departed in silence, leaving Trissiny and Principia to study each other.

“I’m not directly in your chain of command,” Trissiny said, “and there are formalities—not to mention political implications—that would come up if I were to officially countermand the High Commander’s orders and insert myself into a classified program. But it’s just us in this room, and we both understand how Eserion’s mindset can complement Avei’s, when necessary. If you think I can help, Prin, tell me what’s going on.”

“Okay.” She set the spoon back in the half-eaten bowl, and turned to set it on the ground next to her cooling tea. “It’s like this.”

She finished her sandwich first. It was a really good sandwich, some of the best food she’d been able to get since arriving in this city—fresh and hot, with juicy meat and vegetables on warm flatbread, not at all like the kind of stuff she found behind buildings. So she made sure to savor it before setting to work, even if this wasn’t the best place for eating. The smell alone spoiled the experience a little bit. Well, she still had money; after handing over the gold coin for the sandwich she’d gotten some silver and bronze ones back. There would be other good food. She was loath to take her eyes off the thing after stumbling across another one, so there she sat, balefully watching it until she had licked the last of the grease from her fingers.

Then, finally, she rose from her seat on an old barrel, stretched, picked up her stick, and went to work beating to pieces and scattering the rancid structure of old bones, flesh, and magic that had been concealed behind a currently shuttered factory.

“Found another one, did you?”

She spun, raising the stick. She recognized that voice. Grinning insufferably at her, the man in the floppy had stepped out of the shadows into the relatively lighter shadows nearby, where the blue sky peeked through the gap between buildings high above.

“You know they’re just going to make more, don’t you?” Vesk said condescendingly. “There are far more capable heroes than you working on this—you ran into a couple, I understand. Well, antiheroes, anyway. These things are going up faster than they can tear them down. At best you’re amusing yourself.”

She threw the stick at him. He didn’t flinch when it bounced off his head. It didn’t even disturb his stupid hat.

“I take it I’m still not forgiven, then,” he said solemnly. “Seriously, I am sorry for the presumption, but you wouldn’t have fared a lot better left out there in the howling wilderness where I found you. Why didn’t you go to the Omnist temple like I suggested? You definitely wouldn’t be scrounging for food; Omnists love feeding people.”

She drew back her lips, opened her jaws, and made a rough hissing noise from the back of her throat, like an angry cat.

“The gods aren’t all like me and Salyrene, you know,” he remarked. “You have to be trying pretty hard to make Omnists hurt you. Hell, most people can’t try hard enough. They’re almost insufferably nice.”

She blasted him with a shadowbolt. He swatted it aside.

“I hope you don’t think you’re spiting me with this stubbornness,” the god said frankly. “I get what I want either way. You’re not gonna work your way out of the ‘mysterious stranger’ role in the time it’ll take events to wash over this city no matter what you do. I was hoping to position you as ‘strange, mute charity case’ for your sake, because I thought you could do with a spot of good luck, but I can work with ‘crazy street person’ just as well.”

She concentrated, gathering power in the form of motes of light out of the air around her. When it was sufficiently formed, she thrust her hands forward and the arcane bolt tore across the alley, filling it with blue light.

He caught that one, then had the audacity to bounce it in his palm like a luminous ball. “The nearest Omnist temple is less than a block from here, due west. That’s down toward the next lower steppe of the city, if you’re disoriented. You don’t even have to do anything; just show up looking like that and they’ll make sure you get a meal, a bath, something clean to wear and a bed if you want it. They can even set you up with work, and work is important for a lot more than making wages. Never underestimate the value of a purpose. But then,” he added, looking past her at the destroyed altar, “maybe you’ve figured that part out on your own.”

Gritting her teeth, she ignited a golden shield of divine light around herself and charged forward to body-slam him.

She bounced right off, staggering for balance, and the god casually tossed her own ball of arcane energy back at her. It impacted the shield in a loud shower of sparks which extinguished both.

“Really?” Vesk asked sardonically. “We can literally do this all day, kiddo. One of us can, at least. Nobody’s gonna be impressed with your Every Salyrite Apprentice Ever package of basic spells—they just prove you don’t know enough of any one type of magic to be actually scary. For heaven’s sake, don’t do any of that at the local police. They are very short on sense of humor at the moment.”

She regained her footing and hissed at him again.

He sighed. “Well, I’ve told you where the temple is. Or… There’s another of these altars about half a block to the south. The alleys made for a deliberately obfuscatory path, but as long as you know the requisite elementary fae magic to go with your other novice tricks, you’ll be able to follow your nose to it now you’ve already encountered two of them.”

The god hesitated, then shook his head and turned to go. “Just be careful. These Tide idiots are trying to avoid direct conflict, but I wouldn’t swear you’re a match for one in your present state. I brought you here because you’ve got every potential for a great destiny. If you just end up getting killed, I will actually feel bad.”

He actually walked away down the alley instead of just disappearing like last time. She shot him in the back with another shadowbolt. It did nothing, of course, but it was satisfying.

Trissiny gazed at the far wall in silence for long moments after Principia stopped talking.

“That,” she finally said, “might work.”

“Well, I thought so,” the elf said petulantly, finishing off the last of her now-cool tea before setting the cup back down next to the empty porridge bowl. “I mean, acknowledging my bias, I could definitely see it working. It’d be nice to have some confirmation, though. I wouldn’t put it past Avei to upbraid me for failing to read her mind. That may be a little paranoid of me, but I’ve not had the best experience within the Sisterhood so far.”

“I will ask her,” Trissiny promised with a fleeting little smile. “Orders aside, I see why you would want to keep that under wraps as long as possible. The whole idea sits right in that sweet spot of being bonkers enough that nobody but you would have come up with it, but plausible enough to others will undoubtedly try as soon as the idea gets out.”

“Yeah, well, I suspect it’ll be out sooner than later,” Principia said, frowning. “Maybe sooner than I’m ready. I know we’re within Shaeine’s earshot, and there is absolutely no way Kuriwa’s not actively listening. She comprehends the concept ‘none of my business’ as well as a horse understands trigonometry.”

“And you were wanting to gather people from N’Jendo and Veilgrad, as well as here, and throw them into some unfolding disaster,” Trissiny murmured. “It makes a lot more sense now.”

Principia blinked. “Wait, Veilgrad? Really?”

“I take it you don’t recall that, either.”

“Now that you mention it, I recall saying the name, but… Veilgrad is full of Shaathists and werewolves. The place is basically a giant miscellany of things that bump in the night. I can see it being a prospect but I wouldn’t wanna go there without a good and specific lead, which no, I don’t have.”

“I know some people there, too, but same problem applies. That’s there, we’re here, and I’m not sure how eager I am to learn what Tellwyrn would do if I went that far afield. She once threatened to chain me and Gabe together at the wrist. I’ve only come to understand how serious she was in hindsight.”

“You could do worse,” Principia said with a sly quirk of her lips.

Trissiny turned a flat stare on her. “We are not that close yet, Locke.”

“Yes’m,” the elf said solemnly.

Trissiny shook her head, and then turned again to stare at the wall, eyes narrowed in thought.

Principia watched her in silence for more than a full minute before suddenly speaking.

“I knew Sabah Aldarasi.”

Trissiny blinked in surprise and turned back to her. “The Hand of Avei who was killed by the Enchanter’s Bane? The way I was taught, that was a big part of the reason Viridill turned on the Empire after it was fired.”

“Yeah,” Principia whispered, herself gazing off into the distance now. “Her, and Sarsamon Tirasian. I knew him as Sarsa, dumbass wannabe adventurer from southern Calderaas. We were kind of a team for a while, there, just as what would become the Enchanter Wars was getting started. That’s incidentally also how I met Arachne, a bit later. Of course, far as we knew, it was just the latest occurrence of the orcs going on one of their crusades across the borders, and some shenanigans in the background where Magnan had a bug up his butt about fae magic and was leaning on both the Emperor and the Archpope to crack down on witches. Chaotic times, but eh…I’d seen worse. The whole world didn’t go nuts until that idiot fired off the Bane. And quite accidentally killed my friend.”

“So,” Trissiny said very quietly, staring at her, “when you heard I’d been called as the new Hand of Avei…”

“Look, I won’t say any part of my judgment at any step of that entire process was sound,” Principia said, wincing. “But that particular moment… Yeah, haring off to Viridill to plow through Abbess Narnasia was a uniquely unwise thing to try. That just triggered something in me I had made myself forget was there.”

“I see,” Trissiny murmured.

“I abandoned them too.” Principia’s expression was completely hollow, eyes far away. “After Sabah… You’ve never been around a Hand of Avei without being one, you can’t know what it’s like. Even if your grasp of history warns you that there’s always a bigger fish, that they always end up meeting something they can’t defeat in the end… A paladin is an inspiring presence. You believe they can do anything, no matter how stupid you know that is. You want to be the best version of yourself you can be to help them, if they welcome you into their circle.”

Trissiny kept silent as if afraid to distract her as the elf carried on in an uncharacteristically haunted voice.

“That was new, to me. And then, boom. She was dead. Just so much fucking dust. Sarsa was a wreck—those two were the kind of irrationally in love that mostly only happens in great adventure stories. Slap slap kiss, it was all very amusing and sweet until it turned into a tragedy. The others… And, well, the whole world started falling apart. The Empire was falling into civil war, three major cults were actively trying to tear down the Universal Church, the Collegium was collapsing as different kinds of magic users started slaughtering each other. Viridill full of orc refugees. It was a time when heroes were desperately needed. Sabah made me believe I could be something truly great. And suddenly she was gone, and I needed to step up. For my friends’ sake, if not the world’s.”

Her shoulders hunched as if she wanted to collapse in on herself.

“So, naturally, I fucked off to Onkawa to get some sun.”

“You’re not a coward,” Trissiny said quietly.

“Don’t—”

“I’d like to think you know by now I don’t do platitudes. I am very well acquainted with your faults, Locke, and cowardice isn’t one.”

“Of course it is,” Principia said bitterly. “I’m not afraid of pain or death, but my own feelings? Oh, that I just can’t face. Onkawa didn’t exactly work out either, shit was going down in every corner of the world and I immediately ended up neck-deep in Black Wreath nonsense, but at least that had nothing to do with me. There was nobody I cared about involved; it was damn well therapeutic.”

They were silent again for another minute. Trissiny just watched her, waiting.

“The only way I knew how to relate to people was the only safe way I managed with my mother and everyone else in the grove,” Principia whispered at last. “Long as I made enough of a pest of myself that nobody wanted me around…well, that was always how it ended up anyway, and I felt better when it was on my terms. I kept moving, didn’t keep any friends around for very long. The Guild is well set up for that kind of lifestyle. Then fucking Sabah came along and ruined everything. I never did manage to completely straighten myself out again after that.”

She glanced up at Trissiny again and then dropped her gaze immediately, avoiding her eyes.

“Part of it…that one child support con, the whole reason you exist… Well, I thought it would be good to have a child. And then I did and it was terrifying beyond the capacity of words to express. You can’t run from that; you can’t just leave them behind. To love someone that way means you will be shattered, completely broken down to your core, if you lose them.”

Principia paused, swallowed heavily, and spoke in a ragged breath.

“So…I got it out of the way, instead of waiting for it to happen to me. Thank the gods Arachne was around, or… I’m just so goddamned sorry, Trissiny. I chickened out, that was all there was to it. What it means to be truly connected to people… The vulnerability is horrifying.”

“Yeah,” Trissiny agreed, nodding once. “I wouldn’t want to live without it, though. Without people to love… What’s the point?”

“I get it, finally,” Principia said with a deep sigh. “My squad… Omnu’s balls, I’m amazed I’ve kept them alive this long. Between Syrinx and dragons and whatever else, it’s been a whole series of incredibly close shaves. And it’s just not gonna work forever. Soldiers die, that’s what they do, and I am going to lose some of those girls way too soon. I mean, I could live with Nandi kicking it, she’s been around forever and still hasn’t gotten over her own lost mate, but the others? They’re just kids. Brave, smart…the kind of heroic dumbshits I was supposed to be if I hadn’t run away instead.”

Drawing in a deep breath, she threw her head back to gaze up at the ceiling.

“What I do not get is why it’s such a relief. Both them, and you. Making peace with what it’s going to mean when someone else is taken from me and deliberately sticking by them anyway. I feel like I could piss myself from terror every moment I’m awake, and yet… I think I like it better this way. Is that normal?”

“Yes, Prin,” Trissiny said, smiling, “you ridiculous two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old child, that is normal.”

Principia lowered her head to meet her daughter’s eyes.

“That’s fucked up.”

Trissiny blinked once, and then began laughing so hard she fell over.

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15 – 48

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“Still?” Gabriel protested.

“This thing is some serious shit,” Ruda grunted, shifting position. “There, think I got it.”

The mithril blade of her rapier did cause the bars of the cage to dissolve, as they had guessed upon concluding that the thing was actually made of magic. Unfortunately, that meant it couldn’t be simply wedged into them to weaken it, as the slender blade could make contact with a maximum of four bars at a time, and on being touched they disintegrated, causing the blade to drop.

And the bars to re-form. That was the kicker; made of solid magic as it was, the relative ease of breaking the bars made no difference as they regenerated instantly. Joe’s wandshots made no lasting impact and the group had been unwilling to risk any less precise spells or energy attacks with Mary trapped inside. Even so, it was easy to make individual bars crumble, thanks simply to the unique arsenal in the group’s possession. The trick was getting them to stay that way.

Now Gabriel, Ruda, and Yngrid were huddled awkwardly around the cage, with the mithril rapier and both valkyrie scythes carefully positioned to press against as much of its outer surface as they could manage. They had made three small gaps in the cage’s coverage, and it still remained otherwise solid.

“Maybe if you move the scythes so they’re nullifying one continuous stretch of the bars?” Fross suggested, fluttering closer to inspect the two patches that had rusted away to nothing and failed to restore themselves so long as the reaper weapons remained in position.

“This is not as easy as it looks,” Yngrid said irritably. The long hafts and curved blades of her and Gabriel’s weapons made arranging them that way physically difficult, especially with the need to keep three people huddled around the tiny cage holding them there. And, most importantly, the need for everyone present to avoid touching one of those blades.

“Wow, that must be really challenging then,” Fross chimed innocently, “cos it doesn’t look easy at all.”

“Anyway, don’t think that’d help,” Gabriel muttered. “We can make gaps in the bars, but then the scythe blades are in those gaps, and she sure as hell doesn’t wanna touch those.”

Mary croaked desultory agreement, ruffling her feathers.

“What if she grabs the mithril?” Juniper suggested from behind them. “Maybe that would cure the transformation?”

“Bad idea,” said Gabriel. “You don’t wanna see what would happen if somebody suddenly expanded to twenty times their size while surrounded by unbreakable metal bars. We’d all be standing in a puddle of elf noodles.”

Mary began squawking in a constant staccato rhythm.

“We are working on it, Kuriwa,” Trissiny assured her. “I’m sorry, I know that can’t be comfortable, but it would be worse if we just tried to hammer that thing with spells.”

“Actually, that may be worth a try,” said Ariel. Mary’s squawks increased in pitch and volume.

“You have an idea, partner?” Gabriel asked tersely.

“The cage is both recycling its own expended energy and drawing ambient power to sustain itself; the intensity of both processes increases the more pressure is put upon it, and after the addition of the rapier those currents of magic have grown unstable. I believe a careful application of brute force at this juncture may shatter it entirely.”

“Sure doesn’t look like it’s givin’ up the ghost,” Ruda growled.

“Sophisticated magics intended for purposes of security rarely betray their weaknesses at a glance. That is rather the point of them.”

Mary squawked shrilly.

“Could you stop?” Gabriel snapped. “That isn’t helping! Aren’t you supposed to be some kind of shaman?”

“I don’t think she can actually use much in the way of magic in that form,” McGraw noted. “Never seen ‘er do it. For that matter, my friend Raea has an animal form, too, an’ she’s always limited herself to fangs an’ claws while usin’ it.”

Mary chattered at him angrily.

“Well, I’m sorry if I’m blowin’ your secrets,” the old man said wryly. “Unfortunately for you, I like you too much not to help get you outta that thing. You’ll just have to forgive me.”

“Aye, well, if it’s brute force we need,” Billie began, reaching into her pockets with both hands.

Everybody yelled at her so loudly that no individual exhortations were distinguishable.

“I never get to have any fun,” the gnome grumbled, turning away in a sulk.

“Well, let’s either come up with something or take a goddamn break,” Ruda complained, still hunched over the cage to hold her rapier in place in a careful posture that didn’t interfere with Gabriel or Yngrid, or bring her into contact with either scythe. “I’ve got cricks in places I didn’t fuckin’ know I had, here.”

“The original problem still applies,” Toby pointed out. “We can’t just pour magic at that thing while she’s in there…”

“I believe that if we sacrifice some power for precision, we still have methods at our disposal,” said Shaeine. “Allow me to try something.”

A silver sphere slightly smaller than the cage appeared above it, then pressed downward. The shield bubble flickered and sparked from the pressure, continuing to push itself against the cage until the brass bars trembled. There was no other visible effect.

“That is further destabilizing the flow of restorative magic,” Ariel reported. “An additional source of pressure may finish breaking the spell entirely.”

“Well, then, let’s try this again,” said Joe, drawing his wands.

There was a tangle of bodies arranged all around the cage, but tiny gaps existed between them, and that was all he needed. Rather than attempting to explain this and reassure everyone, he shot first, dispatching two clean beams of light into the cage itself. One, the angles being what they were, only struck and disintegrated a single bar, but the second he was able to position such that the beam pierced two on its path through.

“What the fuck!?” Ruda shouted. “Watch what you’re—oh, hey.”

For those not immediately clustered around the cage, the first sign of success was the crow herself shooting upward out of the group, cawing triumphantly. Ruda, Gabriel and Yngrid all stepped back, carefully disentangling their weapons, just quick enough to afford the rest of those assembled a last sight of the cage, which now lay in metallic strips stretched outward from its base as if it had burst open at the top, unfurling its bars like a flower. In fact, it died rather like a flower, the strands of brass curling up and rusting away to dust before their eyes, until seconds later the last scraps had dissolved to nothing.

Mary spent this fleeting moment circling overhead, evidently just because she could, before settling to the ground. By the time everyone turned from the spectacle of the disintegrating magical cage, she was an elf again. Shifting to face the group directly, Mary curved her upper body forward in a gesture that fell between a deep nod and a shallow bow.

“Thank you very much for the assistance, children.”

“Oh, I’m sure you woulda gotten out of there eventually,” Gabriel remarked, shrinking his scythe down to tuck away in his pocket, a performance Yngrid watched with a small frown. “Prin seemed to think so, anyway.”

“In all likelihood, yes, but I am no less grateful nonetheless. I find nothing enjoyable about languishing in a cage for any period. Now, with that addressed, there are more important matters.”

She turned and strode toward Principia, who was still laid out on the cracked pavement, now draped by a blanket and with Merry sitting by her head. At Mary’s approach, the other Legionnaire rose to her feet, eyes narrowing.

“Kuriwa,” Trissiny said, moving to intercept her, “I don’t think what Locke needs right now is more punishment.”

Mary actually stopped, raising an eyebrow at the paladin. “The concept of punishment, Trissiny, is only applicable to people who understand precisely what is happening to them and why. Tormenting an unconscious victim is nothing but pointless sadism. I have my faults, but I hope you don’t think that is among them.”

“Right,” Trissiny said vaguely. “Just checking.”

“On the contrary,” Mary continued in a lower tone, taking the last steps to Principia’s side and sinking to her knees, “I am concerned chiefly for the girl’s well-being. Everything else aside, what she just went through was clearly traumatic for multiple reasons, not least of which that having excess data pumped into an unprepared brain can damage it significantly. The magelords of Syralon have been known to use that as a punishment before even they outlawed the practice as too cruel.”

There was a constant and usually soft whistle of wind across the plateau; as Mary reached out to place her fingertips along the side of Principia’s face, it shifted in tone. The effect was subtle, likely expressing itself as a subconscious sense of harmony to some of those present, but those with acute hearing or musical training could discern that the voice of the wind itself had shifted to a flawless three-tone harmony in major key.

“My thanks again, priestess,” Mary said, turning her head toward Shaeine with another deep nod. “Your instincts were correct, and your quick action likely saved her from serious harm. Her mind is undamaged, but still struggling to process the sheer volume of material. I can aid her recuperation by way of an elemental blessing that will purge foreign contamination. This is usually meant as a counter to curses and the like; adapting it for this purpose may be tricky. Please give me quiet in which to concentrate. Mind magic is the province of the divine, and achieving these effects through the fae requires great exactitude.”

“Okay, well, I’ll ask everybody’s forgiveness in advance because this is a pretty ruthless thing to suggest,” said Gabriel, raising both his hands in a gesture of surrender, “but maybe that’s not the best course of action? As long as Locke’s not in urgent danger, we should think about letting her have some extra time to sleep if it means she wakes up with that knowledge intact. To say nothing of the immediate stuff going on, like whatever she was warning us about in N’Jendo and Veilgrad, the sheer scope of knowledge…”

“That is ruthless, Gabe,” Toby said with a frown. “Who knows what kind of strain that’s putting on her, even with Shaeine’s help?”

“He’s not wrong,” Mary said curtly, “and the suggestion has merit, but in this case it is not up for discussion. Principia is a child of my own blood. And while her actions here have added up to possibly the single most wrong-headed thing I have ever seen anyone do, it was nonetheless a courageous act, undertaken to protect young people under her care. I will not suffer her to be permanently harmed for it. Besides, I want her good and lucid when I am explaining to her in exquisite nuance the depth of her poor judgment.”

“What,” Ruda snorted, “so the difference is she’s one of yours, so you’re throwing all greater concerns out the window and claiming privilege?”

Mary had lowered her eyes to stare fixedly at Principia’s face. Now she lifted her gaze to meet Ruda’s, impassively. “Correct.”

McGraw cleared his throat. “Don’t pull that thread, miss. Sometimes you just gotta make allowances for people who can blast you over the horizon.”

“Yeah, thanks for the advice, but we all have a history class with one of those,” Fross chimed.

“All right, fair enough,” Ruda said with a shrug. “I gotta mention, Boots, your granny reminds me of Naphthene.”

“Ouch,” Trissiny drawled.

While they chattered, the light around Principia had gently shifted, taking on a pattern of shadows over the prone elf as if waves were being reflected about her. Merry was frowning in unease, alternately at this and at Mary, but had not yet decided to intervene. Quite suddenly, though, Mary straightened up, her eyes widening, and the light vanished.

“What happened?” Trissiny demanded, turning toward her.

“Well,” the Crow mused, raising one eyebrow and gazing down at Principia in renewed interest. “Never mind, I suppose.”

“Never mind?” Trissiny exclaimed. “What, is she…?”

“She’s fine,” Mary assured her. “Better by far than I expected, in fact. It appears that she is being taken care of. Further intervention by me will not be necessary. Nor would it be welcomed.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“With this no longer a cause for immediate concern, there remains another matter we urgently need to address,” Mary said seriously, straightening up and turning toward her. “What exactly is that mask, and where did it come from?”

The tension increased palpably as the assembled students stared either at her or at Trissiny. No one answered.

“In all my many years,” Mary continued after a short silence, “I have never observed an artifact that could reproduce a powerful being from the age of the Elder Gods, in the person of whoever used it. I infer from your brief mentions of the subject that it can grant its wearer the gifts of a variety of persons. I am also, being attuned to the currents of fae magic, not unaware that some event of world-altering significance occurred in this vicinity a few days ago. The dots are not difficult to connect. I think you children had better start explaining yourselves.”

“Yeah, we’ve kinda made peace with that,” Juniper said. “The explaining, I mean. When we get home to Last Rock, Tellwyrn’s probably gonna chew us into mulch. I don’t really think we need to explain anything to you, though.”

“No offense intended,” Toby added.

Mary half-turned to stare pensively at the Great Tree rising in the near distance for a moment. “I suppose the sequence of events which led to this point is less important than that which must follow. With regard to that, however, there is the future to consider.” She turned her stare on Fross. “You still have that mask. What, precisely, is your plan for it? I should hardly need to tell you that such a thing cannot simply be allowed to tumble around the world unsupervised.”

“Oh. Really?” Ruda turned to direct a wide-eyed stare at her classmates. “Hey, guys, turns out that fuckin’ thing can’t be allowed to tumble around the world unsupervised. Holy shit did we miscalculate! Maybe we shouldn’t pawn it, after all.”

“Ruda,” Trissiny said quietly, “don’t. Not with this one.”

“Uh, yeah, ‘scuze me,” Joe added. “Mary, I know these folks, an’ there ain’t a thing wrong with their intelligence.”

Weaver snorted very loudly.

“I have a high opinion of Trissiny’s faculties in general,” Mary replied, “and her tacit endorsement of the rest of this group counts for a lot, in my view. All other things being equal… But things are not. I can imagine no sequence of events which would lead to the creation of that artifact which does not presuppose that Principia’s complete lapse of all sense and reason was not the first to take place here recently.”

“It was Arquin’s idea, just for the record,” said Ruda.

“I don’t care whose idea it was,” Mary said, her voice rising slightly. “I care what is done about it. This, I am aware, is the last thing an independent group of young people ever wants to hear from anyone—”

“Don’t say it,” McGraw warned. She ignored him.

“—but you had better let me take it.” Mary turned to stare expressively at Principia. “Before it causes even worse harm than it already has.”

Joe pinched the bridge of his nose and grimaced into his fist. Billie puckered her lips as if to whistle, but produced no sound, just glancing around at everyone else present. Yngrid gripped the haft of her scythe in both hands, looking warily at Gabriel.

All eight students just stared impassively at Mary.

“With stakes like this,” she said softly, “make no mistake, I will not hesitate—”

“Kuriwa,” Trissiny interrupted, “please believe that I’m very grateful for all the help you’ve given me. I love you and have absolutely no intention of ever causing you any upset. And you are not, under any circumstances, getting your hands on that mask.”

The Crow sighed very softly. “Can we not find room to negotiate on that point?”

“If you’re thinking about trying to take it by force,” Gabriel said evenly, “think a lot more carefully. None of us is capable of sticking you in a cage, lady. All we’ve got is sharp objects and massive firepower to hit you with.”

“And none of us wants to do that,” Shaeine added. “You are honored kin to Trissiny, who is precious to all of us. The safety of the world, and the responsibility for actions we have set into motion, must supersede those concerns, however.”

“Yeah, so, please don’t push us on this one,” said Fross.

“The safety of the world,” Mary said, a tinge of bitterness creeping into her voice. “What, then, is your idea to ensure it?”

“We’re gonna give it to Professor Tellwyrn,” Juniper replied.

Mary clenched both fists; the very breeze around them suddenly blew colder. “That is absolutely—”

“The single best idea I’ve ever heard out of these twerps,” Weaver interrupted. “You weren’t there, Mary, but the rest of us have already been through this, back during the Belosiphon affair. When faced with the question of what to do with an impossibly dangerous artifact that nobody could ever be allowed to have, the least terrible solution we could come up with was letting Tellwyrn have it.”

“Arachne,” Mary spat. “That reckless, aggressive, thoughtless—”

“You want things, Kuriwa,” Trissiny said. “Tellwyrn may be all of that and worse, but she also has no ambition. All she wants to do is sit on her mountain and teach. She has everything in the world she’s after. You? You’ve got plans and an agenda. If you had the Mask, there’s no question that you’d use it toward your ends. This is not about us thinking Tellwyrn would find a better use for it. This is because she would have no use.”

“It is incredible to me that you could believe that,” Mary retorted. “I have known her a great deal longer than any of you, and trust me—”

“Arachne Tellwyrn is a creature of vastly more discretion and restraint than basically anyone gives her credit for,” Yngrid interjected. “Even my sisters know of her… Well, actually, some of that’s secret. But for what it’s worth, I agree. She’s already got too much power to be tempted by a thing like that and nothing she would actually want to do with it.”

Weaver stepped up beside the valkyrie, sliding an arm around her waist. “And it’s academic, besides. Tellwyrn already has a whole collection of dangerous objects of about this caliber, which nobody’s seen hide nor hair of since she got them. We know she can be trusted to hide things and not touch them.”

“No,” Mary snapped, “you know she can be trusted so far. None of you have seen Arachne backed into a corner, desperate, or enraged beyond reason. I have. The best I can say about it is that in the past, she had no such collection of horrors upon which to draw. And now you want to add to it?”

“Yeah, okay, but…why are you better?” Teal asked.

Mary turned to her. “For better than four thousand years, I have walked this world doing my best to protect it.”

“Good fuckin’ job,” Gabriel snorted. “Cos as we all know, nobody’s ever terrified by the name Mary the Crow.”

“They talked about you in the grove, when I was there,” Juniper added. “The Elders made it sound like you really only bother to protect the elves. Actually…they didn’t sound super grateful for your help.”

“They really aren’t,” Trissiny said quietly. “I’ve mostly heard about it from my grandmother, and a story from one source can be inaccurate, but the way Lanaera tells it the only people who are less happy to have Kuriwa’s sudden help than the elves in general are her own descendants in particular.”

“I see her elevation to grove Elder has done nothing to blunt that nest of brambles Lanaera calls a tongue,” Mary grated.

“Mary,” Joe said gently, taking a step forward. “Look, I dunno anything about you and other elves. What I know is that all of us have learned to trust you.” He gestured toward the rest of his party with one hand. “You’ve saved all our butts more than once, and I for one really appreciate having the benefit of your experience. I feel like I’ve learned an incredible amount from you.”

“But?” Mary prompted bitterly.

“But,” he echoed with a slow nod. “I think Trissiny’s right. Nobody needs to have that mask, not if it does the kind of stuff we just saw. It ain’t a question of who’s got a better purpose for it. It should go to somebody who’ll lock it away an’ forget about it. And Tellwyrn’s the only name that comes to mind.”

“Esteemed elder, forgive my frank speech, but we must call this what it is,” Shaeine said solemnly. “Your perspective is understandable: for ages you have labored hard and done your best, making difficult choices to guide the world to the best outcomes you could manage. You have learned in that time to rely only on yourself. It is understandable that you are reluctant to trust anyone else with possession of such power, accustomed as you are to the assumption that if you want something done right, you must do it. Am I wrong?”

“I cannot say that you are,” Mary replied, mastering her expression.

“And that’s fair,” Teal agreed, nodding. “But…everybody thinks that about themselves. We are each one of us the hero in our own story. But to pull back and look through the perspectives of others… Does your record of actual achievements really suggest you’re the most qualified to take on a burden like that?”

“I begin to wonder,” she said stonily, “if I am wasting my time trying to talk about this with you.”

Gabriel drew his wand back out. “I really hope that wasn’t meant the way it sounded.”

“Kuriwa.” Trissiny stepped forward until she was a few bare feet from Mary, staring her in the eye. “Let me be clear: I don’t know whether or not you have the physical capacity to seize that mask from us, but even if so, that would only be the beginning. If I have to press the issue, the next time I do so it will be with Lanaera, Rainwood, and Zanzayed, plus anyone of our bloodline they know who would think it a valuable use of their time to humble you and take an artifact of power out of your hands.”

“Child,” Mary said sardonically, “if you think to get more than two of our family to tolerate one another’s company for more than an hour, much less cooperate toward a common end, I sincerely wish you luck.”

“You haven’t managed it,” Trissiny replied softly, “because you’ve never been able to offer them the one goal on which they would all agree: thwarting you.”

They locked eyes, and slowly, Mary’s wry expression melted away to a flat stare of displeasure.

“What,” Ruda snorted, “so even her own descendants would rally to mess her up over this? And you wanna go and claim you’re the most competent person who could be trusted with that mask? Fuck you, lady.”

“Hey, now, maybe we should all take it easy,” McGraw said soothingly, tucking his staff into the crook of his arm so he could raise both hands peaceable as he stepped forward. “Mary, given the disparity in our levels of experience, I’ve never tried to pitch myself as your equal, but with all due respect, I reckon there’s one area of understanding where your agelessness leaves you at a disadvantage.”

Mary finally tore her eyes away from Trissiny’s to turn a weary grimace on him. “Oh, do tell.”

“There comes a point,” he said, “where a person’s just gotta acknowledge that their time has passed. That the best use o’ their talents is in offering the benefit of their years to the younger generation, steppin’ back and lettin’ ’em take over.”

“Aye, ain’t that more or less exactly what grove Elders do?” Billie added.

“That’s what Tellwyrn’s done,” Juniper said softly.

“As much as any group of kids I’ve ever met, I reckon these know what they’re about,” McGraw continued, nodding at the students. “I ain’t sayin’ everything they do’s gonna be the right call or that they won’t mess up and create havoc now’n again. But if you’re gonna try to fix that, well, you’re not just dealin’ with this one specific situation anymore. You’ll have set yourself up to straighten out somethin’ absolutely fundamental to the world, and honestly, even your talents ain’t equal to that task.”

Mary stared at him for a moment, then at Trissiny, then Gabriel, and finally at the comatose form of Principia.

“This conversation is not over,” she said abruptly. “But…you have all given me some important things to ponder. Thank you, again, for helping me out of that trap.”

She turned away from them and strode off. The entire group stared in silence as the ancient elf went right up to the edge of the plateau, facing the Great Tree in the distance, and squatted on her heels in a posture not unlike a roosting bird. There, she fell still.

“So,” Brother Toraldt said loudly from the far edge of the gathering, “shall I infer that we are yet again not going to depart today?”

Everyone turned to stare at him.

Sister Elaine sighed, even as she stifled a small smile, and patted the dwarf on the shoulder. “Come, Toraldt, we may as well go unload the packs again.”

“Again,” he huffed, but turned and followed her around the corner of the nearest building. The rest of the group watched in silence until their two Order of the Light guides were once more out of sight.

“Okay, I’ll be honest,” Fross stage whispered. “I completely forgot they were here.”

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“Here.” Trissiny took two steps to the side and handed the golden cage to Joe, prompting Mary to flap and croak indignantly within. “Would you mind?”

“Uh, sure,” he said uncertainly, taking it from her. “I mean, not at all. What’s…?”

Her hands free, Trissiny stepped forward, cracking her knuckles. In the space of one stride, her gait seemed to shift from her usual stiff bearing to something subtly evocative of a slouch, even though she still stood straight enough to pass for a soldier. The nuance was as impressive for how difficult it was to pin down as for how fast she had drawn it over herself like a cloak.

“And so, here we are,” Trissiny drawled. “The great Keys finally becomes the victim of a con. Spectacularly. When you fail, you don’t fail halfway, do you?”

Principia had returned her focus to the screens orbiting her, but at that glanced again down at Trissiny through a gap between them. Only for a second, though.

“You want to change strategies less abruptly in the future, Trissiny. I’m pleased that you’ve learned to project a front, but doing it so brazenly makes the ploy quite transparent, especially to people who know you. The tactic is sound, your technique just needs refining.”

“Thanks for the tip,” Trissiny said lightly, her smirk not faltering for having been pointed out as a facade. “But don’t change the subject: we’re talking about you, not me. You’d expect a thief a bare few months on from being tagged to fumble now and again, but you’re Principia freaking Locke, the great con artist, centuries-old player of the game and veteran of a thousand capers. You getting utterly bamboozled is actually news worth noting.”

“I am processing a quantity of information that would cause your brain to shut down if you were exposed to it. The idea that I could be bamboozled—”

“I’m talking about what you don’t see, not what you can’t see. Anyway, don’t feel too bad. It would be a story for the ages if you outfoxed a trickster god. Getting outfoxed by one is only natural.”

“If you’re referring to Vesk, that has been dealt with. Thanks to me, whatever he planned for Gabriel was circumvented.”

“That just goes to show that more knowledge isn’t more understanding,” Trissiny snapped. “You were actually smarter before putting that thing on! The Principia I know never claimed to be perfect. She faced her mistakes and tried to fix them. She was confident in her skills, but never so arrogant she assumed no one could beat her. Because she was smart enough to know that overconfidence immediately leads to a fall!”

This earned her another direct look from Principia, this one more lingering. “If you have a compelling theory explaining how Vesk has outmaneuvered me, offer it. That would be relevant, if correct.”

“Think about what happened. He’s been setting you up over the long haul, Keys, starting when he intervened with your squad in Tiraas. That planted the idea in your head that when he meddled, you—and people you cared about—would be exposed to risks and costs to achieve whatever story he was trying to tell. And then he showed up here, just as the Mask was being created, and said…what? The way you described it, he did nothing but mumble dire warnings and portents of great doom. Right when you were here, under enormous pressure. There’s whatever you’re doing for Rouvad that you need to be in good with the University for, Tellwyrn’s threats of revenge if anything happened to us. You trying to rebuild some good faith with Teal and Shaeine, while everybody made you a punching bag for practical jokes. And…we both know every minute you’re around me you’re constantly reminded of how horribly you’ve screwed up our relationship, and how much you want to fix it. Vesk dropped into the middle of that stew and set you to fearing for all of us, and the very next thing you learned was about the Mask and all the trouble it’s bound to be at the center of. You were good and primed to be spooked so hard even your self-control slipped, Prin. And that’s when Gabe was called away, alone, in a move you would easily recognize as a story trope. There’s no way Vesk didn’t know Vidius was going to react that way. Heck, I bet he prompted Vidius to time it when he did.”

“Actually,” said Gabriel, “I don’t think—”

“I do think,” McGraw interrupted, then turned, looking to his own companions for confirmation. “We talked about this amongst us when setting out, remember? We inadvertently brought Mr. Arquin there by helping Weaver un-doom his doomed romance. That was only possible because we had somebody who’d been there before: Joe.”

“And I was there,” Joe said slowly, “at the behest of my friend Jenny, the so-called Shifter, who according to Mary has been associated with Vesk in the past.”

“She works for him directly,” Toby said quietly. “We’ve seen her in Vesk’s own personal citadel.”

“Oi, yer one of ‘is own bards, aye?” Billie asked, punching Weaver in the knee. “Just outta curiosity, did this improbable love story between some random guitar-strummin’ arsehole and a freakin’ extra-dimensional specter o’ death ‘appen ta start off in some kinda bizzare circumstance that mighta been prompted by a certain god?”

Weaver and Yngrid said nothing, but looked at each other, their eyes wide in an expression of realization that was as good as any answer.

“Ho. Lee. Ssssshit,” Gabriel hissed. “That magnificent bastard.”

Mary squawked and fluttered furiously, rattling her cage.

“Well, I will say it makes sense fer a trickster deity to play his games on a particularly grand scale,” McGraw drawled.

“You got conned, Keys,” Trissiny said bluntly. “He got you thinking emotionally instead of with your wits, and then gave you exactly the jab he knew would make you jump. Every Eserite knows that life’s a game: as long as you’re treating it that way, you keep your emotions out of your way and avoid tensing up so bad you can’t react. Vesk put you under every kind of simultaneous pressure he could bring to bear, made you think about what was at stake instead of what you were doing. You stopped playing, for probably the first time in a century, and you immediately lost. Take the lesson, Keys, and stop doubling down on your screwup. You’ve lost; it’s time to walk away.”

Principia had already gone utterly still, her eyes fixed straight ahead and hands suspended in the act of reaching to poke at more screens. As Trissiny finished speaking, even the rotating panels of light around her stilled, fixing themselves in place and ceasing to alter their displays. She hung that way as if frozen in the five seconds of silence which followed, before finally speaking a single word.

“Plausible.”

Trissiny let out a soft breath, releasing tension she’d been concealing. Gabriel and several of the others ventured small smiles of relief, and Mary began muttering unintelligibly to herself in her hoarse avian voice, ruffling her feathers.

“But irrelevant.”

The panels resumed their cycling and Principia went back to glancing about and periodically touching them as if nothing had happened.

“However we came to this point, the situation is what it is. Our intervention is required—”

“Why, though?” Teal stepped forward, her hands jammed in the pockets of her blazer, and looked up at the levitating elf with an openly inquisitive expression. “What, exactly, are you trying to accomplish, Locke? Because you’re supposed to be protecting this student group, and I don’t see how dropping a bunch of adventurers onto us and then sending us into some kind of disaster in N’Jendo is doing that.”

“If you decline to render aid, Mrs. Falconer, I will not compel you. I will be disappointed, but forcing action on your part would defeat the purpose.”

“Hey, don’t get me wrong.” Teal pulled her hands out and held them up in a placating gesture. “I’m all for protecting the innocent. But here’s the thing: I have zero idea who you are and what your agenda is. We’ve just heard a thorough rundown of why you are not behaving or thinking at all like our Lieutenant Locke, not to mention a pretty spooky case study of what can happen when an all-powerful being is allowed to pull strings behind the scenes. I think I speak for everyone when I say we’ll be glad to help if our help is needed, but we don’t know what you’re thinking or what you’re after. Doing anything on orders from you is going to require some trust. Principia has earned some, much to my surprise, but it’s clear whatever we knew or felt about her doesn’t apply to whoever I’m talking with now.”

There was another short pause.

“The concern is not unreasonable,” Principia said curtly. “What would reassure you?”

“Well,” Teal shrugged, “what exactly kind of a thing are you supposed to be? What was the word you guys used…?”

“She’s an Archon, apparently,” said Gabriel. “A chief servitor of one of the Elder Gods. Tarthriss, in this case, according to the Avatar we were just speaking with in the Golden Sea.”

“That fucking thing really can reproduce people from before the Elder War?” Ruda muttered. “Fuck a fuckin’ duck.”

“Reproduce people?” Joe muttered. He got no response, save perhaps the sudden utter stillness of Mary in the cage he was still holding.

“Okay, so, that’s troubling,” Teal said frankly. “You’re a servant of a being who is obviously dead. Whose agenda are you following now?”

“I have already answered that,” Principia replied, impatience entering her tone. “I am acting on orders from Avei.”

“What orders?” Trissiny demanded.

“That is classified. Yes, General Avelea, even to you, unless the High Commander or Avei herself countermands that order. I calculate a high probability of the latter, as your active involvement in this plan would obviously be advantageous.”

“And when Avei set out to doing this,” said Fross, “was she leveraging a certain very clever thief in her employ? Or do you think she was planning on you using an impossibly dangerous magical artifact that didn’t even exist at the time in order to become a long-extinct class of Elder God servitor which it sounds like she herself deliberately wiped off the face of the earth? Cos there’s several jumps in there and they kinda suggest this is not what Avei sent you out to do.”

“Any military commander must know the assets she has in the field in order to deploy them properly,” Shaeine agreed. “If you presume to be acting in Avei’s service, Lieutenant, it is basic sense that in the aftermath of such a drastic development, you should seek out updated orders before acting further.”

“Unfeasible,” Principia stated. “Gods are not so easily approached directly.”

“I can arrange that, you know,” Trissiny pointed out.

“Unnecessary!”

“Unless,” Trissiny drawled, “there’s some reason you don’t want to hear the goddess’s opinion of your actions here.”

“My actions are consistent with Legion doctrine! Operatives in the field are expected to react to changing circumstances and apply their best judgment as necessary.”

“I’m pretty sure there are no Legion doctrines that even try to cover this,” Merry protested. “I mean, Avelea’s not here to correct me, but I’m willing to bet on that.”

“Different Avelea,” Joe explained as Gabriel turned to frown in confusion at Trissiny.

“Leaving aside Legion regulations,” said Trissiny, “you are still an Eserite. Whatever responsibilities you’ve been given, I have to assume you’re Eserite first and foremost. Knowledge is power, Locke, and it follows that absolute knowledge is absolute power. What does power do to people?”

“You will not distract me by quoting—”

“Then forget Eserion and Avei both!” Trissiny shouted. “If you have access to all the knowledge of the Elder Gods, I assume they knew things about psychology that have been long since forgotten. How does power affect the brain, Locke?”

Another silence fell. The rotating panels seemed to glitch, momentarily reversing their course and then freezing for a second. It was hard to tell behind the mini-screens bristling from her crown, but Principia appeared to be frowning slightly.

“I… Irrelevant. I have the full faculties of—”

“Of a chief servant of the most infamously power-mad beings that have ever existed?” Teal finished. “Are you beginning to see why this is a tough sell, Locke?”

“Not to interrupt,” Toby said quietly, “but there’s something I can’t help noticing. A couple of times now, people addressing you have spoken of Principia Locke as if she were a separate person, not party to this conversation. And you didn’t correct either one. Also, you yourself spoke pretty disdainfully of Principia before. Is that even still you in there?”

“I have been improved upon,” she said stiffly.

“Well, I obviously don’t have all the knowledge you do,” Toby replied, “but I don’t think so. I’m not trying to excuse Principia’s flaws, but the truth is I like her. She isn’t all-knowing, but she’s experienced and clever. I’ve developed the impression that I’m probably never going to agree with Principia’s methods of doing anything, but even so, I understood her goals, and they’re good ones. Prin cares about people, and about values, and does her best to do some good in the world, in her own way. I trust that a lot more than some detached information-processing servitor making abstract plans for me and who knows how many other people. And I think I know what Prin would say about someone like that, too.”

“I don’t care what she would say!” the floating elf burst out, audibly agitated now. “You don’t understand. With nothing but a single limited point of perspective, there’s so little you can do, and yet so very much damage you can cause! Principia Locke has ruined everything she ever touched; I can fix it.”

“You shut your FUCKING mouth!” Merry roared. “Locke has fought tooth and nail to protect our squad when everybody else in the world wanted us dead, and she succeeded against the most ridiculous odds! I don’t know who or what you even are and I don’t care. You don’t talk about her that way!”

“I understand,” Toby said, his quiet voice a stark contrast to Merry’s anger. “You got a sudden view of your whole life from a new perspective, and the realization hurt. I really do understand.”

“You understand nothing,” Principia spat. “You have neither the ability to perceive what I do, nor the history of selfishness and destruction I have to—”

“He does, though,” Juniper cut in, stepping forward. “And so do I. Not in the same way as you, any more than Toby and I had the same exact experience, but you’d better believe we get it. The moment of insight when you realize how horrible you’ve been is agony like nothing else I’ve ever imagined. And here’s something else I can tell you about living through that: if you try to run from it, you’ll only make it worse. You have to face what you’ve done, let it hurt, and do better.”

“You don’t understand,” Principia repeated, her voice outright pleading now. All around her, the glowing panels had begun spinning so fast she couldn’t possibly be reading them, for all that her eyes kept darting without resting in one position for an instant. “There’s so much going wrong in the world, but from here I can do something about it! I can at least make up for…”

“Locke,” Merry said, insistently but far more calmly than before. “You can’t save the world. The world is not for saving. Trust me, that’s the thinking of the kind of dumb, chapbook-addled teenager who tries to walk into the Golden Sea to become a hero. That’s what I do understand. The world is always going to be fucked up; it’s supposed to be. If it wasn’t, that would mean nobody had any choices or agency. No flaws means no virtues. A perfect world would be hell. Everything’s a mess, and everybody is supposed to do whatever they can, with whatever they have, wherever they are. You’re not supposed to make yourself some kind of demigod, that’ll just end up adding to the world’s problems. If you try to take away other people’s responsibility to help fix things, you are taking their power to become better.”

“Well put,” McGraw said, tipping his hat to her.

“We’re not going to take orders from you,” Trissiny said quietly. “Not from…this. All of us will do what we can, where we are, using our best judgment, just as Tellwyrn taught us. If you turn yourself into…whatever this is…that’s nothing but a loss. We’ll have lost someone smart and motivated to help just when we need her the most.”

“That’s not fair,” Principia protested. Several of the screens began to wink out of existence, creating gaps in the translucent globe around her.

“It’s not just a loss in the strategic sense,” Trissiny added, lowering her eyes and turning away. “I was just starting to like you a little bit. If you…if the woman I was getting to know is just…gone, now, then… Damn it. I already miss her.” She emitted a short, startled bark of laughter. “I’m just as surprised as you.”

“I just…” The last of the screens vanished. Principia hung there—not just hovered, hung, with her arms dangling at her sides and her head drooping forward in a defeated posture. “I thought I could… It would all be better without the mess I was. Just…intelligence and a plan, and maybe I could make up for everything.”

“Nobody’s not a mess, you goober,” Gabriel said with a wry grin. “That’s normal. It’s healthy. Life’s about embracing your flaws and making strengths of them, not throwing them away. Without flaws, what the hell are you? How are you supposed to improve if you don’t have screwups to learn from?”

“You can’t make up for anything,” Juniper added. “The past doesn’t work that way; it’s done. You have to become a better person and do better things.”

“Take that thing off and come down from there, Keys,” Trissiny said gently. “We need you. While you’re fucking around with magical artifacts, the bastards are out there winning.”

Mary croaked softly.

Principia stared disconsolately at the ground for an interminable moment.

Then, abruptly as if trying to surprise herself before she could react, she grabbed her own face and pulled.

The Mask came free and immediately tumbled from her hands, and she plummeted toward the ground.

Trissiny darted forward with her arms outstretched and Principia tumbled right into them, her head lolling back. Fross swooped in as the Mask of the Adventurer went spinning off to the side, seizing the artifact and making it disappear back into her aura storage before circling back to rejoin the group.

“She’s… I don’t know what’s wrong!” Trissiny said in alarm, gently laying Principia on the ground. “This didn’t happen to anybody else who tried it on!”

The elf was still slumped weakly, but now began to twitch violently, her eyes rolled up into her head.

Shaeine had already darted forward to kneel at Principia’s other side. Reaching out to place one hand on her forehead, the drow closed her eyes, frowning in concentration.

Principia stilled, then let out a heavy sigh and finally relaxed, her head rolling to one side as Shaeine withdrew her hand.

“What happened?” Trissiny demanded.

“I put her to sleep,” said Shaeine. “A simple, natural sleep, the only kind I can grant. I do think it’s the best thing for her, Trissiny. I’m not able to interpret thoughts or even emotions, but when I touch someone’s mind that way I do get a general sense of it. A mind, to my awareness, feels much like a deep pool. Something with a serene surface but great depths beneath. Principia’s, just now, was boiling.”

“You two weren’t with us in Puna Dara,” Gabriel said, leaning over them with a worried frown. “The Avatar we met under the city had had his mind stuffed with a constant stream of information. That would make anybody crazy. You just can’t pour unlimited data into a brain that’s not meant to handle it.”

“Will she…” Trissiny cut herself off, swallowing heavily.

“I don’t know,” Shaeine said, reaching out to grasp her hand. “There is no precedent of any kind for this. But I do believe sleep will help her, Trissiny. Dreaming is how the brain sorts away extra information; that is why people begin to go mad if deprived of sleep. She needs to dream. I suspect she will sleep much longer than normal, and I strongly advise that she be allowed to. We should not wake or try to move her until she comes to on her own.”

“And then, we’ll…find out,” Merry whispered, kneeling at Principia’s head and gently smoothing back a lock of black hair that had been disturbed.

“Well,” Juniper offered, “at least we got to her before Vesk got what he wanted. I mean, it’s not much, but it’s a little satisfying that the person who set all this up didn’t get away with it.”

“I would strongly advise against ever thinking you’ve put one over on Vesk,” Weaver said even more sourly than usual. “Sounds like that’s exactly what got her into this situation.”

“Yeah, I have to agree with Grumpypants on this one,” said Gabriel, frowning deeply. “Think about it. If this was a chapbook and suddenly some random-ass thing happened out of nowhere and brought every plotline that was going on into one place for no good reason…well, I’d probably put the book down.”

“Yeah, famous arbiter of literary taste you are,” Ruda said solemnly.

“I just mean,” he snapped, shooting her a look, “Vesk is the actual god of bards. Do you think he’d set up something so hacky and contrived?”

“He’s right,” Teal said grimly. “We talked Locke down before actually getting shunted off to deal with…whatever it is. But now we know there’s something big about to go down in N’Jendo where our help would be useful, and we know there’s somebody in Veilgrad who can help us deal with it. And it’s not like we can just ignore that knowledge, now is it?”

“Not like we can really do anything about it, either,” Fross pointed out. “I’ve been working on learning teleportation but I’m at the level of moving erasers across the classroom. I’m not about to try to send people, especially not over that distance, especially not this big a group, and most especially not people I care about.”

“Try it on Weaver?” Billie suggested. “Fer science!”

“My point is,” the pixie chimed in clear exasperation, “at a walking speed, which is all we’ve got to work with, getting down from here to anywhere is going to take days at least, and that’s after waiting for Locke to wake up. Which might also take days.”

“Now, I’m not real clear on exactly what that mask thing is or does,” McGraw said, “but it clearly helped Prin perform an impossible teleport, and we do still have it—”

“NO!” almost everyone shouted in unison.

“That thing has done quite enough damage,” Trissiny added, gently folding Principia’s limp hands on her chest. “Let’s not borrow any more trouble. If we’re still caught in Vesk’s narrative, I don’t doubt for a moment that something else will come up before we know it. In the meantime, everyone should take a breather while we can. For the moment, at least, everything is back to normal.”

Mary began screeching, squawking, and flapping about in her cage so violently that Joe had to struggle to keep his grip on it.

“Oh,” Trissiny winced. “Right. Almost everything.”

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It was hard to know where to look first, and that was not even counting the distraction of everyone’s ears popping as they abruptly moved from the Golden Sea to the cooler, thinner air of the mountains. The plateau itself, an ancient plaza surrounded by stone buildings, might have been any moderately well-preserved patch of ruins anywhere, but beyond it was the stark grandeur of the Wyrnrange stretching in all directions, and the incredible shape of the Great Tree commanding the whole horizon to the north.

More immediately present, though, were the people.

The class of 1182 themselves were clustered together in a tight arc facing the teleport’s arrival point, while off to the other side stood a Silver Legionnaire with a corporal’s insignia next to a human woman and a dwarf man in sensible traveling attire. Both groups were easy to overlook, however, in the presence of Principia Locke.

Her black hair was tied back in a sleek tail not wholly unlike a Legion regulation braid, and further constrained by a silvery apparatus resembling a crown fitted most of the way around her skull, its front apertures bristling with tiny translucent panels attached to spidery silver arms, positioned where she could see them peripherally without blocking her forward vision. Patterns of light flickered across the metal band of the crown, and on the metallic trim of her glossy white robes. Whatever material they were made of did not look like fabric, though it moved easily enough; it gleamed as if it were metallic itself, and was further augmented by structural traceries of what might have been steel or possibly mithril, these further augmented in places by tiny lights of various colors. Huge, heavy-looking bracers covered her forearms, also bedecked with lights and set along their backs with long display panels, and her waist was encircled by a thick silvery belt, at the front of which glowed a circular display which cycled rapidly through different colors and inscrutable symbols.

She stood surrounded by a ring of hovering shapes, mostly rectangles with rounded corners, made entirely of pale light and displaying columns of text, symbols, complex diagrams and patterns that looked like maps. Principia kept her eyes on these, deftly manipulating them with tiny movements of her fingers, causing the displays to move about and change content in some pattern comprehensible only to herself.

“What the fuck,” Ruda demanded, summing up what everyone was thinking before getting down to specifics. “Who the fuck are all these yahoos and why are they here? Hi, Joe.”

“Hey, everybody,” Joe said with a wary smile. “Good to see y’all again.”

“Excuse me, but is that a valkyrie?” Fross chimed. “Because I don’t think I’ve ever seen Juniper frightened before.”

“I’m fine,” Juniper said flatly, though she was as rigid as a tree trunk and staring at Yngrid through eyes widened with panic. Sniff, picking up her mood, placed himself in front of his mistress and hissed aggressively at the new arrivals, fanning his wings and head crest.

“Also, why’d you bring the cranky bullying librarian?” Teal added. “I was quite happy pretending he’d vanished off the face of the earth.”

“Me, too,” Weaver said frankly.

“Peace.” Mary stepped forward from the group which had just ‘ported in, projecting her voice in a manner that was both serenely calm and commanded obedience. “Clearly, there is already a tangled web of introductions and explanations that need be made here. I advise approaching this with all due care and precision, one step at a time. And it seems to me the first step should be obvious to us all. Principia, you feckless child, what have you done to yourself?”

“Shut up, Kuriwa, nobody likes you. Gabriel Arquin.” Principia’s delivery was clipped and flat, quite unlike her usual cadence. “Your recklessness staggers the imagination. What could you possibly have been thinking, shunting yourself off to a remote nexus of unfathomable power amid a gaggle of dangerous reprobates in the middle of the events that have been transpiring here?”

“I’d take offense, but damn if she didn’t nail us,” Billie commented.

“Okay, you know what, Locke?” Gabriel snapped. “I’m not one to lecture people as a rule, but I’ve been getting in some good practice recently and I’m in no mood to take this from you of all people. As I suspect Trissiny told you because she got all the common sense in your entire bloodline, I was sent on a mission directly by Vidius. So not only do I not really have the option of turning that down, but it’s not as if I was wandering around in the weeds unattended. Anybody should be able to infer from context that I was fine. And your reaction to this was to go and put that goddamn thing on your face after all the moaning you gave us about what a terrible idea it was? You’re officially the last person allowed—”

“Vidius is going to kill you.”

The simple, stark statement cut through his tirade and brought him up short, mouth slightly open. The entire time, Principia’s eyes had been darting from one point to another on the various floating displays orbiting her; she still did not look directly at him, but as she spoke one of the rectangular light screens shifted to a vertical orientation near her eyeline and displayed what looked like a human silhouette with scrolling notations in a language none of them could read.

“How many paladins have you known, Arquin?” she asked before the tension could mount too much further.

He narrowed his eyes. “Well…just the two. Three, I guess, if I get to count myself.”

“I’ll grant you three, because I’ve still known a number which dwarfs that utterly and every single one of them died for the same reason: being a paladin. Going on missions for Vidius is the thing that will kill you. The very idea that you are safe because you’re on assignment from him will do it faster unless you purge that completely backwards thought from your brain right now and redouble your situational awareness while on the clock. More immediately, the lot of us are standing at the center of a web of connection and prophecy stretching through the very nature of magic itself and eclipsing the scope of the world. You don’t grasp a fraction of the extent, but you should have been adequately warned by the fact that Vesk was involved. You, who have spent more time than most of us recently dancing on his strings. I know you’ve read enough stories to have spotted some of the things it was likely to mean when you left the group on your own in the middle of all this. In the best case scenario, the rest of us would have been forced to ride to your rescue amidst who knows what carnage. At worst, it was a death sentence. To a thing like Vesk, the death of a hero is nothing but proper motivation for whoever’s left.”

“And yet I note that none of that happened,” Gabriel said, now frowning at her warily.

“It did not happen because I broke every rule of principle and basic sense to prevent it,” Principia said tonelessly. “I was right when I warned you not to use this mask, and I was right to make that sacrifice. It takes nothing less than changing all the rules of reality to cheat a god. Especially that one.”

“Mask?” Mary demanded. “What have you done?”

“It’s a long story, Kuriwa,” Trissiny murmured, edging over toward her. “I’ll bring you up to speed—”

“You will not,” Principia ordered. “You know very well that she of all people does not need to get her claws on it.”

“Locke,” Trissiny said, turning directly to her, “I think it’s time you took that thing off. You’ve accomplished what you set out to, and you are starting to sound alarmingly unlike yourself.”

“I should think you would welcome that development,” Principia replied. As she spoke, the ring of hovering screens around her doubled, forming two bands as if flanking the equator of a sphere, rotating slowly in opposite directions. The crown on her head sprouted more tiny sets of arms, projecting a new set of smaller panels around the edges of her eyes. “You have always been correctly skeptical of…myself.”

“I will remind you, Lieutenant,” Shaeine said evenly, “that you specifically asked us to end you if it became apparent that you had lost yourself to the artifact. That conclusion is growing perilously close.”

“Yes, that does sound like something I would say, does it not?” Principia mused, her eyes darting rapidly between screens, fingers flicking them this way and that faster than ever. “Completely sincere, and yet deliberately manipulating your emotions. With no malice, simply a lack of understanding any other way to relate to people. It’s pathetic, if you think about it. In any case, you should disregard that instruction. At the time I did not know the merest fraction of the things I know now. I have much better ideas.”

“That is enough,” Mary stated, beginning to weave her arms about in a dance-like series of movements that caused a gentle breeze to begin playing across the plateau, smelling of moss and wildflowers. “When you are neck-deep in the consequences of your actions, girl, recall that you were warned.”

“Oh, I think not,” Principia said evenly, extending her arms out to the sides to touch her fingertips to screens at opposite points flanking her.

The air pressure abruptly plummeted further, causing everyone’s ears to pop again, and currents of air coalesced around Mary into visible streams of compressed gas. The elf emitted a single, hoarse squawk, and then the entire net of air tightened onto her like a clenching fist and she shrank down to the form of a crow.

Before the bird could take flight, a sphere of light flashed into place around her. This instantly imploded, collapsing just like the streamers of her own hijacked spell of a moment before, but instead of crushing her, it formed a shape. Specifically, a golden birdcage.

All of this coalesced into being at about chest height. Then the cage plummeted to the ground, where it bounced twice and rolled over onto its side, Mary furiously cawing and flapping about inside it.

“I’ve no doubt you will weasel out of that sooner than later, Kuriwa,” Principia announced, “and then surely enact some horrible revenge on me, predictable creature that you are. It will all be more than worth it for the sheer satisfaction of knowing that for one sweet, blissful moment in history, nobody had to put up with any of your bullshit.”

Trissiny darted over to pick up the cage, carefully holding it upright to peer between the bars. This gentler treatment did nothing to lessen the crow’s outraged noise.

A single wedge of silver light flashed into being and stabbed directly at Principia’s face. It dissipated upon crossing the boundary of the screens surrounding her.

“Please do not strain against my defenses, Shaeine,” Principia requested calmly without even glancing at the drow. “I will not harm you, but you risk burnout or mana fatigue by pushing your magic against a superior force.”

McGraw coughed discreetly, stepping forward. “If you don’t mind my askin’, Prin, what kinda superior force are we talkin’ about, here? Not to gloss over the fact that this is a darn sight different from your general bearing the last time we met, but I confess an old professional’s interest in any interesting new form o’ magic.”

“Disingenuousness does not suit you, Elias,” she said tonelessly.

“In point of fact, I’ve found it a more versatile tool than anything in my spellbooks,” he said wryly, “but I won’t begrudge your opinion.”

“She is not using any specific school of magic, but all four and multiple shadow schools in equal measure, performing constant microcalculations to effect physical subjectivity rather than relying on the inherent compensatory attributes of any one magical form,” said Ariel.

“Can ye dumb that down fer those of us who don’t go to Crazy Magic College?” Billie asked.

“In essence,” Principia herself explained, “the unique attributes of each of the four fields of magic on the Circle of Interaction manifest themselves in the characteristic style of magic for which each is known, because magic is a way of bridging the gap between an idea in a sapient mind, and the innumerable calculations and exertions of infinitesimal amounts of basic universal forces on the subatomic level to express that idea in physical reality. Because a biological sapience can neither exert those forces unassisted nor perform the necessary math, each of the four schools expresses spells according to its particular idiom. To bypass these innate restrictions and tendencies and express subjective physics without artificial limitation, one must simply do all the calculations oneself without relying upon the calculator function of the magic fields. That capacity appears to be a function of the persona I am borrowing.”

Mary squawked and rattled her cage so hard Trissiny had to tighten her grip on it.

“She is describing the theoretical ultimate expression of magical practice,” said Ariel. “To my knowledge, this was only theoretical. I have never seen nor credibly heard of any practitioner capable of doing this.”

“Oh, that’s it,” Ruda said quietly. “I just realized what was nagging at me about this. She’s talking just like Ariel. You guys hear it too, right? That inflectionless delivery, the run-on sentences…”

“LT, you’re scaring the hell out of me,” Merry said frankly. “Mission’s over. Please take that thing off.”

“A thought occurs,” said Principia. The rings of screens multiplied again; now there were three, apparently conveying even more information to her. Her feet lifted bodily off the ground and she gradually floated upward to levitate about a yard up in the air. “If the Mask is permanently attached to someone, it is by definition out of play. Since absolute security is obviously impossible, this may be the only way to nullify the inherent danger posed by existence.”

“No, Locke, that turns it into a different kind of danger!” Trissiny exclaimed.

“Excuse me, but would I be right in guessing that this borrowed persona works mainly by feeding you information?” Toby asked, stepping up to within a few feet of the barrier of Principia’s light screens.

“Essentially,” she said in a disinterested tone, fixing her attention for a moment on a panel showing what looked like a complex spell diagram. “Not only acquiring data through means beyond mortal senses but processing it at a capacity that would be otherwise impossible.”

“I see,” he replied, frowning. “Prin, I think you should be mindful of what a sudden switch of perspective like that can do to a person. You’re an Eserite, you understand better than anyone how power affects people’s heads. Right now, it looks a lot like you’re turning into exactly the kind of thing you’ve spent your life fighting against, and I really can’t think that’s what you intended.”

“A switch of perspective is a good way to put it,” she said, rising higher into the air. “Suddenly having a bird’s-eye view of my own consciousness is, in a word, humiliating. Princpia Locke is a broken, sideways-thinking creature developing a real conscience disgracefully late in life and even so expressing it through the lens of self-indulgent, self-centered slyness. An arrested adolescent smugly mistaking her own failure to function in a socially normal manner for mental and moral superiority. If she’s not going to have an emotionally healthy connection to anyone, it seems to me logical, not to mention appropriate, to become an entity which does not require them. Clearly no one will miss her.”

Mary’s renewed harsh cawing sounded eerily like agreement.

“I don’t get how you can apparently know everything and not know how wrong that is, Locke,” Merry said, her tone openly hurt. “The people who need you most are fully aware what a piece of work you are. We like you anyway, dumbass. That’s exactly what having a connection to other people means.”

“Locke, if you don’t take that thing off voluntarily, we’ll have no choice but to take it from you,” Trissiny warned.

“None of you have that capacity,” Principia observed. “The chances if all of you act in perfect unison are very small. I calculate this group is not able to coordinate with the necessary precision, anyway. Please do not risk injury by trying, Trissiny. There are significant events developing and all your strength will be urgently needed very soon. I am forming a plan.”

“If she’s able to see everything and do any kind of magic…” Teal looked around at the others, as if someone present might have answers. “How can you counter that?”

“Well, the original Archons all died,” said Gabriel, “so by definition they aren’t invincible.”

“In the old days,” Yngrid said quietly, “Archons were countered by the existence of other Archons, sworn to other gods, with contradicting agendas. They were only wiped out by direct action of the Pantheon, and that only after their patron gods were all gone.”

“You hear that, Locke?” Ruda called. “You’ve got no Elder God backing you up, and you’re this fuckin’ close to pissing off the gods that exist now. Come down from there and quit being a smug, all-knowing dong before you get your ass smote.”

“In the event of divine intervention, I expect confirmation from Avei that I am acting in accordance with her orders and established strategy.”

“What?” Trissiny exclaimed, echoed by a hoarse croak from the cage in her hands.

“Events and individuals are more connected than I ever imagined, across a scope which it would not have occurred to me to conceive of. Observe.”

Principia shifted her hands rapidly, tapping several points on various rotating screens in passing—five rings of them, now—as if she were activating runic controls.

The light on the plaza grew paler, and suddenly there were thick, tangled steamers of cobwebs binding each of them to one another, and extending off from the mountaintop in all directions. Several of them shouted in alarm and tried to pull away, causing the whole web to shift with them. The effect was purely visible; their movements were not restrained, nor could they physically feel the spider silk.

“Don’t be alarmed,” Principia instructed, tapping screens again. The light returned to normal and the webs faded from view. “I was initially concerned myself, but after a careful analysis I have determined that this effect is not harmful. On the contrary, its purpose appears to be preservation. Though I am unable to determine the origin point of this binding effect as it is temporally out of sync and my own ability to gather information thus is blocked by Vemnesthis’s activities, I calculate that each of us has been saved several times in the last three years from catastrophic and possibly lethal harm by these protections, through means which at the time would have appeared to be coincidence. The existence of time travel as a factor confirms the influence of a god, most likely operating from the future. No one else could circumvent Vemnesthis.”

“You think Avei did this?” Trissiny demanded.

“Perhaps. What I know is that I, personally, have been directed toward a specific end by Avei via the orders of the High Commander, and I now see the opportunity to advance my strategy far more rapidly that I anticipated before, and avert a major crisis in the process.”

The panels had continued to expand until she was now encircled by a full globe of them, hovering well above the level of their heads and rapidly reaching out to touch points on the passing screens in some pattern that made sense only to her.

“The incipient events in N’Jendo must be stopped for obvious humanitarian reasons. The forces assembled here, once connected with those already operating in Ninkabi, should prove more than sufficient. However, I calculate that there is time to gather more, which will not only increase the prospects of success further but will represent major progress in service of Avei’s long-term goal. I believe events in N’Jendo can be safely allowed to progress for a short time further, as Arachne and others are working to stabilize one of the unfolding disasters there. We should intercept her efforts in time to assume credit and absorb Ingvar’s wolf cult, of course, but this will leave us time for a necessary detour first to Veilgrad.”

“Ingvar’s wolf cult?” Joe shouted. “Hang on, you’re gonna need to explain that one!”

“What the fuck do we need in fucking Veilgrad?” Ruda demanded.

“Yeah, we’ve kinda done Veilgrad already,” added Fross.

“Seems rude to burn it down twice,” Toby said gravely.

“I understand all of this is confusing,” Principia said in that disturbingly impassive tone. “Your own perspectives are cripplingly limited. To explain it all would simply take too long. For the time being, you will just have to trust me.”

“Here’s the thing,” Trissiny said, stepping forward with Mary’s cage still in her hands. “I do trust Principia…strange as that sounds, to me. Even acknowledging how generally shifty you are, I know what you value and what your goals are. I know Principia Locke will always try to achieve what she believes is right, and in the end, I mostly agree with the end objective even if I take issue with your means of getting there. I trust you, Locke. Not…this. This thing that mask is turning you into. All systems are corrupt, and you’re becoming the system. Please, Locke, take it off, get your head back together, and then talk to us.”

“Your frustration is natural, Trissiny, but you will have to bear it. There’s just not time for thorough explanations.”

“Then let me put it a different way,” Trissiny said grimly. “Remove that mask. That is an order, Lieutenant.”

Finally, Principia turned her head to look directly at her, staring down her nose from high above through a gap that opened up in the translucent screens orbiting her.

“I’m sorry, General, but I am unable to comply. Not this time.”

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Trissiny stared out across the edge of the plateau, through the space where he had vanished. Despite his and Schwartz’s conjecture over the summer about the damage that scythe could potentially do to reality, there remained no hint of the slash Gabriel had just carved in the air, just the quiet mountain breeze and the unpleasant but very faint buzzing in her ears caused by the charm he had used to conceal their brief conversation.

She held up the sheet of his enchanting paper, inscribed with a glyph-adorned circular diagram in faintly luminous purple ink; the basic structure of it was comprehensible to her thanks to Yornhaldt’s classes, but her knowledge of enchanting was very general and well below the level of this. And he’d just scrawled it in a few seconds. He was getting really good with these charms. Not for the first time, Trissiny resolved to focus more on her light wielding. It wouldn’t do to use it too much as a crutch, but it was a skill no Hand of Avei had developed to any great extent, and one which would thus take enemies by surprise, provided she was careful not to show it off excessively.

Pretty much the way Gabe used his arcane craft these days.

Raising her eyes to gaze again into the distance, Trissiny absently rubbed one thumb across a clear patch along the edge of the paper. It probably wouldn’t be necessary to destroy it; stable area of effect charms made from such basic materials burned themselves out very quickly, she knew that much about enchanting. The ink’s glow was already starting to fade. Once it went dark, it was just colored ink on paper, good for nothing except possibly as a little keepsake to tuck away…

And then, faster than she could react, it was ripped out of her hand.

Trissiny spun, instinctively reaching for her blade, and found herself almost nose-to-nose with Principia. Or would have been, had the elf’s nose not been turned the other way as she critically examined the charm.

“Sinneck’s silencing glyphward,” Principia mused. “A little sloppy, but he was probably in a hurry and it doesn’t really need to last long, does it? And as usual, you kids missed the broader strategic point under your fancy tricks: you can mask your conversation from the local elf, but the elf will still notice if she suddenly can’t hear your breathing, heartbeats, or anything at all from this little circular patch of ground.” Lifting her eyes to meet Trissiny’s, she deliberately ripped the charm in half, causing the faint buzz to vanish. “Where is he, Trissiny?”

She took her hand off the handle of her sword, deliberately straightening up. “It’s all right, Locke, he’ll be back…as soon as possible.”

“Not what I asked you.”

Trissiny narrowed her eyes at the flat tone. Principia was staring at her in a way she never had: like an authority figure demanding an explanation. Even when she’d faced the woman from the wrong side of cell bars, she had never had this attitude. Trissiny immediately decided she didn’t care for it.

“It’s nothing you need to know about, Locke.”

“You are too intelligent for me to need to list all the reasons that’s wrong, but I’ll indulge you. I am responsible for all of you, we are about to leave and this is going to delay our departure, possibly to the point that our guides will declare the window missed and we’ll lose another entire day to this, and this group has ample warning from no less than a god of self-inflicted trouble descending upon all our heads. And now, I find I can’t detect Gabriel Arquin anywhere within the range of my senses. So I’ll ask you once more, Trissiny: where did he go?”

She refrained from gritting her teeth in sheer annoyance at the fact that Principia was right.

“It is a paladin matter, Locke. Vidius needed him for something. Furthermore, he described it as…family business.”

“And you just let him go?” she demanded.

Trissiny frowned more deeply. “Did you not hear me? It’s not as if I had any prerogative to stop him.”

“You know, I can’t help but think back to a certain hellgate incident. Now, I wasn’t there, so stop me if I’m wrong about this, but the version of the story I was told involved two paladins being ordered to stay and fight, and their entire circle of friends refusing to let them do so alone. Ring any bells?”

To her vast displeasure, Trissiny felt color rise in her cheeks. “That was a completely different situation.”

“Yeah, unlike most of your friends you have an actual claim when it comes to butting in on paladin business and a much better chance of surviving it. I’m a better enchanter than Arquin and I can hear the beetles under the stone you’re standing on, Trissiny. So do you want me to chase the little brat down myself, or would you rather spare him the embarrassment and show me which way he went?”

“I doubt even your senses are sharp enough, Locke. When Vidius chooses to help him do it, Gabe can shadow-jump. With that scythe, he can apparently do so into places where it wouldn’t usually be possible.”

Principia clamped her lips into a thin, unhappy line. “I see. And you wouldn’t happen to know where…?”

She shrugged. “Family business, he said. And something Vidius cared about enough to both send him on, and help, which means it’s probably something to do with the valkyries, not his father. Could be anywhere.”

They stared at each other for five seconds before Principia finally spoke.

“Well, Trissiny, this is a real watershed moment in our relationship. First time you’ve disappointed me. I suddenly feel very maternal.”

“Now, you listen here—”

“You should have stopped him, idiot,” Principia shot back, jabbing one finger into Trissiny’s chest. “Failing that, you should have gone with him. At the very least, you should have warned the rest of us something was happening! All of that was well within your power, and glaringly obvious. And yet, here we are!”

“Enough!” she barked. “One more word, Lieutenant—”

“Have you ever even stood in a phalanx? I’m not talking about training, I mean shoulder to shoulder with your sisters while taking enemy fire and facing the real likelihood of losing comrades under your command. Because let me tell you, General, that is a whole different category of experience from the heroic solo warrior paladin shit you’ve been doing.”

“How dare you—”

“We both knew I’m a far better thief, but believe me, I’m as surprised as you to find that I’m a better soldier.”

Despite herself, Trissiny was struck silent. All she could manage to do was stare, her mouth open with her half-formed rebuke forgotten.

“Yes, we have our issues, and they’re nearly all my fault,” Principia went on relentlessly. “And yes, you outrank me. But if you have an iota of sense, Trissiny, you will listen to me when I criticize you. It’s not as if I do it often, and you can really use the benefit of my experience. Especially when it’s over the very real chance one of your friends might get killed from his and your combined goddamned stupidity!”

The elf dropped the two halves of Gabriel’s glyphward and turned on her heel, stalking back toward the half-ruined old building behind them. Trissiny was mortified to observe that the entire rest of her class was assembled in the doorway, watching in silence.

“Where are you going?” she demanded of Principia’s back.

“Where do you think? To fix this.”

“You’re disappointed in me?” Yngrid exclaimed, clutching Weaver tighter. “You, Gabriel, of all people? You know what it’s like, for all of us! Haven’t I done enough in eight thousand years to earn one spark of happiness for myself?”

“Whoah, whoah, whoah!” Gabriel said, holding up the hand not occupied with his scythe and stepping forward. “As far as that goes, I think you’re dead right, and I’ll back you up all the way with the big guy.”

She froze with her mouth open to continue arguing, blinking in confusion. “Oh. Then…?”

“Vidius sent me here and tasked me with bringing you to heel, and that means it’s gonna be done on my terms. And whatever I decide to do will damn well reflect the fact that all of you girls have been worked non-stop for an unfathomably long time, that he’s never had cause to complain about your performance, and that quite frankly Vidius has spent so long paying no attention to your own interests that if he failed to see something like this coming, well, that’s on him.”

Thunder rumbled along the distant horizon to the south. All of them turned to stare in that direction, save the projection of the Avatar, who just cocked one eyebrow in silence.

“And if he has a problem with that,” Gabriel added with a scowl, “he should definitely have thought more carefully before designating me the arbiter of this business. But he did, and I am, and so this isn’t as simple as you just going AWOL, Yngrid. I’ve gotta work out something to do about this, but I won’t stand for you being put upon any further over something so incredibly understandable on your part.”

A tremulous smile flickered over the valkyrie’s features, in sharp contrast to Weaver, who was still clutching her and glaring at Gabriel. A moment later, though, she frowned in confusion.

“I’m…glad to hear that, little brother, but… I’m not sure what you’re upset about, then.”

“Aren’t you?” he demanded. “Come on, Yngrid. You politely toed the line for thousands upon thousands of years, and now you finally decided to buck your duties because of…” He flung out his free hand at Weaver. “Really? Really? This guy? This family-sized tin of hickory-smoked buttholes?”

Billie burst out laughing so hard she immediately fell over, which did not even interrupt Gabriel’s tirade.

“Are you kidding me? Girl, as soon as all this is settled one way or another you and I are going to sit down and have us a long, awkward talk about your taste in men, and wow the fact that you’re hearing this from me of all damned people should shed some light on the depth of your bad judgment here.”

“Oh, I remember this one, now,” Weaver drawled. “Didn’t see him in the library much. Settle a bet for me, Arquin: can you actually read?”

“I’m not even gonna bother threatening you with the cliché, you walking ingrown crotch hair,” Gabriel retorted, causing Billie to begin rolling back and forth, clutching her ribs and absolutely shrieking. “You give her cause to regret this even once, and it ends with one of her sisters standing over you and deciding your eternal fate. I suggest you keep that firmly in mind at all times, you greasy wedge of pepperjack dickcheese.”

“…please…stop…” Billie wheezed desperately. “…can’t…air…”

“Gabe,” Yngrid said, her quiet and earnest tone a stark contrast to everything else going on. “I understand why you think that, but please trust me. You don’t know Damian like I do.”

“Scuze me for insertin’ myself into what sounds like family business,” McGraw said, diffidently tipping his hat, “but I think it’s worth pointin’ out that this fella is a Vesker bard. He lives his life playin’ a role, and the moment you take that for the real man underneath, you’ve fallen for the grift.”

“Yeah, I’m not buying that for a second,” Gabriel said flatly, “and I say that after spending a week of this summer being dragged around by Vesk himself. You wear the mask, you become the mask. If someone acts like an insufferable asshole, that fact alone means they are one, irrespective of their tragic backstory or whatever else.”

Joe cleared his throat. “Hi, Gabe.”

Gabriel glanced at him. “Hey, Joe. Surprised to see you here.”

“Yep, that’s kinda what I wanted to bring up. I know our orbits have only crossed here and there, but the fact is I do think of you as a friend.”

Gabriel raised one eyebrow. “Well, likewise, I guess.”

“I mention it because I can say the same of Weaver, here. Not to argue with your assessment, exactly, but the fact is the man has a whole group of friends who’re willin’ to not only trek to this godforsaken patch of dangerous nowhere—uh, no offense, Avatar.”

“It would be fruitless to take offense at accuracy,” the Avatar acknowledged, nodding wryly to him.

“But,” Joe continued, “also care enough about the big jerk to risk antaognizin’ Vidius himself so he and Yngrid could be together. I get the impression you’re concerned for her well-being, here, so…hopefully that counts for something. Man has the capacity to make solid friendships, and I hope my own judgment means at least a little bit.”

Gabriel heaved a deep sigh, shifting his stance as if he were actually leaning his weight on his scythe. “Well…whatever. Regardless of that, we still have the matter of a rogue valkyrie loose on the mortal plane and my obligation to do something about it.”

“Why?” Yngrid asked bitterly, tightening her grip on Weaver’s arm. “Can’t you just leave us alone?”

“Yngrid,” he said wearily, “you have to know that even if I you were one hundred percent in the right, you are just too dangerous a category of being for it to be that simple. And you’re not completely in the right, are you? Did you ever even ask Vidius for any kind of reprieve?”

“He’d never have agreed to that, and you know it!”

“No, I don’t know it. My experience with him has been largely a process of him trying to be more flexible and less bound by old ideas that don’t work anymore. That’s the only reason I’m here. And whether or not that’s true, the question remains: did you ask?”

She looked away, scowling.

“Because if you’d come to me, I would absolutely have spoken up for you,” Gabriel continued. “Hell, your sisters would have, as well. Most of them, anyway. Did you seek anyone else’s help before having Grumpypants McPonytail pull this scheme?”

“It doesn’t matter now, anyway,” she muttered. “What are you going to do about it, then?”

“Lemme just be serious for a sec,” Billie said, still grinning but sitting upright now. “Is lookin’ the other way entirely outta the question, here?”

“Fraid so,” McGraw answered before Gabriel could. “There’s already an actual god watchin’ these shenanigans directly. However this gets resolved, it ain’t gonna just go away if everybody involved agrees to pretend nothing’s up.”

Gabriel lifted the butt of his scythe off the stone floor, beginning to pace back and forth. “As usual, it’s less about the thing itself than the things connected to it. This is going to have wide ranging repercussions. A valkyrie back on the mortal plane is a big deal,Yngrid! The entire rest of the Pantheon is going to be alarmed about this, and they’re just the first. We both know what happened when the last fallen valkyrie ran into the Empire’s forces. Also, apparently you girls are inherently terrifying to dryads, and there are at least two of those interacting regularly with mortal society now! Wait, no, five, that I know of. What happens the first time a dryad accidentally flies into a panic and people are in the way? And for that matter, Yngrid… What about the rest of the girls? You know all of your sisters would want the same chance, if one was available. Did you give any thought to how they would feel after you ditched them?”

Yngrid had pressed herself hard into Weaver’s side, now, wrapping one black wing around him so that they resembled a single dark shape with two heads. Her eyes remained on the ground, refusing to meet Gabriel’s stare.

He stopped pacing and rested the butt of his scythe on the floor again. “Well. Obviously, I don’t have the power to send you back.”

Everyone had the presence of mind not to look at the Avatar, who himself obligingly remained silent.

“Honestly,” Gabriel muttered, “even with all the rest of it… I dunno that I could stomach doing that even if I was able. But Yngrid, we have to do something. Do you have any ideas? Because believe me, I am open to suggestions.”

“Take credit,” Mary said quietly.

He turned a pensive frown on her. “…go on?”

“It is a very old trick of politics, when one is unexpectedly outmaneuvered,” she said in the same soft tone, her expression intently focused. “Claim that whatever transpired was your own idea, and step in to guide its consequences. That will not solve all the issues that may result from this, but it addresses the immediate implications of Vidius having been thwarted by one of his own servants. He—and you—save face and regain the initiative, and you will have gained a powerful agent for your god’s ends who is less constrained than the rest of her sisters.”

“Huh,” Gabriel mused, his expression growing distant. “You know, I think you might be onto—”

“Young man,” Mary interrupted softly, her eyes fixed on his waist, “where did you get that sword?”

The group parted like waves as Principia strode through them into the building. Merry was still inside, standing with a backpack slung over her shoulder and watching warily, but apparently not having been quite curious enough to push into the crowd of students to stare.

“What exactly do you plan to do?” Trissiny demanded, striding in right on Principia’s heels. “It’s not like you can follow him!”

“No, indeed,” the elf concurred, slowing as she stepped past Merry, almost to the entrance on the other side, which led to the broad plaza in the center of the plateau. “I have neither the know-how nor the magical muscle to track a shadow-jump, much less one going into someplace that required god-driven murderscythe power to penetrate. But someone, somewhere, somewhen, has both those things.”

With her back to them, she held up one hand. In it was the silver-trimmed wooden face of the Mask of the Adventurer.

“Whoah,” Merry exclaimed in alarm.

Her alarm was nothing compared to that of Fross. “WHAT THE HELL? That was in my dimensional storage! My personal—it was basically part of my— How in the name of—”

“I’m a thief,” Principia said flatly, turning to stare at them. “More specifically, I am a damn good thief, and now you know why my tag is Keys and not Dazzling Personality.”

“You do know we are extremely capable of just taking that away from you, right?” Ruda asked in a deceptively mild tone.

“I should damn well hope so,” Principia replied grimly. “Avelea, Punaji, Awarrion.” She pointed at each of them in turn as she continued. “Mad at me, raised to make ruthless decisions, and both. I have no idea what kind of rabbit hole I’m about to crawl down, and I’m going to count on you to put me down at the first firm sign that it’s necessary. I said firm sign, but also the first one. If you see the need, do not wait for me to get positioned to fend you off.”

“Locke, think about what you’re doing,” Toby said, stepping forward. “You were more wary of that thing than any of us, at least at first, and rightly so.”

“And that is the point,” she said patiently. “You kids may think of me as kind of a joke, and that’s fine, but the fact remains I am responsible for you. And remember, our one and only conversation with Arachne on the subject established that I am entirely expendable in this arrangement. This thing should not ever be used in any real-world situation beyond your little trial runs, but sometimes we just don’t get the luxury of doing things as they should be done. If somebody’s gotta get bent over the barrel for this, it’s going to be me and not any of you.”

“Does someone have to be?” Juniper asked. “That can’t be your only idea.”

“Tracking a shadow-jump by itself is among the most complex and advanced magic in existence,” Principia replied, her patient tone beginning to be strained. “And that’s not even touching on the matter of whatever required him to use that scythe to claw open a doorway. This is my only idea, or you could bet your green ass I wouldn’t be doing it.”

“But do you need to follow him?” the dryad persisted. “Gabe can take care of himself, and he knows what he’s doing. He does!” she added a little defensively when everyone else turned to look at her. “He’s not the same guy we started school with two years ago. None of us are.”

“Vesk was here!” Principia shouted. “Fucking Vesk! The patron god of plot contrivances, who regards people’s gruesome deaths as great character development for their grieving loved ones! The last time I took orders from that asshole I came very damn close to losing good women under my command. Other people died under our weapons who absolutely did not need to, and wouldn’t have if he’d just stayed out of it! But it did solve our immediate problem, in the end, and in a much more dramatic fashion than the patient and thorough campaign we’d been gearing up toward. And that is what it comes down to with him, kids. As soon as you find yourself in one of his goddamn stories, you are in it and you’re not going to wiggle out from under his thumb until he’s had a satisfying climax and denouement.”

“Fuckin’ ew,” Ruda muttered.

“The only thing to do,” Principia continued more quietly but just as insistently, brandishing the mask at them, “is lean into it and try to guide the damage in the least awful direction you can. Whatever Gabriel’s involved in now, the timing alone tells me he’s bitten off more than he can chew. I have a feeling this was only ever going to end with somebody using this horrible abomination of yours, and then probably learning an ironic lesson about power and taking the quick and easy path. And as I said, it’s going to be me, is that clear? You just remember what I told you. Be ready to help Gabriel with whatever bullshit we are about to find, and be ready to deal with me if it comes to that.”

She took at deep breath and stared at the mask in her hands with undisguised contempt. “And damn that little shit for making me do this. Somebody please wring his neck for me.”

Then, before anyone could argue further, Principia pressed the Mask of the Adventurer to her face.

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