Kindaria crouched motionless behind a screen of bushes. She’d been hiding there for over two hours, watching the fog creep slowly over the graveyard below. Occasionally, an owl would stoop nearby, snatching up a mouse or other snack. The wind barely stirred the trees. Without the slow, fluid motion of the fog, she could’ve been staring at an oil painting. 
        But still, she crouched. And watched. She had studied the pattern, and everything fit. It would be tonight, and it would be here. Kindaria’s hand tightened around the hilt of her ninja-to. The leather creaked reassuringly under her fingers, the only sound in the preternaturally still night.
        Or was it? The unicorn’s ears flicked forward. Yes, something was moving. A soft, barely perceptible sound was coming from the graveyard below. She reached up with one hand, touching her pendant through the hardened leather of her cuirass. She whispered the word of activation. Her vision sharpened, piercing the fog. Distant things came into instantaneous focus and her peripheral vision widened. The magic of her pendant would only last for a few minutes each day, but with it, she could see everything.
        And she could see the dark soil of the graveyard as it was broken by a rotting, skeletal hand rising from it.
        The sharpness of her vision faded just as she saw hands break through the soil in a dozen other places. It was happening. She’d been right. One hand still on her sword, she flicked her other hand behind her back, signing the discrete symbol for alert. Her companions were camped over a hundred yards distant, but Ezriette’s eyesight was almost as keen as Kindaria’s pendant-enhanced vision.
        Her ears flicked backwards, expecting to hear the solid sound of Kalliam’s plate boots or the soft tinkle of Noelle’s flail. Nothing. Kindaria frowned and made the signal again. Behind her, nothing but silence. Had they fallen asleep? She was sure they were more professional than that. Lyss, at least, would have had some kind of clever magical ward against dozing off, maybe even some kind of spell-sentinel to watch for her signal.
        Before her, a figure descended from the sky just past the gates of the graveyard. His black robes shimmered around him like liquid shadow as he raised his arms. Arms arose from the soil now, followed by the shoulders and heads they were attached to.
        Panicking, Kindaria reached out with her telepathy, channeling thoughts through the spiraled horn that rose majestically from her forehead, seeking her friends. They were asleep, but not naturally. She could feel a dark edge of magic insinuated around their unconsciousness. Below her  the torsos of the dead buried there pulled themselves out of the ground. Dozens, hundreds of undead were slowly emerging from their resting place. The dark magician weaved his hands in a complicated pattern, a spell weaving itself between his moving fingers.
        Kindaria thrust her hand into the pouch at her belt. She brushed aside her coins and a small pouch of poison reagents until her fingers fell on a small stone. She pulled forth the blue stone and with a grimace, smashed it against the tip of her horn.
        The thunderstone cracked and erupted. A deafening peal of thunder cracked the air around Kindaria. The sound was staggering, but she gritted her teeth, focusing it through her horn to her compatriots. The crack of thunder echoed in her brain, nauseating her, but she succeeded: the magical explosion of sonic energy, channeled through a telepathic focus, shattered the magical sleep spell keeping her friends unconscious.
        He’s here! she sent to her comrades hastily. Ears ringing, she was already dashing down the hillside, pulling her ninja-to silently from its sheath. The dark wizard stared at her, obviously alerted to her presence by the thunder she had summoned. He scowled and shouted something at her, surely something dramatic and pithy, but all she heard was the ringing in her ears.
        The wizard raised his arms, beginning his interrupted spell anew. Wisps of dark magic rose from his fingertips like tendrils, sparking at their points. They flew out from him, over the heads of the staggering zombies, skeletons, and ghouls that had been raised from the graveyard. The tendrils tangled together at a central point in front of the chapel doors, twisting and intertwining until they formed a flat disc. A portal. So that’s how the other graveyards had been emptied without alerting the villages. This wizard was raising an army, summoning them from an easy source of dead bodies, and whisking them away before anyone caught on.
        Kindaria glanced over her shoulder. Kalliam’s form launched into the night sky, a black shape against the inky blue midnight, but he was too far. The roc wouldn’t make it in time. Lyss and Noelle took to the sky too, easier to identify due to the light glowing from Lyss’s hands as she prepared spells of her own. Somewhere below, Ezriette would be running with hellish speed.
        Kindaria closed on the wizard. He twirled to confront her just as the portal snapped into existence on the far side of the cemetery. The undead lumbered toward it, the moans of zombies and the clattering of skeletons filling the air. Only the ghouls stopped to study her, slavering over her flesh, but even they turned. Whatever called them to the portal was even stronger than their hunger. 
        Her silvered blade flashed in the moonlight, but the wizard sidestepped with uncanny speed. Flames licked his fingertips and shot out from his hand, but Kindaria was prepared. She spoke the command word for her cuirass and the flame was turned aside harmlessly. She feigned to the left, then struck to the right when the wizard used his motion spell again. His fingers shimmered in front of him as he weaved an incantation quickly and her blade struck solid air and skidded to the side.
        The wizard raised his arms and flew several feet backwards, dark robes swirling around him. She growled deeply and charged forward. Shimmering magic formed between his hands and he shot a bolt of force at her as he remained hovering in the air. She twisted easily as she ran, not even losing momentum as she twirled to one side, the first bolt and the two that followed it hissing harmlessly past her..
        Moonlight gleamed off her horn as she surged forward. She sprang into the air, twisting as she rose. She saw the fear spark in the wizard’s eyes. Lightning shot from his fingertips. An amateur’s spell, quick and dirty. It struck her, but didn’t stop her. The electricity coursed through her muscles and she could smell singed fur. But her momentum carried her forward. She whipped her blade around, the force of her spin propelling it even faster. It struck the invisible shield he had raised, passing straight through it with barely a hitch. She felt the spell shatter around her blade. Then their bodies collided in midair, her ninja-to parting his robe, his fur, and his gut. It slid in with ease until she felt the blade scrape against the column of his spine and get caught there.
        They fell together, the dark wizard crumpling to the recently turned earth. Kindaria barely managed to keep her feet, landing in a crouch over the wizard’s body. Her hand twitched at her side, unused to the absence of her sword’s hilt, which bobbed above the wizard’s stomach with his dying breaths. 
        Rain fell around them: the dark rain of Ezriette’s arrows. Dozens of dark shafts, tipped with silver arrow heads, fell in pulses, peppering the scores of undead still shuffling toward the portal. Many of the creatures fell, but many more continued on. 
        Kindaria gripped the wizard by his collar and lifted him up. The hood of his shadowy robes fell away, revealing a startlingly young face. He was a red fox, eighteen or possibly as old as twenty. Blood trickled from his muzzle.
        “Where are you sending them? Who is gathering this army?”
        “Impossible,” the young wizard croaked. “The Master said. . .you would never find me.”
        “Who is your master?” she demanded, gripping the hilt of her sword. She twisted it slightly, feeling the blade separating the two vertebra it had wedged between. He croaked and writhed in pain, though his legs and lower body didn’t move.
        “Tell me!”
        A heavy weight fell on her shoulder. Kalliam’s gauntleted hand.
        “Kin, you must not torture him. His wounds don’t have to be fatal. There are subtler ways to get him to talk.”
        Kindaria glanced up. Kalliam and Noelle flanked her. Behind them, Ezriette was on the hill, raining silvered re-death on the undead, while Lyss blasted the hoard with fireballs from the sky, her red and purple wings beating powerfully to keep her aloft for so long. Still, the undead never paused. They continued to shuffle toward the portal, getting through in threes and fours, shambling over the bodies of the fallen.
        “My Master. . .fears nothing from you. If you are foolhardy enough, you can find him--. . .” Blood sputtered from the boy’s mouth as his body lurched. 
        “Kin!”
        “I didn’t!”
        Kindaria released her grip on her sword’s hilt and the fox’s body slumped to the ground, revealing the hunched form of a ghoul that had skulked up behind him. The wizard’s heart still beat in the abomination’s gnarled hand. Kindaria gasped and staggered back in alarm, falling backwards. As her butt sank into freshly turned earth, she heard the hiss of Kalliam’s broadsword. 
        Noelle struck with signature precision and aplomb. The triplet heads of her adamantine flail arced through the air. They sank into the ghoul’s knees with a sickening crunch, shattering the undead’s legs. From the other side, Kalliam’s blade sang through the air. Before the ghoul’s body could fall, its legs torn out from under its body, Kalliam’s broadsword sliced through its neck cleanly. The ghoul’s body fell to the ground in pieces, its head rolling one way as its shins clattered along the ground the other way. Its torso fell atop the dead wizard, whose heart still thumped as it slid out of the ghoul’s claws.
        Kalliam reached his hand out to Kindaria. She grasped it and stood, grateful that the massive roc paladin said nothing about her alarm. She put a foot to the wizard’s corpse and jerked her sword out of his spine. She, Kalliam, and Noelle all looked up simultaneously as the air crackled. Without its progenitor, the portal was collapsing. Tendrils of uncontrolled magic snapped from the portal’s periphery, shattering the shambling corpses of the undead nearby. Despite the obviously fatal consequences of approaching the portal, the undead kept shuffling toward it.
        “They’re not his,” Kindaria said, her eyes narrowing. She knelt to wipe the wizard’s blood off her blade on his cloak. 
        “The Master’s,” Noelle agreed. “This underling was only here to raise the portal.”
        “So he somehow raised these undead in proxy?” Kalliam said, sounding dubious.
        Noelle nodded again. “He could have set it up in advance.”
        “Given the wizard some kind of activation item,” Kalliam countered, his dubious tone turning thoughtful.
        The three were silent for a moment. None of them moved to assist Ezriette or Lyss. Between the pair’s sheer destructive power and the portal’s increasing instability, the undead were falling rapidly. They would be decimated within a few moments. Kindaria, Kalliam, and Noelle watched the slaughter of the Master’s would-be army impassively.
        “Or he was here himself, and trusted that his wizard would be a suitable distraction,” Kindaria said slowly.
        Noelle turned, arching her eyebrow slowly. “You were the only one watching, Kin. Did you see anyone else?”
        Kin was silent for a moment longer. The portal crackled, then split, turning from its deep blue to an angry purple as the spell tore itself apart. The spell ripped apart then erupted in a blinding flash, like silent lightning. Most of the undead were blasted to pieces by the uncontrolled arcana. Two of the slowest zombies still stood, and Kindaria watched as twin arrows pierced their skulls at the same moment. Then, the graveyard was still.
        “No,” Kindaria finally said with a sigh. The renewed stillness of the graveyard harkened back to the utter silence and stillness she had felt in waiting. Nothing she had seen, heard, or felt suggested there might’ve been someone else there, pulling the strings. “Do me a favor though, and let me know next time you’re planning on getting ambushed without me.”
        Kalliam snorted and Noelle chuckled ruefully. “Will do.”
        With a rush of wind, Lyss landed beside them. The phoenix woman smiled at her companions and turned to accept Ezriette into their circle as the ranger strode up. Kindaria smiled at Lyss, who smiled back. The unicorn and phoenix shared a brief kiss as Ezriette knelt by the corpse, pushing the ghoul’s torso off it perfunctorily.
        “Everyone okay?” Kalliam asked. Kindaria gently insinuated herself against Lyss’s side, admiring the way Kalliam kept the group’s well being as his first priority. She wished sometimes that she could think more like him.
        “Other than being bored to death waiting for these two to clean up the mess,” Noelle said, shooting a playful glance at Lyss and Ezriette. 
        Lyss laughed. “You were welcome to join us if you were tired of watching.”
        “Last time I got in a shooting match with you two, I got yelled at.”
        Ezriette shrugged. “These were undead. You might’ve been able to keep up instead of just siphoning off my kills.”
        Kindaria glanced up at Lyss sideways. “Who won, anyway?”
        “153 to 152. Those last two put me over the top,” Ezriette said with a grim smile. She didn’t turn away from the corpse. Her fingers were deftly sorting his belongings. Some jewelry, a magical short staff, a spellbook, and a small belt pouch were arranged in a neat line beside the fox’s body.
        “Kin wins, if you ask me,” Kalliam said, nudging the spellbook open with his foot. “She took this fellow out single-handedly.”
        “Not to mention her quick thinking, breaking the sleep spell,” Lyss agreed.
        Ezriette just grunted, then pulled something out of the wizard’s coinpouch. “Lyss, look at this.” Hands flickering with supernatural flame, the nightmare ranger flipped the coin at the group’s sorceress. Lyss yelped softly but Kindaria snatched the coin out of the air before it struck the phoenix. She handed it to Lyss, who thanked her softly.
        “This is a guild marker,” she said, studying the small octagonal coin. “He’s a professional.”
        “Professional?” Kalliam asked. “He’s so young.”
        “No,” Kindaria said, spying something in the pool of blood under the wizard’s back. “He’s not.” She left Lyss’s side and carefully wedged her toe under the corpse’s arm. She gave a kick, rolling the body onto its belly. The back of his robes glistened darkly, completely covered in his blood. A hole gaped flesh and bone splinters where his heart had been ripped out and a smaller hole pierced his robe further down where Kindaria had skewered him.
        But what Kindaria had seen was further still. Two long, coppery tails emerged from the back of the wizard’s robe, their fur soaked in blood. Not a fox at all: a kitsune.
        “Ah,” Kalliam said softly.
        “That explains why he was so fast,” Kindaria said, stepping back from the body. 
        Lyss arched an eyebrow at her. “As fast as you?”
        “Not quite, but close.”
        The party was silent. Kalliam let out an appreciative whistle. 
        Lyss knelt down beside the line of items Ezriette had sorted. She flipped through the pages of the spellbook as Ezriette upturned the belt pouch. Platinum and gold coins spilled out, followed by a small, geometric opal.
        “He’s not a necromancer. Or terribly creative. Some offense, some defense, and several spells focused on translocation and teleportation. All pretty standard guild fare. Nothing illegal or even original. What’s that?” Lyss asked Ezriette. The nightmare shrugged, passing the opal to the sorceress.
        “You tell me,” Ezriette said.
        Lyss turned the stone over in her hand. The smooth, pale stone was carved into a uniform geometric shape, about the size of a plum. Runes were inscribed on three of the twelve sides. The other four members of the party watched Lyss’s study of the stone expectantly. The stillness of the graveyard rang in Kindaria’s ears as she held her breath, waiting for the sorceress’s appraisal.
        “Communication device,” she said finally. “Unidirectional. And. . .possibly something else.”
        “Activation device?” Kalliam asked. “To trigger the rise?”
        “Or perhaps a passthrough,” Noelle added. “So the master could perform the raising from afar.”
        “Can we use it to pinpoint the Master? Or his army?” Kindaria asked hopefully.
        “Possibly,” Lyss said, sounding uncertain. “It’ll require some study.”
        Kindaria, Ezriette, and Kalliam all groaned simultaneously. Lyss chuckled ruefully.
        “Sorry. In the meantime, we should get to Valcrest. I need to report this to the guild, and I’ll need some supplies for my research.”
        Ezriette stood, pocketing the money from the wizard’s pouch. Drawing out a square of silk, Lyss wrapped the opal stone and stowed it in her own pouch. Kalliam edged the toe of his plate boot under the magical staff and kicked it up deftly. Kindaria snatched it out of the air and reached behind her back, sliding the short length of wyldwood under the leather strap of her bandolier.
        “What about the spellbook?” Noelle asked, kneeling to scoop up the jewelry.
        “Worthless,” Lyss said. “To us anyway. Let the villagers find it. Maybe they have a hedgewitch or something who could get some use out of it.”
        “So we’re just going to leave this mess for them to clean up?” Kalliam asked.
        Ezriette shrugged. “We’re adventurers, Kal. We leave messes.”
        “Usually, adventurers head back into town for payment in the process of apologizing for messes,” Kindaria chimed in.
        Lyss shrugged. “I think it’s more important we make time to Valcrest. And I don’t think we have the provisions to take along the sheep they’d try to pay us with.”
        The five adventurers chuckled, standing over the corpse. Kindaria finally sheathed her sword. Behind them, the graveyard was littered with the bodies of the village’s ancestors, twisted by dark magic. The feathered shafts that sprouted from the bodies like queer, stiff blades of grass began disappearing in small groups as the multiplicative magic of Ezriette’s bowstring faded.
        “Time to go,” Noelle said as their grim laughter petered out. Kalliam nodded, softly placing his hand on the wyvern’s shoulder.
        “Lyss,” the roc paladin said, “Know any pops to Valcrest?”
        The phoenix shook her head. “No. But Fallenwall is far closer than we are now.”
        Kalliam nodded, holding out his other hand. Ezriette grasped the plated gauntlet and held her own hand out to Kindaria. Lyss closed the circle and murmured a word of power. The five adventurers disappeared from the grim tableau.

***

        Ezriette and Kindaria walked side-by-side on the road between Fallenwall and Valcrest. Noelle and Kalliam were a good distance behind with the pack animal, and Lyss was somewhere above, the only one of the three winged members of their party with the stamina to stay aloft for long durations. Despite their wingless state, Ezriette and Kindaria had the best eyes of the group and always traveled at the fore, ranging ahead and to the sides if the path was treacherous.
        Today, however, the path was anything but. Valcrest was a massive trade center, situated between the arms of two major rivers. Fallenwall, located just south of the foothills to have enough arable land to farm for sustenance, had a ready access to raw ores, and was home to many skilled artisans and blacksmiths. As a result, the road between the two cities was well-patrolled and relatively safe, especially during the day. And especially for adventurers.
        “What do you think?” Kindaria asked Ezriette conversationally. Both of them valued silence, but after walking in quiet companionship the entire day before, Kindaria wasn’t sure she could take another ten hours of it. 
        “I think a phoenix and a unicorn is an odd mix, and I wouldn’t mind if you started taking a look at someone closer to your own species,” the nightmare said, favoring her with a sidelong grin.
        “What?” Kindaria said, feeling herself blush.
        “Oh, isn’t that what you meant?” Ezriette said smoothly, playing innocent.
        “I meant this job. The Master. His army. And besides, equine or not, I don’t think a nightmare and a unicorn is any less odd.” 
        Ezriette shrugged casually, letting the back of her hand brush Kindaria’s. The constant flame that surrounded her fingertips felt like the cool kiss of lingering fog. Kindaria continued to blush, a little confused, but didn’t pull her hand away.
        “I have a bad feeling,” Ezriette said finally. “This is pretty far outside the scope of what we were originally hired to do.”
        “Track down the dangerous mage, stop him from desecrating the ancestors of this land’s people, root out his evil, et cetera, et cetera? Sounds like we’re on track to me.”
        Ezriette shook her head. “This is different. I think we’re underestimating this master character. He corrupted a well-established guildmage to be his underling. By conservative estimates, his undead army numbers in the tens of thousands, but we can’t find it anywhere. He hasn’t taken to the field or made demands of the populace. Cutting down the occasional malicious tyrant is nothing new to me. I was part of the group that brought Lord Malengar to justice a few years ago. Whoever this master is, he is working far more subtly than any other megalomaniacal necromancer I’ve ever heard of.”
        Kindaria glanced over, surprised. “You were a member of The Arrowfell? I didn’t know that.”
        Ezriette shrugged. “I don’t exactly advertise it. Kalliam knows. And now you. Dorran, Lian, and Thetta are all dead now, so the fewer people who remember my involvement, the happier I am.”
        “I’m sorry,” Kindaria said, glancing upward as Lyss passed overhead, gliding on massive wings.
        “I’m an adventurer. Dead comrades are far more common than living ones. Anyway, I hope Lyss can turn up some information at the guildhall in Valcrest.”
        There was something in Ezriette’s tone that made Kindaria stop. The nightmare did, too, turning to look at her with a raised eyebrow.
        “Thinking of leaving the band?” Kindaria asked softly. “Starting your own band to take this master on after he marches on some poor country or other?”
        Ezriette shrugged. The two started walking again before Kalliam and Noelle gained too much ground. Both the roc paladin and the wyvern cleric were followers of the Threefold Path, and often spent their traveling hours discussing theology and enlightenment. It wasn’t a conversation Kindaria or Ezriette wanted to be dragged into.
        “It had crossed my mind,” the nightmare said honestly. There was a long pause, comfortable silence flowing into fill the space between them. Then, “You could come with me, Kin,” Ezriette offered softly.
        Part of Kindaria had expected the offer. Hearing it out loud didn’t make it any less distasteful. Kindaria shook her head almost immediately. “I don’t work that way, Ez. I don’t do this because I want to. I do it because people like Lord Malengar and this master person need to be stopped, and I have unique skills that can stop them. You do this for yourself. Lyss does it for power. Kalliam and Noelle do it for faith. I do it because I can’t be a normal citizen. If I didn’t do this, the things I can do--the abilities I have--would find something else for me to do. I do it because if I didn’t, I would become like them.”
        Kindaria took a deep breath, shuddering softly. She hadn’t meant to admit quite so much. She glanced sideways at Ezriette, who avoided her gaze, watching the path as they moved forward.
        “Besides, I don’t think this guy will be any easier to take on after his master plans have come to fruition than before. If we can track him down, we’ll have a chance to strike before he has garnered all the power he wants. If we wait too long, it may be too late.”
        Ezriette looked up then, met her eyes. She nodded slowly.
        “I’ll stay,” she said softly.
        Lyss’s shadow passed over them again. This time, the shadow was accompanied with a blast of air as the phoenix’s wings snapped out, slowing her dive just in time for her to land lightly beside the two equines.
        “Girl talk?” she asked teasingly, sliding her arm around Kindaria’s midsection.
        “Something like that,” Ezriette said with a smile.
        “She was trying to lure me away from you--get me to trade one fiery treat for another.”
        “Tsk,” Lyss said. “Careful, Ez, we might have to duel for her.”
        “I’ll take those odds,” Ezriette said eagerly, her smile turning to a grin.
        “Don’t I get a say in the matter?” Kindaria asked with a playful pout.
        “No,” the sorceress and the ranger chimed in together. All three of them laughed and Lyss pulled Kindaria closer, favoring her with a slow sweet kiss. The unicorn yelped slightly when Ezriette goosed her during the kiss. Despite the awkwardness of Lyss’s short beak, her kisses were always tender and she did, in fact, taste slightly spicy. Kindaria let some of the tension that her conversation with Ezriette had stirred up melt away.
        “Don’t distract me too much, Lyss, or Noelle and Kalliam will catch up. I’m sure both lesbianism and interspecies mingling are frowned upon somewhere in the Threefold Path”
        Ezriette glanced over her shoulder and chuckled. 
        “I don’t know about the former, but I seriously doubt the latter is a problem.”
        Kindaria glanced backward as well. She whispered the command word for her pendant, and as her vision sharpened, she got a clear view of the group’s two moral compasses kissing slowly as they lead the pack animal further back along the road.
        Ezriette sighed dramatically. “It’s going to be a long walk.”

***

        On the morning of their third day of travel, the band of adventurers stood just inside the gates of Valcrest. The city was densely populated, its borders confined by two wide and swift rivers as the Crestfall River broke free from the larger Valiant River, both turning toward different paths to different seas. As an independent city-state, Valcrest and its nobility was one of the most powerful economic forces in the area. The city kept a very small standing army, and supplemented its tactical numbers by rotating in different mercenary bands, patroning adventurers, and acting as the host city of the Guild of Arcane Adepts, usually known simply as the Magician’s Guild. 
        Even in travelling clothes, Kalliam’s plate and Noelle’s chain stashed on the pack animal, and even without a common party name or sigil, the five were easily identifiable as an adventuring band. Though not an uncommon sight, the citizens of Valcrest gave them a wide berth as they started down the main avenue from the southern gate.
        “I should get to the guild. That wizard’s actions are a serious breach of protocol,” Lyss said. Without waiting for a confirmation from Kalliam, she launched herself up and out of the city traffic, a few citizens crying out in alarm and surprise, the wind of her wings beating down over fashionable, wide-brimmed hats.
        The Magician’s Guild operated on a strict code of ethics. Magic was not uncommon in the City-States, but most of it was old, static, or divine, or in many cases, all three. Noelle and Kalliam had access to a limited pool of divine magic granted to them by the three goddesses they worshipped and years of devout training. Ezriette had a small knack and a single magical bowstring that was a relic of an ancient artificer. Kindaria carried nearly a dozen small magic items, relics as well, that each housed a small but powerful magical property. Collections of such magnitude were rare, even of such small items, as all larger repositories of more powerful magical items had been raided, stolen, abused, and destroyed thousands of times in the centuries since magic had truly been commonplace.
        Rarer by far was New Magic, such as the power that Lyss wielded. A tiny percent of the population had more than just the sort of knack that aided Ezriette. They had true, innate control of magic. The power was destructive and usually fatal if left uncontrolled. The Guild of Arcane Adepts found these natural sorcerers and trained them in return for adherence to their code. And to defy the guild meant death: rogue wizards were far too dangerous to leave unaddressed. 
        Kindaria watched as Lyss’s form dwindled in the direction of the city’s center.
        “I should get to the market,” Kindaria said. “That wizard’s staff is probably worth a small fortune. Get us some nice rooms this time, alright?”        

***

        Three hours later, Kindaria strode through the door of the Queen’s Orchid, one of the nicest taverns in Valcrest. Rather than loose boards and threshes, the floor was polished stone. There were booths instead of common tables, with plush velvet cushions and heavy curtains for privacy. This was a noble’s inn, not an adventurer’s tavern. Kindaria approved. Her dark leathers stood out in the polished room like an ash smudge on a new dress. She made her way to the bar, which was a tall affair hewn from mahogany. A steward stood stiffly behind it and raised a brow at her archly. She placed her ninja-to on the bartop along with a gold coin. He nodded, and stowed the weapon behind the bar. He gestured toward one of the booths that had its curtain drawn.
        Kindaria pulled aside the curtain to find all four of her comrades waiting there for her. She smiled, slid onto the cushioned bench, and drew the curtain again. Without a word, she divvied out coins. Mostly platinum, with a handful of gold each so that things broke even. Kalliam whistled.
        “That much?” he asked.
        “No,” she said simply. “More. I took the liberty of buying a few potions and some supplies. What did the guild say?” she asked, moving closer to Lyss. The phoenix put a comfortable arm around her.
        “Dagon Sirian,” Lyss said. “His marker didn’t bear any trace of dark magic and he was in Valcrest just three weeks ago to pay his annual dues.”
        “So he wasn’t raising any dead himself,” Kalliam said thoughtfully. “Just the chauffeur, getting those things from point A to point B.”
        Lyss nodded. “It also means that this,” she placed the geometric opal that had also been on Dagon’s body on the table. “Was no passthrough. If the necromancy was cast through an object on his person, it still would’ve triggered his guild marker.”
        Noelle frowned. “So the Master was there. And we missed him. Somehow.”
        Kindaria frowned, too. That didn’t seem right. How could she have missed another mage? The night had been so still. 
        “The good news is,” Noelle continued. “That while you were out shopping and you were out hobnobbing,” she teased Kindaria and Lyss, “I managed to dig up a clue.”
        Kindaria sat up a little straighter. “A clue, huh? Telling us that the Thrice-Blessed Goddesses are pretty sure the Master is a ‘Bad Person’ doesn’t count as a clue, Noelle.”
        Ezriette snorted with laughter. Kalliam glowered, but Noelle just smiled and continued on.
        “A real clue. At least, I’ve got a feeling they’re connected. Brother Medellan Aurora was slain several weeks ago. His body was just discovered three days ago.”
        “Medellan Aurora? Is that a name I should know?” Ezriette asked skeptically.
        Noelle shook her head. “No. That’s the whole point. Medellan was a Watchkeeper.”
        Kalliam and Lyss both hissed with surprised, Kalliam’s dark look growing even grimmer.
        Ezriette and Kindaria glanced at each other. Ezriette shrugged, so Kindaria turned back to Noelle. “Watchkeeper?”
        “A hermit of the Threefold Path. They worship in solitude, isolated from the rest of the world by both geography and magical wards. Each one is entrusted with a different secret, a different piece of knowledge too important to lose or forget, but too dangerous to know. I don’t know all the secrets Medellan was entrusted with, but the bishop in Valcrest did tell me that he knew the Words of Entry to the Solemn Library.”
        “The resting place of Venturi the Profane,” Ezriette said.
        “Are we sure these events are related?” Kalliam asked.
        “Would you rather we be dealing with two completely different megalomaniacs rather than just one?” Noelle replied.
        Kalliam paused, looking thoughtful. “If it meant that the man capable of hiding an undead army of tens of thousands without leaving a trace didn’t have access to whatever secrets lay buried in the Library, and vice versa? Then yes, I’d take two, rather than one with the power of both.”
        “What would the Master want in there, though?”
        “To raise Venturi’s body to be some powerful ghoul in his army?” Lyss suggested.
        “Ancient spells in the books Venturi buried with him? It can’t be called a library for nothing” Noelle added.
        Kindaria shook her head. “There are no books in the library. Just corpses. The legends have been muddled over the centuries. Venturi the Profaner wasn’t a man, it was a cult. The Profaners of Venturi. It’s a long, epic tale, but I’ll give you the short version. Venturi was a god in one of the oldest pantheons, the patron of healers. The first Profaner was an exarch blessed with Venturi’s most supreme divine magic. But he went mad when his love, a young queen, was struck down in battle. He drew on Venturi’s divine blessing of health and twisted it, distorting it until he could wield the power to wrench his queen back from her holy rest. Her body rose again, the first undead to befoul this world’s soil.
        “Infuriated and disgusted, Venturi struck the Profaner down, intending to take his power back and condemn him for eternity. But the Profaner and his undead queen overpowered the god and eventually enslaved him. Profanity spread throughout the queen’s nation. Undead were raised by the thousands, outnumbering the living, walking among them in an obscene imitation of life. The First Profaner and his queen ruled mercilessly, bending the living to their will and slaying those who did not bend, raising their corpses as more loyal servants.
        “So loathsome was the nation of Profanity that the other gods of the pantheon had no choice. They killed Venturi to end his enslavement, which stripped the Profaners of their power. The entire nation, both the living and dead, the innocent and the heinous, was wiped out by the gods’ wrathful hands. The citizens were sent to their peace, but the bodies of the cultists, the Profaners of Venturi, were gathered by the pantheon and locked in the Solemn Library, where their souls would never know peace. It’s called a library because of the shelves. Shelves upon shelves of bodies.”
        The other four stared at her as she finished the tale. Noelle was the first to find her voice.
        “How do you know all that?” Noelle asked.
        Kindaria reached up and gently touched her horn. Unicorns could pass on a small store of memories from generation to generation, and the gift was usually reserved for the oral histories of a unicorn’s tribe. 
        “Venturi created my race,” Kindaria said softly. “Every unicorn knows that story. Every unicorn harbors, in their heart, the indignity and injustice Venturi suffered at the hands of the Profaners.” She shook her head slowly. “I know why the Master is going to the Library.”
        “Why?” Noelle asked, leaning forward curiously.
        “The Solemn Library is one of, what, a handful of crypts from the Last Age of Magic that has never been breached. He wants the same thing that every other crypt robber in the last millennium has wanted.”
        “Magical artifacts,” Ezriette filled in. Kindaria nodded.
        A soft knock sounded at the edge of their booth, a gentle rapping on the outer edge of the bench. Kindaria slid away from Lyss’s side to lean over, curiously pulling aside the curtain. A woman stood, wringing her hands. As she glanced in at the motley assembly, she seemed to relax somewhat.
        “Oh, thank goodness,” she said. “You are adventurers. Please, I need your help.”
        The group turned to look at Kalliam, their erstwhile leader, since no one else seemed willing to take up the role.
        “Ma’am, I’m sorry. We’re already under contract.”
        “Please, you must help. Or at least come and see for yourself. My baby’s been murdered.”
        Kindaria gasped softly. The other four seemed unimpressed.
        “We’re adventurers, ma’am, not the constabulary,” Kalliam said calmly.
        The woman shook her head. “I know, I know. I just . . . please. I don’t know who else to turn to.” The woman began crying, lifting her wrung hands to her face. Kindaria’s eyes narrowed slightly noticing the raw, scrubbed look of her hands. Glancing the woman over, she gasped again softly and turned her head to get Kalliam’s attention. She motioned as the woman cried. The hem of the woman’s dress was soaked an inch deep in blood.
        The five exchanged glances and Kalliam slowly nodded. They slid out of the booth. Ezriette collected their weapons from the bar steward as Noelle draped a comforting arm over the woman’s shoulders. The woman whispered the blessings of a dozen or more gods as she realized the group was agreeing to help her, and lead the five out of the tavern.

***

        Leaning out the window, Kindaria hunched slightly as her lunch vacated her stomach. She turned to rejoin the group, but the smell struck her again and her stomach lurched, emptying itself further. Ezriette placed a gentle hand on her shoulder and offered her a handkerchief. She spat the last of the bile out onto the street and placed the cloth over her muzzle. Holding it there, she steeled herself and turned back to the room.
        The nursery was not much bigger than a closet. The walls, once whitewashed and painted over in whimsical murals, were red with blood, speckled brown where spatter had dried. The liquid covered the floor, thick and congealing. In the center of the massacre, the remains of a baby lay in a crib, it’s ribs cracked open, it’s heart laying exposed. The poor creature had been alive when its chest had been ripped open, the heart allowed to beat the thing’s lifeblood into the small room. 
        “He was hungry,” the woman said, eerily calm and staring at the ceiling. “I called for the wetnurse, then went to market when she arrived.”
        “When I got to the door, it wouldn’t budge,” the wetnurse picked up the thread. She was pale and shaking. Unlike the mother, she was covered in blood, from head to toe. “I could hear the wee babe wailing inside. I pounded on the door screaming, but I couldn’t force it open.” She lifted her handkerchief, sobbing into it shortly.
        “When--. . .when it finally flew open, he was just there, breathing his last. The window was open. I. . .I screamed, I think. And then I passed out. It’s. . .oh goddess.” The wetnurse turned and ran down the hallway. Not too distantly, Kindaria could hear the woman being sick. Her own stomach lurched in sympathy.
        Ezriette slipped between the crib and Kindaria to kneel by the window. “Someone stood here,” she said. Beneath the sill, there was an area of clean whitewash in the silhouette of someone’s legs. “Watching, I suppose?”
        “Not just watching. Collecting,” Kalliam said grimly.
        Noelle nodded. “This was a ritual. The blood of an innocent.”  She looked at Ezriette. “How long ago?”
        Ezriette sighed and shrugged. “I’m not sure. A couple of hours? Three at most. With the wetnurse having passed out, it’s hard to be sure, but that’s my guess based on these walls. The Master, you think?”
        Kalliam shook his head. “I have to think so. This is a powerful ritual.” He made a short signal of silence to his four companions, then turned toward the woman. “Ma’am, I think it’s obvious that there’s nothing we can do to help here.”
        The mother nodded. Her face was was stony and calm. Tears streaked down her cheeks, but she didn’t acknowledge them. “I know. Thank you for coming. This is necromancy, isn’t it? The guild is so far away. Adventurers were the only thing I could think of. Oh,” she said, voice catching in her throat, her eyes losing focus. “My baby. . .”
        Kalliam laid a hand on her shoulder. “You did the right thing. We’ll notify the guild. You should be commended for your quick thinking given the. . .the circumstances.”
        The five quietly, awkwardly, slipped out of the room after that, tracking more blood through the hallway as they left the building in silence. When the door shut behind Lyss, they could hear the woman beginning to wail. Kindaria handed the handkerchief back to Ezriette. They walked a short way from the building then stood at the opening to an alleyway. Kalliam looked uncertain of which way to go. Finally, he turned to his companions.
        “A message?” he asked.
        “A taunt,” Ezriette agreed. “He knows we’re in the city and we’re still powerless to stop him. We have no idea who he is, or what he wants.”
        “An army of undead, a powerful, obscene ritual, and the key to the divine tomb of an ancient necromancer.”
        “He’s preparing,” said Ezriette. “He’s smarter and far more patient than any threat this land has seen in a century.”
        “We should go back to the tavern and collect our things. We won’t be sleeping in Valcrest tonight.”

***
        Three hours later, the group stood at the crest of a hill to the northeast of Steelridge. Situated for strategic access to iron and silver mines and stands of rare, sub-arctic woods, Steelridge was one of the southernmost city-states and was isolated by miles upon miles of low, rocky hills. The Solemn Library had been raised in the far outskirts of the nation the Profaners had once controlled. Not quite desolate, but certainly isolated enough to discourage those of casual curiosity. Luckily, the bishop in Valcrest had been able to provide translocation to Steelridge.
        “See anything?” Kalliam asked, kneeling on one knee in the frost-coated grass. Ezriette and Kindaria both shook their heads.
        “No movement,” Ezriette said. “The whole thing is grown over.”
        The five approached cautiously. There was no discrete way to approach the library. It stood alone in the center of a low depression that stretched for a mile in all directions, a massive building of dark granite overgrown in gray foliage. Grass the color of ash stood waist high in the depression, made brittle by frost, struggling to eke out an existence in the near-arctic environment. It shivered and snapped with a tinkling sound as Kalliam, Ezriette, and Kindaria moved through it. Lyss and Noelle made slow circles in the sky above them, Noelle’s massive, leathery wings occasionally sounding with a sharp snap as she beat them powerfully to keep herself aloft despite the weight of her chainmail.
        The Solemn Library was fronted by a modest set of stairs that came up to a small landing. There were no trappings of a typical crypt. No carved figures or fluted columns. Just simple stone stairs leading to a massive door set into a square, three-story tall stone wall. Vines that looked anything but native covered every surface, as gray as the frozen grass. They had to step carefully for their boots to find stone as they mounted the steps. With a buffeting wind, Lyss and Noelle landed beside the other three on the landing. Just before the door was a scorched circle where the vines had been seared away. They still smoldered, the red embers of dying vines the only color in the bleak landscape.
        In front of them, the door stood ajar, a low, constant moan coming from within.
        “He’s only just gotten here?” Kindaria asked dubiously. “We can’t be that lucky. He’s had this information for weeks.”
        “Who’s making that sound, though?” Kalliam interjected. The moaning was constant and definitely coming from within the catacomb. “It doesn’t sound like undead.”
        Ezriette held up her hand, silencing both of them. She was kneeling beside the crack of the door, concentrating. As Kindaria watched, the flame around the nightmare’s fingers changed from orange and red to a light blue color, nearly matching the grey of the stone and vines. She curled her fingers then made a fist, which she jerked back suddenly and sharply. There was a short, strange fizzing sound followed by the flash of a magical rune in the air by the door.
        “Traps,” Ezriette said. “Regardless of our timing, we’ll have to proceed slowly.” Then she jerked her head and slipped inside. Kalliam and Kindaria followed, with Lyss and Noelle bringing up the rear.
        Kindaria wasn’t prepared for what she saw inside. She was familiar with the legends of the Library. She had seen its size from outside. She knew what it contained.
        But she had never imagined there would be so many bodies.
        Two shelves loomed to either side of the massive door, about 15 feet high. Bodies were stacked four high in individual alcoves. The shelves extended easily a hundred yards deep into the Library. Kindaria quickly estimated that she stood in an aisle of at least three hundred bodies. An aisle extended to the left and right from the door, leading to more lines of shelves which she could see rising higher and higher to either side. The shelf against the distant far walls were the full three stories high. 
        And they all still lived.
        She stared at the closest body. Its face held a grimace of pain. Its skin was pale but it did not have the palor of death. And as she watched, silent, holding her breath, it occasionally twitched or clenched its muscles. It was alive and in pain. That’s what the legends meant, when they said the Profaners’ souls would never know peace. How long had they been locked here? A thousand years, at least. Probably more.
        “The gods do not take enslavement lightly,” Kalliam said. His four comrades nodded. Solemnly. Kalliam moved to take a step forward but Ezriette, kneeling, reached out quickly and grabbed his shin. He stopped. 
        Ezriette sighed and shook her head.
        “So many traps,” she said softly. “I can barely sense them all. Whoever is here is still here, and he arrived days ago, preparing for our arrival behind him. The smoldering vines were a ruse to trick into thinking he’d just gotten here, trick us into rushing ahead.”
        “Not the Master then,” Kindaria said. “Presumably, he was in Valcrest the same time we were.”
        “That could have been another turned mage serving him,” Noelle countered. They all looked at Kalliam, who frowned. The weight of leadership seemed to be growing heavier on his shoulders as the mission grew more complex.
        “No,” he said finally. “Anyone can retrieve a magical item from an ancient crypt. He would’ve had to be present to benefit from the ritual. He was in Valcrest, and it is a minion we face here.”
        Ezriette nodded, adding, “And where the last one specialized in translocation, this one specializes in traps.”
        “Is that even a valid speciality?” Noelle asked. They glanced at Lyss, who shrugged.
        Lyss opened her mouth to explain. Kindaria tensed, sensing an intellectual discourse on what constituted moral practices by the guild, and what qualified magic as dark or as worthy for study. She stood.
        “We don’t have time for this,” Kindaria said, interrupting her lover.
        Kalliam and Noelle were thrice-blessed by their divine faith. Lyss had New Magic. Ezriette had a knack for accuracy and magic detection. Kindaria’s true value did not lay in her collection of magic items, impressive though it might be. No, Kindaria’s unique value as an adventurer came from speed. She was simply faster than anyone had a right to be.
        She touched her leather cuirass, then a copper bracelet on her left arm, her steel studded belt, and then two different rings on her fingers, whispering the activation words for each one in turn, protecting herself from flame, lightning, acid, poison, and cold.
        Then she ran.
        Instantly, she could feel the traps that Ezriette could see. Though they were arcane and not physical, they pressed into her skin just as if she had stepped into a snare’s triggerwire. They pulled at her, half a dozen or more. And then one by one, they began to snap. 
        Fire erupted behind her. Arrows of force materialized in front of her but she was able to twist between them with ease. The floor turned to ice and a fostbitten hand reached for her. The chill she felt when it brushed her calf reached all the way to her bones. A pit appeared in front of her but she ran over it without pausing, recognizing the illusion. There were more explosions. This time she could feel the fireballs erupting just behind her, could feel her cuirass turning away the flesh-scorching heat. She was slowing. But she was nearly there. 
        Her horn glowed as she instinctively turned away a psychic assault. Chains formed themselves out of the stones that made up the floor. They whipped out at her like tentacles, snatching at her ankles and thighs. Her preternatural speed snapped the chains easily, but they still slowed her down. When a final fireball exploded, it struck right at her feet. She was engulfed for a moment in its acrid, arcane flame. She could smell her singed hair. The enchantment of her cuirass surged, then buckled, breaking under the onslaught. She screamed in defiance as the flame seared her fur and scorched away her tail to a nub, but then it was over. One final, arcane trigger wire was stretched taut across her chest. She stepped forward and it snapped.
        The building shook and a thundering cracking sound filled her singed, swiveling ears. The granite floor in front of her warped and then shattered. The shattered stone lifted up, taking on the form of a single, massive arm. It slammed a craggy hand down on the unbroken floor beside it. A second rubble-formed arm lifted up and slammed down a hand twin to the first. With a lurch, the hands pushed, lifting an enormous shape out of the broken floor. It pushed itself up to its knees then stood. At fifteen feet, the golem of shattered granite towered over her, leaving a vaguely humanoid crater in the floor of the library. It clenched its fists, stretching its arms to either side as it roared.
        A second roar echoed it, challenging it. Kindaria heard the solid sound of metal against stone just behind her. Kalliam must have been pacing her to be so close behind. A blast of air struck her in the back as he unfurled his wings a step behind her. He took another step and placed a hand on her shoulder. Warmth suffused her scorched, injured body, the healing magic of the Threefold Path flowing into her. Still roaring, his next step lifted him into the air. The roc paladin’s huge wings beat powerfully. He pulled his sword out in a single motion and hefted it over his head for a powerful swing that would be amplified as gravity pulled him back down toward the ground.
        Kalliam’s grace, power, and speed made for an impressive charge, but Kindaria instantly saw that it would not be enough. Despite being a huge creature of several tons of rock, she could see how fast the golem was. Its arm was already in motion to swat Kalliam out of the air before his blow could land. The power of the strike coupled with Kalliam’s launched height and the mass of the golem’s hand and Kalliam’s armor . . . the paladin would be utterly demolished.
        Time seemed to slow as Kindaria reacted. She dashed forward, her ears brushing the soles of Kalliam’s plate boots as he soared over her. She leapt too. Without wings, the height of her leap was nothing compared to Kalliam’s, but her movement was similar. Her ninja-to slid fluidly out of its sheath and she lifted it in both hands above her head.
        The golem’s swing carried his hand directly into her blade. Sparks flew as her blade angrily hissed through the golem’s arm. It sheared through the animate granite, ripping its hand from its body. The stone hand still flew forward, carried by the momentum of the swing, but without the full weight of the golem’s powerful blow behind it, the hand merely struck Kalliam in the hip and fell to the ground, knocking him slightly to the side but not pulverizing him to the floor as he should have been.
        As the enormous hand fell from Kalliam’s hip toward the floor, an eerie, crackling light streaked through the air beside the striking paladin. A ball of magical force struck the golem in its other shoulder, breaking with a massive clap of thunder. An arrow screamed through the air just behind the spell and embedded itself deeply in the crease where the creature’s arm met its body. The arrow exploded, wrenching the arm free from the body in a shower of shale and granite fragments. The golem reeled and Kalliam struck, plunging his broadsword into the creature’s chest.
        The golem roared, twisting its upper body, only the hilt of Kalliam’s broadsword protruding from its chest. It shook itself, flinging Kalliam to one side. Kindaria dashed backwards, feeling the wind from a wild swing of the golem’s hand-less arm. Then a different wind blew her hair forward instead of back and she looked up to see Noelle streaking through the air like a missile, her wings tucked as she dove down from near the ceiling of the library. The wyvern twisted in mid-air. She moved from Kindaria’s view landing behind the golem with an audible thump. A moment later, cracks began to form through what remained of the golem’s form, spiraling out from hilt of Kalliam’s blade.
        As the cracks widened, pure white light poured through. The air was filled with the sound of stone snapping, like the earth tearing itself apart during a quake. A single sound rose above the noise: Noelle’s scream.
        The golem burst. Shards of granite erupted into the air to shower down on the crew and the tortured bodies lying in the nearby alcoves. The rain of pebbles sounded like the hiss of heavy rain on a wood roof. Kindaria shielded her eyes until the rubble stopped falling. When she opened them again, she saw Noelle panting, a twisted, interwoven symbol of the Threefold Path, cast in silver, gold, and mithril, clutched in her outthrust hand. Nothing was left of the golem but pebbles and dust.
        Kindaria looked back toward the door at the devastation she had wrought by triggering the traps. A patch of the ground was still icy and would likely remain that way for years. She could see the chains she had shattered lying in broken stone-hewn links on the ground. And in five places, the ground was blackened from the fireballs. The pyromancy had been so destructive that it had actually blasted away portions of the shelves on either side, had eaten into the slowly writhing bodies there. The skin of four bodies had been charred, portions of it blasted away entirely, revealing glistening raw flesh underneath and, in places, the unnerving palor of exposed bone.
        They didn’t move or cry out in pain. If it caused them any additional discomfort, they showed no sign. The four who had been burned just continued their slow, barely perceptible twitching in torment. A queer sense of satisfaction came over Kindaria. Whatever fate these cultists endured, it was even worse than having your flesh seared away to the bone. And they had been enduring it for millenia. She still wondered if it was better than they deserved.
        “You alright?” Noelle asked, placing a hand on Kindaria’s shoulder.
        “A little singed, but Kalliam patched me up mid-charge. It could be years before my tail grows back, though,” she said with a sigh, glancing over her shoulder. She twitched her now-hairless nub of a tail.
        “And days before that smell wears off,” Ezriette said, wrinkling her nose.
        “Enough banter,” Kalliam said sternly, picking his broadsword up off the floor. “We have a mage to hunt.”
        Kindaria moved to the front of the group with Kalliam. Ezriette and Lyss followed, the phoenix staying on foot for now, with the ever-stalwart Noelle bringing up the rear. The traps had stopped about halfway down the main corridor. Apparently, the mage had thought fifty yards of deadly traps and a fifty ton granite golem enough to stop them. The preparations had surely taken days, and it would have likewise taken days for Ezriette and Lyss to undo them safely. Kindaria smiled. Her way had been far quicker, and far more fun.
        She brushed her hands over her cuirass. The hardened leather was cracked across the breast. She had felt the magic buckle and snap in the full force of the last fireball. It was going to take her a small fortune to replace it. But the magic in the cuirass had saved her from the inferno. A singed tail was a far better fate than having your flesh chewn to the bone by fire.
        “Good thing you’ve been saving,” Kalliam said, as if reading her mind.
        “The money isn’t as bad as finding someone with something they’ll actually sell,” Kindaria said, glum at the prospect. She looked up at Kalliam. There was a thoughtful look on his face.
        “I might be able to help there. One of my old friends is lucky enough to have had the option to retire from adventuring rather than. . .the usual way one leaves the job. He just might be willing to part with an old friend. Remind me, next time we’re in Fallenwall.”
        Kindaria nodded, grateful, but didn’t say anything. They had reached the end of the main aisle of the Library. They were at the back wall of the building, if she were any judge of distances. It was massive, featureless, and nearly square. A single door stood in front of them, ajar. She reached out, brushing a thumb down the metallic door’s edge.
        “Silver,” she said.
        Kalliam raised an eyebrow and pulled the door wide. Stairs descended, leading deep underground further than the light would reach. Kalliam reached into a small pouch at his belt and pulled out a small, bulbous, alchemcal bottle. Shaking it, the chemical stoppered inside began to glow with the radiance of the midday sun. He held it into the stairwell.
        Light burst forth from every surface, the bottled sunlight being reflected again and again, amplifying the light source. The stairs, the walls, the ceiling--everything was wrought from silver. The silver stairway was incredibly deep, and the moaning sound was coming from wherever it ended, echoing off the silver walls.
        “Do we sneak down?” Ezriette asked, staring down the long staircase over Kindaria’s shoulder.
        “Unless Lyss can pop us down, I don’t think we’ll have much success sneaking down a silver staircase.”
        Lyss shook her head. “It’s impossible to translocate in here. I tried while we were fighting the golem.”
        They looked at each other and shrugged. Kindaria and Ezriette ran down together. Their leather allowed them some small element of stealth down the metal stairs. The racket of Kalliam and Noelle running down behind them was comical to say the least.
        Ezriette and Kindaria dove to either side as the stairwell ended, opening into a large room. They both rolled, hoping to find cover, but finding none. They rose, Kindaria a hair faster than Ezriette, in a crouch, weapons leveled. But the room was still.
        Lyss burst out of the room next, shooting upwards toward the ceiling, which was over fifty feet high. Noelle and Kalliam lumbered out last, the wyvern cleric in a defensive crouch, Kalliam with his broadsword brandished in both hands.
        There was no enemy to face. The room was a single, massive, underground cube, fifty feet to a side. In the middle of the room lay six raised daises. Each one upheld a single body draped in dark red robes. A thick silver chain held each one to their dais. Their mouths had been stitched shut and they writhed in constant agony, backs arching. Occasionally, one would raise their head as if to scream, and Kindaria could see the agony in their eyes.
        Past the six was a much smaller pedestal, perhaps four feet high. Something small lay atop it, dark and tangled, but from this distance, Kindaria couldn’t see what it was.
        The moaning sound was deafening now. It filled the chamber, despite its enormous size, constant and unending, tortured. They had finally found its source. At the far end of the room, a massive sword had been thrust into the floor. Not massive the way a troll was compared to an man, or even massive the way a castle was compared to a hovel. This was massive on a much larger scale. The hilt of it butted against the ceiling and it appeared that over half its length had been speared into the earth below. Its blade was narrow, like that of a fencing foil, but it was still two feet wide. The blade and its hilt were simple and utilitarian, utterly unadorned, but they were appeared to be pure silver and they radiated a light that filled the room.
        And there, where the blade pierced the floor, it also pierced a single man, the cross-section of the blade nearly as big as he was. The blade glistened with fresh blood that spurted from his enormous wound as he writhed on the floor. The First Profaner writhed in agony, his limbs flailing in his own blood, body arching, lifting along the blade with a wet sound before thumping to the floor again. His mouth had not been stitched shut like his followers. Instead, his tormented moans filled the Library as he paid an eternity of penance for his unutterable sins. 
        “The Sword of Kalentite,” Kindaria whispered, standing from her crouch and moving next to her comrades.
        “Kalentite is the Shieldbearer,” Kalliam said softly. “He wields no sword.” His tone was not argumentative. He was repeating from rote something that had been presented to him as fact during his pious training.
        “Not any more,” Kindaria whispered. The divinity of the sword was without question. Who but a god could wield such a thing? “And those six must be the First Profaner’s disciples. They are responsible for aiding the First in enslaving Venturi, then bringing Profanity as religion to the people of the nation. The people we saw above are just worshippers. Clergymen and adherents who committed unforgivable sins in the name of the Profane. Those who were innocent were also killed, to wash the land free of Profanity’s word, but they were sent on to their holy rest.”
        “So many,” Noelle whispered. They all nodded.
        “Look,” said Ezriette, pointing. Her keener eyes had spotted something they’d all missed. An eighth body, lying on the floor beside the pedestal. It had been easy to overlook. It was mundane, simply dead rather than tortured. The body of the mage that had beaten them here.
        The five of them crossed the room without saying a word. Kalliam nudged the body with his booted foot, rolling it onto its back. A nightmare, like Ezriette. His hands were curled into gnarled claws and were stiff and brittle to the touch. The front of his robes had been affected as well and some of the cloth flaked away as Kalliam investigated the body.
        “He made it this far, laid all those traps. . .for what? Surely he couldn’t have been after the sword. It’s not like you can carry that away on a cart,” Noelle said, frowning. 
        Ezriette knelt by the body, proceeding with her usual indifference at effectively but respectfully stripping it of valuables. Kindaria, for once, paid little attention. Her eyes lay on the pedestal nearby.
        On top of the silver pedestal was a single skull. No, not a skull exactly. It was a. . .head. A woman’s head with what had surely once been beautiful, black hair. The head was still alive despite being separated from its body. Its face was sunken, skin hanging off the muscles in thin sloughs, pale bone shining through in places. Her lips were shriveled, peeling back from discolored teeth in an unnatural sneer. Her eyes were peeled back, pinned open by small silver nails that had been pounded into her face. Her hair was a dry, tangled mess, kept pinned to her head by a thin coronet that encircled the single, rainbow-hued unicorn horn that rose proudly from her head. 
        And she was crying.
        The queen, Kindaria realized. There was no eternal pain for her. Her suffering was to watch her lover writhe and moan and be unable to look away. For over a thousand years she had been forced to stare and watch.
        Some might be moved to pity or sympathy. The punishment was certainly harsh and unforgiving. But it was no less than they deserved. These were evil people who had committed unspeakable acts. Kindaria’s stomach twisted as she watched the woman’s disembodied head cry silently on her timeless perch.
        “He came for this,” Kindaria said, drawing the group’s attention to the head. They turned as one. Kindaria held up her hand.
        “Don’t get too close. That may’ve been what killed him. The old pantheon still watches this place.”
        “Is that. . .?”
        “The Profane Queen,” Kindaria supplied, nodding. “Her coronet was a powerful magical artifact even before the First Profanity. Who knows how her rise from the grave and her brutal rule over a nation of both living and dead twisted its magic? It’s undoubtedly what the Master was after.”
        They all stared. The coronet was a single ring of adamantium. In places, it shone with the true purple-blue hue of the incredible metal, but most of it had turned a dark, reflective black like that of obsidian. It seemed to pulse faintly with the head’s silent sobs. The sight of it repulsed Kindaria.
        “The Master’s pawn already died trying to retrieve it. We should leave it and this place and track him down,” Noelle said.
        “He knows the Words of Entry,” Kalliam said. “He can come anytime he likes.”
        “And next time he’ll be better prepared,” Lyss added, holding up the geometric opal Ezriette had found on the dead mage, identical to the one they’d found on Dagon’s body. They all assumed it was some kind of communicative connection with the Master. “He can just walk in here and take it whenever he likes.”
        Kindaria shook her head. “The old pantheon would stop him, wouldn’t they? Are we really suggesting that the artifact is in better hands with us?”
        “Hubris is the downfall of many adventurers,” Noelle agreed quietly.
        Kindaria looked around. Were they really having this conversation? Voting on whether or not to remove an artifact that had lain, hidden in safety, under the watchful eyes of the divine for thousands of years? Hubris, indeed.
        “Gods, old or new, are not omniscient nor omnipresent. If we have the crown, the Master must go through us to take it. If we leave it here, then he can come get it at his leisure and, I imagine, use it somehow to destroy us handily.”
        “Are you more watchful than a god, Kalliam?” Noelle asked, frowning as her lover came down on the opposite side of the issue from her. “We must sleep. We are mortal.”
        “Lyss can craft powerful protections,” Kalliam argued. Kindaria glanced at Lyss. For a moment, the phoenix seemed pleased with herself, smug even. Kindaria felt a slight chill. The look faded quickly, but it disturbed her somewhat. Then again, the crown was undoubtedly the most powerful artifact discovered in centuries. Lyss would be the first to get to study it. She would be the mage to bring it before the guild. A certain amount of self-satisfaction was forgivable in that case, wasn’t it?
        Noelle and Kalliam bickered over the issue. Kindaria and Ezriette remained silent. Kindaria glanced at Lyss again, expecting her to bring more weight to Kalliam’s argument, but she had grown silent and distracted. She had both opals in her palm now and was bent over them. Kindaria stepped easily between Noelle and Kalliam, placing her hand on Noelle shoulder, silencing the argument,
        “Lyss?”
        “I’ve found him,” Lyss said. “Something Noelle sparked an idea. Something about being watchful. I cast a spell into one of the stones and, as I expected, it was transmitted to the other. But I was able to pinpoint where else it went.”
        “We take it with us, then,” Ezriette said with a tone of finality. Hers was the deciding vote. “If we can figure out how to take it.”
        All were silent. Their eyes all turned to the dead mage on the floor.
        Kindaria sighed.
        “I can take it,” she said softly. They all looked at her. “Both the coronet and I, after a fashion, are creations of Venturi’s divine blessing. I can lift it from her head without fear of retribution.”
        “Are you sure?” Lyss whispered softly, her voice tense. Kindaria blushed softly, meeting her eyes.
        “Not really.”
        Kalliam opened his mouth to protest, but Kindaria had already stepped forward. She looked down at the queen. Their eyes met. Kindaria shuddered at the raw hatred she found there, burning with fiery passion. The thoughts of possible sympathy or pity that had flitted through her head vanished. This creature was evil incarnate. Removing the artifact would mean she had one less tool to wreak her loathsome fury on the world, should she somehow escape her torment.
        “Kindaria,” Kalliam said softly in warning. But her fingers were already on the coronet. They burned where they touched the obsidian gleam, but she lifted the ring from the queen’s head without harm. She moved her fingers, only touching the blue-purple of untainted adamantium. 
        The five adventurers breathed a collective sigh of relief as she stepped back, no holy reckoning befalling her. She held it at her side like a chakram.
        “Let’s go,” she said, urgently.
        “Should you give that thing to Lyss?” Ezriette asked uncertainly. Normally, she stood beside Kindaria when Lyss didn’t. They worked well as a pair. But now she stood noticeably several steps distant, eyeing the dread ring in Kindaria’s hand.
        Kindaria shook her head. “The divine protection may be a product of this place, not the crown’s placement on the queen’s head. We should be well away from this place before anyone else gets near.”
        Each of the other four took a silent step backwards, looking relieved at being given permission. They all eyed the artifact in her hand with distrust. Seeing their fear swelled something inside of her. Pride. Yes, they should be afraid of her. None of them could do the things she could do. She was faster. Her blade could pierce through Kalliam’s armor with ease, if her arm were guiding it. And with the coronet in her possession. . .
        Kindaria gasped, reeling herself back in. She staggered a step backward, resisting the urge to drop the coronet as if it burned her. She had to control herself. The crown had touched some deep part inside of her, the part she kept reined in by being an adventurer, by working for people like Kalliam. The part of her that knew exactly what she could do with her speed and her blade. She shuddered. She wanted to fling the ring away, to leave it buried here. But if she did, she may as well be handing it to the Master herself. Only she could carry it from this place. She had to be stronger than it.
        “Kin?” Kalliam whispered softly. The other four were staring at her. She looked up grimly.
        “Lead me out of here, Kalliam,” she replied. “I need your guidance.”
        Kalliam nodded, his face hardening with a seriousness that would have looked silly on anyone else. He strode confidently toward the stairs and Kindaria fell into step behind him. Ezriette knelt briefly by he corpse. Coinpouch, spellbook, and a few assorted items were shoved into her pack to be accounted later. 
        When they emerged from the front door of the Library, the sun was lower than Kindaria had expected. It had been early afternoon when they had arrived, but now the sun was sitting on the horizon, threatening to set. She shivered. It had felt like they’d only spent minutes in the Library, but it had clearly been hours. They walked to the crest of the depression in silence, Kindaria’s hand trembling as she clutched the ring fiercely.
        “How close can you get us, Lyss?” Kalliam asked.
        “Straight there,” she replied. “Now that I know what I’m looking for, these stones have a hint of translocation laced through them.”
        Kalliam nodded, and without another word, the group winked away.
        The ground around them changed remarkably little from one place to the next. They still stood on the lip of a massive depression. But rather than a quiet, forgotten building, this crater contained a massive army that surround a single, immense tower. The sky here was already dark, suggesting they were fairly far east from where they had started. The mountains ringing the crater shielded it from any light that would have lingered after sunset.
        No fires burned in the army down below, but it shifted constantly, restlessly, a dark, waving sea surrounding the tower, the room at its peak shining like a lighthouse.
        “The Dawnrider Mountains,” Noelle whispered.
        “What, how can you tell?” Ezriette asked, frowning.
        Noelle pointed to the western wall of shielding mountain peaks. “Mount Cormen,” she said. “We’re seeing it from the opposite side than is visible from Treddington, but its triple peaks are unmistakable.”
        Kalliam whistled softly. “Past Mount Cormen? No wonder his army remains so well hidden.”
        “He must have found a pass,” Kindaria said. “Treddington refers to these mountains as the ‘Eastern Wall’ for a good reason.”
        “Ezri, how many?” Kalliam asked. He moved away from the lip of the crater and knelt against the rock, so his body was shielded by the upthrust ridge. The others followed his example, with Ezriette keeping her head over the ridge as she counted.
        “I can see twenty formations. If they ring all the way around the tower, then there’s probably about thirty total. Its hard to get an exact number on the formations, but there’s at least two thousand smaller creatures in each, plus two bone golems. There are also a few smaller groups of different creatures. Vampires, maybe, or shadowgaunts. I can’t tell from here. Rough guess, you’re looking at sixty to a hundred thousand troops.”
        The five were silent as that number sank in slowly. A hundred thousand troops was more than twice the number of men any independent city-state marshalled. Together, the city-states could put together a comparable force, but if these troops marched out of Mount Cormen itself, they would fall on Treddington long before any military alliance could be fielded. And each city they fell upon would only add to their troops as the fallen army was raised to bolster the Master’s.
        “We have to attack,” Noelle whispered urgently, surprising everyone. Noelle was hardly a pacifist, but of the five of them, she was the coolest head when it came to resorting to violence.
        “Before he decides to march this army,” Kalliam agreed,
        “Kin,” Lyss whispered softly. The whisper drew everyone’s attention. Kindaria held up her hand, which still clutched the coronet.
        “Do you have something you can use as a vessel? It would be best if you didn’t have to touch it.”
        Lyss nodded. She moved her fingers and drew a box right out of the air before them. It was insubstantial, its its edges merely lines of blue glowing force magic, its sides made only of air. Kindaria nodded as it was opened and placed the coronet inside. It settled as if placed on a pillow. Lyss snapped the force container shut, whispering a series of arcane key words over it.
        “A longer ritual could bind it safely past my own death, but for now, we’ll have to depend on spells tied to my own mortality.”
        “So no one else can get to it, provided you still live?” Kalliam asked. Lyss nodded. “Good enough for me. Lyss, Noelle, and I will come in from above. Ezri, Kin, you two will close the pincers in from the bottom, cutting off his escape and probably finishing the job when you arrive. The three of us can keep him busy, but I have a sinking feeling we’ll need Kin’s speed to finish the job.”
        Kindaria nodded, but privately she was astew with worry. Coming in from the bottom meant moving through the undead ranks. Plus, she had used the vast majority of her artifacts’ powers getting through the gauntlet at the library. She only had a single stored spell remaining.
        “Since Lyss is our best flier, she’ll remain aloft and coordinate the attack when you two are ready. Everyone clear?”
        Lyss, Noelle and Ezriette all nodded readily. Kindaria stared over the lip at the undead army below. Everything was going so fast and nothing felt right. There was something she was missing. She felt that if she could just stop, if she could just sleep, or maybe even just spend an hour nestled against Lyss’s side, everything would work itself out in her head. She was still shaken by the way the coronet had assaulted her. Could Lyss’s box keep it out of the Master’s hands? Out of. . .her hands? She wasn’t sure if she could trust herself if it found its way into her head again. She shivered.
        The others were growing restless, waiting for her assent. She stared down at the army below her. Undead. Tens of thousands of them. And presumably a single man controlling them all. A single lynchpin that, if she could pull it, if she could kill him, could save the world from the monstrosity she beheld. Save the world from everything that Venturi, her creator, abhorred. She shivered.
        “Let’s go,” she whispered.
        She and Ezriette both vaulted easily over the lip of the crater. The drop beyond was sheer, over fifteen feet before the wall began to ease into its gradual grade toward the center. Ezriette tumbled gracefully as her feet hit the steep slope, but Kindaria caught it deliberately with her hooves, sliding down the shale as her nightmare friend did a triple flip before coming to her feet. As the ground leveled out, they both hit it at a run. Kindaria had to rein herself in slightly so she didn’t outstrip Ezriette’s pace, which was still remarkable compared to normal standards.
        The sheer wall of the crater turned to thin soil within a few steps, and a few steps beyond that, tall grasses sprang up, fronds reaching up above their heads. Kindaria lost sight of Ezriette, but she could still hear her, and hands-breadth away, hidden behind a wall of grass. Looking up and over her shoulder, Kindaria could see Lyss take flight far above them, hopefully high enough that she would be mistaken for a hawk or other mundane bird by the army and anyone watching from the tower.
        Kindaria counted her breaths rather than her steps as she ran across the sloping plain. Her body moved automatically. Speed was what she did, and pacing Ezriette was like keeping a casual jog. Time melted away. She couldn’t be sure if she’d been running for seconds or half the night. She melted into the mindless state of running, of driving headlong and heedless toward her destination. She dreaded what she would find at the top of the tower. The Master had proven himself careful, clever, and powerful. What would she find, when her run ended?
        Ezriette reached past the wall of grass that separated them. She tapped Kindaria’s wrist in a quick signal they had developed during their first days of working together. As one, the two dove forward, tumbled, and came up in a crouch, their momentum carrying them to within a few inches of the edge of the plains grass. In front of them, the grass had been trod flat by thousands of restless, undead feet. They were at the edge of the army. It could hardly be called a camp, for the things never slept. Ten feet in front of them, a horde of skeletons, zombies, and prowling ghouls shifted restlessly. The heads and shoulders of six or seven shadowgaunts milled deeper in the crowd, the creatures several feet taller than the humanoid corpses that comprised the bulk of the army. And directly in the center of the formation stood an enormous seventeen foot tall bone golem, a creature crafted from thousands of bones likely from hundreds of different creatures. Where the rest of the army shambled, milled, and prowled, the golem simply stood staring out over the grass.
        “Alright,” Ezriette whispered. “How do we sneak past this?”
        “There were lines between the formations, weren’t there? We’re staring at the middle of one. We need to at least get between two, to give ourselves a chance. From there. . .we’ll just have to run.”
        They moved carefully along the edge of the grass, skirting less than ten feet from the undead troops in some places. They didn’t run as they had before, but crept quietly, being careful not to disturb the grass at the very edge. Kindaria could see a break in the mass of corpses up ahead.
        The light changed, just slightly. She glanced upward. Against the dark gray sky, she could barely see the outlines of her comrades’ wings beating slowly. They were high enough that the sound of their wings didn’t reach her ears, but they were in a stoop, headed from a higher altitude down to the window of the tower.
        “What the fuck are they doing?” hissed Ezriette. 
        “She must have lost us in the grass and thought we were through. Hang on.”
        Kindaria knelt, resting a hand on Ezriette’s shoulder as she focused through her horn, trying to reach the others telepathically. A wall of pain slapped her in the face as she tried to make the connection. She gasped and staggered, having to bite her lip to keep from crying out. Ezriette caught her by the wrist before she could fall out of the shielding wall of grass.
        “What is it?”
        “Something’s blocking me,” Kindaria said, rubbing her forehead. A headache throbbed dully in her temples. She and Ezriette looked up simultaneously.
        “We have to make a run for it,” Ezriette said. 
        Ezriette unshouldered her bow and Kindaria slid her ninja-to silently out of its sheath. The nightmare squeezed her hand fondly, then they both broke out of cover at the same moment, charging in a headlong dash for the break in the army’s formation.
        Nothing noticed them. The ghouls continued to prowl between the wavering pillars of zombies, occasionally taking a nibble of their raised flesh. Skeletons shifted from foot to foot, their bones rattling when they jostled one another. The bone golem stared stoically out over the grass. 
        And in the narrow aisle between one formation and the next, a unicorn and a nightmare galloped between ranks without making a sound, though their silvered weapons gleamed threateningly in the dim light.
        Kindaria slapped a hand against the tower to stop herself as they arrived. She stood straight as Ezriette joined her. Together, they looked back at the army. Not a single undead head turned to follow them.
        “They’re not on alert,” Ezriette said, not bothering to whisper. “They’ve simply been commanded to wait.”
        “It must be an effort to control so many at once. Simple commands. Wait. March. Attack. I suppose patrol is needlessly complicated, when no one knows where you are.”
        They didn’t have time to consider their luck any further. Ezriette grabbed her arm and they circled the base of the tower together. The stone yawned into an opening on the far side. Stairs lay inside, spiraling upwards. The Master hadn’t even bothered to construct a door. It felt like luck again. And to Kindaria, luck felt wrong. Forboding. But she didn’t have time to worry about it. Lyss, Noelle, and Kalliam had already made their attack. Their lives could depend on that luck.
        Ezriette and Kindaria dashed up the stairs. Kindaria could have made it up faster, but working as a team would better their chances, plus, pushing herself to her limits would leave her winded at the top. She matched Ezriette step for step. The staircase seemed to spiral endlessly. She could hear the nightmare panting beside her and glanced to the side in concern. Their eyes met and she saw something entirely foreign there. Worry. Ezriette was practical, tactical, and straightforward. She wasn’t the kind to worry. Something was very, very wrong, and the ranger felt it too.
        The end of the staircase came at them in a flash, the two only having a single twist of the stairs in warning before the door was upon them. It was a single, simple wooden trapdoor set into the floor of what Kindaria assumed was the Master’s laboratory above. She didn’t slow down, but increased her pace slightly, moving a step or two ahead of Ezriette. She twisted her body, putting her shoulder forward. It slammed into the door, crashing it open. Pain shot down her arm as she burst into the room, leaping up from the stairs and to the left, trusting Ezriette to dive to the right as always.
        Her body stretched out in a narrow arc as she dove. Lyss stood in the middle, arms raised. Two bodies were on the floor. Kalliam was bleeding from multiple wounds, his breastplate shorn off his body entirely, muscled chest gleaming in reflected arcane light as he battled with a mage before him.
        “Kindaria!” he screamed. “KILL HER!”
        Confusion flashed across Kindaria’s face. The mage he was fighting was a man, a massive hulk of a kitsune as big as Kalliam was and clearly trained in martial as well as arcane arts. Her body hit the floor as she tumbled. Kill her. The words echoed through her mind. She twisted, midroll, facing Lyss as she came up in her customary crouch.
        Bolts of dark, crackling energy scorched the air as they flew toward her face. She twisted, crying out a warning to Ezriette. The first bolt missed Kindaria entirely. The second one streaked through her hair, barely missing her ear. Where the bolt touched her hair, the strands curled, grayed, then fell away.
        Kindaria continued to twist, hand outthrust toward Ezriette, mouth still open, mid-scream. Ezriette’s body was a thin line as she arched through the air out of the trapdoor and to the right. She curled, moving to hit the ground in a tumble as she always did. Exactly as she always did. The bolts hit her in quick succession, one in the side, the next in her hip. Her cry was cut short as she was tossed off her trajectory and through the air. She landed in a slump on the floor and slid a foot before coming to a stop, not moving.
        Kindaria whirled. Dark lightning crackled from Lyss’s upthrust hands and wingtips, striking the domed roof of the room. Four geometric opal orbs hung in the air like a floating belt, swirling around her waist like planets around the sun. The coronet rested on her brow. The opals, coronet, and her fingers all glowed with the same necromantic energy that pulsed through the room. 
        Lyss’s laughter--the Master’s laughter--filled Kindaria’s ears.
        Kindaria ran forward, gripping her blade in both hands. As her speed increased, the world slowed. The two bodies lay strewn across the floor between her and Lyss. One was a robed mage, a gryphon, whose skull had been dashed open. Two of the three heads of Noelle’s mace were still embedded in his brains. Noelle’s body lay slumped over his legs, her body shriveled, her face gaunt and old, her body quite literally lifeless.
        Lyss smiled at her, a deep, satisfied smile, the smile that had graced her lips ever so briefly in the deepest heart of the Solemn Library. She deliberately turned her back on Kindaria, facing Kalliam. The mage’s muscles bulged, augmented by arcane power, as he and Kalliam grappled. The mage whispered words in a frantic cadence. He gripped the blade of Kalliam’s sword in both hands, blood streaking down his arms. As Kindaria leapt low over Noelle’s body, Kalliam won the struggle. He plunged the sword forward, slicing off most of the wizard’s fingers in the process. The glowing tip of Kalliam’s sword burst out of the mage’s back. At the same moment, that back was struck by three of Lyss’s deadly, necrotic bolts. The force slammed the mage’s spell-surged body into Kalliam.
        They toppled together out of the tower’s window.
        The gap between Kindaria and Lyss closed in an instant. She wanted to scream, to cry out in vengeance and betrayal, but instead, she parted her lips to whisper the word of activation for the last magic item she had that still held a charge. Her sword. Kindaria was fast. Some preternatural gift gave her speed that even gods might envy. Her sword was faster. When activated, it could slice quicker than the eye could see, and it would accelerate her own body to match it. It lasted for only two seconds, but the last time she had used it, those two seconds had been enough to shred her way through a marauding band of over a dozen ogres. The first syllable came to her lips.
        Lyss raised her hand. Her fingers flexed and a deep purple charge of magic flared in the coronet on the phoenix’s head. It shot to her fingers, and from there, to Kindaria’s face. She was too close to dodge. The magic struck her like a great weight, sending her skidding back, her hooves scraping against the floor.
        She opened her mouth to complete the command word, but her jaw didn’t respond. She tried to make a sound of alarm, but nothing came forth. The magic had shorn her lips from her face, silencing her completely. Lyss had known exactly what she would do. And how could she not? They had adventured together for months. Lyss knew Kalliam’s every strategy, Ezriette’s every dive, and Kindaria’s every magical item.
        Kindaria ran forward again. What else could she do? She dove forward in a single, final desperate attempt to skewer her own lover through her chest. Magic struck her again, like donkey kicking her in the stomach, but she had expected that. She flicked her wrist and her sword continued to streak forward even as her body flew back. She hit the wall hard, slamming against a stone pillar that separated two glassless windows, inches away from meeting the same fate as Kalliam.
        Lyss began to laugh just as the sword struck her. The blade slid silently into her body, cutting off the maniacal chuckle prematurely. Kindaria’s lips twisted into a grim smile, taking petty satisfaction in having found one thing to surprise her with. But she had missed. She had flicked her wrist an instant too late. The hilt protruded from Lyss’s shoulder, two inches shy of the heart Kindaria had been aiming for.
        Lyss’s look darkened. Kindaria groaned. She ought to stand. To fight. A wound like that would weaken anyone. If she could only stand, she would still have a chance.
        But her body wouldn’t move. At first, she thought it the work of the bolt that had hit her. Had it sapped the life from her the way it had Noelle and Ezriette? But no, she could see her hands. They had life and were not weakened. She could move them, flex them. No, the force of her body hitting the wall had shattered her spine. She was paralyzed.
        Lyss stood from where she had slumped against the workbench in the middle of the room. She whispered arcane words that Kindaria couldn’t hear over the beat of her own heart, and pulled the sword out of her shoulder. The wound gushed blood, soaking Lyss’s robes. Then the phoenix whispered another word. This one Kindaria could hear quite clearly. It was the sword’s word of activation.
        Lyss disappeared from view. A breath later, she was by Kindaria’s side. Kindaria would have cried out in alarm, but she could only huff a breath out of her nose. She looked down. Her own blade pierced her stomach, only the hilt showing, the blade pinned deep into the stone behind her. She saw it, but didn’t feel it. It was as if her lower body belonged to someone else. She looked up, meeting Lyss’s eyes. The phoenix smiled cruelly.
        “Perfect,” Lyss whispered. She raised a crystal vial to Kindaria’s face. Kindaria flinched, closing her eyes and turning her head aside. Lyss moved away a moment later. When Kindaria looked, the vial was filled with a clar liquid.
        “Tears of the betrayed,” the phoenix cooed sweetly. Kindaria lifted her fingers to her cheeks. When had she started crying?
        On the stairs, she realized with a start, when she and Ezriette had shared a look. Some part of them both had known.
        “Adventurers are so useful,” Lyss continued, walking casually back to the workbench. “Providing an alibi for me to slay an infant in broad daylight. Getting rid of my minions when they’ve outlived their usefulness. Even providing a pure-hearted unicorn to lift the Coronet of Everlife right off the queen’s own head. Oh yes, perfectly useful indeed.”
        Kindaria’s vision blurred. The life was bleeding out of her. She paid attention to the items on the workbench for the first time. Two crystal vials much like the one Lyss now held. They both held something dark, thick, and crimson. A third crystal bottle, much larger and still empty. And a single coin that hovered over the polished wood, frozen in the air. Lyss’s guild token, held in some kind of magical stasis, allowing her to operate right under the guild’s nose.
        “Why?” Lyss asked conversationally, as if Kindaria had asked a question. “A phoenix with the blessing of New Magic, sweet Kin. Don’t you understand? It is too perfect an opportunity to waste. A phoenix is already the master of life. Now I will become the master of death as well. I will be the most powerful queen since the Profaners walked the earth. And you politely handed me this world’s most powerful artifact to be my phylactery.”
        “Blood of the innocent,” she said, pouring one of the dark vials into the empty bottle. “Flesh of the tortured. Tears of the betrayed. Small prices to pay, sweet Kin. Thank you for the part you played in my ascension.”
        There was a dark flash as the final ingredient was poured into the bottle. The mixture bubbled and steamed. The Master’s plan was coming to perfect fruition. They hadn’t been working against him--her--at all, but playing right into her carefully laid plan.
        There was movement at Kindaria’s side. Ezriette lifted herself up on a weak shoulder, bow already drawn. Her face was drawn and emaciated and her hands trembled on her bow and its string. She looked a century old, or perhaps older, but Lyss’s bolts hadn’t stolen all the life out of her. She loosed the arrow, but it was too late. Lyss had already tipped the potion into her mouth. The arrow tip sang as Ezriette slumped back to the floor. It pierced Lyss’s heart. The phoenix’s eyes went wide. She swallowed. Then her body erupted in a burst of ash and flame, her keen sounding through the small room. The coronet fell to the floor, ringing until it settled, the ash of Lyss’s corpse falling to cover it.
        The spell that had stolen Kindaria’s lips broke as its caster perished. But the blade pinning her to the wall and the paralysis rendering her legs useless was no spell. She felt cold. She could barely feel her fingers and her vision was darkening. She reached out, body straining against the piercing blade. Her fingers found Ezriette’s. She squeezed, and the fingers squeezed weakly back.
        “I’m sorry,” Kindaria whispered.
        “She. . .dead?”
        “Yes, but she will rise again. A phoenix lich, with power over life and death. We failed, Ezri.”
        “S-sorry. . .”
        “Good shot,” was all Kindaria could whisper. She was crying again. Ezriette weakly lifted herself. Kindaria pulled on her hand and the nightmare dragged herself at an excruciating pace to lie beside the unicorn. She slumped, head landing in Kindaria’s lap. Kindaria held her close, and the world went black.

***

        “So what, that’s it? I’m dead?”
        “Sorry, Nikki,” Jake said, genuinely glum. “Sammy, Lyss raises in. . .” Jake rolled a six-sided dice. “Four days. I can write you up a stat sheet if you want?”
        Sammy shrugged and grinned, practically bouncing in her seat. “Wellll. . .everyone else is dead, so the campaign is kind of over isn’t it? Let’s start a new one!”
        “I can’t believe it was you the whole time!” Nikki said, throwing up her hands in frustration. “Poor Kindaria! I worked so hard on this sheet!” She growled, balling up the seven sheets in front of her that had been scribbled half to death over the last four sessions.
        “Hey! I might need that!” Jake said, snatching the paper out of her hand. “Kindaria would make an awesome undead minion.”
        “Ugh!”
        Sammy leaned over, slipping her arms around Nikki’s waist. “Sorry,” she said. Her grin and continuing bounce didn’t make the apology seem very sincere.        
        “You killed my very first character! Both of you!” She glared at Sammy and Jake accusingly. Jake shrugged, scooping his myriad of dice off the table and into his hand.
        “It was her idea,” he said. Then he grinned. “Her awesome idea.”
        “He said I could only do it if I kept all of you fooled AND found a way to get the last two potion ingredients without blowing my cover.”
        “What about the first one? Flesh of the tortured?” Karen asked. She looked glum, too. She gathered Ezriette’s sheets into a stack, handing them to Jake.
        “Medellan Aurora, the Watchkeeper. That’s how she got the secrets out of him,” Jake supplied.
        “Oh,” Karen and Nikki said in unison.
        “She did a really good job,” Jake admitted, gathering up the rest of the character sheets. Nini and Alex walked out of the kitchen where they’d retreated for a drink--and possibly a little more--when Noelle and Kalliam had died. Alex paled as he saw Jake scoop up his sheet.
        “Alas, poor Kalliam. He died a noble death.”
        “He died stumbling out a window to his death,” Sammy said, sticking her tongue out at him.
        “Nobly stumbling,” Alex corrected. He paused. “Out a noble window. To his noble death.”
        They all laughed. Even Nikki chuckled grudgingly.
        “It was fun though, wasn’t it?” Sammy asked, nuzzling Nikki’s cheek. Nikki had been surprised, to say the least, when Sammy had pestered her into joining a Dungeons and Dragons game. Jake and Karen had been taught by Mr. Keating, and they had convinced Sammy to play by letting her be a princess for her first campaign. Together with Nini and Alex, they had all started a game together the previous summer. Nikki had balked, saying that D&D was too geeky, even for her. It hadn’t been until she and Sammy had started dating that she had finally caved, if only for the excuse to spend more time with her girlfriend.
        “Yeah,” she said finally. The group gave her a good natured cheer. Karen and Nini looked away politely as Sammy gave her a grateful kiss on the lips, tongue poking into her muzzle for just a second. The girls slapped their boyfriends sharply when they weren’t as quick to avert their eyes.
        “So. . .next week?” Jake asked, grinning excitedly.
        “Will we have to make up new characters?” Nikki asked.
        “Yeah. I wanna try Eberron this go around.”
        “Thank goodness. Noelle was awesome, but I’m tired of playing a goody-two-shoes,” Nini said, wrinkling her nose. 
        “And while we’re playing through that setting, I’ll have time to craft a new campaign featuring Lyss the Lich and Kin her undead consort as the main villains.”
        “Lyss the Lich,” Sammy said with a frown. “God, that sounds awful. I never said it out loud.”
        “Undead consort?” Nikki asked, making a face.
        Karen dropped down into Jake’s lap, knocking his dungeonmaster screen to the floor. “Soooo, we’re done for the day?”
        “Uh huh,” Jake said. Karen and Sammy both grinned. Nini was a bit slower on the up-take, then grinned too.
        “Our parents aren’t expecting us home for hours,” Karen said slowly.
        Sammy reached down, threading a finger through a ring in Nikki’s collar, she gave a playful tug, and Nikki stood, bumping her hip playfully. ‘We’re gonna go to the park,” Sammy announced.
        “To read,” Nikki added.
        “Uh huh!” Sammy chimed in as Karen and Nini started to make their own excuses, the group dissipating quickly into pairs.