Ain't No Rest For The Wizard

[Caden Law]

The door slammed shut with a kind of absolute finality, and the Wizard Blueraven understood in one sobering instant that he would probably not see his homeland again any time soon. Strangely enough, he didn't really mind that much. Salvar was cold. And he'd just helped murder the living god of at least a few tens of millions of people. It was probably good that he didn't go back there any time soon. Probably better still that Caden wasn't there now. In fact, the problem wasn't that Caden was no longer in Salvar.

The problem was that Caden was back in Tembrethnil Forest.

What was left of it.

Perhaps seeing the place was even more sobering than how he'd gotten here -- being teleported at the whims of a true Goddess who no longer owed him a favor. Caden looked around. The ground was still corpse-gray, and there were plants petrified all over the place. Their leaves had been blown away, and what grass remained looked like it had the consistency of dried paper and ash. Everything leaned out from ground zero -- not where Caden stood, but close enough that he still had chills running up and down his spine. He turned away from it and said, "Well, this isn't a hysterical downer at all."

A few seconds ticked by as the Wizard took off his soot-stained goggles, plundered around beneath his breastplate and inside of his coat, then took out his signature glasses and put them on.

The Elder Thayne still stood in front of him, larger than life and somehow realer than the rest of the world around her. The Wilder Queen no longer clung to a single form for the sake of on-lookers. Her appearance changed as wildly as her namesake, always humanoid but rarely human. Only the wings, massive golden shrouds dotted with stars, remained a constant. They draped over her shoulders like a shroud, and seemed to yield modesty more by chance than anything else. There is work to be done, Sorcerer.

The statement practically metabolized the alcohol right out of his system.

(Conveniently enough, it also made Caden vomit on the spot. A combination of exhaustion, undescribable dread and several types of shock will do that to you.)

It took Caden another minute or two to wipe his mouth and get the taste out. What remained was the peppermint aftertaste, and the clammy cold that he had come to associate with Necromancy. Another layer of unpleasantness. The Wizard cracked his neck a few times before asking, "Why did you bring me here?"

Because this is where you belong. You were never meant to leave Raiaera, the Thayne told him, and then Caden perceived a smile that he couldn't actually see with his eyes. You were never meant to do a lot of things.

"But here I am," he said.

Here you are.

The Wilder remained. Caden stared at her, waiting. Both of them, waiting. But it was the patience of a true God against that of a mere mortal. Eventually, Caden asked, "What do you want me to do?"

What you were supposed to.

"That tells me nothing."

It tells you everything.

"Khal'jaren's supposed to be the cryptic one, dammit," Caden spat, turned and found himself more or less face to face with Charger. His semi-trusty, quite tempermental riding ram, a gift of sorts from one of the few real friends Caden had made during his trip through Salvar. Big, white, black-hooved and curly-horned. "What the-"

He looked back and the Wilder was gone.

"Naturally."

Charger huffed.

"Seconded."

[Caden Law]

Caden rode out of Tembrethnil in short order. It was bad enough that corruption still lingered -- bad enough that he had caused it to begin with -- but the forest itself no longer felt very welcoming of him. A presence hung at his shoulder every second he waited there, silent and accusing and impotently spiteful. It was broad daylight out, but Caden couldn't see the sun for the life of him until he got out of the forest. And by then, the trail was familiar.

He'd been this way before, en route to Salvar. This was the western border of the forest, where he'd last seen the Walkers and not all that far from where he buried the Wizard Blightcrow. In fact...

A little squinting and Caden could still see that wretched old mage's grave. It stood atop a small, completely artificial hill now covered in nightshade and mushrooms. If you knew what you were looking for, you'd see runic patterns in the plantgrowth; Salvic and Elven and a little sideways too. Kholia was dead, but Raiaera was a land where that no longer meant much. Caden still remembered putting the hill in place just to weigh the old Wizard's corpse down if he somehow came back to life (or any reasonable facsimile thereof). Most of it consisted of rocks glued together with clay and then covered in raw dirt. Then came the runes geomanced into every single rock and then the dirt. The plants weren't there before, but the hill had been fresh then.

Caden still remembered the exact number of times he had to stab that rancid old mage to make him stop screaming. Twenty-seven. He had counted.

He didn't stray any closer to the corpsemound than he had to. Just rode on by and took what looked like the same path he'd used to get to Trenycë. It seemed right at first, but the further he went from Tembrethnil, the less anything matched up. That wasn't the right hill, that mountain wasn't peaking up in the distance, those trees weren't there...

About the only thing that looked at all familiar was a rotten corpse on the roadside with a bunch of arrows stuck in it. And Caden wasn't about to rule out the possibility that said-corpse had been reanimated since the last time he'd seen it. Assuming of course it was the same corpse he was thinking of. Faced with more than a dozen miles of open road travel through dingy, seemingly abandoned plains, the Wizard was finally forced to confront and uncomfortable reality. It was something he hadn't experienced in months, years even, but he was feeling it now and it was...

Annoying.

"I'm lost," he muttered. "I'm totally gorram lost."

Charger bleated.

"You shut up. I just need to think some."

Bleat.

"...your mother."

The goat stopped so hard it almost threw him right off. Having experienced a faceplant in snow back in Salvar, Caden's reflexes were just good enough to keep the Wizard from experiencing one in hard-packed dirt here in Raiaera. He tried at the reins for a few seconds, but Charger wouldn't budge.

"Fine, fine. Sorry."

The ram took off at its usual gallop.

Eventually, the sun set and the stars came out. By then it was a bit of a moot point. Caden could see lights in the distance. The closer he got, the higher and brighter those lights became. Close enough and more lights became visible, but these were blue and green and-

"Ah. Hell."

He didn't need to read the sign as he passed it, overgrown thing that it was. Covered in so many vines, shreds of cloth, stains and worse. It was in the shadow of a tree. And when Caden was well past it, the tree creaked a bit. It twisted to watch him, aged bark snapping off and a few railroad spike-sized nails poking out from the stumps of its long broken branches. And the sign?

It read simply, Anebrilith.

[Caden Law]

The closer Caden got, the less he liked what he saw.

It was a city in the distance.

It was two of them. Only one just happened to be undead.

The first city he'd seen stood atop a high, huge hill; almost more like a mesa with a slope on one side. Even at a distance, Caden could see its high walls and ramparts. They reminded him of Eluriand, and so did other things. The fires burning behind them, red and orange and choking with smoke. In the skies above, shapes danced and cackled; shrill sounds that grated on his ears from miles away. He recognized the sound though, and that was another thing that reminded him of Eluriand: Harpies.

The second city was spread out among the network of hills surrounding the first one. A great big horseshoe-like thing that looked like it was made from the festering corpse of civilization. There were run-down wooden buildings by the dozen, rotten farmlands, and some of them burned blue and green in the night. There were stone structures that looked eerily like tombstones the size of churches. Trees staggered on their roots, and ghouls sang to the void between the stars. It was a wretched chorus, awful and undescribable.

And the closer he got to it, the more Caden thought to himself, I should turn back now.

He remembered Eluriand.

I need to turn back now.

His scars remembered Eluriand. An empty pit in his chest remembered watching Trenycë burn at a distance.

I need to stop and get out of here.

But as much as his body hurt to remember those things, his conscience ached more.

"I can't stop," he said to the unquiet dead, though they didn't hear him. "And I can't turn back."

He was still exhausted from fighting Denebriel. The few hours respite he had since then were spent on the road, nothing restful about it. He hadn't slept, hadn't eaten, and the only thing to drink had been wine on another continent. But the Wizard tightened his hold on the reins, and he inhaled rancid magic from the air around him, and he drew out his wand one more time.

"I won't run away from this anymore."

[Caden Law]

There weren't that many real fighters left in the port-city of Anebrilith. Most of the ones remaining were either pirates, the brutes employed by slave-traders, or the street urchins who knew what it took to survive and were willing to make someone else pay the price. Death Lord Kaverre's armies of the undead had done an absolutely magnificent job of whittling away at everyone else.

But there were still a token few left.

One of them was an Elf by the name of Shaul Karna. He was a slightly tall fellow by Raiaeran standards, head-height with your average Man, and he stood out among the local populace for a few other reasons too. One is that his hair was pitch black. Another is that he wore a steel mask with crystalline red lenses over the eyes, lending his voice a hollow reverb. He also wore dingy white robes, tattered from months of heavy use in siege warfare, and pitch black steel armor on his chest and shoulders, with strategic bits for the arms and legs, and finely made gauntlets for the hands. He carried a staff shaped like a long rifle or musket, tipped with a red gem of power that no longer glowed quite so brightly as it did some months back.

Shaul was a traditionalist of the oldest school there is. He walked the Path of the Ranger, but he did so in the shine of that eldritch pantheon, Raiaera's Star Gods. As he knelt behind the battlements of Anebrilith's highest remaining outer wall for his nightly benedictions, Shaul heard something. He stopped mid-way into the first syllable of the first chant, gripping his staff and daring to peek up over the wall.

What he saw was an explosion of raw magic. Blue and pink and red and purple, and he could swear to the Quivering Dancer that there were feathers glowing in the night. He saw ground shifting wildly, spikes shooting up out of the dirt and stone collapsing as if compelled to by some awful force of will. He saw power on display, and the light of it felt exhausted, but it felt like something else too.

For the first time in months, the Ranger Shaul Karna felt hope.

"Deithor!" he called, keeping his voice low out of habit. "Deithor!" At the second calling, the young Drow finally crept out of the guard tower next to him, joining Shaul on the battlements. "Look!"

Deithor did. "What's...what's going on?"

"I don't know," Shaul answered in a gleeful little voice. "But it seems to be coming towards us."

"Is...that a Man?"

Shaul focused. "...better. It's a Wizard. See the Hat? And the-the-the...oh. Oh, no."

"What?" Deithor asked. "Sir? Master Shaul?"

"Oh no."

"What?" Deithor asked again, Shaul's anxiety spreading to the younger Ranger like a bad cold.

"It's him..."

As if for emphasis, something blew up in the field.

"Who?"

"He's here..."

Deithor looked out at the eleventh hour champion who seemed to fill his master's heart so full of dread, and in that moment he noticed two things. One was that the Wizard was riding a very large goat. The other was the barely audible sound of Shaul's hopes crumbling before he could even finish raising them.

"...the Wizard Blueraven is really here..."

(Of course, that might've been the noise of a stone obelisk collapsing in the field. Whichever.)

"Oh...Gods..."

[Caden Law]

"He's headed this way..."

"We have to let him in," Deithor decided immediately, and leapt up from his post before Shaul could try to stop him. While the older Wanderer shouted obscenities in eldritch tongues, the younger one darted down the nearest flight of stairs. It was a spiral path, and he had to jump a sleeping comrade or three on his way down, but the young Drow kept going. At ground level, the doorway was open simply because the actual door had been cannibalized for firewood a few days ago.

"A Wizard comes!" Deithor shouted. "A Wizard comes!" There were only two guards at the gate -- the only ones who could be spared for the job, and the only ones who would've taken it anyway: Heldreth and Balakai, both of them also Drow and both of them just as young and maniacally optimistic as Deithor was. "Open the gates!"

There was some hassling. People cleared the streets in a hurry, but for a few thugs who had more self-preservation than that. Big, burly types who'd been able to come and go with the slave ships and the pirate vessels, slaking their awful thirsts and sating their eager appetites as they pleased. Two of them drew swords and a third had a crossbow loaded.

Shaul, for all his reservations and indignations and worse, put the crossbowman down without giving any of them the slightest hint of a warning. Killshot straight to the face, cratering his head wide open at the point of impact. The other two beat a quick retreat while Deithor, Haldreth and Balakai undid the locks and pulled the doors half-way open.

"Let him in! Let him in!"

Less than a second later, there was a white-and-blue blur shooting between the doors like a cannonball. The lower half bleated loud enough to sound like a roaring bull. The upper half screamed in a high enough pitch to sound like a frightened little girl.

And then there were chunks of somebody's ancestor gored all over the ground, and the riding ram was cornering so hard it bashed through a dicrepit shop window, and the rider wasn't actually there so much as he was staggering fast for the gates and shouting, "Shut the bloody things!"

"It's stuck!" Haldreth keened while Deithor and Balakai powered their door shut. "It's stuck!"

"There's a ftaghn zombie lodged in it!" Haldreth screamed. Because there was. And it was still squirming and there were a lot more inbound and they were moving very fast and-

"Dammit!" Blueraven Said, flicking his wand in mid-stride. Rocks shot up out of the ground, slamming into the door and driving it shut with a resounding crunch and a spray of oily black ichor all over Haldreth. A few seconds later, the doors actually shuddered as a flood tide of undeath broke against it like cresting waves. Bony fingers wore themselves to nubs outside, while the three Drow and the Wizard worked the locks into place. Teeth snapped out of their sockets trying to get a purchase on enchanted steel bars, and faces pounded themselves to hamburger meet on what little enchanted wood was exposed behind them.

The gates held.

Whether that was a good thing or a bad one was yet to be seen.

"Well!" Caden said to the Drow, now that he actually had a chance to study them up close. It only clicked that they were Drow before he could think of something witty to say. He was left dumbfounded enough to ask, "...this is Raiaera, isn't it?"

"Absolutely!" said Deithor, who was easily the oldest of the three. He looked to be no older than one of Caden's nephews, probably fifteen or sixteen. And he was so energetic, despite all circumstances to the contrary. For a moment, Caden actually thought he'd ended up in an alternate reality where Drow were pleasant.

And then he heard a splash in the muddy ground in front of him, looked and saw a Starlit Ranger. They were a distinct bunch. Standard Rangers never dressed so well, nor did they carry riflestaves. This particular Ranger remained crouched for a few seconds, then stood with the slow grace of an Elf at war. Caden stared at him. Then he took a guess.

"Ringo, was it?" he asked. Caden had known a few Walkers before, and he no longer believed in coincidences.

"Shaul," was the answer. Caden almost shrugged to say close enough when the Elf continued, "Ringo Cehenath is dead."

"Oh." Caden blinked. "I...take me to your leader?"

The riflestaff was pointed directly at him before he could even finish speaking. By this point, Caden was actually too exhausted to be surprised. Given his relations with Elves and indigenous peoples in general, he almost expected it enough that it would've had a minimal effect anyway.

"Your last words, Defiler Blueraven. Choose them carefully."

A chorus of what from the Drow. Caden grimaced.

"Okay. Goat."

The gem lit up. Caden's life rather pointedly didn't flash before his eyes. But the Ranger did. Caden jumped to the side, knocking over Deithor and Haldreth as he did, and Shaul backflipped forward into the gate with a high-pitched scream of his own. Charger caught him square in the backside at what must've been forty miles per hour, and then the mountain goat from Hell rammed right into the gates so hard you could hear the walls supporting them rattle. Stopped cold and bleating indignantly, Charger stumbled back a few paces and shook the cobwebs out while Shaul crashed to the ground in agony.

By this point, the three Drow were questioning the wisdom of anything they'd done tonight.

"Warned you," Caden sighed, taking Shaul's staff and then systematically stripping him of his pistol-gripped wand, his flute, his fighting knives, his throwing knives, his carving knife, his fillet knife, and what looked like a hobby knife too. He took the Ranger's cloak, dumped the blades into it and tied the entire thing shut before handing it off to one of the apprentices. "Don't mind him, boys."

"I'm a girl," Balakai protested. Caden adjusted his glasses and looked at her: Flat as a board, her hair chopped short, wearing a dirty green version of Shaul's Ranger get-up with none of the armor, but her voice was girlish and her facial features were close...

"Okay," he shrugged. "Sorry about that, ma'am."

"MY LEGS!" Shaul howled, kicking feebling at nothing in particular. He was trying to strangle Caden from a distance.

The Wizard nonchalantly holstered his wand and kicked Shaul in the face. Hard enough to knock the mask off and expose the Elf beneath. His face was long, strong in the jaw and scarred visibly in several places. He was also completely unconscious. The apprentices were literally too stunned to be outraged. It probably helped that they must've been through months of siege warfare before this.

"Alright then," Caden said as he wiggled some feeling back into his toes. "One of you help me load him onto Charger. That's it, thank you. My name is Caden. And you are?"

"Deithor." Oldest, probably. Still young and somehow bright-eyed. His skin was so black it almost shined purple in the firelights of Anebrilith. Held Shaul's riflestaff like he knew how to use it.

"Haldreth." Youngest by the look of him. Heavier than Deithor, but when Elves are involved that's not saying much. His skin was more grayish, his eyes darker but still expressive.

"Balakai." The token girl, definately the middle-child in terms of age and mindset. Blue eyes, skin that actually was purple. Would've been more attractive if she were older.

Child soldiers. Too young to be fighting even by Caden's standards, but here they were.

"Charming," He said. "Apprentices? Figured. I'm assuming the walls are usually left unattended?"

No answer. Not even nodding. The undead had already given up on the door, and only distant ghoulsong and the shrill laughter of harpies remained.

"Thought so." Caden rotated his arm a few times and finally checked to make sure everything was still where it should've been. He was bleeding at the neck and there was a cut on one of his legs, but it could've been worse. "No sense fretting over it then." He grabbed Charger's reins, then lead the ram away from the gates. His knees were still shaking and his eyelids felt like lead weights. "Come on. You'll have to tell me everything and take me to your leader."

"Shaul is our leader."

"Your real leader. Should be a Seer or something, right?"

"She's...not responding, sir," Deithor uncomfortably admitted. "It's complicated..."

"You can explain on the way," Caden said. He already had a feeling that he was going to regret this.

[Caden Law]

The city of Anebrilith had been under siege for almost a year and a half now. It had missed the initial waves of undead by luck and geography, but then came the refugees and the siege engines, so fast that it was hard to tell where one group ended and the other began. The sheer number of refugees had been enough to gut whole parts of the surrounding area within a few weeks, and the panic they brought with them didn't help much. Most of the picturesque rural suburbia that had grown up around Anebrilith over the centuries was gone by the time the Necromancer's armies had arrived. The ports emptied, the city itself mostly evacuated of everyone who could get out ahead of time...

Then came the first siege. And with it, the dregs of the high and low seas alike. What had been a shining beacon of Elven society was now little more than an abused whore, beaten day and night by the unquiet dead and raped at least as often by the hook-handed drunks with ships. Killian Grimstone of the Necrosition, aided and abetted by a monster Caden knew entirely too well from his nightmares. Not that he remembered the thing's name. The first siege was broken by a Drow and a Man; the name of the one was unknown and the name of the other was just plain weird.

"Godhand Striker?" Caden had asked.

Then came the second siege, and it was worse. Much worse.

They came in force this time, sustained and ruthless and better organized. The Death Lord in charge had done his homework, bringing necromantic auxilliaries in addition to hordes of walking corpses; his own personal lieutenants. Xem'zund's armies were starting to sound like real ones already. "Baron Rovsen Kaverre, he calls himself," Deithor explained. "Foppish prick if I ever saw one."

"You've been watching the pirates too close, Deith," Balakai chastised. Of the three apprentices, she was the only one who actually sounded like a Drow, and even then all of them could've passed for humans or half-elves with the way they talked. Caden chalked it up to the war.

"He didn't try to take the city," Deithor continued like he hadn't heard Balakai at all. "He just...encircled it. And let the rest happen on its own, almost."

Kaverre struck at random, with overwhelming force that always seemed just that little bit too weak to break through the defenses. He had harpies in the skies around the clock, plucking good men and women and children right out of the street with no warning whatsoever, but not always. Mostly, they just circled. And laughed. And sang with the ghouls at night, making it that much harder to sleep.

Kaverre let ships in. Pirates and slave-traders and smugglers especially. And he let convoys in too, their wares completely untarnished so long as they swore to drive hard bargains and didn't try to smuggle anyone out as more than property. He caged the Elves of Anebrilith in and then he dissected everything that made them what they were. He took and took and took, always letting them steal, bribe, bargain, buy and do whatever they had to just to survive -- just to find that little shred of hope and resolve to keep going.

Just so he could knock them down again.

"About three months ago, maybe four, we snuck our way in on a pirate ship," Deithor explained. The mission had been one of merciful reinforcement. It didn't work out that way. They managed to take out a few pirate lords, but no-one left in the city knew how to sail on their own. They were too weak to make effective fighters. And the harpies saw everything. No way to train in secret. So the Walkers tried a more direct approach.

"Ringo died first," Haldreth said, empty-voiced and grim in the eyes. "Ripped apart by giant necrotic spiders. Kaverre's got his mask as a belt ornament."

"What happened?" Caden asked.

They were trying to assassinate him. A true Ranger mission, full of stealth and guile and intrigue. Ringo, Shaul, Erral and a few that Caden had never heard of. To the Rangers' credit, most of them actually made it back in one piece. To their misfortune, not all of them made it back alive.

"That's how Erral died," Haldreth added. "Made it right into the gate before undeath took hold of him."

Erral killed a few more of the Rangers, and some of the apprentices too.

"And when that failed, we simply tried a counter-siege. But only the Seers were trained to Walk that particular Path," Balakai cut in. "We came with eight. Only one remains, and she's been unresponsive for weeks now."

"What happened to her?" Caden asked. As luck and timing would have it, he posed the question right as they arrived at what passed for Walker headquarters: A blasted-out concert hall, and not even one of the big landmarks either. The apprentices lead Caden inside, and Haldreth stayed behind to clean the gore from his clothes and rearm the wards that kept local nasties and sky-stalkers alike from barging in. Charger and Shaul stayed with him, if only because the ram wouldn't go any further into the building. Caden followed a silent Deithor and Balakai deeper in until they arrived at a basement.

Balakai spoke a passcode in Alerian, one of the few major languages Caden didn't speak, though it sounded almost like a butchered variant of Raiaeran.

"We who will not die?" Caden asked in actual Raiaeran.

"Close enough," Haldreth said.

A few seconds later, a Ranger simply appeared in the doorway of the basement stairwell. She, and Caden was sure it was a woman, wore the same battle-shredded robes as Shaul and used the same riflestaff too. Her hair was longer though, too long for any human woman to make practical in the Ranger's line of work. And it was white, even if dirtied by circumstance.

"Drow?" Caden guessed.

"Yes," she answered. "Ape?"

"Wise-ass," Caden replied.

"...he can pass," the Ranger said, and Caden could almost hear her chortling. Laughter must've been rare around these parts.

Down they went, and it was only when they neared the bottom of the stairwell that Deithor finally answered, "She tried to summon one of the Pantheon's captains."

"She succeeded," Balakai snapped. "They all did. But there's a price for that."

The basement was weird. It was equal parts study, war-room, shrine and hospital. There were scrolls of musical notes on one wall, near-empty shelves and half-full weapon racks on another, a few simple cots and one actual bed. Not a nice one, just a bed. The only things on the shelves were masks and empty helmets; Caden recognized the patterns as Ranger and Seer, and one that didn't look at all familiar. The bed was small. Narrow. It had one occupant. Caden knew her.

She was short, thinner than she had been at Tembrethnil but still beautiful in the way that Elven women always are. Slants here, curves there, soft angles and sharp ears, closed eyes and a pink-lipped mouth closed tight. Her hair was dark blue, shorter and straighter than Caden remembered. She was still wearing a set of battle-stained Seer's robes, but all of her armor had been removed and neatly piled at the foot of the bed. Her mask and helm were among the rest of the armor. Her sword was propped against the side of the bed, curved and ornate and exactly the way he remembered it. She almost looked perfect, like she was sleeping.

But the air around her pulsed. Things writhed in and out of it, eldritch lights sparkling for a moment and then vanishing as quickly as they came. It was as though something had simply laid claim to her, and you could look and touch but that was it. Caden could sense a pressure in the room, like reality itself was weighted down around the Seer, and it made him cold.

"There's always a price," Balakai sadly repeated. "They sent great captains and soldiers to aid us, but Vara was the only Seer who survived the attempt. Morilin hasn't been able to wake her. Seer Lin'Quel has been missing since the night of the summoning. All we have is his mask. Vara's the only one left, and..."

The girl trailed off. Her armor actually had enough of a chink in it that she didn't violently object to Deithor's arm around her shoulders. Caden ignored the urge to play big brother to the two of them.

"Captain of what, exactly?"

"The Pantheon's Armies," Deithor answered. "The Star Gods. Surely you've heard of them by now, if any of the Wanderers are familiar to you?"

"...heard of them, yes. Know them closely, not really."

"She managed to call down the wrath of He Who Dances In His Name," Deithor said. "One of their highest servants. He used her as an avatar to do battle on this plane-"

"And the others?"

"Seer Teriniel managed to serve as an avatar of Song of Wild Nights, and Seer Barathul became His Divine Right Hand and-"

"What happened to them afterwards?" Caden interrupted.

"...they were...empty," Deithor confessed. "Nothing but husks and clothes. That's what happens when you try to contain a god in a mortal shell."

Caden remembered Denebriel, and his encounters with the Elder Thaynes. He had no problem believing the boy.

"Ever since then, she's just...laid there. No need to eat, or drink. No need to relieve herself. Doesn't respond to anything. She just breathes and sleeps," Balakai said, sadness turning to reverence. "It's...beautiful to sleep near her."

"Well," Caden pinched at the bridge of his nose. "You're not doing that tonight. None of you are. You're going to leave me alone in here and whatever happens, whatever you hear, think, say or do, you will not come down here."

Both of them shot looks at him. Caden had been stared down by better. And by worse.

"You're also going to take the Ranger standing four feet to the left of me and the Ranger standing nine feet ahead of me and drag them out too."

Silence.

"Don't make me repeat myself."

As if on cue, both Rangers appeared, riflestaves aimed squarely at his head and chest. Neither asked, but Caden answered them anyway: "Lucky guess. It's where I'd stage an ambush if I were you. Now get out."

Either his skills at bluffing were getting better, or the Wanderers in Starlight weren't quite as hardcore as Caden remembered them. Either way, the two senior Rangers and both apprentices left the room. Hesitation marked every step, but you don't argue with a Wizard in situations like this. You either kill him quick and hope he stays that way, or you do what you're told and hope it doesn't end in hexes and tears. They filed out and Caden waited until they were all the way up the stairs before daubing a finger in blood from his leg wound. He traced a spell on the doorframe.

A split second later, the air froze into solid black ice between the basement and the stairwell. Caden left it there, staggered over to Vara's bed and took out his knife.

"Sorry about this," he said. "But it's for your own good."

[Caden Law]

There was a lot of blood by the time Caden finished his ugly work. Blood and splinters. He never was much of a wood carver, and the floorboards were pretty tough. First came the circles, then the seemingly random assortments of lines, and then the blood and ink that turned those lines into sideways lettering. Pretty much all of it came from Caden, with a little help from a small jar of ink someone had left dusting in a far corner of the room. He couldn't actually pierce Vara's skin or he would've used some of her blood to help.

The end result was twofold: Caden was so exhausted and lightheaded that he was having trouble standing, while Vara's bed was completely encircled within an unactivated barrier spell. It was crude work. Caden wasn't used to making barriers, and he had always been more of a secular Wizard than one of those Church whackjobs. Like his little sister, Cadence. She would've known what to do about this.

"Ugh," Caden grunted at the thought, sitting down outside the circle and rubbing at his eyes. Thinking of Cadence meant thinking of consequences: How would the loss of Denebriel affect the people of Evernorth? It'd always been so far removed from any seats of power, its Wizards always holding a bit more power in town than its Clergy...but then there was Cadence and her ilk, who were both and-

"Stop that," he said to himself. "Need to focus here."

Caden looked up to the circle, the bed, the elf, the distortions imploding and expanding in the air above her. They didn't hurt to touch, oddly enough. Didn't cause damage to anything Caden poked them with either. The whole thing looked positively demonic, but it felt utterly amoral; completely lacking any conceptual links to good or evil. The distortions didn't even feel like magic, living or dead. Caden tried to think of the situation as it might relate to Sorcery, but nothing came to him. He tried to connect and compare it to his studies as a Wizard, but this was new. Demons had rules and those rules were well recorded and reasonably understood. Whatever was plaguing Vara, it didn't fall into any category Caden was familiar with.

"Trigger," he mumbled to himself, stabbing the knife into the circle and shunting some power into it -- what little he had left at this point. "Trigger, dammit." The spell sparked and sputtered to life, blue lighting up in slow paths along each line and letter in the circles. A wall formed, eventually, and it was thin and transparent, blue and occasionally marked with the appearance of drifting feathers. It was a miniaturized version of the spell Caden had used to sever Denebriel's power and set up a magical null zone. The thing above, attached to, possibly echoing from within Vara, pulsed against the spell's walls. But it did not distort them, nor did it push through them. It didn't even acknowledge them, except as a fish might notice glass.

"It'll do," Caden decided.

He then did what any (in)sane Wizard does after killing a false god, killing that same god's guardians, blowing out huge chunks of a city, toppling ancient orders, jumping continents at the behest of another God, riding hours at a time through war-torn plains, then charging head-on through a city of undeath and confronting the passive shades of an eldritch abomination: He crawled over to one of the cots on hands and knees, and flopped his way into it. Caden didn't really fall asleep so much as he passed out. Drooling. Face down. Goggles still on. With one leg hanging off one side of the bed and the one arm hanging off the other. With that same eldritch abomination still locked in the room with him.

[Caden Law]

There once was a Wizardess who vied with a gent named Tön're Aullum-Seu, known to his peers by such colorful titles as the Darkest Lord of Dai-Hath, the Blackest Warlock of the Obsidian Coven, the Binder of El'Rolloch, the Dier in Iron and the Eighty Year Sojourner in Vile Truth. Tön're is remembered, at least in certain circles that keep track of these things, for being one of the archetypal black magic badasses. Even though he spent eighty years in an arcane prison while they Worked out the means of actually executing him, and spent most of that time guiding proxies through astral commands and other such methods. Tön're's great contribution to history, and the one that ensured his name would be remembered, was a proverb roughly translating as Never give a Wizard time to prepare.

The Wizardess who vied against Tön're, and whose identity is remembered only as the White Lady Anon, made a few contributions that have mostly been forgotten. The one that's remembered is the one that was unintentional. It's a quote that was originally in an ancient, mixed dialect of Salvic and Raiaeran, presumably from a scholastic trade language no longer used in either country. It was translated liberally into Old Diamonic, then re-translated into a dozen other languages, such that it has no need for formality when quoting it. Even if someone doesn't know of the White Lady Anon, there's a pretty good chance they've heard her wisdom at some point in their lives. Especially when they were children and the monsters in the closet were so very, very real.

Sleep lightly and carry a big stick.

As an apprentice, Caden had slept lightly and often did carry a big stick. In those days it literally served as a teddy bear you could bludgeon things with, and it was practical at two levels: Not only could you smash animals with it if attacked in your sleep (as Caden had to do at least a few times out on the frontier), but you carried it with you into your dreams. Caden didn't put up with nightmares in his childhood. He beat them stupid. As he'd grown older and more insecure in his imaginings, he lost that sense of invincibility through caution, translating it more into waking actions than sleeping ones. Tonight, he regretted doing that.

Because tonight, as he drifted off into la-la land, the Wizard found himself truly drifting off. He remembered hitting the bed, and then he remembered standing up on ground that moved like a river.

He stood still then, there, in a place without time and meaning. He stared at his feet, and he noted with detached calm that the world was dark and glowing and the river was made out of faces and flesh between them. A glance left, there stood a ziggurat of choral and bone. A glance right, fire that laughed like a man and walked like a woman and burned like some fifth stage between wretched age and infantile innocence. Behind him, Caden could see stars racing along hills that rose and fell like breathing, and a sky that was moving without clouds or fixed points or colors at all. Directly ahead was a grand temple in the likeness of a skull that wasn't at all human, with watery lights freezing in its eyes and doors in each of its million teeth. Somewhere, a violin was playing.

There were children laughing and singing.

And the skittering of claws on bone, the sound of skin crawling, of mouths opening and of eyes grinning like they had teeth -- because they did.

Caden wished he had a big stick nowadays. He couldn't feel his magic. A stick would've been nice.

[Caden Law]

He settled for screaming and flailing around and falling out of bed. The Wizard jolted upright, dizzy and irate and trying to draw his sword, wand and rod all at once; the wand summoned out of his coat, slipped through his fingers and crashed into the ceiling. The sword didn't even leave its scabbard, and the rod came up more like a drunken baseball bat, stopping just short of cracking Caden across the back of his own head.

Left, right, back, forward. He was in the room. He was himself. His hands were still pallid and veiny, his goggles were lopsided and his Hat was lying on the floor. Caden gulped. He looked over to the barrier spell, Vara, and the distortions. The air had no face, and the antilights sucking in and out of it lacked any physical features at all, but...

Caden could swear they were smiling at him.

A thousand tiny little mouths, smiling at him.

Caden felt nothing for a few seconds, then half-heartedly mumbled, "It's nice to be out of my league again. I was almost getting accustomed to knowing what I was doing and having a fighting chance at it." This was not spoken with a smile or a challenging tone. Caden was serious. So numb that you might as well have dunked the essence of his personality in novacaine and shot it full of morphine, but utterly serious.

The Wizard replaced his holster, summoned his wand properly and adjusted everything back to its proper place. Then he walked over to the circle and stepped right through it. The sensation of being cut off from background magical energy wasn't all that different from holding one's breath, though it was made more disconcerting by the fact that Caden was still breathing. He tried to imagine a wall in his thoughts, just as a precaution, while he bent down and wrapped his arms around the Seer. She felt light. Caden didn't have much experience picking up Elves of either gender, but Vara felt lighter than any human woman he'd ever lifted. He hauled her over one shoulder like a sack, then nonchalantly stepped out of the circle.

Vara didn't stir in the slightest as she left, but the thing remained in the circle. Caden set her down, rather brutishly, on the nearest cot. The thing in the circle was still heaving in and out of existence, and now he could see it pushing up against the barrier. The distortions were growing faster and faster, until they weren't, and then they just stopped all together. But he could still see a bulge where they pushed against the circle and then even that was gone. Caden heard a snap sound and he knew it was gone.

After a minute or two, the circle faded out completely. Caden felt the magic powering it shut down, and then he felt nothing out of the ordinary at all.

"Huh," he sounded to himself, then looked at Vara. She was still sleeping, now sprawled out rather indignantly with how he'd practically slung her down. Caden went over to the shelves and started pilfering around. He found smelling salts, went back to Vara and waved them under her nose. When that didn't work, he tried a few light slaps to either cheek. When that didn't work, he shook her and tried shouting. When that didn't work, Caden actually resorted to his Wizard's Voice. And when even that didn't work, he settled down on the edge of the bed and tried to think the problem through.

And here, his education combined with his instinctive knowledge of Sorcery came in handy: "In the old stories, the princess is awakened by a kiss from a prince. Technically speaking, a magi are a form of nobility...and...Sorcerers are a form of royalty," he said to himself, "The kind won through trial and conquest..."

This was followed by another, more muted, "Huh," and then a "Hn," and finally a "Screw it."

Caden leaned over her. Considered what he was about to do, both as a mage and as a man: On the one hand, he had to focus enough to conjure up the Sorcerous powers and channel them to his lips and mouth. On the other, Vara was beautiful. Alarmingly beautiful. And he hadn't had so much as a kiss in five years.

Deep breath. And...

Incidentally, for a dainty little Elven maiden who hadn't moved in weeks, Vara had one hell of a left hook.

[Caden Law]

"Aw, man," Caden said with a grin. "This is just like old times." He poked the bars. "I mean, shinier, yes, but still. I feel like I'm back in Tembrethnil already. Or perhaps Evernorth. Or Dueril's shack. Definately not that one Orc ship though, their bars were nowhere near this fancy."

Vara's Voice literally dripped liquid sarcasm out of thin air: "Glad you approve, Wizard." The stuff puddled, congealed and evaporated in short order. Apprentice Rangers clustered behind her, mostly in abject terror. Shaul occupied a cot. He had a wand in one hand and a water skin in the other.

"Gods...it just takes me back to better times, more innocent times. D'you kids know her tattoos used to look more like dimples when I first met her?" Stares from the crowd. "Oh, she was so...nubile then. Probably still is, way you Elves are, but good Swaying Saint..."

"You disgust me."

"Just like old times!" the Wizard laughed.

And then, rather abruptly, he stopped. "Except it's not. You should have three more of your best in here if you plan on holding me for any amount of time. Nine if you plan on actually killing me."

"That cage will explode with enough force and heat to reduce this whole theater to molten glass if you try anything." Vara's eyes narrowed as she spoke. She had her armor on again, sans helmet, and her sword in hand, sans sheath. Its blade looked like molten glass, or genuine liquid crystal, or some other material that made no sense for a bladed weapon.

"That's nice," Caden shrugged. "I killed a demigod about twenty hours ago. I'm a little tired, but I could add everyone in this city to my tab if I had to."

"You're bluffing."

To which Blueraven merely smiled as only Wizards can.

"I can smell corruption on him," Shaul spat. Several of the apprentices finally followed his example, pulling out riflestaves and pistolwands of varying make and quality. Caden noted that all three of his early saviors were using what looked like jury-rigged field work. Balakai's had obviously been carved out of an oar and Deithor's still had a bent nail near the tip.

"Of course you do," Caden said, hiding his hands. "I just waded through a field of undead not three hours ago."

"No," Vara Said. "You have changed, Wizard. Your very aura is different."

"Oh, that." Caden showed his hands this time. The hiding had been a specifically planned lead-up to it. The skin was still paler than the rest of him, veins still stood out. They were ugly. One was scarred rather badly from magical acid burns back in Salvar. "I'm a Lich now." Cue the gasping apprentices and the shocked look on Vara's face. "Just kidding. Have dabbled a bit in Necromancy, but only as a counter-measure." Bold-faced lie. He didn't want to think about the times he'd ripped energy from the Sway, or even from Xem'zund's assassins. Let alone Tembrethnil. But... "Oh, don't look so surprised. Not like I haven't committed crimes against nature before or anything. Just ask the Spirit of Tembrethnil Forest. Oh, wait. You can't."

"Monster. Let me kill him, Seer. Please let him kill him," Shaul said, and a few of the older apprentices were really, really backing him on it.

"You really have changed," Vara noted, her Voice gone out in absolute surprise. Maybe she was a little bit tired too. Her sleep didn't seem particularly restful, and even though Caden was the one sporting a fist-sized bruise on his chin, that had been a rather rude awakening.

"For what it's worth," Caden said. "You have absolutely no idea."

The surface of the cage's bars quivered slightly. The air in the room moved in time with the rise and fall of the Sorcerer's Voice. The Mark on Caden's cheek actually lit up with each and every syllable, and dust began to drift down from the ceiling, shelves and walls.

"Why are you here?" Vara asked, staring now.

Caden shrugged, and finally let go of the bravado. Sincerity was key here. And he really did tell her the truth this time: "Because I was supposed to be all along."

"You've been missing for months," Shaul replied. "Gone into hiding to study the foul wisdom of the enemy, perhaps?"

"Left Raiaera on a journey of self-discovery, actually, back in Salvar," Caden answered, ignoring the accusation. Shaul's justifiable paranoia wasn't worth being angry over at this point. He waited. Elves had a sense of drama, most of the time. Sooner or later, someone would ask the obvious.

Vara did: "What happened to you?"

"In dramatic or chronological order?" Caden asked. No answer. "I burnt down an arcanery, killed four or five Death Lords in the mountains, learned how to swordfight from a Drow-Dwarf named Dueril, was arrested, nearly executed, triggered a purge of Warlocks and a near-civil war in my hometown, was banished from said-hometown, had my heart broken into a million tiny, slightly bookish pieces in said-hometown, went to Berevar, met somebody else's Gods, gained tremendous power and insight and optimism, went to Knife's Edge, killed my God, met another of those other Gods, was thusly Godjacked and dumped here, and then...oh, well." He shrugged. "You know the rest, I'm sure."

A chorus of mute stares.

"Gods, you should see the looks on your face right now. It almost makes it all worthwhile. Except not."

"Are you insane?" Deithor asked.

"Not at all! I'm a Wizard."

"Which is even worse," Shaul muttered.

"You just wish you had a Hat this pointy."

Silence.

Caden stood up in the cage, though it left him hunched over doing it. "Oh, that's another thing. I forgot to mention it last time I saw you, but I went timetravelling and for some reason I keep glowing gold and getting taller by about an inch every few months. Neat, isn't it?"

Caden nonchalantly let himself out of the cage. Nobody so much as blinked. It was about the effect he was hoping for: They were already shellshocked from war, and from the sudden return of their leader, and now here was a human Wizard being completely and harmlessly insane in their general direction. Sooner or later, even an Elven mind will short out. Caden politely shut the cage behind him and examined the locking mechanism before announcing, "I have no idea how I just did that. So." He looked to the lot of them. "Any questions? Concerns? Comments? Compliments of my sexy Hat and manly scars?"

Nothing for the longest time. Then Vara actually admitted, "You did get taller. I had not noticed that."

Caden summoned his wand, rod, knife, sword and breastplate from the farthest corner of the room, fitting each one back into its place accordingly. It was then that Shaul asked, "Who'd you kill for the Conscript plate? You threw yours away back in Tembrethnil."

Caden finished latching it on. Thought about it for a second. Then answered in absolute honesty: "Myself."

"What."

"Myself. I killed myself. The breastplate was a reward from Elder Thayne Draconus. You know, he actually smiled without lips when he gave it back to me. Said it was about time I saw its use, or some such. Swell guy, really."

"What."

"Question," Caden said. Vara looked at Shaul just shook his head at the floor and lowered his wand in defeat. The Seer looked back, and Caden smiled. "Does it always feel like this when you lot brag about how awesome you are? Because I could really get used to it."

"Whatever chance you had of bedding me before, you just blew it," Vara replied in short order.

Caden snapped his fingers, but the impact wasn't anywhere near what it would've been a few months ago. He actually spent a few seconds seriously considering his next words. They were rude, crude, and really just plain Wrong on a lot of levels.

Which is exactly why he said them anyway.

"Well, for what it's worth, I actually did want to bed you for a little while there. But that was just a momentary fad, courtesy of shock and desperation. Truth is, there are two things to consider: One is that your insides have been populated by an eldritch abomination for at least a month now. It'd be like chucking a piece of meat into a canyon full of writhing teeth. Two is that, well...this is personal, but one of my life's goals has been to see if there is such a thing as an Elven prostitute."

Shaul actually sat up. "You're still on about that?"

"Abso-gods-damned-lutely," Caden replied with a completely straight face. He then adjusted his Hat, straightened his glasses and started walking. "Incidentally, I'll be back later." Through the door, up into the theater. Charger bleated a greeting. "Don't wait up!"

Fifteen Elves and Drow stood in absolutely baffled silence. One more just groaned and went to sleep on the spot.