The Red Requiem in Cresting Summer

[Caden Law]

Solo. Trying to knock this one out fairly quickly. No idea how long it'll take though.

"You're looking a bit wearier than usual," Haldur commented, and the Wizard looked up from his latest blank page with a set of bleary eyes and an open mouth. "...dare I ask?"

"I don't know," Caden said. "Ask."

"What's got you so down?" Haldur asked.

The Wizard shrugged. "I'm not?"

"You're one mouthbreath away from drooling and you've been staring at a blank page in your grimoire every night for a week. I'm more used to dealing with elves now, but..." The old half-elf made some funny hand gestures and pointed. "You look like a man with something big and bad on his mind."

"I am," Caden admitted. "I'm just not sure what."

"Well. Now we're getting somewhere," Haldur said as he picked up Caden's mug and filled it with distilled water -- per the Wizard's request. Nine hundred people in Carnelost, half of them soldiers and most of the rest gravediggers, and Caden was the only one who constantly refused alcohol. "What could be on your mind?"

Caden thought about it for a few seconds, then said, "It's hard to narrow it down."

"What's the first thing that comes to mind?"

"...that the war isn't over yet," Caden said. "And that I've got unfinished business too, and I'm not gonna like where it takes me. Which leads me to think that maybe, just maybe, I've lost sight of my real goals and I need to get the hell out of this country. Again."

Haldur stared at him and said, "Believe it or not, you're not the only patron I've had say that."

"You don't get it," Caden told him. "Xem'zund put out a personal hit on me. I was hounded every freaking day for months, even when I wasn't in Raiaera. It helped focus me, now that I think about it."

"And now it's gone," Haldur said.

"Sort of," Caden replied. Because it wasn't really gone so much as it was...diminished. "I..."

"I can see the marbles rattling around in your skull now, boy. It'll come to you. Don't push it."

"Yeah," Caden sighed, looking back to the blank page. He already knew what needed to be done.

And he sure as hell didn't think he was going to like it.

[Caden Law]

That night, the Wizard went to his room at Haldur's Inn. He set up a candle and, by its dull red and orange light, he wrote for the first time since leaving Beinost.


Strange aeons are the ones I live in.

About two? months ago, I helped to kill a festering demigod on its own home ground. Which is to say that I got the crap kicked out of me, as did a bunch of other people, and then some musclebound lunatic killed it with nothing but a wrestling hold and his bare teeth. He died too. Nobody else did though, and I even saved a young girl's life. There was much rejoicing on all fronts.

For my part, it was empty. (In part because I was trying not to vomit from using so much black magic and Sorcery during and after the battle.)

The thing about old mages, and the evil ones especially, is that they don't just die. You have to be thorough about it. Very, very thorough. If there isn't a body to examine, you can't be sure. If there is a body to examine, you still can't be sure. After our party disbanded, I stayed behind and revisited the site of the battle.

I never found any bodies.

What I did find was a lot of disintegrating slime where something huge was decaying. And it all felt empty to my magic senses; like someone had been there, had shaped the slime into something else, had used it and been comfortable with it, had survived something awful...and then snuck away in the night.

I did some research. Into my own notes, into the local lore, and into the sections of my book copied from the Greyspine of N'Thayn'sal. None of it said anything about Xem'zund returning again, but I did hit upon the fun little fact that he had apparently returned from the dead at a place called the Obsidian Spire, located deep in the Red Forest in Southern Raiaera.

Being the do-gooding striketard that I am, I've decided to investigate. And by investigate, I probably mean something closer to, "Sneak into the ruins of the Spire and re/permanently kill the shit out of anything I come across." Although it'll probably just end up being, "Sneak into the ruins, then run screaming from whatever's inside."

Just to be on the safe side.

The hard part is that this derails me from a much-needed trip to Scara Brae. There's a monster underneath that city, supposed to come roaring out into the world within the year. I could try to go stop it, but that would leave no-one to ensure that Xem'zund is well and truly D-E-A-D dead. I thought about trying to contact my Magi, but decided against dragging them into this. Even if their skill has grown by leaps and bounds since I last saw them, they just wouldn't have the experience necessary for either task. So I'm going to try and do them in rapid succession.

Gods help me, and et cetera.

[Caden Law]

The Wizard pointedly did not set out early the next day. He woke up in the morning, yes. He went to what passed for Carnelost's market district -- two rows of tents brimming with imported food and goods -- and he secured provisions. Not much, but every bit was going to help. Food first, and a skin of water, and a few vials of alchemist's fire. A lantern, which Caden managed to fix to one end of his staff with a thick leather strap and some rudimentary alchemy. When he was done there, he trudged back to the tavern, went to the darkest corner and waited patiently. Ate breakfast. Had lunch. Spent most of his time taking notes and planning the excursion as best he could.

Skipped dinner, which always happened late in Carnelost because so many of the locals worked overtime. Gravedigging was a thriving industry in Carnelost. More than a million bodies had been set into motion by the Necromancer, and when he fell, they fell. They needed to be buried somewhere. Carnelost was a dead city and so, someone in the chain of command reasoned, it should also be a city of the dead.

Caden would have liked to point out the obvious flaw in that idea: Carnelost was also right next to the Red Forest, which in turn held the Necromancer's home spire. Maybe there was a wisdom to the choice somewhere deep within, something Caden was overlooking completely, but he couldn't figure it out at all.

Caden left the tavern alone. He shouldered his gear, lit his lantern with alchemist's fire, and left Carnelost behind without saying good-bye to any of the locals he'd met during his stay.

[Caden Law]

The Red Forest was, frankly speaking, the single eeriest, most terrifying place in Raiaera. Viewed at a nice, safe distance it was just an assortment of thick red-leafed trees. Some of them were very tell. Some of them were rather short. The grass grew green and orange and gold, the dirt was packed and brown. The trees themselves were mostly black or gray or brown. At a distance, and especially during daylight hours, they looked almost inviting. There was even a scenic dirt road leading right up to the forest's edge.

A closer look would reveal the deeply carved ditch running around the forest; more like an empty mote that hadn't finished drying from having the water pumped out of it. Roots stuck out like clawed finger tips, and here and there you might see rocks that looked uncomfortably like skulls. Fish lay dead on the side farthest from the Forest, and moss was slowly creeping toward the bodies. Every so often you might see a toad the size of a small cat. Go far enough and you might see a toad with a small cat's tail sticking out of its mouth.

Go in close enough, as the Wizard Blueraven did, and you'd find yourself stopped by a solitary watchman staffing a very new looking guardhouse; one that was entirely hand-worked stone, with signs of dwarven craftsmanship, in a land that was best known for elves and their delicate architectural stylings. The watchman himself stood next to a little shack between the guardhouse and a short enclosed bridge, well lit and gated on both sides. He was a tall, lanky sort by elven standards, and he wore what looked like Coronian knight's armor enscribed with a few dwarven runes. The only trace of Raiaeran anything on him was a harp-bow and its matching arrows. Even the horn hanging from his belt was non-elven in make.

"Halt!" he cried as Caden came closer. "Turn back now!"

"No can do," Caden replied without even blinking.

The watchman's response was an arrow to the ground about six inches in front of Caden's left foot. The Wizard stopped, considered the projectile, and quickly realized that it could've been a ricochet shot to one of the vital arteries in his legs if the elf had wanted it that way. He doubted the plate armor on his thigh would've done much to stop it if the angle was good enough.

"Turn! Back! Now!" said the watchman with conviction. "Entry into the Red Forest is strictly forbidden without a direct order from the Lady General. I will not warn you again."

"Actually," Caden said. He took one step forward with his free hand reaching. The arrow hit a churning well of gravity and anti-gravity, coming out as splinters and a misshapen head in another direction entirely. "I probably outrank you."

"Sorcerer!" the elf cried and loosed two more arrows in rapid succession. Caden obliterated both, then snapped his fingers and blew the quiver off his belt. The watchman reached for more arrows and, when his hand couldn't find them, settled for a rather long dagger sheathed on the small of his back.

And then he fired that at the Wizard.

Who was also a Sorcerer.

Caden had to dodge this one with a quick side step. He gathered his will in the moments it took the watchman to discard his bow and draw his sword. The elf lunged forward with speed that most humans would've envied on their best days.

"Geo Vence," the Wizard Spoke, funneling his will and intent through his Voice. The spell slammed the watchman hard, first by twisting the ground right out from under his feet and then by driving him down with a wave of ill defined force; either arcane or gravitic magic in action, and it didn't matter which. The effect was only a temporary stun at best, but that was all Caden needed. "Bind."

The earth itself rose up and shackled the watchman down on his back. This was followed by a round of mostly dwarven and coronian obscenities, and then one or two salvic blasphemes as well. Eventually, the elf resigned himself to his fate and Caden felt safe enough to come closer.

"Let's try this again," he said in a cheerful tone of voice. "My name is Caden Law, Commander of the former Blueraven Brigade at Eluriand, partial slayer of Xem'zund, general saver of your pointy-eared ass. And you are?"

The guard stared at him a moment, then actually looked ashamed of himself. "I-I'm sorry, sir. I just-I expected you to be..."

"Taller? Shorter? Less awe inspiring?"

"...not quite so shabby, actually," the elf said. Caden imagined killing him on general principle, but decided not to.

Although that didn't stop him from saying, "I could drown you in dirt right now, y'know."

"And it would be an honor, sir."

Caden stared at him this time. "I don't want to know," he eventually decided, then undid the bindings with a wave of his hand. The watchman sprang back up and sheathed his sword with a deep, apologetic bow. Caden grimaced and felt embarrassed, and actually blushed a little as he said, "Just tell me your bloody name already."

"Kinolan Finwei," the watchman said, straightening up at last. "I am the Night Watchman of the Red Forest, sir. It is my solemnly sworn duty to keep the ill advised from crossing that bridge," which sounded like he left out the part that went, And to keep the awful things from crossing it as well.

"Charming. Any reason why?" Caden asked.

Kinolan blinked at him a bit, then pointed to the Forest. This close, it looked as if it were bathed in moonlight even though the sky was cloudy and dark. The trees moved a little, never in time with the breeze. Far enough in and fireflies -- at least they looked like fireflies -- glittered and danced close to the road. When the wind stopped moving, and the trees stood still, there was a quiet chittering sound that Caden needed to strain to hear.

He looked from the forest to Kinolan and asked, "Any reason why?"

"...you're insane, aren't you?" the watchman asked.

"I'm a Wizard. There's not much of a difference, technically speaking, except that I explode things with fancy words and I wear a very sexy, awesome Hat that you can't have. Even though you want it. Go on, Kinolan. Admit that you want this Hat." He tilted his head forward. "You can touch it if you'd like."

"I-What..."

"Go on. Touch the sexy Wizard Hat."

Kinolan actually began to raise his hand to do so, then stopped short and took a few worried steps back. "There are awful things in there, sir. Madness that way lies."

Caden grinned at him, but said nothing.

The wind blew. The forest chittered. An insect clicked its mating calls.

Kinolan finally sighed. "It's your funeral if I let you through."

"Please," Caden sighed. "As if I'll ever get something as nice and predictable as a funeral."

[Caden Law]

Caden had no experiences to fall back on if asked to describe what happened next. In almost eight years of gallivanting around the world, wizarding things that needed wizarding, he had never once been given the kind of treatment that Kinolan bestowed upon him: Total hospitality.

No poison, no further insults, not the slightest bit of doubt about his motives; nothing negative in the slightest. The elf had a sense of polite disinterest in Caden's goals, but he still welcomed the man as a war-hero and more or less forced him to have a snack and warm up by the guardhouse's fire before continuing. Caden was almost speechless throughout, though he couldn't help but notice the lack of windows to Kinolan's dwelling. When he asked, the elf shrugged and said, "Carnelost's Watchmen take week long shifts. We're only ever out at night, so having open windows would just be an inconvenience during the day. Sunlight seeps in, gets in your eyes...and then you're facing the next night without any rest whatsoever."

Which made a shred of sense until Caden considered the fact that arrow slits, at least, would've made the place more defensible. He did not bring this up, and neither did his host. Kinolan treated him to some elven toast and a slice of ham, then gave him water and finally consented to let him through the gates. First was the outer gate, on the Carnelost side of the bridge. It was old and rusted, but the lock had very recently been replaced and there were still fresh claw marks all over the wood and the hinges; as if something or someone had been desperate to remove them for a long while.

"Courtesy of the Necromancer's fodder," Kinolan declared, then lead Caden to the other side of the bridge. It was barely fifty feet but it felt like crossing an endless expanse between worlds -- and Caden at least had a bit of experience in that. Enough to know when he felt it. He kept one paranoid eye to the side at all times, but the dried up river never seemed to widen and the bridge didn't grow suspiciously longer, and there wasn't even a breeze to disturb the myriad spiderwebs strewn about between wooden support beams.

At the second gate, Kinolan paused. "Whatever you do," he said. "Do it cautiously. Be as cryptic, as vague, as nightmarishly incomprehensible as your Hat marks you. Do not ever identify yourself by your true name."

Caden looked at him. "Something in there?" he asked.

"Someone," Kinolan answered. "Lots of someone. That's the story, anyway."

Caden waited. Kinolan seemed to shrink a little in hesitation. The Wizard had to order him, "Out with it already. What's the story?"

"When the Forgotten One, Podë, cursed this place...the forest wasn't exactly empty. That's why we were alright with leaving the Necromancer's Spire intact for so many years. It was...I don't know how to explain it. Like a lightning rod? It dragged down the wild power of the Red Curse. Held it in check, sort of. And kept whoever's in there weak enough that the Watchmen were not necessary until after the war," Kinolan explained. "I wish I could tell you more than that, but..."

"Don't crap around. You can tell me at least a little bit," Caden said. "What are the stories about?"

Kinolan looked through the bars of the second gate, and he seemed older for it. Tired. Afraid. "A lot of them died with Carnelost. A lot more with Istien. The stories were mostly oral, best left untold to outsiders. I don't think a Man in Raiaera knew them. Most elves didn't. The Wanderers, maybe."

"How do you know then?" Caden asked.

"I don't," Kinolan said, bluntly and with a shrug. "I've been told about them. I can infer things from them. They were the kinds of things that snuck out in odd ways, when the teachers or my parents didn't expect to say anything about them. The rest had to be guessed at. More so now, I suppose."

Caden grimaced.

"All I can tell you is that you shouldn't trust anything in those woods. Don't speak to strangers. Don't go to court. Don't embrace the wild. Whatever the stories could have been, those were always the moral."

He put key to lock and turned it. But he did not open until he said, "Hurry. And don't cry for help if ill tidings should befall you. Beyond this bridge, I cannot help you any further."

The gates flung open. Caden spent a few seconds regarding Kinolan skeptically, then shrugged the weight of his gear and took up his lantern-ended staff. He took a few steps and felt the world subtly shifting as he crossed an unseen, unmarked, unfathomable threshold. He felt the dirt beneath the soles of his boots, and he could suddenly hear all kinds of forest life that hadn't been present before. Wolves howled, birds crowed, bugs chirped and clicked and dragged their calls out into the night. The moon was high and full and the skies were clear where they had been cloudy and dark, but not another star shone.

Wrought iron crashed shut behind him. Caden could think of nothing profound to say or do. The Wizard merely surveyed the yellowy dirt road before him and he kept moving.

[Caden Law]

Caden proceeded down the path with caution. The Forest seemed to grow louder and quieter in turns. Whenever he stopped and dared to close his eyes -- to leave himself vulnerable -- the Wizard almost thought he could make out a pattern in the rising, falling levels of noise. It was like listening to music that had been slowed down and jumbled up between dozens of instruments that were playing one note every few seconds.

The deeper he went into the Forest, the stranger it looked. Gone was the red-leafed semblance of normality, replaced by something that looked, felt, and quite possibly was alive. Mushrooms bloomed by the side of the road, great big fungal piles that were as big as bushes and spotted with different shades of red. The grass looked increasingly bloodstained and there were odd patches that looked as if bones should've been lying in them. Caden saw movement a few times, and bright yellow eyes shining out of the dark, but nothing approached him until he arrived at a crossroads.

That happened to have a town built around it.

One that wasn't there until Caden blinked at the sign reading, We Are Unforgotten, albeit in a very old, archaic form of Raiaeran that Caden had only ever heard a few times.

The town itself was basically empty. It consisted of just ten small structures; four of them houses, one an inn or tavern, one a smithy, one that was mostly collapsed with a bathhouse sign on the rubble pile, and another that looked like a town hall or a church or both. Everything was precisely carved, if hole-riddled stone. The wood parts had long since rotted away on most of the buildings. Caden looked everything over very carefully before he dared blink again.

It was all still there.

"Well. Shit," he said. "Didn't see that one coming."

"Nobody ever does," a breathy voice said behind him. Before Caden could even jump away and start blasting things, the voice's owner was twirling around in front of him.

First it was a male, then it was a female, then it was a male again. He bowed low towards the ground, hands flourishing to the sides, stark white hair tufting out of gigantic cones on the back and sides of his head. She straightened up immediately, and Caden was actually stunned by the figure of her: he had never seen a full elf with curves quite like that. He took a step forward and allure turned to intimidation; the male version was built like a gymnast and a marathon runner on steroids. Both genders wore the same bee-striped leggings, the same tight black pants, the same green and red Renaissance shirt and roughly the same liquid porcelain mask with cold black eyes.

Only the man's teeth were sharp.

"We seem to be getting so many visitors lately," he said, and took a curving step forward. "The Forest hasn't been so mortal since the Dreaming Death first fell," she added, cocking her hips and cupping her breasts with one forearm and her chin with the other hand. "I dare say this is beginning to get..." He leaned forward, showing his jagged teeth. This close, Caden could see bits of skin in them. "Interesting."

"D'you know that every single crazy I've dealt with lately has that exact same speech impediment?" Caden asked, then swiped out with a rotary Gambit. She jumped away, landed as a man, then handsprang back as a woman, man, woman again. Up to her feet with an about-face twirl, and then he balanced upon one leg while completely turned sideways.

"I think we might be off on the wrong foot," she said, lifting her raised leg until she was doing a standing split. With pants so tight under the glare of a sharply lit moon, Caden found the view more intriguing than the way the thing spoke. Memorable, in fact. "Allow me to introduce..." She spun down to the ground and he looked up with another grin, sitting indian with his hands clasped in prayer. "Myself."

Caden held the Gambit between them for as long as he could, then reading his fingers for the snap and waited. The creature seemed pleased by this, and she continued thus.

"I am Nimble-Kneed Bailequin Roulette, at your service. To whom am I speaking?" she asked, leaning forward and oozing femininity with every breath. The only thing that made it unattractive was the certainty that she'd be a he on the next movement.

"The Wizard Blueraven," Caden declared, snapping his fingers again. An instant later, Bailequin was dodging an icing ball of flame that left a glassy crater in the dirt behind him. She landed with another artistic spin and was suddenly holding a sword that cracked as a whip less than a second later.

"The pleasure's all mine," he said, again holding a sword. "To what do I owe the honor?"

"Nothing you need to know," Caden replied. "Go away."

"Mmmmmno."

"Go away," Caden ordered.

"Nope."

"Go away," the Wizard ordered, and the porcelain-faced freak just giggled at him like a strung out pixie.

"Nice try, but. No. Not yet, anyway, I've still a warning to gift you with."

"Certain death awaits me?" Caden asked.

"Am I really that predictable?" she asked in kind, and actually looked a little stung doing it. Caden almost felt bad. Almost. Not quite.

"Getting there. You're not even all that disturbing," Caden shrugged. "Nothing personal."

The dancer grimaced, straightened up and told him, "Stay off the roads then, if you want to avoid the Solitary Hunter. Stay on the roads, if you want to avoid the Wild Hunters. Always keep an eye over your shoulder for the Hunter of Men, and never-"

Caden actually landed the hit this time. The Nimble-Kneed Dancer shrieked and fell over with her face blown off. She kicked and he flailed and they screamed and screamed and screamed...until laughing in unison.

When Bailequin sat up this time, the porcelain had signed to black and the eyes were glowing orange. A ripple of color turned its whole body white, then black, then yellow and red. "The vagueries of this land will make a fool of you, Wizard Blueraven. A fool to Death," it said, with the lyrical voice of a woman and the hungry voice of a man. "For your unprovoked strike shall I hound you unmercifully. For your impatience and simplicity shall I weave the most intricate and subtle of unmakings. For your-"

"Shut the hell up," Caden said as he blew the thing's throat open. Its head snapped back and worms, wasps, beetles, and spiders all came spilling out as the body decayed to ichorous yellow slop on the ground. Only the black porcelain face remained, puddled separate from the rest.

"The Court of Summer is in session, Wizard. Protection is denied you this season, from the hunters, from the land. Make your peace while you still can," it said, then seeped into the dirt.

Caden blinked and the town was gone.

"Well," he said to noone in particular. "Sod on you too, ya cryptic freak."

[Caden Law]

Thirty minutes later, the Wizard almost regretted his quick trigger finger. He even thought about whether or not it would've been possible to trick Bailequin into following him, into being useful.

Because another body would've been pretty useful to hide behind once the wolves showed up. Granted they were chasing someone else, but they were still as big as horses with teeth the size of butcher knives and fur the color of dried blood. Assuming their fur hadn't been colored by dried blood, which was completely possible given the matted look of it. Their eyes were glowing too, the same color as the ones that had been watching him when he first set foot in the Red Forest. That alone made Caden's knees feel a bit wobbly. Then he saw the glowing blue drool and decided that remaining uninvolved was his best bet.

Reacting quickly and on instinct, Caden ducked off the road behind the nearest tree and snuffed out the Alchemist's Fire burning in his lantern. He heard an awful scream and the sound of crunching bones and a howl that sounded more like thunder than any mortal creature. The Wizard drew out his wand with one hand and inhaled, drawing in enough power to leave a thin coat of frost on the ground at his feet and the tree bark at his back. He waited. More bones cracked, and then there was a gruesome laughter that sounded like a Fallien hyena. Something creaked close by, and then something else creaked after it. Shrubs rustled just out of sight. Something took a hit with a loud whump. The sound repeated itself; whump whump whump. It stopped.

Barking and cursing followed.

Canid laughing and human screaming.

Bones crunching; it sounded wet this time.

The tree rattled a bit, and Caden heard branches break on the far side of it. He clenched his hands tight and cursed himself for not planning ahead far enough to put on his goggles at the start of the journey. The glasses were more comfortable, but they were a liability in a fight.

Blood sprayed out along the dirt road beside him, followed by an awful screech.

The next thing Caden knew, branches were sweeping shut around him and all he could think to say was, "Oh shit."

He lunged forward. The branches barely missed. The Wizard hit the ground rolling as a root snapped up out of the ground and came after his nearest foot. He kicked it away and waved his wand frantically, calling up the Earth itself and impaling the tree straight through its trunk at a dozen different angles. Bright green sap bled out in short order, and the tree itself shrieked and writhed about as leaves started to fall off in huge numbers. Caden put a dozen more spikes into the thing, pinning it hard in place and letting it bleed out the hard way. The tree petrified in seconds.

That was when he noticed a loud yelp that cut short mid-way through.

This was followed by another laugh, which also sounded like a hyena.

Caden stood up slowly, paranoid of the trees and the bushes, and made his way around the dead plant to behold a sight of unholy slaughter. The wolves were lying in butchered piles on the ground. Some had been burnt, most had been stabbed or chopped apart, and one's head had been caved in grotesquely between the eyes. All of them were still breathing. Even the one whose lungs were lying about ten feet away, clutched between some of the dead tree's branches. At the heart of it all sat a man who was drenched red from the waist down, with plenty of matching stains from the waist up. He was shorter than Caden by a good four or five inches, with thick black hair and an unkempt beard. He had a scholar's tan -- which is to say that he was about as pale as Caden himself -- and big brown eyes that were about as insane looking as the Forest itself. He wore a heavy beige monastic robe and a thick rope belt. He had a short axe in one hand and a long kris knife in the other. There was a black book hanging by a chain from his belt.

Frankly speaking, Caden had to call a spade a spade: "You look completely striking insane."

The man gibbered a little, his eyes rolling in opposite directions as he jerked around from one side to the other. His breathing was a shade past erratic. He was trembling, heaving, and veins stuck out prominently on both temples and his forehead. One by one though, his eyes settled on the Wizard. His maniacal expression gradually gave way to a genuinely ordinary smile. He exhaled shadow and straightened up from the ground, holstering his dagger as he went. The axe stayed out. Caden was not comfortable with the axe staying out. Especially not with the whiteknuckled grip the man had on it.

"So," he said to the man. "Lovely weather, isn't it."

"Do you hear the voices too?" the man asked. For having such a high-pitched, animalistic laugh, his voice was almost absurdly deep. Caden couldn't hit that pitch even when he was using his Voice. "You're a mage, aren't you?" the man asked. "Aren't you?"

"Wizard, actually," Caden said.

"I knew it. That," the man pointed with his axe and grinned. There were flecks of something black in his teeth. Caden inched back a step on general principle. "That is one sexy fucking Hat."

"Ah," he said. "Yes. Yes it is." He tapped the brim with his wand. "Hat makes the Wizard and all that. I'm Blueraven, by the way. You are...?"

The man cocked his head to the side and grinned vacantly. "Nobody for the duration. You see, I made some very unfortunate decisions in my life."

Caden stared at him. He waited a few seconds before asking, "Are you a Warlock?"

The grin grew a little wider as the man said, "Something like that, yes. Something. Like. That. Yes."

"Then what do I call you for the time being?" Caden asked.

"Bonekeeper," said the man, shuddering just a bit as he got the word out. "It's what my coworkers used to call me. Ignorant corpsemonglers they are. Were. Would still be."

He laughed again, still like a hyena as he shifted his hold on the axe and knelt down near one of the wolves. Without so much as batting an eye or changing his expression, focus, or tone of voice, he started skinning and boning the thing's nearest leg. He wasn't even watching what he was doing. "What brings you here?" Bonekeeper asked.

Caden tried not to feel squeemish at the grating schklick sound as he said, "Oh. Things. You know."

Schklick schklick schklick gush. Bonekeeper hit a major artery and the dead wolf's heart was actually still beating by the look of things.

"Could you, y'know, stop that. Please."

"I can't," Bonekeeper snickered. "I need reagents. This place's just murder, Blueraven. Gotta watch your back. And, near as I can tell? It might be a good idea for us to get off the roads."

"You're the second person to tell me that tonight," Caden said, looking around just in case. He almost wished that he hadn't.

There was another man standing far down the road. He wore black; black leather, black scalemail, black cloak, black everything. He rode a black horse, with big black hooves and eyes that were glowing red rings on black backgrounds. He had a broadsword in one hand, gleaming silver with black ashen runes etched and filled in the sides. There was an axe and a cavalry saber and smaller blades sheathed and holstered on saddle-mounts behind him. In his left hand, he held a jack-o'-lantern shrouded in green and orange fire, its teeth jagged and its eyes sharp and strangely expressive. All this was intimidating enough on its own.

What was more intimidating -- what elevated this horseman from Scary to Terrifying -- was what he didn't have.

A head.

"This is going to be a very long night, isn't it," Caden said.

"You think day's gonna be any better?" Bonekeeper asked, completely unphased as he dragged a freshly severed leg off the road. "Man are you in for it..."

[Savas Tigh]

Different name, same poster.

His name was actually Savas Tigh, and he was a lot savvier than Caden when it came to the Red Forest. Mostly because he had been trapped there since the moment his dark lord died, all the way back in the Spring of Retribution Dawning. He had made the mistakes of giving out his name when the Spring Court was in session, and he knew better now because he was still alive and nobody who can survive in the Red Forest for more than two months can be called anything less than competent.

Less than sane, yes. Less than extraordinary, probably. More than evil, absolutely.

Savas, however, had the terrible misfortune of being an unrecognized Death Lord. He had been an entry level cultist, held back by the lich who oversaw his sect, and then he had tried to become an Archivist and found himself held back again because the Spire at Narenhad went down before he could receive his confirmation. He again applied to become a Death Lord. He was held back again by his lich overseer.

Then he murdered the lich in question and applied again, in the twisted bureaucracy of Xem'zund's living and semi-living servants. This time he was accepted. He cut the deals, he swore allegiance, he carried out the lesser rites and then he began his pilgrimmage to the Old Spire for what his betters called Confirmation. He was actually going to be murdered on the spot and resurrected as a Dread Rider. He was going to have a big shiny lance and a gigantic tiger-jawed spider with acidic webbing and everything was going to be ichorously fabulous.

And ten minutes after getting into the Forest, all three of Savas' guides collapsed to bones and dust. He felt the psychic backlash of his lord's death, and he still hadn't quite recovered his sense of equilibrium for it. But he had survived. That was the important part.

Savas had survived. And although he had sold his Name as a part of the deal to become a Death Lord, that deal was null and void. So he kept on. And he explained all of this to the Wizard Blueraven as he slowly, deliberately chopped off the skin and muscle of the dead wolf's foreleg. "I figure if I reach the Spire, there'll be an Archivist's Tome handy and I can, y'know. Take my Name back somehow. Yep, yep."

Blueraven screamed. Then he Screamed. The Wizard wasn't a very good conversationalist.

"You got a big reason for being here?" he asked. The Wizard screamed something that sounded downright blue on the brain, and Savas looked up in time to see him smash the Horseman from his steed with a boulder at near point blank. Implaccable as ever, the Horseman backflipped off of the boulder in mid-air, stabbed the ground and swung back down to his feet. The jack-o'-lantern, hovering about a neck's length from his collar, actually grinned.

"Well," Savas mumbled as Blueraven frantically backpedaled and parried a sword thrust with his wand. "S'pose that's a good enough reason."

Power flooded off of the clash as Blueraven parried more sword strokes with his wand and staff. The lantern went flying off in segments at some point. Blueraven hit the Horseman with blasts, with boulders, quakes, balls of ice and fire; he even tried to impale him on rows of spikes, but none of it worked. What the Horseman didn't shatter, cleave, dispel or otherwise flawlessly counter, he just dodged so easily that it looked more like Blueraven was missing on purpose. With every exchange, he put a few more nicks into the Wizard's armor. Came a little bit closer to cutting the Wizard's skin. Put a little more fear into those sickly blue eyes. It was actually fascinating enough to watch that Savas stopped carving for a moment.

"GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME!" the Wizard finally Screamed, his Voice sounding heavier than it did before. He landed a crude kick to the Horseman's thigh and a ghostly boot manifested around it. The boot was easily as long as the Wizard was tall, and wide enough to match. It hurled the Horseman all the way back to where his steed stood waiting, but did little to hurt him.

"Hey," Savas called as the Wizard stomped his foot back down and made ready to cast another spell. Ice gathered around him in huge chunks, and feathers began to fall from nowhere all around him. "Hey!" Savas called again, waving his axe.

"WHAT?!" Blueraven snapped. Savas almost fell back at the weight and force of his Voice.

"Just get off the road, dumbass!"

"And how is that supposed to help?!"

"The Horseman sticks to the roads! Off road's got its own masters. He respects their boundaries by Law."

"That," Blueraven said in his normal, mortal voice. "Makes absolutely no sense whatsoever."

"It's that or draw a circle," Savas told him.

"That even less so!"

"Oh, fine. Ignore me. Not like I survived here for two months or anything!"

The Horseman came charging back in, this time mounted. The beast's teeth were on fire. Icy prints trailed each hoof. Blueraven looked half-ready to try and meet him head on again.

A Circle of Power imprinted itself in the road around the Wizard, shattering ice around him.

The Horseman veered off at the last second, squeezing between the Wizard and the grass as he went. His sword glanced against an invisible barrier to one side, runes sparking off the contact. His shoulder glanced one as well, turning the air blue as the Horseman went. Blueraven watched him with a paranoid expression. The horse bucked a bit, but its rider's expression simply soured. The Horseman didn't budge.

"Should'a gone off the road," Savas told him.

"He really can't get me," Blueraven mumbled.

"Should'a gone off the road, Pointyhat. Seriously."

"Why?" Blueraven asked.

"Because now you're gonna be there until he gets bored and goes somewhere else."

Blueraven's face actually twitched. All of it. His glasses hung lopsided. "How long can that take?" he asked.

Savas shrugged. "A while."

[Caden Law]

The funny blood-drenched axe-wielding serial killer-looking disgruntled beard with legs who I'm calling Bonekeeper says I'll be here for a while. "Here," for personal reference, is defined as a ten foot wide Circle of Power in the middle of a road. The reason for this is someone that Bonekeeper has identified as the Headless Horseman of Sanguine Nightroads.

Much too dramatic and respectable, that title. Have taken to calling him Pumpkin (in notes*). Pumpkin is approximately six feet of armor, leather, weapons, and the color black. Pumpkin has no natural head. Uses a flaming pumpkin -- Jack O' Lantern -- in place of one. It hovers ~1 inches above where his neck should be. Pumpkin is probably the most dangerous pure melee fighter I've seen since my run-in with zombie ninja hitmen in Salvar. I might actually rate him as the equal or better of Ghez Felhammer in terms of sheer implaccability. His strikes are backed by some sort of power, but I cannot identify it as anything more than sponsored arcana.

He is also standing outside of my circle. Patiently. Watching me. I suspect that if I were to try and leave the circle from either side, he would cut me down in an instant. Going out the back from him would end with my getting eaten by a horse. I do not want to be eaten by a horse. So I will sit. Bonekeeper says Pumpkin will eventually leave. So. Yeah.

* No way am I going to call him that to his hollow burning face.

Addendum: Will keep an hourly log.

Hour One: Pumpkin not moving. Bonekeeper keeps mutilating the corpses. He is a necromancer. Have not seen the magic yet, but it does not take a magic missile technician to figure that one out.

Hour Two: Lost staring contest with Bonekeeper.

Hour 2.5: Lost staring contest with Pumpkin. Should have known better. Has no eyes to blink. Cheater.

Hour Three: Bonekeeper just raised the wolves as one big bodily horror. Am working on alliance of convenience. Think I could take him, don't need to risk it. Yet.

Hour Four: Alliance of convenience secured via mutual swearing on power. Said alliance left open a gap for hands-on murder. Will sleep lightly.

Hour Five: Going mildly insane. Pumpkin has not moved in four hours. Bonekeeper is using a bloody pile of meat-zombie as a bed.

Hour Six: Itchy itchy itchy itchyfor itchyfor what what huh?

Hour Seven: TIC TAC TOE!

Hour Eight: The sun should be up any minute n

Ah. Found reason for Nightroad Horseman: As the sun rose, Pumpkin finally saddled up and rode off into the shadows deeper in the forest. Suspect he cannot be out during the day. Circle finally fading out with the passage of time, but should be sa
The entry ends here because Caden immediately found out that the roads weren't safe during the day. The page he was writing in is slightly torn where his pencil point ground against it as he was running over to the grass. The page is also slightly stained from the grass and dirt that Caden fell into as he was dodging an attack from roadside.

Said attack came courtesy of a great big obsidian sword, roughly twice as long as he was tall, and easily wide enough to effectively bridge a short river. Its wielder was a man who had literally been stuffed with straw, to the point that it was sticking out of his ears, nose, and from under his fingernails. His skin was bulging and deformed in places. And his eyes were clamped shut by huge irony staples. He dressed in a hat with a wide brim, and he wore clothing that looked like it belonged to a Salvic witchhunter.

The Straw Man rode atop a boar the size of a small house, one that had eight sturdy legs and a bristling hide that was covered in tough scars and callouses. Smoke poured from its nostrils with every breath, and the thing had at least six full-blown tusks to accompany devil's horns and a barb-ended tail.

Caden watched them go after that one attack. Watched and waited, then looked over to Bonekeeper. The necromancer deigned to open one eye and said simply, "Toldja so."


Strike me.

[Savas Tigh]

Once Blueraven had escaped from the roads and their lords, Savas finally deigned to wake up. He kept the corpse-horror intact as the Wizard got his act together. He was about to say something about their respective goals when Blueraven looked him dead in the eye and rasped, "You need a striking bath," in a tone that may as well have included the words you bloody peasant.

Which was, from a strictly literal perspective, totally true. Savas was low-born, had never been christened a Death Lord, and was still completely covered in (mostly dried, crunchy) blood. He scratched at his chin and shrugged, "'Kay. The rivers are actually a little bit safer than most of this place."

"Take me to one," Blueraven ordered. Savas grinned at him, showing off those big blocky teeth of his. A few seconds later, the Wizard sighed, "Please."

Savas took the lead in a quick jog. Blueraven trailed, a little to the left to avoid bumping shoulders with the corpse-horror. Which, incidentally, was starting to sizzle and steam as the magicks animating it began to wear down. They arrived at river just a few minutes later, about three and a half feet deep, clear-watered and slow moving. A few small fish swam about inside, accompanied by turtles and frogs. Savas unchained his tome and chucked it at the horror, which simply ate the thing in one snap of its largest set of jaws.

Then he dove in.

The water turned red in a matter of seconds.

"Well," Blueraven mumbled. "So much for getting something fresh to drink." His skin was almost empty by this point. It had been a long night.

Savas gargled something red and disgusting at him.

"Salvic, please," Blueraven said.

"...how'dja guess?" Savas asked.

"...I didn't, actually," Blueraven admitted. The Wizard sat down then, took out his grimoire again and put pencil to paper. "Now tell me everything you know about the Red Forest."

"For what?" Savas sneered suddenly, his entire demeanor shifting as he spoke. "So the big bad Wizard no longer has need of the obvious lawbreaking miscreant? The one who's got no chance in ten Hells of winning if we were to come to blows?"

Blueraven stared at him.

"I'm a necromancer in Raiaera, bird-boy. And I didn't last so long, in or out of this godsforsaken forest, by being a complete fool."

"Noted," the Wizard said. And then he guessed, "You were on the other side, I take it."

"And you weren't?" Savas laughed. "You stink of the Black Arts worse than I do!"

Blueraven wasn't laughing. It actually took Savas a minute or so to realize that, and to fully map out all of the implications that came with it. "Ah. So you're that Blueraven."

"Didn't know there were more of me," the Wizard said, with every appearance of honesty. Savas was actually baffled by that.

"Seriously?" he asked.

"Seriously."

"The Death Lords spent most of the war trying to curse you to death," Savas replied, conveniently omitting his own involvement in about a dozen such attempts. "The Dread Sovereign only put an end to it when Lord Hasseract found out that your Name was...spread out, so to speak."

A look of recognition flashed across the Wizard's face, followed almost immediately by a sickly, pained expression. It lasted a few seconds, then faded into something completely unreadable. At last he said, "Blueraven Brigade. My soldiers at Eluriand. I...I'd forgotten about that."

Savas tilted his head. "So that wasn't a deliberate move."

Blueraven shrugged. "I don't remember," he said. "It was a long war. There were a lot of things I did that I don't remember the reasons for. Few of which I'm particularly proud of."

"That's just lovely," Savas said as he climbed out of the river on the far side. "I have something new you can be particularly unproud of, the reasons of which you won't care to remember later. Want to know what it is?"

"I could just skewer you instead, Bonekeeper," Blueraven replied. "Our earlier bargain didn't rule out hands-on murder."

"Nor did it rule out zombies," Savas grinned, and the horror quivered with excitement. Blueraven hadn't even noticed it creep up behind him. "Or thrown axes, or plague-laced rivers waiting to be triggered."

Blueraven leered at him and said simply, "You didn't."

"Didn't I?" Savas asked. "Subtlety, Wizard. Subtlety."

"Your Voice hasn't even come in yet," Blueraven replied. "It'd be a joke if you tried to take me on."

"Exactly why I'd rather not," Savas said. "See, Blueraven...Caden Law, actually," he waved a hand as if to justify the fact that he'd already known. "You very obviously know a lot about my field of choice. Enough that you could be a capital-N-Necromancer. While I..." Savas grimaced. "Barely rate as a hedgemage. But, I know more about these woods than you do. And without some kind of guide, your chances of survival drop further by the minute."

"I held my own against the Horseman pretty well," Caden said. "I would've survived long enough to go off the road on my own sooner or later."

"No you wouldn't," Savas snapped. "You fight in a straight line. I watched. You give ground backwards, you push forward, but you hardly ever side-step."

Caden stared at him.

"And on top of that, you've come just far enough in your power to get arrogant with it. If you think the Straw Man and the Horseman are the most dangerous this place has to offer, you'll be dead by noon. If you want to survive, you need someone who isn't all-powerful to guide you, because you're just too bloody smug to have good survival instincts in this place."

"Do you have any idea how striking stupid that sounds?" Caden asked.

"I'm a weakling who's survived two months here," Savas replied. "You're a high-end Wizard who almost died at least twice before the sun finished coming up."

A few seconds ticked by.

"Point," Caden admitted. "What sort of deal are you proposing, Bonekeeper?"

[Caden Law]

Salvic Wizardry is an ill codified beast in the world of arcane academia. There are schools, colleges, universities; where the vast majority of talented peoples cut their teeth on the knowledge arcana. There are tight bonds between individual students and masters; apprenticeships that last anywhere from a few months to multiple lifetimes. There are wild talents honed through raw trial and error, recognized through great deeds and dogmatic ritual alike. Once in a while, there arrise basement prodigies, and self-taught scholars arcana who pull the foundations of their knowledge from dusty old books forgotten by time and circumstance.

For all that variety, Caden had never yet heard of a master-student relationship such as the one he was now bound to: a younger Wizard effectively being blackmailed into touching an older, less skilled mage. And he was bound to it. Blueraven gave his Word, and a Wizard is only as good as his Word. That was one of the few laws that was truly universal.

"Just to reiterate," he said, "This is temporary."

"You said that already," the newly identified Savas Tigh replied.

"I know. That's why I was reiterating."

"You already reiterated."

"It bears repeating," Caden sighed, then pointed to the nearest bush. "Evoke!"

"Now?" Savas asked.

"EVOKE!"

Savas whipped out the first of a dozen bone-wands from his belt, pointed them at the bush and screamed something incoherent at the top of his lungs. The bush withered black and caught fire over the course of several seconds. For about half of that time, Caden had a sword at Savas' throat.

"Not. Fast. Enough," the Wizard said. "Not intricate enough, not good enough."

"I only just started-"

Something about the click as the Wizard sheathed his sword was actually enough to end the conversation cold. "Not even evil enough, for that matter. You lack purpose, Bonekeeper."

"That isn't my Name," Savas snapped.

"It is until we get your real one back," Caden replied.

To which Savas changed the subject in a breath: "Then what's the deal about purpose in magic, eh?"

"Catch-all term for the driving force behind your magic. It can be willpower, it can be emotion, philosophy, simple know-how; but it needs to be there and you don't have it. You're trying too hard to strike a balance when that's the last thing you need right now."

"Fine then. Evil!" Savas flourished his wand and cast a spell at a nearby tree. It actually made the thing look healthier and greener than any of its red-leafed neighbors. Caden sighed.

"It's more complicated than that. Do you actually know why you're here right now?" the Wizard asked.

"To get my Name back," Savas answered on reflex.

"No. Deeper than that. Why are you here right now? What do you plan on doing after you get your Name?"

Savas thought about that for a minute, then admitted, "I don't know."

"That," Caden said, "Is your starting point. Mull over it. In the meantime, you owe me some explanations about this hellhole."

[Caden Law]

Savas launched into a tirade after that. Caden did his best to try and jot everything down, but the hedgemage was literally foaming at the mouth from talking so fast. What follows is a later revision, written after finding something reasonably kin to shelter.


According to my newfound apprentice, detailed later in this entry, the region of Lindequalmë is home to not one but four Courts of Seasons. Savas is sketchy on the details, but appears to have earned enmity with the Spring Court during his initial days here. With that particular court now 'out of session,' he has a symbolically clean slate to conduct relations with the new court: Summer.

Who I, apparently, have pissed off.

Yay, me.

...really!

As it turns out, the Bailequin Roulette is an Emissary of Seasons. Which is sort of like a diplomat. It is one of a token few wildcard entities not belonging to a particular court, instead shifting its allegiance to match whoever is currently in power. It also goes out of its way to lead outsiders astray, usually to kill them outright so that they don't upset Roulette's balance of power. Without the existing wildcards, who all hate each other, the various Courts are effectively deadlocked: none of them have a decisive advantage over the others.

All four Courts are based in a town hidden somewhere in Lindequalmë. Savas keeps calling it Hidden Leaf, but I've settled on Redwood for obvious reasons. It is apparently populated by some kind of near- or even proto-elves. Other than that, Savas has basically managed to confirm my suspicions about a few other things.

Both the Straw Man and the Horseman reminded me of fables. So did the wolves that Savas killed and rendered down into an abomination. From what he said, there are also wisps inhabiting the forest; awful manifestations of the wills of dead soldiers from the Corpse Wars, able to escape or resist Xem'zund's pull for one reason or another. There are bogarts in some of the shadows, strongest at noon and during the full moon respectively. There's a woman in a red hood I need to look out for, a beast that used to be a prince, and at least one creature that very roughly matches descriptions I've heard of satyrs.

None of which remotely compare to the Wild Hunt or the thing that Savas only reluctantly identified as the Shaper in Flesh. He actually sounded afraid when he spoke about that last one. I prodded him a bit and he went on to call it a bunch of dramatic names like the Facechanger, the Hunter of Men, the Husker, Red Wendigo and a host of other things. He refused to tell me anything about it beyond a trait that it shared with the Wild Hunt: Neither is confined to the roads. The Hunt can only cross them at certain points. Both have likely been aware of my arrival since I got here.

The Skinwalker is probably watching us right now.

Judging solely by Savas' reaction to my attempts to get information about it, I have no doubts that it's the worst of my troubles.

More to the point, I am being stalked by fables. Podë's legendary curse turned the Red Forest into some kind of physical manifestation of the fairy tales we've all heard as children, except using the grimmest, ugliest versions of them. Actual myths seem to have been sprinkled in over time; I'm not sure how. I have a sneaking suspicion that if any of the Thaynes are involved here, it's going to be Y'edda or Hromagh. The Seasons are roughly compatible with one of her titles and her themes. And I still remember Hromagh's hand-picked version of me from the Icehenge.

On second thought, I might want to look into avoiding the Hunt more.

Incidentally: The concept of barriers and boundaries has a lot of power in Lindequalmë. Not entirely sure why. It might have something to do with the nature of Podë's Curse and how it literally cut the Forest off from the surrounding area. It might owe something to the way that the Elves themselves try to keep it all contained. Either way, a standard Circle of Power is like a brick wall to the locals. It wouldn't surprise me if most of them could shoot through it, but I haven't run into any ranged opposition yet. Here's hoping it stays that way.

And now onto the matter of the loathsome bastard I must temporarily call my apprentice.

His name is Savas Tigh. He is approximately a year older than me -- ten months, but I'm rounding here. He is Scarabrian by birth and childhood, Salvic by adolescence onward. He attended a scholamance in the southern territories, showed himself to be a difficult student, and was apprenticed to a Wizard called Dead-Eye. Who is, conveniently enough, dead. The way Savas smiled when he said this to me is Disconcerting.

From my amoral, unlawed standpoint, I can see exactly why he would've been difficult for the dogmatic teachers at a Salvic school of magic. His talents remind me, however roughly, of Sigel Ventre: he is a natural ectomancer, and probably a natural necromancer. He probably just has black magic going for him by nature, which would explain how he became one of Xem'zund's minions. His talents and skills as a mage seem to lean almost exclusively towards thaumaturgy. He's tried to get around this by making bone-wands with specific spells engraved in them. But his bone-carving is...lacking. I might be able to bolster his evocation if I just keep pushing him far enough, but I have some doubts about that.

Savas has done horrible things by default. His association with Xem'zund is proof of that. But he has no sense of purpose. It's almost like he is being driven by an absence of it. Gee, I have no idea what that feels like. A better man might play off of this to try and reform him. At the least, shift him from Stupid Evil to Competent Neutral. I can think of ways to make his magic work without relying so heavily on gore and mayhem.

A better man might.

I am not a better man.

I'll settle for shanking him in his sleep once he's outlived his usefulness. Until then, I'm bound by a Wizard's Oath to train him to the best of his abilities...

Caden ended his log entry there. He stared at the page for a long time, then slapped the book shut. He looked around the cave that they'd taken shelter in; first at the mouth, where the sun was setting outside and some kind of giraffe-thing was being chased down and eaten by a pride of five pink lionesses and one red-mained male. None gave the slightest hint of noticing the cave, probably because of the lines drawn at the entrance. Then he looked to some of the insects, which glowed a pale mix of red and green as they skittered up and down the walls; all of them alone, all of them quick and nimble with no regard for gravity. Then he looked to the hedgemage.

And Savas was looking right back at him, his tome open and his pen slowly dripping into the mouth of his ink jar.

"Something the matter?" Savas asked.

"Not at all," Caden replied. "Just mapping out your skillset," which was the truth. More or less.

"Ah. Same here, actually," Savas said. Which was also the truth. More or less.

[Savas Tigh]

Give a man a reason and he will follow you into Hell.
Give him a good enough reason and he will conquer it in your name.

- Tön're Aullum-Seu

The problem with the legendary Dark Lord's viewpoint in this regard is that he focuses on motivation of other people. Never oneself. I have followed followed followed followed.

I would very much like to lead. I just don't know where.Put a philosophically delusional serial killer and a homicidally paranoid scholar into a room. Bind them with a tightly worded non-aggression pact, and then force them to share knowledge.

See how long and how deeply either of them sleeps.

Here's a hint: Not long at all.

Savas and Caden barely made it to four hours between them. By near-midnight, they had both given up on the idea of rest and set out from the cave in earnest. Caden had his staff and a newly ignited vial of alchemist's fire. Savas had a bone-wand in each hand. They walked almost shoulder to shoulder at a distance of about six feet, neither gaining the lead and neither falling behind. Sidelong glances and long silences dominated the night between them until, finally...

"Do you actually know where you're going?" Savas asked.

"Not a clue," Caden admitted. "I'm trying to find the ruins of the Obsidian Spire."

Something howled in the night. One voice at first, then five more joining in slowly. It took almost thirty seconds before the howling died down. Savas politely waited it out before asking, "Seriously?"

"D'you know where it is?" Caden asked.

"I have a better idea than you do."

"Lead the way then," Caden said. And Savas did, by all of four inches. "Why haven't you gone there before?"

"Every time I try, something or someone gets in the way," Savas answered. Which was basically true. Ish. "The closer you get to the Spire's ruins, the deadlier the forest becomes. The safest route is through the Hidden Leaf-"

"Redwood."

"Whatever. It's through there. But for obvious reasons..."

"Not an option," Caden sighed. "Don't s'pose we could try killing Roulette, could we?"

"Good luck with that," Savas answered. He stopped suddenly. Blueraven stopped with him. They exchanged a sidelong glance.

And then the Wizard drove one end of his staff into the ground, causing a huge hill to surge up behind them. Savas whipped around with wands crossed, then dragged them apart and screamed. Magic pooled quickly where the bones had met; all inky and black. The sound of his mortal voice was just barely enough to get that power moving in short order. He missed. The shot crashed into the top of a tree and ate a gaping hole into its canopy, while the target spun and whirled and flipped through the air with a grace as far beyond elves as elves could be beyond men.

The Nimble-Kneed Dancer touched down between and behind them, arms splayed wide apart and legs curled in a crouch that was more style than compensation for impact. Caden didn't even look as he ripped the energy out of the air where the Dancer had landed, leaving behind a great big block of ice in its place. Bailequin spun around behind him, too fast for eyes to track.

Savas tried anyway. He pointed a wand and triggered a spell.

Pitch black magic wheezed between the Wizard's shoulder and the brim of his Hat. Close as it came to Caden, it still only ended up tagging a tree and sundering the bark. "Strike!" the mage screamed.

"Quickly now!" the Roulette called in a man's voice. Savas and Caden both strained just to follow him, and she was actually spinning and dancing and throwing in pirouettes just because she could. "The fun has not even begun!"

"I hate cheap rhymes," Caden sneered. "Sandtrap."

An instant later, Bailequin's rapid movements started to kick up grass and dirt, and the Dancer actually slowed down enough to become visible as it lost traction. Savas tried to lead a shot and came within a shadow's breadth of hitting the mark this time. "Oh, that's just cheating," the thing called in its womanly voice.

"Cheat some more!" Savas called as he tried to line up another shot. "Cheat some bloody more!"

"Sirencaller's Collapsing Borders in Hexare's Namesake Pattern," Blueraven replied, and lines pounded into the ground all around them, shaped by will and Word into a rough hexagram. It was big.

And then it got smaller.

Bailequin laughed right through it, leaping the boundaries with an ease that neither of the Road Hunters could even dream of. The only telltale effect of its passage was a flashing blue wall that glittered around the Dancer in mid-air, and was gone just as quickly.

"Screw all of this," Caden finally snapped, then drew his hand high and snapped again -- fingers this time. He snapped them again. Then again. Then again, and every time the air grew a little built colder. When the Wizard snapped a seventh time, snow was starting to fall all around him.

On the eighth, a spark erupted between his fingers and transformed into a lunatic spiral of fire -- concentrated fire, so intensely bundled up and tightly controlled that it burned blue and arced at right angles as it swept over the heads of Wizard and mage, then dropped down and spread out in a widening pattern until finally hitting the ground and detonating in a spray of glassing sand and boiling steam. Bailequin dove right into the explosion and came tumbling out, trailing flame and smoke and laughter as he cartwheeled between them.

And then she crashed into the hole-riddled iceblock and completely shattered it. The effect on her was staggering. Stunning. Stopping.

Savas chinned the bitch with a bone-wand. It shattered on impact and black magic erupted between his fingertips, wrinkling the skin of his hand and turning veins an ugly green. But it blew her mask wide open to show an ugly, deformed silhouette underneath. Bailequin collapsed to his knees with a sick, drunken laugh. Caden smacked him down further with his staff, and then Savas kicked her in one arm and pinned him down on his face. Caden's staff sealed the deal with a straight thrust that would've broken any mortal man's neck.

"Got you," Savas sneered as he shook the feeling back into his hand and drew out that murderous axe of his.

"No," Bailequin rasped suddenly, like a woman after chainsmoking. "I've got you."

And with an eerie laugh, the Dancer melded into the ground.

One tenth of a second later, Savas looked up to Caden and followed the Wizard's line of sight to something else entirely.

A tall, muscular man standing atop a spotted red and black hyena. He wore red hides and leathers, and a red cape with a heavy fur mantle. His face was mostly hidden within the confines a leather and metal helm with massive oxen horns curving out of the sides like tusks, but his eyes burned cold and green. He drew a sword from his back, seven or eight feet long and a foot or two wide at the base. Its hilt alone probably counted as a short staff, but he held it with one hand and he held it high at that.

Runes lit up from one end of the blade to another. He opened his mouth as if to yell, but only a familiar howling sound came out.

A few seconds later, another howl followed. Then another. And more, until there were five of them in addition to the tusked hunter's own. Five more, and they were coming from all around where the Wizard and the mage stood.

"The Wild Hunt," Savas mumbled as he looked around.

"...this is Roulette's idea of subtle," Caden replied. "I'm going to beat him to death with a dictionary for this."

[Caden Law]

"WIZARD BLUERAVEN!" the Wild Hunt's apparent leader called, his Voice so loud and heavy that it actually hurt his target's ears. "Long have we sought after thee! From the Blightwood of Tembrethnil to the Faraway Realms of Frost and Snow that are your homeland! Long have we sought after thee, and long have we been denied our primal right to the Hunt!"

Caden tightened his grip on his staff, even as he reached for the arcanist's rod at his belt. He kept the alchemist's fire clenched tight and close, even as he shared his grip between it and the rod. "To what ends have you sought me?"

"The Dread Necromancer did place a bounty 'pon thy head, marking thee as a prey-thing. Thou hast been hounded, hunted e'er since; but always have the best, greatest of hunters been denied the right of the chase. The Beast Lord himself deigned thee off limits, though we tried mightily in spite of His sanction. Ye boasted the protection of that petty librarian for far too long, but thy role in the affairs of Althayne's World has reached a crux this night. Hromagh's sanction is unbidden, the patronage that guarded you is no more. The right is ours again."

"The bounty on my head is no longer!" the Sorcerer declared. "I am prey no more!"

"Prey does not decide when the hunt ends, Wizard. At best, the prey merely determines whether this be a chase or a battle. Thou may decide, as our final courtesy before thy blood is spilt!"

"We're really fucked aren't we?" Savas asked, his voice shaking just a little as he moved to put himself back to back with Caden.

"...y'know," Caden began. "I honestly can't tell. The Sorcerous Voice didn't phase him."

He hesitated. It wasn't as though the Hunt was completely unknown to him. One of the Caden Laws that he had fought -- and killed -- to acquire his Sorcery had vaguely mentioned them. He even Spoke with a Voice like their leader. But Banecrow had fear in his Voice, even then, and a dread that Caden was only now beginning to understand. The Wild Hunt, even at a glance, were obviously demigods or something close to it. Maybe they were individually at the low end, maybe they were bound by ritual and tradition of some sort, but together they were mighty beyond his reckoning. As fierce as Denebriel and Xem'zund had been, the Hunt could've probably run them both down if turned completely loose.

"Hunter!" he called in a desperate bid to buy time. "I invoke the right of Man to know my murderer!"

The leader laughed, as did his fellows. They all sounded like dogs barking. Whole packs of dogs.

"No such right exists!"

"It exists in the hearts of Man!" Blueraven argued. "Such a right is common courtesy in any duellist's land, and Raiaeran law demands it for any formal duel. So too does the Wizard's Coda of Beinost, and many of its predecessors in Salvar!"

The laughter ended so quickly it was like someone had turned off a song in mid-syllable. Switches flipped slower than that. People blinked slower than that. The head hunter grimaced, his teeth shining white in the pale Raiaeran moonlight.

"These are the Wildlands, Sorcerer. No law exists here."

"Liar!" Blueraven snapped. "My very name is Law!"

Silence followed. Listen closely enough and you might hear individual blades of grass shifting about in the evening breeze.

"I might add," Savas chimed in, "That where man goes, the concept of law follows. Where a Wizard goes, the concept of law simply is."

"...very well then," the leader Said with some obvious hesitation and discomfort. Such reasoning seemed a bit out of his league. "Thy cunning is rewarded, mages two. My name is Bhor Vider. I am leader of the Wild Hunt, as best any can."

"And I am Herne the Hunter," Spoke another of the pack, drawing Caden's eye in an instant. This one was more bestial than Bhor, with a mostly thin coat of orange fur that grew thickest at the shoulders, chest, neck and head. Great stag's antlers grew from his head, each tip capped with solid gleaming obsidian. He wore a short robe fashioned in red plaid, little more than a kilt with an unusually thick shoulder strap. He carried a shaped log covered in short obsidian blades, its tip decorated with one gigantic curved tooth. He mounted no steed, for he needed none. "I am the King of Beasts. Mine are the wolves nipping at your heels, mine are the crows plucking at your eyes, mine is the tongue lapping at your blood."

"Wodan, Son of Godhan, bearer the Spear Sleigoch and the lightning the chase," Said another, who rode atop a horse with tiny clouds churning up thunderstorms at its hoofs. He wore a wide-brimmed hat with human teeth dangling from its edges on sinuous string, and where one eye should have been there was only a chill blue light in its place. He sported a beard and wore leathers, but his arms were bare and showcased a tapestry of runes and sigils.

"Frechah Onetha, the Huntress In His Name," another one declared, showing off a compound bow that would've made a good siege weapon. Her arrows were more like notched, fluted spears. She was hard and beautiful in the way that women warriors wished and murdered, sacrificed and sold souls for. Every scar was more like a piece of jewelry than a flaw, and she showed them all by wearing little more than wode and a bit of plaid. She rode a tiger, white with red stripes and black teeth. "Mine are the arrows that pierce mens' hearts. Mine is the way that widows."

"These people are starting to sound scary," Caden mumbled.

"I've been fighting brown notes since they started speaking," Savas admitted. "Got a plan here?"

"...I was hoping you'd come up with one while I delayed," Caden said.

"...ah. Well. That's inconvenient."

"Yep."

"Guthor Rashanar, the Slayer of Fairies and Fools," the fifth member of the Hunt declared. He looked almost like an Elf; like the kind of larger than life heroic figure that Elves claimed descent from in their myths and legends. He was easily the tallest of the lot, with the most pointed ears, and the thickest beard, and the brightest, most calculating eyes. He alone wore metal armor in abundance, but it was all a badly mangled patchwork that had been slammed together from trophies taken over years. He had daggers the size of machetes sheathed in rows on his chest and hips, and a single great saber that was as big as Caden or Savas. He rode a draconic creature that lacked wings, and said nothing further of himself.

"I think I might have an idea," Savas said.

"Don't say it. Just do it," Caden advised.

"I'll need you to clear me a path out to about...a hundred feet from here."

The Wizard clenched his jaw. "Running away is not our best option here. Neither of us has a mount. All of them do, or else they don't need one. Like Herne there."

"It's not running away. I just need you to buy time. And you're a better target than me anyway, I'd just bog you down."

Caden couldn't argue with that. Mostly because he didn't have time. The final member of the Hunt introduced himself with a Voice that truly thundered.

"Azulavasco," he called himself, raising high a staff with a single massive tooth curving out of one end like the head of a scythe. He stood atop a nimbus of bloody red vapor. He wore a pitch black cloak with a hood, and a chestplate fashioned from bone, wood and hide. A short-sleeved blue robe marked him out in the middle of the Red Forest of Lindequalmë, while a massive sword rested easily at his side. Caden recognized the weapon. It was his once, in another time and place, and it had almost taken his life in this time at another place.

"I alone bear the Hunter's Arcanum," Azulavasco declared. "I alone know the method to the Angry God's Madness."

"Strike us both," Caden muttered.

"What say thee now, Sorcerer? Stand and make war 'pon the Wild Hunt, or take thy chances fleeing us as the doe flees the wolves?" Bhor demanded, and Caden suddenly felt the need to remind himself that the hyena-rider was probably the most dangerous of all of them. His own experiences with Banecrow meant that Azulavasco was, hopefully, the weakest. The rest were impossible to place at this point.

"Well?" Savas asked.

Caden hesitated.

And then he gulped hard, and wished that he had enough faith to pray. To who didn't particularly matter.

"Do it," he said, and then looked Bhor Vider square in the eye.

"I choose to fight!"

Some kind of divine help would've been nice right about now.

[Savas Tigh]

Imagine the sound of a pool draining in an echo chamber. Imagine lightning and thunder collapsing in on themselves, imploding into a mute singularity. Imagine the heaving breaths of a drowning man getting his first taste of fresh air after escaping a sinking ship. Imagine a tornado caving in on itself.

That was what it sounded like when the Sorcerer Blueraven went to war with the Wild Hunt of Lindequalmë.

The opening blows came so fast that Savas didn't even know what was happening until it was over. Even the Hunters were caught flatfooted and off guard when the Sorcerer struck.

First there was ice. A two inch thick layer that simply appeared on the ground for almost fifty feet in every direction, accompanied in short order by cold fog and snow. Trees petrified so quickly that the leaves didn't even fall off, instead turning solid gray as even the power of a Forgotten One's Curse was torn from them. Grass died faster still, turning milky white beneath the ice as the ground became a dozen layers of permafrost. There was only a narrow path through it all, and Savas took it on sheer reflex.

In the same instant that the hedgemage made his first step, Caden brought rod to bear on Guthor. He hit the Fairy Hunter with a concentrated blast of fire, not much thicker than a human forearm, but intense enough that it left rings of lightning and clouds of flame in its wake. The demielf went flying back with a gaping hole where his heart should've been, burnt to glass along the edges. His expression didn't even change until well after he hit the ground, and by then Caden had thrown out two more blasts in opposite directions using his staff. The first took Frechah in the stomach before she could draw even one arrow, and it blew a gaping trench into the head, neck and shoulders of her tiger as it went. The second struck Herne even as the Hunter tried to evade it, and he went down screeching like a wounded animal as the last of Caden's initial power surge hit him in one hip.

"And the battle is joined!" Bhor called out with a savage sounding sense of glee.

Savas didn't look back to see the hyena charging forward with jaws open. He didn't get to watch his adopted mentor bash the thing aside with a wave of his Sorcerously echoed staff, nor did he see Caden channel that same energy into a futile attack on Azulavasco. He heard thunder as Wodan joined the fighting, and he felt the ground shake as ice melted all around him only to crystallize right back to what it had been before. The explosion that followed hurt his ear drums, but he didn't let that stop him.

Savas hit the fifty foot line, burst into laughter, and kept running.


The Hero dies a thousand times, in a thousand fables, in a thousand lands.
The coward dies once, in one story, at the time and place of his choosing.
The immortal never dies, because the immortal never chooses.

- Deño Deacon, Warlock Violencia

[Caden Law]

It was fast, it was furious, and it was nothing but adrenaline that kept Caden's body from giving out less than ten seconds into the fighting. He brought three of the Hunters to heel in as many seconds, but they weren't going to stay down and he knew it. Demigods, from his experience, had a nasty habit of shrugging off minor inconveniences like gaping chest wounds.

And it was all he could do to stay on the offensive once Wodan and Azulavasco got involved. Their power was the Wizard's boon: he had sucked the energy straight out of everything in range and the only new power to throw out came from the leftovers of their misspent spellcasting. Wodan's lightning blasted holes six feet deep into the ground, and Azulavasco's spells sent ghost-serpents whipping through the air. In the midst of it all was Bhor and his hyena, its snapping jaws the stuff of a man's nightmares.

More than once, Bhor's sword almost took Caden wholesale. Even a glancing blow would've killed him, and the sheer speed of the demigod's attacks was enough to burn the air and leave an afterscent of scorched ozone. Caden dove beneath the hyena's body, hit the ground rolling between its hind legs and fired off a blind magic missile into its rectum as he came to his feet. The creature screeched and bucked and ran for it, Bhor laughing all the way. That left Wodan charging in on horseback, spear leading the way. Caden dodged the point of the weapon and shouldered the shaft of it aside, blasting Wodan at near point blank with his rod. The magic -- classic Wizardry, no Sorcerous power to it -- barely damaged the Hunter's clothes. Wodan passed him by and that left Azulavasco-

Caden ducked his scythe. It was a very near miss.

He jammed his staff into the Hunter's nimbus cloud though, tearing the magic right out of it and channeling it into a spoken Word: "Fall!"

Gravity met Sorcery met Arcane became Evocation: Azulavasco went from seemingly hovering on nothing one second, to crashing straight down through twenty feet of permafrost the next. Through sheer force of will, Caden triggered a Stone Maiden Mausoleum around him, then turned his attention to-

Wodan struck with another lightning bolt. Caden sidestepped it by a bare margin, inhaled the energy and sent it back as an Arcane Blast at the Hunter's normal eye. Hat-teeth blocked the spell, causing it to detonate prematurely, but the Hunter was still just stunned enough that Caden had the drop on him for a quick swish-and-flick follow-up: Magic Missiles, dozens of them in an evocational stream that finally bowled Wodan off his horse and sent him crashing to the ground.

Pure paranoia lead the Wizard into an abrupt sidestep, which saved his life as Bhor returned to the frey. The hyena's jaws missed, and so did the sword. Caden watched them pass, then echoed a downward swing of his staff.

An instant later, Bhor slammed straight down through the hyena's hunched shoulders, ribcage, chest and internal organs. He went groin-first the whole way, then plowed into the ground until Caden ran out of steam and fell to his knees. By that point, Bhor was up to his neck, with one hand stucking out and his sword slipping and sliding along the icy ground about ten feet way. The hyena had been ripped in half. Calling the sight grotesque would've been a compliment.

"Thy spirit is strong," Wodan shouted with a hoarse laugh. "Thy cunning be a grand thing, but ultimately..."

Caden looked up in time to see the spear aimed at him.

"Futile."

"Ftaghn," Caden muttered, then rolled out of the way and reached out with his magic. The hyena was dead. But it still had energy, and Caden was too desperate to worry about morals anymore: he tore the leftover life and soul straight out of the beast's corpse-chunks, then used it to will the ground up between himself and Wodan.

A blast of lightning shattered rock all over him. Caden inhaled the leftover power and succeeded in putting a Blast into the Hunter's eye socket this time. Wodan fell back, kicking and screaming. Caden started to get up-

A spear was suddenly pinning him to the ground. It had passed through his armor, his clothes, and scraped a few layers of skin from his right side in passing. It happened so fast that the Wizard didn't even know what hit him until he looked over to see Frechah sitting up with bow in hand, its string still twitching. A few seconds later, Azulavasco tore his way out of the ground with pure brute force. Bhor followed suit almost lazily, while Herne limped into view with blood gushing down one leg. Guthor was the slowest to stand, but he was still getting up.

And Caden was completely exhausted. He had to plant his staff into the ground and use Frechah's arrow just to stand back up, awkward as that was.

"Any second now," he wheezed. "Any godsdamn second now."

"Methinks thy ally-fool has shown his wisdom in abandoning thee," Bhor declared, to a chorus of ragged and amiable, Ayes. "It was a good game while it lasted, Blueraven, but the fight is over. You lose."

Bhor took up his sword.

And then he froze.

All of them froze.

A few seconds later, thin purple and pink threads seemed to materialize around every single one of them like a second skin, all leading off into the forest as thin black lines shaped themselves into the ground and the air. Caden was bleary-eyed by this point. But he knew spiderwebs when he saw them.

"Well," he said to himself. "At least...at least...

"...hellfire. I haven't got anything good for this one," the Wizard mumbled as he passed out.

[Savas Tigh]

Savas Tigh wasn't much to write home about when it came to evocation. He really couldn't think, act and react on his feet the way that Caden and some others did. He could hold his own with a weapon, or with a preset spell like the ones his wands were carved for, but he was never going to be a master of the seat-of-your-pants arcana that allowed Caden to juggle black holes and hit people with eldritch fists the size of buicks. But he had one thing he was really good at, even if he was limited in training and hands-on experience.

Savas Tigh was a truly natural thaumaturge. And while evocation escaped him for the time being, he was still formidable when it came to inventing rituals on the fly. Being grunt-level hired help for Death Lord curse rituals was at least good for that much.

Savas ran a wide circle around the field of battle, barely twenty feet past Caden's icy dead zone. The entire time, he was spouting off words in Sideways Diamonic -- a tongue-twister of a language that helped compensate for the fact that he didn't have a Voice of his own just yet. The actual words were hardly recognizable as language, but they only formed part of the ritual. As he ran, as he spoke, as he controlled his breathing, as he tracked the flow of battle; Savas counted off his steps and eyeballed the distances as best he could. Eight times in his run, he adjusted his course slightly and left behind a bone-wand. When he was done, he clasped the axe in both hands and finished the chant by aiming it squarely at the heart of the battlefield and focusing all his will, all his power, and every shred of energy he could tear from his wands and the surrounding area; all purposed around the idea that Savas was a spider, and these fools were all trapped in his web.

The spell triggered.

The web gradually manifested, its strongest lines anchored at the eight bone-wands while dozens -- hundreds more shot out from mid-air at the circle's boundaries. By the time the spell finished forming, it was violet and black like hell's own silk, and none of the combatants could budge an inch as Savas adjusted his Working to draw power from their attempts -- to sustain itself on their own struggle against it.

This, he knew, was only a stopgap measure. But it would hold long enough. Savas pictured his axe as the spider, gradually climbing over to where Caden slumped, and then dragging him out with the arrow, his staff, and everything else about him. Without actually being able to use his own body for the effort -- to physically lift Blueraven and carry him out by hand -- the Wizard seemed to weigh a ton.

By the time he finally got Caden out, the Wizard was coming round and he was dizzy. Savas was getting dizzy. The Hunters were starting to catch on, lessening their resistance experimentally. They found that some of the weaker lines simply disintegrated with the less effort they put into breaking them. It took a little while for them to make the jump from Point A to Point B, during which Savas rasped, "Get up. Get up, you lazy bastard."

"Clrghlymulch," Caden slurred at him as Savas yanked the spear-sized arrow from his clothes. "Cntmvtmch."

"I will punch you in the dick if you do not get up and start running," Savas threatened.

Caden managed to sit up, then stand on wobbly legs a few seconds later. He inhaled power from all around them, dropping the temperature in the process, and regaining a bit of color as he did it. "Not-still not used...to throwing out that much, that quick."

"Yes, well, I hope you're used to frantically running for your-" Caden was already ten or eleven feet away. "...right then."

Savas followed suit, barely gaining ground and only because his younger teacher was still lightheaded and having trouble navigating. The hedgemage overtook him after about a minute, and then they heard eight brittle bones popping not nearly far enough behind them.

"Think we got about as much mileage as we could out of your little trick," Caden said, his words now sounding only breathless and tired instead of drunk and exhausted.

"Mileage? We didn't even get to three hundred yards!" Savas snapped, and just barely managed to gain a lead on the Wizard.

"You know what I mean, beardy."

"All I know is that I don't wanna die and I probably could've gotten away and godsdammit I should've kept running..."

"Your next words. Choose them carefully."

"...lovely weather tonight," Savas wheezed. Caden overtook him this time.

The Hunters howled awfully behind them, like thunder rolling in over the woods. Savas looked back to see black-hipped Herne the Hunter limping after them, every single stride longer and healthier than the one before it. Behind him was the rest of the Hunt, some sharing mounts to make up for the damage the Sorcerer had done them. All of them, from Herne to Bhor, looked as if they were having more fun now than they had since before Savas and Caden were twinkles in their great-grandfathers' eyes.

"Fly! Fly like devils at your heels, for we are worse yet!" Bhor called out to them, striking down a tree in passing from Azulavascoe's nimbus. "Know that salvation, e'er hollow and untrue, lay just beyond your reach!"

"The hell's he on about now?" Savas sneered.

"That," Caden said. Savas looked ahead and almost screamed. "Hold on."

And then he did scream.

Caden whipped up his staff and rod, and the ground surged beneath them. It rolled forward like a speeding, cresting wave made out of a hill of red grass. Branches slapped at them in passing, and small animals lashed at Savas' face more than once, but none of this was what prompted him to start screaming.

What caused him to scream was the sight of a wrought iron gate hanging wide open, twenty feet tall and only half as wide. It was fenced on either side; wrought iron there too, but not very high at all. Torches burned with a bright, utterly unnatural red flame that completely void of any other color in the spectrum. They didn't even have variations in tint, and the light they cast was constant; not flickering shadows anywhere in their reach.

The Wizard's hill reached the gate-

And stopped cold, catapulting Savas and Caden right through it. They continued along for about twenty more feet, then slammed down and went skidding on a cobblestone road thickly covered in leaves and straw. Savas started to sit up before Caden had even caught his breath. He stopped just as quickly.

There was a spear at his neck. It glowed orange and yellow, like a dim piece of the sun itself. The thing holding it looked as much like an elf as an elf looked like a man: all the features that set elves apart from humans were somehow exaggerated, taken to a whole new -- or perhaps an unfathomably ancient -- level. His ears were pointed, and they were longer. His eyes glowed orange, except for pale white lights that rested where pupils would have been. His hair was long, red like Lindequalmian grass, and his skin was as pale as porcelain with green veins that stood out more like decorations than defects. He wore a long white robe accompanied by brightly painted wooden armor.

Even as he put a spear to Savas' neck, another such creature put a spear to Caden's. Neither one moved.

"We should've taken our chances with the Hunt," Savas concluded. "Didn't see the sign back there, did you?"

"The one on the gate?" Caden asked through grit teeth. "Wasn't paying enough attention to read it."

"Simply put," the first guard said, "You have trespassed upon the Eldarin Village Hidden in Leaves after making unprovoked war upon an emissary of the Summer Court."

Caden and Savas remained silent. From behind the guards, a familiar woman's voice giggled.

"No, Wizard," Bailequin Roulette said as he peeked over the appropriate guard's shoulder. "This is what I consider subtle."

[Caden Law]

Caden had been ensnared before. A large part of his adventuring experience boiled down to Do Something Stupid; Go To Jail, for a given value of jail. A lot of those jails were elven-made, and Caden had spent enough time in them to memorize pretty much every basic detail they had in common with each other.

He had no interest in counting off the differences and similarities between elven and eldarin cages. And he also still had a vial of alchemist's fire clutched like death in one of his hands.

"Can't we just-just talk this out? Just once?" Savas actually whimpered. "I've been good-"

"He made war on me with the Wizard," Bailequin chimed as a woman, then followed as a man, "He made his choice."

"You-y-you!" Savas stammered.

All of which made for a good distraction as Caden funneled power into the fire-vial, brightening its glow over the course of seconds. His guard, for all the otherworldly intimidation he offered, wasn't paying enough attention. Caden made him pay for it. First, he let go of the vial.

Then he used a modified version of the spell used to summon pieces of equipment from the Wizard's person to his hands; modified in this case so that it summoned the vial to the guard's face. Dead center between the eyes, specifically. If the guard had been paying attention, Caden would've lost his throat before the spell got to the half-way mark.

Glass shattered. Alchemist's fire burned, hot and bright and greener still with exposure to open air. The guard staggered back with a horrific scream, but Caden was already onto his next target. He tore the energy right out of the flame and froze it into a solid patch of ice that covered the eldarin's face from eye to mouth to eye. Then he snapped his fingers and channeled that energy into a rotary Arcane Blast centered on the top of the other guard's shoulderpad. It had the net effect of disorienting him too much to even notice that his had was briefly on fire, giving Savas the time to skitter out of the way of his flailing spear before he passed out on the spot.

The left Bailequin.

Laughing Bailequin, the Nimble-Kneed Dancer.

"First," Caden said to it, "I'm going to cripple you and shut down your magic. Then I'm going to find the biggest godsdamn dictionary on this planet and kill you with it. Are we crystal clear?"

"Shut up, Wizard," Savas finally ordered. "We need to get out of here now."

"What?" Caden snapped.

"We have to leave this place!"

"And take our chances with the Wild Hunt?"

"The alternative is capture, unwinnable trial, unbearable torture, and brutal execution," Bailequin chimed. "And not necessarily in that order, should you keep aggrevating circumstances."

"Exactly!" Savas shouted. "At least with them we can run away!"

"No you can't," Bailequin said. "You opted to wage war on them."

Savas gulped.

"Doesn't matter either way," Caden sighed. "I haven't killed Bailequin yet. So."

He was about to cast another spell right then and there. Probably an evocational version of Siege Arcana, just to be thorough.

Instead he stopped cold with sixteen spearheads ringing tight around his neck, their blades overlapping like scales and their wielders seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at all. He felt at least three of them braced against his body in a triangle, all back-to-him, with blades drawn and rather stylishly placed at major vulnerable spots. Caden had no doubt that they could pierce his armor on the first try. As if to add insult to injury, he could hear hundreds of bowstrings pulling taut all around the road, and just a precious few red dots lit up on his face, head, and even on his Hat.

It was then, and only then, that the Wizard saw enough reason to stand down and say, "We should've opted for the Wild Hunt."

"Yes," said Savas in roughly the same situation. "Yes we should have. Dick."

"Shut up, Bonekeeper. Just shut up."

[Caden Law]

There are about twenty illegibly shredded pages in Blueraven's Grimoire; knowledge lost for reasons best left unsaid. What follows is a shoddy, somewhat panicked rewrite of and addendum to those notes -- most of which were inspired by the ten to fifteen minutes Caden and Savas spent being "escorted" to their holding cells.


Have ascertained connection between Eldarin and Elves/Drow. Laid out thus: ???? -> Eldarin -> Wanderer-type Elves -> modern Alerian/Raiaeran split.

Eldarin appear to be the most recent common ancestor of both elves and drow. Having studied the features of the Leaf people (inasmuch as I can, given the circumstances), I can safely say that their features are reminiscent of both the Alerian and Raiaeran peoples, and somewhat similar to an Orc/Elf/Human hybrid I met some years back*. Eldarin society also has clear commonalities with both of the major elf nations' laws and customs, particularly in its aristocracy, pantheism, racial prejudices, and cultural emphases.

Long story made dreadfully short: Wanderers in Starlight wish they were as crazy as these assholes.

Eldarin society, near as I can tell, is centered on the city-village of Redwood**. It is broken along four major castes, with each caste further defined by similar Paths to the ones the Wanderers use: Bard, Faithful, Warrior, Forger, Ranger, Seer. The key difference here is that the Eldarin replace Faithful, Forger, and Ranger with Artisan, Shaman, and Peasant.

Just to pre?iterate a later point: These people have a way of life dedicated to being a peasant. And unlike the Wanderers, they have no encultured way of getting off one Path and onto another. You can only go further and further down whatever Path you choose, such that a Warrior can eventually become a Town Guard or a Shaman can become a Doctor.

The Paths are effectively cross-caste (even Peasant, I think), but some castes are obviously bound to have more of some Paths than others. Incidentally, Eldarin castes are arranged top-down.

The rulers are called the Sidhë (sid-HAY; it threw me too). They're effectively a matriarchal aristocracy. The only one that lesser castes can be promoted into -- men, anyway. Women hold the power among the Sidhë; few men are actually born into their ranks, and most men either marry into the Sidhë or earn a place through some as-yet-unknown means. Women who are not born Sidhë will never become Sidhë. They apparently allow outsiders among their ranks under the same rules.

The Sidhë are further divided into four Courts, each one coming into or going out of power with the passage of seasons. Each Court is ruled by a Queen, seconded by her Ladies or Maidens or whatever. Each Court acts as both a legislature and an actual court of law. The Queen is judge, her Ladies may be attornies or jurists depending on the trial. Men are always limited to jury duty unless representing themselves. More on this much, much later.

Immediately beneath the Sidhë are the Contributors (actually called something else, but the word doesn't translate easily to Salvic. Or any other modern language). They're basically the artists, scholars, high-end craftsmen and music-makers; the snobs who go around making art at people and expecting money for it, more or less. Except that Eldarin magi also generally fall into this caste. Most Sidhë men come from this class, judging by my guards' comments to each other.

Third down are the Knights (actually Warriors, but that's confusing). They're a bog standard warrior-class, with about the membership you'd expect of such a thing. There seem to be a few magi in their ranks, but not not much to write home about. They have a surprising number of Peasants too.***

At the bottom are the Commoners. Who are exactly what their name implies, and who dedicate themselves rather slavishly to fullfilling that role.

The village itself is more like a city inside. None of the buildings are very tall, except maybe the Courthouse and some of the Sidhë manses, but they're mostly packed in and the fields are somehow larger within their fences than without. Trees actually grow into houses here. Some of the architecture reminds me of the village where I met Bailequin.

WHICH brings me to my next point: These people are certifiably Lawful Insane. What follows are the laws I have had identified to me or that I can safely infer from my surroundings.

Everything You Say Will Be Used Against You, along with everything you do. And they're very, very literal here.
Never Attack Unless Attacked, which doesn't allow you to throw out pre-emptive strikes.
Do Not Attack An Emissary, which gets very messy in Bailequin's case.
Do Not Trespass, which applies specifically to Redwood and its interior properties; a broader version seems to symbolically apply everywhere else in Lindequalmë.
Obey Your Destiny because all people and things apparently have a specific destiny to fullfill. This concept is extremely pervasive, probably explaining why they have a Path dedicated to being a Peasant. It's also supposed to be a near-instant death penalty should you violate the next law...
Do Not Impede The Destiny Of Another under any circumstance. Which seems to negate almost everything if you squint a little.

The problems all come from Bailequin Roulette and the people/things like it. Emissaries are a special class of Lindequalmian entity that are sworn to the service of the Sidhë Throne -- not necessarily a specific Queen, just the office they occupy, for as long as they occupy it. They seem to owe their true allegiance to a much higher entity, roughly the same one the Queens probably bow down to. ****

Each Emissary has a specific role. Bailequin's role is to literally spook people out until they attack it. By lashing out at Bailequin, you violate the No Attack law, and you interfere in its destiny by ending its ability to affect yours and by slowing it from finding a new target. Eldarin law gets around the fact that Bailequin tries to alter everyone else's destiny because they, along with every other native-entity in this redhole, can ignore him completely.

I am currently weighing the options of whether or not I should try to commit genocide on these people or not. The problem is that, while they left me a pencil, my book, and my 'civilian' clothes and glasses, they took everything else. The same for my adhoc apprentice. Gods know they're not exactly contributing to the world around them or anything...

* Era of Kadin, also known as "The Sum Total of my Repressed Sexuality." Gods, I need to find her again...
** Redwood is what I will call this place forever. Hidden Leaf Village sounds, frankly speaking, like a little kiddy hide-out in a back yard game of pretend. Redwood also writes easier.
*** I may have actually mistranslated the word used to identify Peasants. It's probably some 'classier' word like Servant, but I'd rather not give them the dignity.
**** Y'edda, specifically. I still remember the Spring Knight at Icehenge. And I'm still dreading what I'll probably have to do to get out of this mess.The next page is almost entirely spur of the moment, born out of random thoughts at dawn.


Podë's Curse turned Lindequalmë red and eerie, but I think it might have done more than that.

I was going over events in my head and it occurred to me that when I tried to kill Bailequin the first time, it wasn't paranoia motivating me. I was genuinely so annoyed I lashed out at the thing. Likewise, I chose to fight the Wild Hunt instead of running from them, even though I was so terrified I couldn't stop my knees from shaking until casting the first spell. I've thought about the laws of this village, among other things, and I've even thought about my newly adopted 'apprentice.'

And it hit me: The Curse does something to affect behavior. I would have struck out at Bailequin, but I would have done so with a better chance of hurting it. I would have chosen to fight the Wild Hunt, but I would not have thrown out so much power so quickly that it left me unconscious; and I would've tried running away first, not second.

I'm not sure if it would've changed my decision to cut a deal with Savas. I hope so.

Either way I have to wonder if it's the cause of the Eldarin's legal system...

[Savas Tigh]

It bears mention that the Wizard briefly shared a cage with his apprentice. That's why there are so many wrecked pages in Blueraven's Grimoire: he clubbed Savas over the head with it after the older mage tried to write upside down in his book.

The Eldarin separated them accordingly. And since Caden wasn't talking and the guards were doing a mighty job of ignoring him, Savas took out his pen and his book, and he went to work killing time the ink fashioned way.


My name is Savas Tigh. My Name is ______. My nickname is Bonekeeper. I am not my own man. It does not matter. Today I will die.

To you, merry reader, assuming this black book isn't burnt to ashes by my executioners, I can only say this: There are four queens. Be wary of them all.

The Autumn Queen, Machwyn.
The Winter Queen, Nethüen.
The Spring Queen, Lurline.
The Summer Queen, Osirine.

Beware Spring and Summer above the other two. They are the seasons of deception, of life amok. I made the mistake of getting on Lurline's bad side when I first came here. Spared my head by an hour and some minutes. Don't think I'll get that lucky this time.
He stopped at that. Grimaced and looked over to the Wizard. "How the hells do you do this for hours on end?"

"Practice and persistence," Caden told him. "There's a tribe of scholars out in the desert who call it 'zoning out.' It's a form of meditation."

"Any attempt at spellcasting will see you both dead," one of the guards casually interrupted himself to say, then merged back into his own conversation without missing a single syllable.

Caden shrugged and went back to scribbling.

Savas fidgeted a bit and dipped his ink into the jar. He was now keenly aware of a mistake made by his captors. When they'd thrown the mage and his master into cages, first one and then two separate, they hadn't bothered taking their books or writing tools. Savas had assumed, and Caden probably had too, that it was because the cages were magic-proofed or the guards really had no reason to be concerned.

Now he realized that for all their perfection, the eldarin did have reason to be concerned. They'd just made a mistake and hadn't even caught it.

He looked over to Caden, then back to his book. He thought hard about what to do next, and then he started to write Sideways in a mix of Old Diamonic and Salvic; the one specifically to hide the other. He dared not channel power into his writing, and that was fine. He didn't need to.

The tome already had power in it to begin with.


By the Dark Lady sleeping in void,
By the Lone Scholar contemplating in mind,
By the Drowned God walking in darkness...

I call to you.

By the worm-eye that bled dry in all the dark places.
By the wound that never healed for all truths left unrevealed.

I call to you!

By my blighted art...
He stopped writing.

And he slowly, very methodically, put away the ink and the quill pen. Waited for the ink to dry before shutting the book. Closed his eyes, and did what Caden had recommended.

Savas Tigh meditated on the words he hadn't written.

[Caden Law]

The Courthouse of Redwood was more like a small sporting arena, at least from what little Caden and Savas were allowed to see. There was a short hall leading from their cells to the courtroom, which itself was open-air with just two stands for the accuser and accused. There were eight guards, in addition to the two that lead them into the room. At the northernmost wall was a balcony-like stand where the judge -- the Queen of Summer -- presided. It was more than twelve feet up from the ground, and separated from arena-like stands by just a few thin, mostly symbolic walls. There was another box not too far from her, clearly reserved for jurists, and heavily populated by women who made the most glamourous of elves look downright trollish.

They were so beautiful that it somehow struck Caden as repulsive. He couldn't bring himself to look at any of them. Savas seemed to be having the same problem, but the lesser mage dealt with it by staring blankly at the ground while his guards kept checking to make sure he wasn't incanting anything.

"The Summer Queen Osirine, presiding!" cried her left-hand Emissary, a burly looking fellow in an outfit that looked similar to Akashiman armor, albeit less artistic and a whole lot greener. Red details marked it in an archaic form of Raiaeran that Caden recognized, but could not read well enough to discern meaning from. He carried a spear that looked like a falchion on a red oak stick.

Beside him, Osirine manifested. It was a flashy display; swirling red, green, and gold leaves that all caught fire, and then the fire took the shape of a woman, and then it simply puffed out and she was sitting there. The sheer presence of her was breathtaking, enough that most of those still standing had no choice but to kneel. Savas was one of them. Caden was not. She wore a red dress, sewn almost entirely from leaves and gold, accented with fabulous gems in all the right places. Her actual features were genuinely undescribable. She was more like the idea of a superior being, of a beautiful woman, of a near-god, than the actual manifestation of one.

She gave a slight nod of her head, and Caden's guards ushered him up to the defendant's stand.

"Wizard Blueraven!" she called in a Voice that was scarcely mortal. It hardly even qualified as sound. "You stand accused of the most grievous crimes; of unprovoked attack upon an Emissary of my Court, and of the obstruction of destiny! How do you plead?"

Caden looked around. He thought his words through very, very carefully. He ran a dozen possibilities through his head-

"Sustained silence will qualify as an admission of guilt, Wizard."

Every single option ended with him dying. Some more painfully than others. He closed his eyes. Took a deep, ordinary breath.

And he plead, "Sane."

A hushed murmur raced through the jury box. The Queen did not look amused.

"Sane is not a plea. You must decide guilt, innocent, no contest, or-"

"Sane," Blueraven said again.

The temperature actually rose in the courthouse. A thin aura of candle-like heat built up around the Queen's throne as she leaned forward. "Do not interrupt," she ordered, her Voice heavy like a lead weight on Caden's eardrums.

"I plead sane to the charges brought by an insane Court," Blueraven declared without one hint of apology. He bolstered his Voice through Sorcerous will, and that alone was enough to earn drawn swords at his neck. "The charges set against me cannot stand!"

"On what grounds?" the Summer Knight demanded, presumably because his Queen was too busy seething.

"The primary charge against me is of unprovoked war on an Emissary of the Summer Court. My target was a being whose sole purpose is to provoke conflict. The secondary charge, obstruction of destiny, rings false on three fronts: By attacking him, I helped further and fullfill his destiny in provoking me. By not attacking him, I would have been obstructing his destiny, and would have forced him to delay provocations of another target. Lastly, if I am guilty on the second count, so is every single person in this village who has ever ignored the efforts of Bailequin Roulette!"

Murmurs turned to an uproar. Caden knew right then and there that if it came to an actual trial, they'd kill him out of sheer spite. The Summer Knight and Queen were both about to issue a response when there came a blast of smoke from the plaintiff's stand. When it cleared, there stood the Nimble-Kneed Dancer in all its blackened androgynous glory.

"I object to the Wizard's claims!" it shouted. "He is not of us! His individual guilt need not reflect upon all our kind!"

Caden actually grinned. He turned his head sharply to the Dancer and Said, "If the law does not fully apply to me, then it does not fully apply to you."

"And what reason do you cite for that?" the Queen demanded.

"I'm a Sorcerer, awarded my power by the Elder Thaynes of this world -- including your mistress, the Queen of Seasons herself." Caden shot a glance over to Osirine, and saw her recoil just a bit at the mention of her superior. He'd guessed right. He looked back to Bailequin and added, "Furthermore, you are not an Elf, an Eldarin, or even a true Sidhë! Thus, if the law does not affect me in full, you are not entitled to it either. Your provocations merely served to obstruct my destiny."

The swords were so close to his neck that he could feel individual hairs splitting on top of his skin. It was all he could do not to scream in terror and try to run. Bailequin gaped at him, its masked features stretching to accomodate a jaw unhinged.

"I therefore assert that the Court is insane. The charges are meaningless. This is one colossal waste of time."

"Insult!" Bailequin shouted. "Blasphemous heathen! Degenerating our laws, our codes, our way of l-"

"Incidentally," Caden interrupted. "I invoke the right to duel my accuser for the attempt he has made to stain my Name."

"No such right exists!" Bailequin replied.

"SILENCE!" the Summer Knight demanded, and got his way in an instant. The force of his voice actually dragged the blades from Caden's throat, even if he got nicked in the process.

"The Queen must be given time to make her dec-"

"No. The choice is clear," Osirine Said. "Laws have been breached and tangled on all sides. It would be a expedient, proper solution to simply kill Blueraven where he stands. The wretch with him as well. But for the fact that he is a Sorcerer, and therefore enjoys at least some recognition in the eyes of my own Queen."

Caden tensed. He looked over to Bailequin once more in time to see the thing finally slip into a gender; male this time. Its hands were crushing splinters out of the plaintiff's stand.

"Let them duel to the death then."

The guards were gone in less time than it took Caden to blink. All that remained were Savas, Roulette, the stands, and a familiar pile of gear and tools on the far side of the courtroom. Murmurs turned to cheers in an instant.

Caden snapped his fingers twice in rapid succession, and the plaintiff's stand erupted in flames and steam and splinters.

Less than a second after that, clawed fingertips blotted out the rest of the world.

[Caden Law]

Glass shattered.

There was a visible trail of blood.

Caden ducked down like a limbo player. Bailequin's attack pierced the lenses of his glasses and raked claws across his forehead, deep enough to scrape off the bone. The Dancer kept going and the Wizard screamed in a rage as he twisted around and brought magic to bear: an enormous ball of blue and orange fire that wound of splashing harmlessly off the far wall of the arena. Bailequin dodged it before Caden had even gotten the thing off.

The Wizard clawed out at thin air with one hand and froze his own wounds shut with the other. He couldn't afford to be blinded by blood leaking down in his eyes. Less than a second later, the staff slammed hard and heavy into his grasp. He twisted around to try and keep track of Bailequin's movements-

His back split open. Blood gushed out in a semi-circular arc, trailing the Dancer's movements. Caden had barely registered the pain of the first hit when Bailequin spun back to back with him and swept his legs out. A fraction of a second later, there was an arm crashing across his sternum like a bullwhip made out of solid iron. Caden dropped again, sucking for air and trying to roll away as Bailequin continued to dance around him. Worryingly, she was also starting to incant something.

She pirouetted around him in rapid circles and Caden slammed his hand down without thinking. Rock spikes shot up out of the ground, and fast as Bailequin was, he didn't expect that one. The dancer jumped back with a bird-like screech of pain, flipping impossibly several times before landing on one foot -- on the toes of one foot.

"Third blood to the Wizard," spoke the Nimble-Kneed Dancer, bending sideways as it spoke. Caden responded by coughing up red onto the back of his teeth. "But the fourth is mine, just like the first and second."

"Funny that," Caden rasped. "Just means you'll nip away at me and I'll one-shot you at some point. That's how this always works."

Bailequin tilted his head just a little further, until she was practically arching sideways at angles no human could mimic. "Not this time."

"Keep talking," Caden wheezed. His collar hurt, but it wasn't broken. Yet.

Bailequin resumed incanting in response. And then he was gone. Literally gone. A little whirl of dust kicked up in her wake, and it was all Caden could do to stay focused as he twisted the hand he had on the ground.

The arena had a dirt floor. The Sidhë were old school like that. He was willing to bet that the rationale involved keeping close to nature, but nothing grew here. Raiaera was a magic-brimmed country, and the land grew in sympathy with its people. There had probably been too many executions and harsh judgements for anything to even want to grow here. Caden was hellbent on adding another, preferably not himself.

So when he twisted his hand on the ground, he also twisted the entire floor of the courtroom. It was like spinning a record around while someone tried to dance on it. In Bailequin's case, that meant a dance at very, very high speeds, reliant on the idea of stable ground and good traction.

"Bitch," Caden said without even looking up to see where she'd crashed. He gave a quick glance over to Savas, and the hedgemage looked near catatonic for some reason but he was still standing. In point of fact: Savas hadn't actually moved one inch even though the floor had changed around beneath his feet.

That was worrying.

But so was the sound of splintering wood being thrown around as Bailequin Roulette pried itself loose from where he had crashed down. Caden looked over to the Dancer and it was covered in a hedgehog's array of splinters and tiny open wounds. It bled silver and black. Its Renaissance shirt was completely shredded, showcasing a tightly built torso as a man and a luxurious figure as a woman; both of them wrecked like the rest of it. Its mask was slightly cracked. And when it spoke this time, it did so with both voices in discordant harmony.

"Nice try," they said, then clasped fingers and spoke again.

"Red Requiem in Cresting Summer: The Cardinal Ruby's Sundering in Harmonious Livid Mourning."

Bailequin surged forth like a primal force of nature. She was lightning, he was fire; veiled in a crimson aura of electricity and seething flame. Gems popped into existence and shattered in rings around his path, and her reflection was cast differently in every single one of them. One hand reached out, and blade-like claws shout from between his fingers. Power gathered there; eldritch might that could've blasted the flesh from a man's bones well before the first cut was ever actually made.

They had started with almost twenty feet of distance between them. Bailequin covered that in less time than it takes a human being to blink. It was an outright physical impossibility for Caden to react to her, so he didn't.

He acted in advance of her instead, triggering a Gravity Gambit from the back of his left thumb without ever actually moving his hand in any grand gestures to give it away. The spell started small, but expanded fast. That was the only reason Bailequin didn't see the distortions of gravity and antigravity until it was too late.

Bailequin slammed into the Gambit and the results were ugly.

Her blades broke, and her fingers broke and twisted. Her hand snapped in two directions at once and her wrist bent backwards and her forearm broke in two or three places and this was all just a preview of what happened to the rest of him. Bailequin's gathered power discharged in every direction at once, violently weakened by the spread and the sudden loss of control from its owner. Caden lost a sleeve and a few layers of skin on his already scarred left arm, while the impact threw him to the ground.

Bailequin passed through the Gambit almost a full second later, cannonballing into the very same spot of wall he'd crashed into earlier. The result this time didn't just shatter the wall clear to whatever room was behind it; it also collapsed that section of the stands and sent eldarin and Sidhë stammering out of the way while their safer, more distant cohorts cackled and cheered like maniacs. The Queen herself was unmoved. Even if her Knight whistled a bit, clearly impressed.

Caden sat up on his elbows a few seconds later. The cuts on his forehead had thawed out again, and they were bleeding like crazy, but his head was tilted enough to keep it from leaking straight into his eyes. His back hurt and his arm was starting to ooze blood as well.

But he was still grinning, in the psychopathic way that only a Wizard can.

"Told you so," he said.

[Savas Tigh]

There was a general uproar as the Wizard scraped himself up, bloody arm and all. The dust was finally settling when Caden spat out a little red wad and cracked his neck and back to either side. With an almost uncharacteristic bravado, possibly another influence of this cursed forest, Caden stuck out his bloody hand at the Queen and gestured for her to bring on the next challenger.

It actually took him a few seconds to realize just how bad an idea that would probably be. And it still took him a few more before he stopped gesturing and picked up his staff. Caden actually leaned on it a little as he shouted, "It's done! The Dancer is dead!"

The Queen slowly leaned forward, her hands clutching together as she rested her chin on her thumbs. "No. Bailequin Roulette still draws breath. The battle continues."

Caden blinked once, twice, and then threw an ice-clad ball of fire into the hole where Bailequin had disappeared into. A pair of clawed hands thrust straight into the spell, stabbing it as if they were a jagged knife, then tearing it in half in an instant. Naked flame spilled onto the hands' owner like the egg yolk, but the Nimble-Kneed Dancer emerged from the carnage almost unscathed. He was smouldering all over, with fiery red tears in his flesh and clothes, rather than the properly bleeding wounds of a mortal thing. The Wizard actually smiled, but the only thing reflected in his eyes was bitter frustration.

"You'll stay down on the next go even if I have to tear the life out of you with my bare hands," Blueraven declared, without so much as a hint of threat in his voice. Threats are mere possibilities after all. The way the Wizard spoke, it was nothing short of a fact; no different from saying the mid-day sky was blue.

"Like you'll get the chance," Bailequin replied in both voices. She opened her mouth this time and there was almost nothing but teeth there -- even her tongue was covered in jagged white teeth. He spoke again, no longer reliant on mouth movements to do so. "I'm going to devour your flesh, Wizard."

"No," Blueraven said. "You're-"

It was in that moment that Savas Tigh's feet finally hit the ground, so hard and heavy the whole pit shook. In the span of a breath, the rancid looking necromancer stood bathed in an awful green light. It swirled all around him, it twisted inside of him, and it shone with a black and violet core that pulsed through his every vein. Savas held his tome high above his head, the letters on its covers and binding reflecting like yellow and red spotlights on everything around him.

"I CALL TO YOU!" Spoke the Necromancer as his Voice manifested for the first time. It was almost inhumanly deep, utterly bombastic and rougher than sandpaper. There was an electric quality to it, and with every syllable that passed Savas' lips, the aura surrounding him collapsed and the light grew brighter and more putrid in his mouth. By the time he finished the incantation, it was like his teeth, tongue and inner mouth had all been crafted from tiny dead stars that glowed right through his cheeks and the inside of his skull.

"PLAGUEHEART!"

[Savas Tigh]

The uproar turned to panic. The Queen's response was instant and furious, but her Knight moved faster still. Wreathed in Summer's fire, he leapt from the judge's personal stand and made a beeline straight for where the hedge-necromancer stood. It was already too late.

Savas threw down his tome and, with it, a metaphorical gauntlet as big and as heavy as a falling mountain. The ground simply froze green and black in a swirling pentagram around where the book landed, rapidly enclosed within a purple circle of what looked like blood or ichor. As the Summer Knight's feet hit the dirt, the book's cover cracked and the tome flew open so violently as to lift up by six inches.

Lightning struck and the Knight passed between Wizard and Dancer, heedless of both. His spear's blade lit up with the verdant hues of life unleashed.

Black lightning rippled out of the book and its pages exploded. An enormous clawed hand lunged up into the material world and slammed back down. The Knight tried to swerve around at the last second and made with an attack-

His spear's shaft snapped like a twig. The rest of him did not fair much better.

A second hand erupted from the book. It caught the Summer Knight and broke his arm and spear in the space of an eye blink, then collapsed one of his neck vertebrae and warped his armor as it hoisted him high into the air. There was just enough time to see blood gushing from his mouth and nose before the hand slammed him into the ground and literally splattered his insides all over the place. With both hands now anchored, the demon pulled itself up enough to force its head out into the open.

It was an ugly, horrible thing. Its skin was dry and taught and leathery. Its arms were triple-jointed, with an extra elbow for each. Its head looked like a colossal devil-horned fly with compound red eyes and a mandibled jaw, and it was able to push itself out to the waistline before stopping and craning its neck to view its summoner.

To what purpose have you summoned me, No-name? it Spoke directly into his brain, and everyone else's at the same time. The Queen lashed its chest and back with tendrils of flame that looked like either treebranches or the cat of nine tails. It ignored her.

"To kill! And to keep on killing! Let none of the people in this town survive!" the necromancer said as Caden flailed into his Wizard Clothes and Bailequin tried to make a hasty get-away.

The demon caught her with one hand as his ankle. He dragged the Dancer back, kicking and screaming and shifting between forms for every single second they touched. Your book is an inadequate payment for my services, No-name.

"I offer you the souls of any that you kill, Ignoble Daemon of the Pestillent Horde! Make sport of this misbegotten village and slaughter them all!" Savas jeered, his Voice wavering ever so slightly as his power neared its limits. Summoning a demon was one thing. Calling up a lower-down by name and giving it commands were another entirely. The best he could do was to bargain with it on terms that might appeal to its savage sense of sport.

Plagueheart considered this for a moment as the Summer Queen impotently blasted its back with flaming torrents of leaves and lightning bolts shaped as trees' branches. Of all the things that Savas could have summoned up -- all the ones whose names were written in the very tome he sacrificed to make it happen -- Plagueheart was the absolute worst nightmare for an entity whose power was based on life and law.

Because pestillence is life, and it doesn't care about petty things like law.

Thy offer is accepted thus.

A fraction of a second and the dead knight's body withered and rotted from the inside out, every single fragment and puddle of blood suddenly and inexplicably infested by maggots the size of dragonflies. Fel wings buzzed from a direction that could not be named or pointed to, and the demon's skin bubbled as it pushed the rest of its body out from the pathetic confines of Savas' old spellbook. Left foot first, and then right, and its legs were bent in six places each and ended in two-toed feet with claws as big as tree stumps. The old book simply collapsed to dust and termite-addled ruin as Plagueheart stood to its full height and shrieked the call of its own awful hunt.

Savas stared at it and laughed in disbelief at his own success.

Then Caden bodychecked him, grabbed him and ran for the nearest exit. The Wizard was sputtering curses under and over and next to his breath the entire way out of the courthouse. Insects the size of dogs and cats were bursting out of every wall, and the miasma of death wreaked far beyond the arena. Osirine's branches grew and sprouted in front of and behind them, but these things were only side-effects of her drawing on the total depths of her power; of Osirine's desperate fight for her life.

The last thing they heard from within those walls was the sound of the Summer Queen screaming her last, while the Sidhë attendants fled or fought in turn.

They didn't have to look back to know that it was a futile battle.

[Savas Tigh]

The following entry is written in a scroll taken from the ruins of Redwood several hours after the demon Plagueheart finished his rampage. It's written in fresh ink. Make of that what you will.


We escaped the Hidden Leaf Village with our lives.

To my knowledge, noone else had such luck. It wouldn't surprise me either way. There were only so many ways out and the Sidhë, for all their power and bluster, were almost as limited by boundaries as many of the other things in Lindequalmë. The Wizard, Caden, and I basically fled to the front gate before collapsing in exhaustion. He threw up a crude barrier of rock no more than six inches tall, and then I notched a ward into it with his knife. Nothing fancy. Just a "Keep Out" in the oldest tongue.

We lay there. We sat there. And we bore witness to the probable end of the ancestors to the modern elven peoples. It was bloody. It was horrible. Below all, it was...somewhat satisfying.

I will have nightmares for years, and the Wizard will be lucky if he sleeps at all tonight or the next. We watched men, women, and even one or two 'children' come screaming at the exit, but our barrier was too close. They couldn't squeeze through. They merely clawed at the air, and Caden was too exhausted and afraid, and I was too tired and examinant. They pressed hard on the air and begged for help, but we did nothing, and they would have done nothing for us, and they died cursing our names.

Blueraven's name, at any rate. I don't have mine back yet.

The best part, if you could call it that, was when we finally saw Bailequin die. It came to visit us with scorpions burrowing in its flesh, and said again the words, "This is what I consider subtlety."

We don't know what it was talking about, but that's beside the point.

Plagueheart took his time once Osirine fell. He ravaged the town with locusts, spiders, ants, flies, wasps, and bugs I know not the names of. Drunk with the Summer Queen's power, I think he might have actually descended to the next level of Ignobility by the time he left. There were a few minor demon insects and some foul patches of moss, miasma, and disease when we finally went back. Plagueheart was nowhere to be found. In all honesty, he probably owes me one for all the power and sacrifices he gained from this.

I think we might have stumbled on a few of the dead Court nobles, but the bodies were too ruined to say. Caden got his gear back, I took back my wands, and we spent the next hours looking for survivors and useful trinkets or tools. Hells know if there's still anything left now that we're done.

I took a few bones for my own personal use. Some teeth as well. The Wizard actually wept too hard to object. I took most of the coins too. He didn't want them. I don't know if they'll be of value or not, but it is worth a shot. Some reagents need to be bought the old fashioned way, and I'm starting to get my head together enough to...plan ahead. So to speak.

I took my axe back too. And some swords from the dead guards. Most are notched, battle-worn relics now, but I'll see what I can do to make use of them. I also took a lot of ink, this scroll and some others like it.

The downside to all of this is that I have lost my tome and almost all the knowledge and memory written within it. Including all the summoning and curse rituals I had recorded over the years. I still remember many names, but...

"Names alone are not enough," Savas muttered to himself in a rare moment of honest reflection. He left that part unrecorded, scheming instead over how he was going to get a replacement book of some sort. Caden sat nearby, his head in his hands until well into the night.

[Caden Law]

"This is not going to work as planned," Savas said later that night. "This is seriously not going to work as planned."

"Quitcherbitchin'," Caden replied, clapping his hands and slamming them into the ground. Dirt shifted about in intricate patterns, none of them visible or even detectable by touch. It was a very shallow spell -- a bona fide definition of one, at that. That was all he needed for the moment.

"We need to get moving," Savas said, jittery now that the adrenaline high from before had worn off and victorious introspection had given way to trusty paranoia. "The Wild Hunt is still out there. We're still marked."

"Quit. Cher. Bitch. In," Caden replied, audibly omitting the apostrophe as he spoke. It was one of those little Wizard talents, like being able to speak with actual punctuation and accent marks on letters. He could even drop the quotation marks from his words if he was panicked enough. "We're not getting anywhere the way we've been going. You might know the local big bads, but you were puffing hot air when you said you knew the way to the Spire."

"I do," Savas snapped. "It just keeps changing is all."

"Sure it does."

"Seriously. It does. In case you haven't noticed, this forest is alive."

Caden stopped what he was doing, looked at the nearest tree and said, "Cooperate or I'll go Tembrethnil on your ass."

The tree actually shook a little. Maybe it was the wind.

"Incidentally, we still haven't encountered the biggest of those big bads just yet and I really, really don't want to and the longer we-"

"Savas," Caden said as he finished laying the trap's framework. "As your teacher, friend, mortal enemy, and all around Better, I hereby order you to shut the Hells up."

"Which one?" Savas asked, in utter seriousness.

It had been a long night. Caden was nearing exhaustion. He had the unpleasant feeling that it was going to be a long day too.

[Caden Law]

The sun rose on the land of Raiaera, glittering orange and red with all the imperial majesty of a lazy god. Shadows stretched long and vivid as Caden Law took a seat in the middle of the road, laid his staff down next to him and assumed a meditative posture. Savas had drawn a circle six inches deep around himself and was actively praying to N'jal outside, but the Wizard ignored him.

He pictured a face, dry and leathery and dead, its mouth and nose stuffed with straw and its eyes stapled shut. He pictured a face, shadowed and hateful and dispassionately so, the ultimate impartial judge and daylight highwayman.

And then he insulted it.

"Come get me, you little bitch," Blueraven challenged, and then opened his eyes. He could see the Headless Horseman coming, coming...changing. In the span of a few short strides, the Horseman and his steed faded out of the world and were replaced on the material plane by the Straw Man and his hellboar. He whipped that sword high over his head and came calling with a Voice that was raw anti-sound: every syllable, every utterance came as mute pressure. Only their intentions were truly readable.

Caden took a deep breath and stood up. He held out his hand and the staff levitated into his grasp so hard it hurt.

None of the Straw Man's intensions were good. Most were, in fact, utterly horrifying to think about. The closer he came to Caden, the more the Wizard's ears translated bad intentions into awful visuals. He saw himself being cleaved in half and emptied before he could bleed out. He saw his corpse stuffed with straw, so much straw that it burst the skin of his chest and thighs, so much straw that it ripped out his still conscious eyes -- just before the staples came calling for their lids. He saw himself stapled back together and turned loose in the forest.

And he saw, in an ugly way, that he would not have been alone. There were others out there, the Straw Man signalled, and they were each awful powers in their own foul rites.

As the visuals became real enough for Caden to almost feel his eyelids sting, the Wizard jumped off the road and sprang his trap. Nights prior, he had defended himself from the Horseman with a circle of power.

Now he triggered the spell in the dirt and used one to completely ensnare the Straw Man. For added measure, Caden literally tore three-foot strips off the road, isolating the daylight rider even more. His boar slammed into an unseen wall of air and the Straw Man faceplanted into it a split second later. Then he collapsed down to the ground and was immediately trampled by his own pet pig. Caden didn nothing. He pointedly continued to do nothing, until the Straw Man finally tore out his own steed's heart and kicked the beast over with one hand.

The Circle was sturdy. Otherwise the animal's blood might have destroyed it. The Straw Man threw its heart at Caden's face, but even in death the pig was contained: its organ splattered messily on the air, and gore slicked down an invisible wall all the way to the ground.

"Checkmate," Caden replied.

The Straw Man spoke. Caden had the sudden, inescapable mental image of sexually assaulting himself.

"That. Was completely unnecessary," he replied.

He saw himself being burned to death from the inside out.

"More to the point," he said. "Let's make a deal."

...and the horse he rode in on, apparently.

"Draw me a map and swear a binding oath of safe passage, and I won't close this circle until you can't move. I won't even impale you so many times that your flesh-bag exterior looks a moth-eaten bedsheet. You won't even have your insides set on fire."

Curiosity. Contemplation.

"From here to the Obsidian Spire. By road and by straight line movement. Give me that and this circle will disappear by sunset."

It would anyway. But the Straw Man spoke fear now, not of being wise to Caden's bluff.

The Wizard was satisfied with that. Savas actually stopped praying just to say, "It's impressive now, but this is not gonna end well at all."

[Caden Law]

The Straw Man was furious, but he dealt in better faith than the Sidhë probably would have. Caden and Savas left the roads and cut a quick swath through one of the thickest parts of the forest, a place where the trees had grown in so tightly that it was like plowing through a maze with barely enough room for either man to walk straight without their shoulders hitting a stump or branch.

Caden insisted on Savas going first. At staffpoint, as necessary.

By high noon, the cluster of trees and the tangle of bushes gave way to dead brown grass. Flat ground in turn gave way to an increasingly sloped wall of earth, starting shallow and becoming nearly vertical near the bottom. It was the edge of an enormous crater, though not one carved by an explosion or any such event.

The ground had sunken more than a hundred feet, as if forced down from the weight of one man's long forgotten sins.

Ruins stood and laid everywhere in sight. There were literally hundreds of annihilated buildings, some of them grown over by fungus and others very deliberately torn down as if in a manic frenzy. The only things left standing and in good condition were tombstones. Some of them just happened to be bigger than others, and there were none bigger than the old Obsidian Spire's mount.

To call it massive would have been a gross, slanderous understatement. Caden had been through parts of the world where dead kings were entombed in crypt-fortresses -- Pyramids -- that were smaller than the Spire's mount. It extended up more than five hundred feet, its walls sloping just a bit to accompany the grand stairs that spiraled along its surface. At the top of the mount were the broken circular walls of the Spire itself, solid obsidian and still glassy black in spite of their recent damage and neglect. The Spire was missing from the first floor up, and most of its mass lay in chunks all around the base.

It looked completely dead. Almost harmless. Utterly deceptive.

"I feel power here," Savas rasped. "I feel...home..."

Caden took a deep breath, and everything before him stank of mint.

[Savas Tigh]

By the time they made it down to the bottom level of the crater, Savas was stumbling around like a drunk. There was an utterly palpable sense of ecstacy about the man. He was covered in a glistening layer of sweat and bore an odor that was overpowering even against the background stench of so much black power concentrated into a single place.

"This is it," he said again and again. Caden ignored him. "This is where my Name dwells. Here. Right here."

With a shudder, he took the lead and broke into a sprint for the base of the tower. The necromancer was laughing raggedly for the first hundred feet, dead silent for most of the rest, and cackling like a maniac for the last dozen or so. He hit the bottom steps climbing on all fours like some kind of rabid monkey, his filthy robes doing more to hamper his process than the fact that he probably hadn't slept in thirty or so hours. Caden swore and followed him, albeit with more dignity.

Until the howling.

Six voices, none of them human, all of them hunters. The chorus of the chase, the choir of primal fear. Caden stopped climbing and Savas made it ten or more steps further ahead of him before the second round of howling was contested by a sound that neither mage could even pretend to describe.

It was like listening to vultures laughing in the middle of a thunderstorm. It was lower and softer and weaker than the Wild Hunt's rallying cry, but there was just something about it that struck the two mortal men as being more frightening. More dangerous, in its own way.

This seventh sound lingered for who knew how long, and then it faded out beneath the louder racket of the Hunt's gathering. Thunder roared through the night sky with nary a cloud in sight. The Hunt still howled, but their menace felt diminished somehow. It was as if the amoral predators had been subtly shown up by a thing of genuine evil, and they were too foolish to even realize it.

But Caden knew it.

And Savas knew it.

"We're being hunted again," the necromancer mumbled from his perch on the stairs of the old Spire. There was actual fear in his voice.

"No. We've been hunted all along," Caden replied. "It's just decided to let us know for real now."

The howls began to die down. Caden looked up at Savas and the necromancer refused to meet his eyes.

"The Skinwalker's coming."

Very quietly, Savas took out his axe and replied, "Then working together just became a liability. If you leave my sight again, it's straight to the death."

The Wizard's Hat bobbed as Caden nodded. "Have you fought him before?"

Savas finally looked down at Caden, bitterly dumbfounded. "Don't assign that thing a gender."

"What do you know about it?"

"I've told you everything I care to say-"

"Tell me more. The more I know, the more likely we are to get out of here alive."

"To speak of it is to call it."

"Then start callin'," Caden spat as he drew his sword. The fool actually thought it might do him some good. "Or else we're probably going to get run down by the Wild Hunt before the Skinwalker can even get to us."

"I'm afraid that's not going to happen," Spoke an empowered Voice the likes of which neither Caden nor Savas had heard in months. It was cold to the ear, metallic to the skin, and red on the brain. It conjured images of steel roses blooming out of dead bodies, and awful crimson eyes glaring deep into the secret parts of your soul.

Caden looked up, past Savas, and the rookie necromancer's eyes followed him. There, at the top of the Spire mount's stairs, they saw the last true Death Lord of the Dread Necromancer's armies.

"I am Inquisitor Yorak Grimm," the Death Lord Said, brandishing a black-bladed sword as he spoke. Even in broad daylight, he was as dark as if he had been veiled in shadow. It was like the light itself actually bent to avoid him. Caden was unimpressed. Savas actually started to cry, either in frustration or joy or abject terror.

"I've killed worse," the Wizard boasted.

Yorak flourished his sword, and grey faces washed along its length. He was a very tall, vile looking man dressed like a prince gone to war: elegants silks and high class leathers combined with choice bits of plate, especially around the shoulders and neck, all of it topped off by a silk-lined cape bearing his departed master's awful heraldry. He met Caden's boasting with a truly disdainful look and replied, "You will die this day."

"Prove it."

Savas had just enough time to mutter, "You just had to say it, didn't you," before the sun went out.

Literally went out.

No dramatic fanfare, no great show of power.

"The fucking sun just went out," Caden said.

"Yes, yes it did," Savas replied. "We're going to die horribly now."

Caden grit his teeth and Savas practically shrank into the stairs. He and Yorak were on the same side, supposedly, but that hardly mattered now that the Inquisitor had caught him trespassing on sacred grounds with one of their master's most reviled enemies.

"At least one of you has some sense," Yorak sneered, then leapt for them without the slightest hint of frenzy or hesitation. He didn't even look particularly insane.

Just hateful, professional, and precise.

The worst kind of enemy.

[Savas Tigh]

Yorak passed Savas right by on his way down. He hit the Wizard first and only, and he hit hard enough to throw the sword right out of Caden's hand and embed it into an old cinderblock twenty yards from the base of the Spire's mount. The Wizard himself went tumbling head over heels through the air after it. He reached out with magic and tore a huge stone from the stairs, then landed roughly on it and catapulted the thing -- and himself -- right back into the fray.

Magic exploded. There was fire. There was ice. There were birds made out of light and sword swings that actually screamed and echoed and rattled the air. Savas turned away from it and, in a panic, decided to keep climbing. Let the Wizard and the Inquisitor fight the last battle of the last war on their own.

"I'm not finished yet," Savas Said to himself as he scrambled up the rest of the steps to the Spire itself.

"Actually," Said another Voice, one that was almost normal but for a slight echo and the same red tinge as Yorak's. "You kind of are."

There was a stark white, but awfully limited light now. It was cradled within the long, bony fingers of a man in his thirties or forties, wearing glasses with red lenses. His hair was swept back, stark white like Yorak's own. His skin was pale, the way Yorak's would have been if not for the light avoiding him. He smiled with vampire's teeth, and there were blue veins standing out sharply all over what little skin he deigned to expose.

He wore a purple vlince robe, heavy and monastic seeming, its details done in black silk that glimmered under the light in his hand. Savas knew at the sight of it that the only reason he saw this newcomer's face was because the man didn't care. He had a book standing next to him, balanced by the hand he lay upon its binding. The thing was more than three feet tall and probably as wide, its cover done in leathered human flesh stretched taut over scorched black liviol.

"You're an Archivist," Savas said, despair weighing his voice down to normal with every syllable.

The man lowered his hand, and the light faded enough to see the shape of an orb. Black lettering charred onto its surface as the weapon finished activating.

"Close," he said. "I'm the Keeper of Secrets, the Dead Lord's personal Librarian."

Flame leaked from between his fingers, turning green and flittering about like fireflies as it fell to the ground. The spell was ready.

"Helman Grimm, at your service."

[Caden Law]

Yorak was fast.

And, Caden reflected in the tenths of seconds he had between each major clash, that was just fine. Because the Wizard had dealt with faster. Bailequin was still fresh in his memories, and there was the Skyrider before that, and Rosven's white doll as well. Yorak was fast, but Caden thought fast and he thought ahead, and there was an economy of movement and strategy that kept the Wizard from being skewered to death for the better part of two minutes. Yorak hounded him. Caden couldn't counter with his staff, and none of his other weapons were up to the job, so he countered with the terrain itself.

He was a Geomancer after all. So he bought himself time and distance, sliding each step dozens of feet so that Yorak had to actually put effort into keeping up with him. When the Death Lord was close in, Caden kicked tidal waves of earth at him to slow him down and absorb his attacks. When at last Yorak was too close to shift away from, Caden simply twisted the ground beneath the Death Lord's feet and disoriented him. It was subtle and it was desperate, but it worked. Caden struck with rote spells every time, and some kind of skin-tight barrier absorbed his magic every single time.

"You're only delaying the inevitable!" The Inquisitor eventually said as he whipped around and lashed out with his sword. Arctic blue skulls came roaring off its edge, turning to clouds of icy flakes that buffetted the Wizard and pushed him back. It was a chill that was absolutely unnatural, something that went straight past the bone and into the soul.

Caden resisted it as only a Salvic man can. He pointed his staff and replied, "Dichotomous Thermal Lance."

The icy cloud behind him froze into a solid statue, as did the ground beneath it and at his feet. Fire erupted from the staff's other end in a blast of white hot near-plasma that lit the whole town red and orange and yellow around it. Yorak powered through and went in for a straight thrust to the collar, but Caden sidestepped and smacked him with his staff. The Death Lord recoiled on impact, then came back with a headbutt that sent the Wizard spinning shoulder-first to the ground ten or eleven feet away.

He landed and sank straight down. The earth swallowed him whole.

Then it spat out a titanic fist beneath Yorak's feet, catapulting the Inquisitor skyward whether he wanted it or not. When he was at the peak of his jump, the fist opened and the Wizard had him dead to rights.

He was about to take it when an enormous beam of energy shot from the Spire's mount, blazing over the ruins and the Inquisitor and Caden beneath him. It was a lopsided tower of skulls and bones, charnel green and twisting like a tornado. The power slammed into the nearby forest and flash-rotted trees to blackened stumps, withered grass and blackened dirt in its wake. It lit up everything in sight with a pitiless anti-light that was as unnatural as it was unreal.

Caden acted without thinking in response. He looked away from Yorak, to the Spire, and he snapped his fingers one more time. Extra power was thrown into the spell as he said, "Friopyro."

[Savas Tigh]

Time slowed down as a charnel star exploded next to where Savas was standing. He had dodged the spell on what felt like pure impulse and terror, and probably would have soiled himself except that...it wasn't terror at all. It wasn't even that much of an impulse or a reflex. Savas was a seasoned thaumaturgic henchman in the Dead Lord's armies, but up till now that was all he had ever been: the black magic equivalent to cheaply hired help. He had rarely gotten into actual confrontations, and most of them had been brutally physical affairs that ended with an axe and an obscenity. They didn't require much in the way of higher reasoning, strategy, or objectivity.

This, Savas realized with a sense of cold-blooded detachment underscored by a building thrill of glee and hatred, this was how the Wizard thought.

No, he mused as the Helman's dead beam suddenly flickered out and the Librarian recoiled with a crimson scream; his shoulder was covered in ice around a pitch black scorch mark that was steaming hot. This is how I think.

In one frenzied instant, something snapped in the back of the hedgemage's brain, and he was aware of the fact that he very much wanted to survive and take his Name back. In the same breath, he was no longer numb to his fear so much as he was relying on it for his own survival. And as he focused through his fear, his reason, his motives, Savas remembered that he was holding a nicely sized axe with a wicked edge on it.

Almost as quick as he knew it, the necromancer was swinging. His axe hit vlince and the impact snapped bones even though the thick robes and undergarments the Librarian wore. Helman screamed and shrank back, hurling a blast of energy from his orb without taking the time to aim or coordinate the power he was slinging around. Savas took it head-on and stayed on his feet, necromantic energies washing over his skin like a wave on the beach.

He came through almost unscathed, even if his skin and hair looked a little grayer. He stuck out his free hand and tried to summon a bone wand into it, but one of the swords practically leapt from his back and slammed hilt-first into his palm instead. He threw it down and tried again with the same result. On the third try, the necromancer gave up and just tried to skewer Helman outright.

Something exploded in the ruins below.

Helman caught the blade barehanded and aimed it clear of his head. Savas followed through with a headbutt and broke the Librarian's nose clean. Black ichor flowed where blood should have been. "Damn it!" Helman snapped, then headbutted Savas right back.

Forehead on forehead. Savas collapsed to his knees in shock. Helman tore the sword right out of his hand and threw it clear of the Spire. "Bloody peasant!"

The orb was raised for another spell.

"Know your place!"

There was another explosion of green.

The stairs of the Spire mount collapsed in an avalanche of stone and green energy, all of it choking to the brim with ethereal skulls and the screams of men, women, and children. And for all that power, Savas wasn't there. He had rolled out of the way at the last second.

His axe came up and drove straight through the cover of Helman's grimoire. The results were spectacular.

[Caden Law]

It was all happening too fast for Caden to keep track of. He was fighting Yorak while Savas fought someone on top of the Spire mount. The Wild Hunt had finally arrived on the scene, bursting out of the forest from all the cardinal directions of a compass, with Azulavasco coming down from on high. That left one missing, but Caden was too busy keeping his face free of pointy bits to try and find the remaining Hunter. On top of all that, there were wolves and straw men and a small army of fae humanoids coming down from all sides with no rhyme or reason. The people looked roughly like the former inhabitants of Hidden Leaf, while the wolves bore an uncomfortable similarity to the ones that Savas had slaughtered when Caden met him.

And the straw men just looked like leather-fleshed horrors with straw spilling out of every hole as they moved swiftly and bonelessly in the artificial night of the Brothers Grimm.

Something at the Spire mount exploded, obliterating most of the leftover structure of the Spire itself. Chunks of the mount went with it. Caden barely had time to catalog this before he was ducking past Yorak and summoning up his sword. It slammed into his open hand and the Wizard spun around hard and Yorak was gone. Just gone.

In his place stood the hulking figure of Herne the Hunter, antlers and all.

"You brought the wolves, didn't you," Caden said as a stall. Herne didn't take the bait.

The legendary Hunter only replied after making his strike, which Caden barely managed to block with a wall of solid stone. A wall that Herne still shattered to dust before saying, "Aye, and the crows, the serpents, the lizards, the rats. Mine are the beasts rampaging this day!"

Caden suckerpunched him with a Sorcerous Fist the size of a horse-drawn wagon. Herne went skidding back more than a hundred feet, slammed into the side of a decayed building and leveled it with a thunderous explosion. Not far from that, Caden finally caught sight of Yorak again. The Death Lord was fighting against Guthor the Slayer, meeting him blade to blade as the huge demigod circled him from the back of a fast wingless dragon. Caden turned again and there was Azulavasco coming for him from above, and Frechah on the ground-

Frechah was gone.

No big fancy moves or spells. Just gone.

Caden filed that away for later and threw magic at Azulavasco, who replied in kind as a wolf the size of a bull tackled a company of straw men and all of them burned under the glare of Summer fire. The battle was joined.

[Savas Tigh]

Helman still stood.

After a fiery green explosion that toppled the rest of the old Spire right off its mount, that sent blazing emerald skulls arcing through the air like the sparks from fireworks, that let off a shockwave of anti-light turning everything green and yellow and red for a dfraction of a second...

Xem'zund's former Librarian still stood. There was a single gaping hole in his vlince robe, so large that it had torn off the shoulders and left the whole thing hanging down around his elbows and waist. Most of his hair was missing and his skin had been flash-cooked and then flash-rotted, so much so that it looked like month old leftovers from an overcooked steak dinner. His eyes were almost completely blank as, through sheer force of will, the Librarian literally pulled his own soul back into his body.

Then he collapsed to his knees, heaving for breath.

He was speechless, but every sound of exhaustion confirmed what words would not: his Voice had been blown out. He was as weak now as he would ever be, still clutching to the spell orb with one hand as he tried to brace himself on the scorched marble floor with the other.

"Idiot," he rasped, his eyes finally looking close to human again. Bloodshot, but human. "Ruddy-faced idiot."

He heard a loud crunch, accompanied by what sounded like the tearing of leather and the dripping of puss. Helman looked down to see a sword sticking out of his chest, just beneath the collar bones. He couldn't feel his legs. Helman went to move his arms and trigger the spell orb, only to find another sword lodged in his wrist, nailed his hand down the ground and giving his fingers a spasm. A few seconds later, the orb rolled to a stop underneath a stomping foot.

It was Savas Tigh.

The explosion had completely blown off his robe and reduced the clothes underneath to tatters and rags, but the man himself was somehow unscathed. He was still lugging around a travel bag full of damaged sidhë swords. His axe was still clasped tightly in one hand. That was how he had come through the blast with so few injuries to show for it.

Ink dripped from the blade like blood. Savas had literally axemurdered the last Archive of Xem'zund's dark knowledge, including the registry of Names sold to that long Forgotten lord. By hook or crook, something in that act had guarded him from the repercussions of it.

Helman looked the hedgemage in the eye and grimaced. He knew what was about to happen. "Make it quick," he tried to say, but it just came out as mute lip movements and ichorous gurgling.

"No," Wormaxe told him anyway. "I'm going to take my time on this one."

[Savas Tigh]

Strictly speaking, Helman Grimm was not alive. He probably had not been alive in years. His body was kept animate through a complex weave of magicks designed to replicate actual undeath. It was a part of the dark con perpetrated by the old Sage God, Khal'jaren, with at least the implicit consent of the Scarlet Goddess, N'jal. Caden had once likened it to the idea of using illusions and raw heat to mimic the effects and appearance of actual fire. There was a lot of power and precision to it, but what kept Helman animate wasn't true undeath. It wasn't the pitch black power of N'jal, so much as it was the cunning subtlety and intrigues of Khal'jaren.

Savas didn't know all these details. All he knew was what he saw when he was laying the framework for a Working. He saw a lot of power bound up in Helman's moving, talking, thinking, acting corpse. Because when you go out of your way to make something that looks like, feels like, and has all the effects of fire without actually just lighting a damn match, you have to put a lot of effort into it. Khal'jaren did subtle the way nothing else in all of existence could, but he still had to use an enormous amount of power to do it.

And that was all Savas really needed.

Power.

"I really should thank you," he said as he circled around the Spire mount. "You kept my Name intact and well protected for a long time."

By now, he had dragged Helman to the center of it and set up a very crude circle around him. It had four points. Cardinal points, for both the compass and the cardinal rules as Savas was coming to understand them. Each one was marked with a sword taken from Hidden Leaf. There were four more points for guidance within the compass and the rules, and each of them was marked with what Savas could bring to bear. There were pieces of a broken knife at one, an intact dagger opposite it. There was a pile of teeth at one point and a small assortment of bones opposite them; one disorganized, the other methodically arranged in the shape of an S.

"Don't mention it," Helman tried to say, but only ended up mouthing into stale, artificial night air. The battle had escalated to a full-blown war in a pocket near the base of the spire. His throat had clogged with his own blood, a substance like black tar that would have mended his wounds and evaporated in the span of a few hours. Helman would have been in tip-top shape then, even without his grimoire. He wasn't going to get that time.

Savas had crucified him to the floor, using up so many of the swords that he was out of spares by the time he finished the compass. There was a sword through each forearm, each shin, and another through both hips, and three more in his chest. They were centered so as to hold up his orb of entropy. Savas wasn't powerful or skilled enough to use it properly, but that wasn't quite enough to stop him from just plain using it.

"Bit tragic," the mage said, walking close enough to the Spire mount's edge that he could see the battle raging. Caden was nothing but a speck at this distance, and he was completely outgunned beyond all hope and reason. Wolf packs pounced him from both the left flank and the rear, and he blindly splattered them with a tidal wave of stone and dead soil. Azulavascoe came at him with his scythe at the same time, and the Wizard met it in kind with his staff. Earth shattered around his feet as he literally tore kinetic energy out of the strike and transferred it elsewhere, erupting from his shoulderblades in torrents of fire that arced high and came swirling back down in a drillbit tornado on the demigod's head.

Savas looked elsewhere, and saw Yorak simply slaughtering his way through an actual herd of red-haired grizzlies en route to the antler-headed Hunter. One of the other demigods had wounded him, visibly so even at this distance, but the Inquisitor was hellbent on fighting to his undying breath.

"I kind of feel sorry for them," he said. "Still fighting the last battle of a war that ended months ago." He paused, looking back at Helman. "Well. Trying to. They're not gonna get to lock swords and spells again when I get done with you. And they haven't even noticed the real threat down there."

Helman leered at him and tried to speak. He just gurgled black slop from the back of his throat.

"The thing I can't name is already down there. Hiding in one of Herne's beasts. It already took the amazon she-bitch and the fairy-killer. Nobody even saw it, 'cept me, and only 'cos I got lucky. 'Cos I've seen it before." He spat onto the floor, then shook his head. "Gonna be glad to get outta this place, Archivist. So glad. If I can get out at all."

Helman tried to summon up a spell, to shift energies around in his oily black and throw it at Savas. With some effort, he could have easily transmuted the stuff into burning pitch or jagged frozen daggers on impact. That all required movement though; of energy, of limbs. The swords blocked physical movement, and their placement was such that they disrupted magical movement as well. The layout and composition of the actual circle, ground into place with bonedust turned improv chalk, didn't help his cause one bloody bit.

"Well," the rookie necromancer said, rolling up his tattered shirt sleeves. "I guess there's only one thing left to say."

Savas began to walk in a spiral around his old boss, moving inward slowly and deliberately and with each step counted. He had his axe out.

"I declare myself anew, for the first time but not the last. I am the Dark Wizard, the Necromancer, the Black Mage, the one called Wormaxe."

He brandished the axe as he made the penultimate turn at Helman's feet, then lifted it high and came to a stop with his feet just inches from the former Librarian's shoulders.

"And this," Wormaxe Said, "Is my greeting to the world. Forget me not."

The axe came down...

[Savas Tigh]

...and the Necromancer called Wormaxe should have passed into legend, if there were just more witnesses handy.

It wasn't a Scourging, like what had happened in Tembrethnil during the war. But it sure looked like one as the black night in Lindequalmë suddenly, violently consumed itself from every direction. Emerald green worms literally ate the darkness out of the sky, and then collapsed down into the woods to explode in patches of black fungus and heatless flame. Some of them were the size of horses. One was as big as a house.

None were quite so big as the one that erupted out of the Spire mount. It stretched high into the ill lit sky, devouring shadow and light alike and filling its translucent belly with what looked like the leftovers of reality itself. When it grew long enough, towered tall enough, undulated wildly enough over the forest; its topmost end seemed to split open into a gaping maw that was full of screaming souls.

And then the maw closed shut on Yorak's black sun, tearing it out of the sky. Like a great tree, the ghost-worm fell. Unlike anything in this world or the next, it decayed to nothing before it ever hit the canopy.

This event had just a few witnesses. In the actual battle, the only one of note was Caden Law, and his tellings were drastically limited because they were only available in one book that may, or may not, find its way into a library somewhere. Outside the forest, the only one who was in the right place at the right time was Kinolan Finwei, and with all the stories he told of the Red Forest, hardly anyone saw this as being anymore unusual than the next.

[Caden Law]

When the Holocaust of Worms ended, the whole situation had changed. Caden blacked out for the better part of two minutes as the world went to Hell in a handbasket, then woke up covered in ectoplasmic gore to find himself in a place that looked very much like some of his lesser nightmares.

This thought alone was enough to stop him more than what he was actually seeing.

There was a ruined stone wall in front of him, covered with Yorak's tautly stretched skin, and all he could think to say was, "Lesser nightmare."

The Wizard shuddered and stood, bracing himself with his staff. All around him was more of the same: Bears, wolves, crows, snakes; anything bigger than an insect had been skinned, and its husk nailed to anything big and flat enough to make it stretch smooth. Empty eye holes stared at him, gaping lips screamed in tormented silence, and nowhere in sight was a single drop of blood or a flayed corpse. There weren't even scraps of armor or broken weapons.

Just skins.

Empty husks on display, from one wall of the crater to the other. Some of them even dotted the trees that still stood at the crater's edge.

Caden grimaced, and then felt himself become sick because he wasn't sick. This didn't really bother him a bit, and that realization made him more upset than anything. He was so distrated for a few seconds that when he finally realized what was missing, it made him jump and summon his staff and sword both. Weapons crashed uselessly into his hands: there was no target.

"Where are you?!" he Called. "Where are the Hunters?"

Dead, he soon realized. All dead.

Frechah, Guthor, Azulavasco, and Wodan were all immortalized on the largest chunk of debris in the crater. It was covered in pictographs in a language that Caden didn't even want to know; symbols that literally looked older than the oldest Diamonic, than any kind of civilization as he would ever understand it. They made him afraid in a part of his brain that he didn't even know existed.

Herne was nowhere in sight. One of his broken antlers were literally the only thing on the field that seemed to indicate that an actual battle had taken place. Bhor was missing too.

Caden could swear he heard the ghost of a distant scream at the moment he realized the Hunt's leader was gone. He could -- and would, if asked -- swear it.

But it was just the wind, he reasoned. Surrounded by skins as he was, even broad daylight felt unnerving.

Almost robotically, Caden turned towards the mount and found that it was gone. Not broken, blown apart, or brought down. Just gone.

In its place stood a Dark Wizard, holding the broken handle of what had been a very nasty axe. He was standing straight as a rod, smiling up into the sky with a look of intransient bliss, and shuddering only occasionally in exhaustion and stress. Veins stood out in blues and greens all over his skin, but they were already beginning to fade. Bit by bit. By the time Caden reached him, they were gone. He almost felt jealous.

"It took its fill," Savas informed him suddenly. "For the first time, in a long time. That awful hunter should be sated..."

He looked at Caden sharply.

"Are you, you?"

"Strike off," Blueraven replied. Savas laughed so hard he was sleeping his knee to keep from falling over.

And just as quickly, he stopped laughing all together. He stood straight again, looked Caden in the eye and said, "Be seeing you."

"Where are you going?" Caden asked.

Savas shrugged. "I'll figure that out when I'm out of here. While it is busy elsewhere..." he looked around and shuddered in disgust. It was more of a response than Caden could give. He hated the Necromancer for that.

"And if it finds you before you get out?" he asked anyway.

Savas shrugged again. The scene around them spoke for him.

If demigods could not contest the Skinwalker, then what hope did a rookie Necromancer and a half-exhausted Sorcerer stand? The best Caden had been able to do was fight one or two of the Wild Hunt to a draw. That thing had killed at least four of them, plus an army of beasts and straw men, in less than two minutes. And it had flayed every single one of them, decorating the battlefield with their skins.

Caden considered that and, for the first time in a long time, felt himself becoming afraid.

"Good-bye then, Savas. If we meet again-"

"The truce is over," Savas replied with a grin. "I am an apprentice no more."

[Caden Law]

Caden let him go without so much as a backward glance. For all the damage he might be capable of in the long run, for all the horror he could inflict with time and planning; Savas was still just a weakling Wizard in a forest positively brimming with things that could, and hopefully would, eat him alive and screaming. The notes taken from Greyspine's Grimoire said nothing of a tyrant called Wormaxe, or even of a mad mage named Savas Tigh. He was just some lesser evil and there were more pressing things to deal with.

The flaws in that logic didn't occur to him for a long while. Not until well after what he was about to do.

The Spire and its mount were gone, but the earth they stood upon remained. At the center of it was a gaping stairwell, the sort that you find at the mouth of an elaborate tomb. Torches sat idle about six feet down from the top step, their flames long since run out and layers of crypt dust and cobwebs had formed on both them and the walls. A spider skittered across the last decently lit step, and Caden grunted his disapproval at the whole situation.

At least this time, he had a chance to prepare.

The Wizard inhaled deeply, and for every breath he took, the ground grew colder and colder. The sun was still shining, still beating down on the whole area with enough energy to burn fields and light cities. Caden took that power by force, using techniques he had picked up -- or more accurately, been slapped upside the head with -- back in Salvar. He had refined it since then. Every breath he took was a symbolic collection of energy, and every exhale came out as cold fog. He gathered that power into himself and locked it there, binding it to the leylines beneath his skin. The Mark on his cheek began to glow, and the lines of Sorcery gradually lit up to join it. They were blue, glowing, and looked like some kind of tribal ink mixed with the growth patterns of ivy. The lines spread out from his cheek, building to a symmetrical pattern that covered his entire body and, gradually, caused the veins standing out on his hands to recede and the skin to grow enough color that it matched the rest of him.

When he could take no more power into his body, the Wizard brandished his staff and started channeling energy into it instead. Runes, sigils, ancient script and all else lit up and turned from glassy orange to pale blue. The tip of the staff became engulfed in whisps of power, like a tiny murder of crows orbiting a fixed point at its end. They were blue and purple and pink at first, fading to stark white light that shone clear and cast a shadow even against the sun.

He repeated this process with both his wand and his rod.

When he was finally done, Caden undertook one last precaution that had been denied him when he faced Xem'zund with the other Dawnbringers: he took off his glasses and replaced them with his goggles.

He exhaled, and the breath came as a little puff of boiling steam in a winter wasteland full of empty husks. The sun was setting on the Red Forest of Lindequalmë. Darkness waited, and with it, the end of an era.

[Caden Law]

Caden felt it when he passed a threshold into the crypt. It was an absolutely bone-grindingly ancient piece of Work, but a terribly simple and obvious one as well. It was also the place where Xem'zund's story seemed to end. The tale was carved into the walls as part of an enormous mosaic, ending with the rise of a hooded demigod standing atop the head of a preying mantis, surrounded by intricately carved skeletons standing atop old Raiaeran script -- a prayer of mourning and salvation, Caden recognized.

The story was told without words, and from Caden's vantage point it was told backwards. He knew why that was in an instant: Xem'zund wasn't the kind of foe most people could keep dead, at least not in any meaningful way. He would reform, or possess someone, or do something that brought him back to whatever was at the bottom of this place, and then he would ascend the stairwell. And for every step closer to the surface, he would see his story in the exact order he had lived it. The pictures were unbiased. More often than not though, the Necromancer still won.

He didn't know how many years the story stretched, but Caden could still tell whenever Xem'zund changed bodies. At least forty times, he counted, before he had taken the Starslayer's likeness. The story was too vague to show whether or not he had actually taken the man's body, but there was room to speculate either way: Xem'zund had reincarnated through sheer force of will as well as through possession of his enemies. He was thorough if nothing else.

There were wars. There were gambits. At one point, the wall had a gaping hole in it on both sides. Caden guessed this to be the closure of the Tap. Beyond that, the Necromancer contested with other figures of equal power and glory. There was a woman, clearly recognizable as the dead saint Denebriel. There was a man who dwarfed both of them in power and stature, ripped apart such that his very essence seemed to drip into the ground. Podë, laying the curse that warped this forest for reasons unlisted, and Xem'zund taking the body and soul of a truly forgotten one; the acquisition that made him a Sorcerer, which allowed him to fight the rest of them on even footing.

Far enough down, Caden finally saw what the history books didn't want him to know. He saw the actual origins of the thing called Xem'zund. He looked like nothing more than a humble man in a robe, bowing down to an authority figure as elves rampaged close by.

This, Caden knew, was Zundalon the Cantor. The man he bent knee to was the Abbot, Xem. They were both Durklanic, a race of Men long gone and mostly forgotten in this day and age. They dressed in what looked almost like a mix of Fallien and Salvic fashions, and carried books and instruments of song that made him think of the very elves that ended their civilization.

Beyond this, the wall was a dismal blank. The only pictures remaining were of the con and the war that prompted it. Khal'jaren must have appeared to Zundalon in the same heavy robes that Caden had seen him in. N'jal had probably appeared somewhere along the way in the guise of a spider with the upper torso of a woman, savage and brilliant and gleeful with it. Near them, on the walls, the floor, and the ceiling; a tapestry of stars. All were named in a language so old that Caden actually couldn't even guess at it. This, he knew, was the Elven Pantheon. The real one that the Wanderers followed, not the watered down version that was becoming common in Raiaera.

Caden shuddered.

Then he came to a pair of enormous stone doors, and on the front of them were the likenesses of a hundred or more men and women, mostly human. There were also three wyrmfolk, ten elves, a single drow, and some races that no longer existed. It took Caden a minute to find him, but Devin Starslayer was on there. His face was in the upper lefthand corner-

Right next to Caden's own.

"Well," said the Sorcerer, "That's not unsettling at all."

[Caden Law]

Xem'zund's resurrection chamber was...

...almost exactly what Caden expected it to be.

This was not the grand pit of fear and horror that he had dwelled in when he fought the Dawnbringers. This was a quiet place, a tomb of memories and identity; the one place in all the world where a body-jumping eldritch horror could come when it was most vulnerable. This was where Xem'zund didn't need his masks to maintain a sense of identity. This was where he came to just be...

Zundalon.

Who sat on the far side of the chamber from where the Sorcerer entered, wearing the likeness of an emaciated Godhand Striker. Caden couldn't tell if it was actually his old comrade or if Zundalon had simply reincarnated with his appearance. He waited before saying anything, and Zundalon waited as well. After two bitter confrontations, they were sizing each other up without even giving one another more than a passing glance.

The walls were completely covered in musical notes and scriptures belonging to the dead faith that had once defined Zundalon's life. There were actual paintings -- hand-painted works of art, nothing that had been slapped together secondhand or with magic -- that had been done in the old Cantor's hand. The more Caden looked at them, and at the notes, the more he realized that they all showed a steady progression. Every single one was new, and all of them started off crude and unsophisticated but ended as works of art.

"This is how you regain motor control," Caden said, shutting down the illumination spell on his staff. He purposefully lowered his guard with it, and wandered over to one of the walls, touching a scroll. It was Zundalon's first catechism, a lyrical piece that was brutally crude compared to the works of elves. "This is also how you assert your sense of self in a new body."

Zundalon nodded. He was working on something. It looked like a sketch, but Caden was too far away to see.

There was a pool of charnel green slime glowing in the center of the chamber. Near it was an anvil and a crude forge, along with a huge shelf of reagents and brushes, chisels and more. A fresh mask lay on the anvil, its eyes not yet shaped and its mouth still just a set of lines and holes dotted into place. Near it was a spinning wheel covered in molten glass -- the artifact Xem'zund used to assemble his cloak.

"You could just will it all into existence, but you choose not to. The work gives you time to adjust. To review your failures and learn from them," Caden concluded.

There was a single-sized bed near where the Necromancer now sat. It had been reassembled at least fifteen times, and the wood was so old that it was only holding together because a mage specializing in entropy magic kept it from decaying. The sheets were full of holes and stitches, covered in bloodstains, and the pillow was flat in the shape of a hundred different heads slapped together. There was a music sheet lying on the stand next to it, ancient papyrus that should have been falling apart.

"And that," Caden guessed, "Is your phylactery."

"It was," Zundalon said. "For the first dozen or so reincarnations, it was. A few since then, but mostly it's just for show."

Caden looked at him sharply, and the old Cantor shrugged. "I sing when my body allows for it. I make music when it doesn't. This Striker fellow had a rancid singing voice though," he said, and his own voice was like an avalanche of gravel and gasoline.

"Your power hasn't finished coming back in," Caden noted.

"It has," Zundalon replied without looking at him. "I just...don't feel like using it anymore." He shrugged. "Continue your investigation, please."

Caden waited. Zundalon finally deigned to look at him, and even with Godhand's butch features, the man looked...sad.

"It's been hundreds of years since I actually had someone to talk to, Caden. Keep going. I'll only be a few more minutes."

"What are you working on?" Caden asked.

Zundalon hunched over his sketch and said nothing. Caden braced the flow of power beneath his skin, setting up his defenses for the strike he knew would come somewhere along the line. He turned his attention to one of the paintings. It was Zundalon's third (fourth? fifth?) body, standing shoulder to shoulder with a mage in a great hooded cloak and iron armor.

"That's the Sorcerer," Caden guessed. "The forgotten one you possessed to become what you are now. He was a Necromancer too, wasn't he?"

"Wei Finn Zho," Zundalon answered. "An Akashiman Deathtalker, of a faith and culture that isn't there anymore. I think they might have taken some of its principles to form their warrior cult though. He vied with the Sorcerer, Vashñu, for control over the Black Mountains. Back then I was just a minor leaguer. A mage of considerable power, a sort of divine lich preaching the gospels of the vengeful god of a dead people. Wei considered me an abomination and tried to kill me. With some help from my good friend-" He stopped drawing and pointed to one of the pictures.

It was a Drow, but not like any Caden had ever seen. His ears were straight up, long and pointed, and his eyebrows were thicker and longer than most. His hair was bluer than Caden's coat, and his eyes were blank white with neither pupil or iris. He actually had a full beard, accompanied by an inhumanly strong nose, cheeks, and the chin to match. He dressed like a general at war, carrying a spear that would've been as useful casting a spell as it would have been cutting a man's throat.

"Podë," Zundalon finished, once Caden had an appreciation for the other Forgotten One. "We were...closer in those days. It was convenient. Podë wounded Wei, and then I lead a party of my own Nightbringers into his fortress atop the mountain of Yanbo. I traded their lives and my body for Wei's power. N'jal blessed me for my cunning, but Khal'jaren sponsored the change for his own reason."

It took Caden a few seconds to process all of that. The very first thing he said was, "Yanbo is a harbor. There aren't any mountains near it, last I checked."

Zundalon just smiled and went back to sketching.

Caden lingered on the image of Podë for a while longer and asked, "What did he do to this place, anyway?"

"Podë and I were close allies once. He was always the stronger, older, better of us. I don't know who was backing him, probably N'jal but he never used any of the emblems or powers associated with her. He was the very first Drow, the original Dark Elf. The one that all others are mere shadows of, pale imitations on their best days. He betrayed the Star-Gods for a Thayne, or maybe it was the other way around. Before my time, at any rate. He helped me to become a Sorcerer, and for a time it was good. We had a falling out though. I can't remember what it was. That might be Denebriel's fault though."

"She could manipulate the flow of time," Caden replied.

"I know. Podë actually thought he could beat her with enough troops. She went back in time and aborted all of them before they were born, but we were all so powerful that she couldn't pull the same trick with us. She could still tweak past events though. It made her a nightmare to try and argue with, let alone fight." He paused for a moment, then looked up and grinned. "Speaks volumes for you and the others who killed her."

"I don't think she was at the top of her game," Caden replied, then pointed to another picture. It was a man who made Podë look like a gutless wimp. He was broad, powerfully built, and wore clothes that resembled Coronian, Scarabrian, and even Salvic nobility -- the kind who won their rank through bloody violence and court intrigues. He wore a cape that was black with stark white eight-pointed stars all over.

He was a Wizard.

"Aesphestos the Starkiller," Zundalon said. "The first of us all, the worst of us all."

"Who was that?" Caden asked. His studies mentioned the name a few times, usually in conjunction with some nameless Elven bard who clapped him to death. One of the Thaynes had mentioned it in passing at the Icehenge.

"The true Forgotten One," Zundalon said. "And also Denebriel's father, though I doubt she mentioned that. He was also her husband. He was Hromagh's favorite son, the very first Sorcerer and the very first Wizard before that. Might have had a spark of the truly divine in him. He actually killed four of the Star-Gods barehanded during the War of the Tap. He was also a megalomaniacal godking of a civilization spanning half the world. For all our empires, the rest of us were just nobles waging a civil war in his shadow."

"What happened then?"

"Denebriel got fed up. All of us did. So we helped the elves kill him, when nobody else could."

It all sounded terribly simple. Caden didn't believe it, and Zundalon knew it. Without looking up from his sketch, he said, "The Forgotten Ones were a lot more complex than an evil overlords union. We fought each other, we fought the people, we contended with gods and outsiders and things that can't be named. Aesphestos was the greatest of us all, and he couldn't be allowed to stand. So we killed him. Hard and bloody and permanent. Denebriel turned herself into a walking paradox to make it possible, murdered him at birth to weaken him for the fight against the High Bard, Golan. Then she murdered him again at the moment he became a Sorcerer. And then again at her own conception, and her own birth, and several times after that. Even with his very existence negated a dozen times over, Aesphestos still gave that stupid little fool the fight of his life."

He paused, looking at his work. Spotted an imperfection and reached for his eraser. "Do you know why Golan's name isn't in the history books, Caden? He wasn't an elf at all. He was a half-drow with a human father and a peasant mother. Precious little songfolk can't have that now, can they?"

"You really do hate the elves, don't you," Caden mumbled.

"And you don't?"

"...I think, at this point, you're in no position to criticize anyone for anything," Caden answered. It wasn't an insult. Zundalon didn't take it as one. He shrugged instead.

"Fair enough. When he was dead, we all got together and scattered his essence across the planet. It destroyed Aesphestos so completely that he couldn't bring himself back again. Denebriel lost her mind for that, poor girl. The Tap was permanently damaged. The Thaynes finally started cracking down on us afterwards."

Caden looked around. This was all a bit much, but Zundalon wasn't lying. Denebriel really could manipulate time. It was what allowed her to act so recklessly without censure from any real gods. The Wars of the Tap had raged for...centuries, at the least. Something big had to come along to leave the source of all magic, all life, off limits to mortal touch. The ruin of Aesphestos fit the bill.

"Are you jealous of them?" Caden asked, looking at all the musical instruments.

"Somewhat," Zundalon told him. "The elves weren't actually musical until Podë cursed this country."

Caden looked at him. "What."

"Podë put a curse on all of Raiaera. He was trying to make the place so dangerous, so entangling, that I'd never be able to go after him again. Nasty piece of work, that spell. He called it the Arda Vazra, the Red Requiem. It affects behaviour, warps reality at a local level, and stains everything red with enough time. He wanted to remind me of the day I put a dagger in his back."

"Then why is only Lindequalmë red?"

"Because music, Caden. Music, magic, life, and plenty of old fashioned historical revisionism. Arda Vazra was threatening to spill over into other lands. You can still see traces of it if you know where to look. I sang to keep it at bay from my tower, and eventually...someone outside the curse's reach heard me. Golan's father, I think. He came to Raiaera, singing and bringing music with him, and his power beat back to curse. The elves, who were much closer to the Sidhë in those days, simply copied him. And in the process, they became closer to what they are now. Music gave them a sense of emotion and control that the Sidhë and their ilk can't compare to. It makes them closer to being human, to being truly mortal instead of the Starspawn they really are.

"Guiltless and arrogant, the Elves claimed their music and bardic magic as their own inventions. Nevermind the genocide of my people before that; we were magnificent musicians, Caden. Golan's mother disagreed with the mainstream though, and was darkened for it. Others disagreed too, and there lie the deepest origins of the Alerian schism, which took a lot longer than you or anyone else knows. They rewrote history a few times, closer to its current version, and eventually played the curse back to its current borders. So many thousands of years and magical wear-and-tear later, the curse can be stopped with just the concept of borders. You don't even need a guard to keep it locked in anymore."

Caden thought about all this, and then looked at Podë again. Aesphestos. And then the other paintings, and he wondered, "What did you do to become that thing back in the cave?"

Zundalon actually shuddered. "Have you seen the Wanderers acting as Avatars yet?"

"No, but I've heard enough to guess what that means."

"I tried to do it in reverse," Zundalon replied. "My reincarnation meant trying to wear a Star-God as my next body. I was inactive until the War of the Tap ended because of that one. The Elves actually stopped worshipping the things for a time, upon seeing what one actually looked like. That's why only the Wanderers still followed them until this past war. Why the Elves still persist in trying to water their gods down to something flowery and benevolent. Hopefully the Drow can wipe them out this time. Without converting. Anyway..."

The Cantor stood now, one of history's greatest monsters, and he leaned over his desk. It was lit by nothing more than a pair of oil lamps. Most of the room was like that. He smiled somberly and gestured for Caden to join him.

The Sorcerer did, albeit from what little safe distance he could muster. This was all completely surreal. More so when he found himself looking upon the likeness of a woman with light blond hair and blue eyes, the very picture of what Salvic womanhood tried to be. The woman, Caden guessed, Denebriel tried to shape herself into being. She was absolutely gorgeous, even drawn with hands that weren't meant for anything more complex than gripping a sword.

"Cydonia," Zundalon said. "One of Aesphestos' favorite concubines. Denebriel's mother, and a powerful wizardess in her own right. I took her one night. She didn't...she hated me in those days. And I broke her. Again and again and again, I broke her. But her beauty never wavered. Her power never waned. And when she finally killed herself, it was all I could do to bring her back and ask her hand in marriage."

Caden felt his stomach twist.

"It wasn't perfect. Love and hate are usually just the same thing aimed in different directions. She was always plotting my downfall, making me stronger, and I loved her for it. She fell early on in the last war and, to be honest, Caden? I haven't felt whole since. I think..." He straightened up. Cracked his neck to either side and shook his shoulders out.

"I think I'm ready now."

[Caden Law]

Zundalon the Cantor died in his bed at sundown on the Day of Mourning Stars, three days into the Month of Elder Wisdoms. His true passing went unmarked in the Year of Retribution Dawning, and no history book would ever record his last words to the ages. Caden himself did not write them down.

"That which is dead can eternal lie,
"For with merciful aeons,
"Even Death can die."

The Cantor smiled when he said it, smiled when he died, and kept smiling as Caden burned his phylactery and cleansed his resurrection pool. Piece by piece, with only the corpse as a witness, the Sorcerer destroyed the last surviving Durklan and wiped him clean out of this world. He brought the roof down on the chamber, slowly but inevitably, and then he scourged the walls of the passage clean on his way to the surface. When he was done, he slammed the while thing shut and obliterated it all, compacting the earth down into a crater within a crater, packing it so tight that it would hold shape, and a small lake might form with a few centuries of rainfall or dumb luck.

He didn't mark Xem'zund's gravesite. He didn't really do anything other than to stand watch for an hour, Hat off, skin alight with lingering Sorcerous power, head bowed with an eerie, disquieting sense of respect.

Then he put on his Hat, changed to his glasses, and started looking for a way out. Hopefully the Skinwalker was busy somewhere else.

[Caden Law]

If you are reading this, then it means I made it out of Lindequalmë and probably died at a much later date. Presumably after bedding nine wenches. At once. In all honesty, there's a very good chance I died of heart failure.

But that's beside the point.

The job is done. Xem'zund is now truly dead and gone. His Death Lords have been brought to heel, and if any are even left, it would really surprise me. The last two I saw were slaughtered by a creature called the Skinwalker, along with maybe half a dozen demigods and...yeah.

It's a long story that I don't think I'll ever be able to fully write down, just as I doubt that anyone will ever be able to fully make sense of the Red Forest. There is a curse active there, but after so many centuries I think it's been twisted right into the fabric of the environment. It's a work of such complexity that someone else could spend a lifetime studying it. Definately the kind of long-term magic a Forgotten One would throw around.

And I suppose it's fair to say, the kind of magic I'll be able to throw around someday. I spent a lot of time with Xem'zund when he passed. We talked. I know things about the true history of the world I'll be puzzling over for years. I
Caden stopped writing. He was sitting just outside the Red Forest now, at the Witching Hour, with a high moon in the night sky and nothing but his own thoughts to keep him company. The empty ditch separated him from Lindequalmë, and the idea was that he would go back to Kinolan's once he finished writing and catching his breath. It had been a hard run out of the Forest, even with magic and a certain lack of obstructive predators or locals. He was alone.

Except that he wasn't.

"Who's there!" Caden called, looking into the forest. "Show yourself!"

He waited.

Nothing happened.

For a long time, nothing continued to happen.

And then, out the corner of his eye, the Wizard caught movement. A great lumbering thing, receeding into the woods. He could swore it looked back at him as it vanished, awful red eyes looking straight into his soul, but Caden really couldn't tell for sure. All he had was a terrible sense of urgency accompanied by an even worse sense of certainty.

He had dodged the Skinwalker.

But it knew him.

And it would never forget.

[Savas Tigh]

Savas ran and ran and never stopped running. Down winding roads he lost track of, through fields he couldn't place or name, through the ruins of villages he was completely unresponsible for. Every now and then, he burst into a sick kind of cackle, and it was all he could do to keep his head on straight. The Curse was affecting him less so now that he had regained his Name, but he was still going on several months of total immersion.

He raced his own shadow as the sun fell on the land of Raiaera and the forest of Lindequalmë, propelled along at the speed of baying madness and growling ghosts. Through a burough, through the village where he'd once been taunted by Bailequin, through a muddy pit six feet deep, and through a thorny bush that raked most of his shirt off and bloodied his torso. There were wolves growling tonight.

There was only one Hunter calling, and it was a mournful sound like nothing Savas had ever heard before. If the Skinwalker were anywhere in earshot, it wasn't echoing that cry.

Finally there was a gate in front of him. Savas slammed into it before he could stop himself, then took to climbing like some kind of rabid animal. He had to squeeze over wrought iron spikes and under ancient splintered wood, shredding the remnants of his pants and gashing his thigh in the process. He scrambled to reach one hand through the gate, grabbing his bone wand and the pouch full of coins that he had gathered from Hidden Leaf. The wand was sparking from damage. It wasn't going to last long.

He could hear footsteps pounding on the bridge, coming closer to him. He heard a voice.

"Blueraven? Oh, Gods, Blueraven?! Is that-"

The footsteps stopped abruptly. Savas heard a bow string pulling taut. He reacted without thinking.

The wand exploded, leaving Savas' hand a bloody mess, but the spell went off without a hitch and with all the precision that adrenaline-fuelled homicidal mania can provide. Kinolan didn't even scream as his face blew open, spewing brains and bone, teeth and tissue, snot and blood and miscellaneous fluids all over his own shoulder. His remaining eye actually looked shocked and outraged as he dropped.

Even through the shocked pain of his blood-soaked hand, Savas could feel the elf's spirit departing. It made him feel giddy. And hungry.


It's only cannibalism if it's human.
- Heironymous Ross, the Butcher of Bostok

[Savas Tigh]

Savas ate his fill. He didn't even waste time cooking it. He used the guardsman's own longknife to do most of the butcher's work, and then he took some of the choicer bones and dragged the corpse into the nearest ditch. He took Kinolan's knife, keys and his pants, then left the body where it lay.

He let himself into the guardhouse and didn't feel the slightest hint of emotion upon seeing actual stores of food or cooking equipment. Savas cooked stew and gave himself a rag bath from the same pot at the same time, then he grabbed the only mirror in the house and ritually broke it with the butt of his newly acquired knife. He didn't shave so much as he just chopped off huge chunks of beard and hair, quickly losing the psychopathic mane that Blueraven had known him by. It still left his beard thick and his hair a little mangy, but it was all short and manageable now. He could hassle over his appearance in detail later.

He put on some of the elf's old clothes. They were a little tight, but would loosen with time. He threw on Kinolan's tunic for good measure, then armed himself with the dead elf's short sword and his lumber axe. He kept the knife too, strapping its sheath onto his thigh for ease of use. Kinolan had a small messenger's bag, presumably for carrying personal effects to and from the village. He also had a spare quiver, complete with a flap that was supposed to cover his arrows and protect them from the environment. He wished he'd taken more bones then, but it was alright.

Raiaera was a big country. News travelled slow at the personal level. And there were plenty of people who could go missing without one eyebrow being raised.

Savas spent the next few hours carving spells into the bones. He had one good, sturdy arm bone, ideally suited to holding an ectomancy-based fist spell. He had some ribs, good for shadow manipulation and divination. He had a bunch of hand bones, good for tiny one-shot magicks. It wasn't much, but it was a start.

When he was done, Savas shouldered his quiver full of bones and his travel bag's worth of food and coin. Kinolan had kept logs of his activities, and Savas took a few of those too; empty books, with sturdy leather covers and bindings. They still weren't the same as having an actual grimoire, but they would do for now. He took Kinolan's ink and pen, and his spare pencils too. The last thing he robbed from the guardhouse was a lantern.

Once he was outside, he used his finger to drag lines in the dirt and grass around the guardhouse. It was a spell set on a delayed timer. When he was done, Savas lowered the lantern to hide its light and he held up a divinitory rib bone.

Spirits whispered. Death and life flowed, and only a Necromancer could gauge any meaning from it.

"Okay," he said. "Okay."

He put the wand down, tucking it into his belt for now. Lantern leading, Savas started walking north, towards Tembrethnil.

The watchhouse at Lindequalmë exploded an hour later.

[Caden Law]

Wormaxe was long gone by the time Caden found the guardhouse in ruin. Compounding matters was the fact that summer was the Raiaeran dry season, and the Wizard had to put out the fire lest it spread completely out of control.

He didn't find Kinolan's body until later, when he was checking to make sure the bridge and the gate were intact. There was a bloody trail into the grass, and the light of the Wizard's staff was bright enough to show the body even in the pre-dawn twilight. After seeing so many awful things during and after the Corpse War, Kinolan's mutilated body didn't even make him blink. One missing arm and a mutilated ribcage, some disembodied organs and a mangled skull were literally tame compared to what he had seen when the Death Lords chased him to Salvar.

Caden buried the guard in the fullest honors that he could manage. He didn't have a spare pair of pants, and considering the indignities wrought on the elf's body, he doubted Kinolan would have cared about his clothes.

"Sorry about that," he said to the dead elf, recalling vividly that he could have killed Savas back at the crater. He took a deep breath and exhaled a short puff of fire, turned to smoke rings by the time he spoke again. "I won't make that mistake again."

He bowed. Then he went to the town to tell someone about the dead guard and the ruined house, and the lack of a necessity for a replacement. He would have to lie about how he knew the guard wasn't necessary, but it would be easy enough to make something up about how he had uncovered the curse's basic functions. Once he was done in Carnelost, Caden reasoned, it was time to head to Anebrilith and take a boat back to Scara Brae.

Spring was over. It was going to be a long summer.


There ain't no rest for the Wizard.
- Warlock Deadcider

[Savas Tigh]

Spoils time.

Savas is going to be completely rewritten soon-ish, so...yeah.

Savas has acquired the following items. All are steel and average quality. Raiaeran Shortsword Raiaeran Longknife Logcutter's Hatchet

Savas has also acquired the following bone-items. Note that these are expendable and will probably all be used up during the next thread. All items are elf bone and poor in quality. Wand of Ghost Fist: Fires off a softball-sized fist made of ectomancy. Weak spell. Fully charged. Carved from a humerus. Wand of Escapist's Divination: Reveals the path of least resistance, metaphorically speaking. Carved from a rib bone. Wand of Entropy: Generates a random destructive effect on a target. Weak spell. Fully charged. Carved from a rib bone. Wand of Ghost's Hands: Generates a phantom hand that can manipulate up to five pounds and has a maximum range of twenty feet. Weak spell. Fully charged. Carved from a rib bone. Wand of Guidance: Controls lower level (0) undead (NPCs only). Weak spell, maximum number of five. Carved from a rib bone. Hand bones engraved with various one-shot spells, nothing more powerful than an M-80.

Savas has acquired the following non-combat items. All are leather or cloth, Raiaeran-made and average quality. Clothes: Savas has two changes of clothes, each consisting of pants and a shirt. He has one green leather tunic, water resistant. Savas has one arrow quiver. Savas has one burlap messenger bag. Savas also acquired several empty leather-bound logbooks (journals), some ink, a pen, and a few pencils. Savas managed to steal genuine Sidhë coins; however many and worth however much the thread judge dictates.

And before anyone gets smart: No. He doesn't have shoes. :p

Caden has no special spoils for this one.

[Duffy]

The Red Requiem in Cresting Summer Judgement

Firstly, you asked for no or light commentary, so I’ve picked up on one or two things where appropriate, and praise where praise is due of course. This thread is one of the longest I’ve read both from you as a writer, and on Althanas proper, and you’re to be commended for completing it and doing so with such style, so, on with the judgement!

Story (24/30)

Continuity: (8) Although set over a relatively long time, each event connects and refers where appropriate. There is a real sense of scale not just within the thread, but referring to older events too. You have clearly done your research into the history of Althanas!

Setting: (9) Living, breathing, pulsating world. Simple and effective but brilliantly done. I especially implore your use of sensory descriptions and non-direct descriptions. Describing a bed not for its concrete properties but the reasons it was built for in Xem’Zund’s tower was especially genius.

Pacing: (7) Difficult to perfect pacing with a thread of this length, and it slacked towards the end when Caden and Savas parted ways. It felt almost rushed, considering the bulk and the well timed events that preceded it. Tempo flowed nicely in the court room and the battle outside the tower, seamless but not quite polished to get an 8 or more.

Character (29/30)

Dialogue: (9) No 10 this time, as although it’s witty, fun, to the point and utterly in character, your npc interaction was a little trite. Xem’zund’s speech especially switched from high brow and overly dramatic arch-villain to semi-casual Eastender’s extra (Dallas I suppose works more for you :p). To get a nine you really need to pull some crackers, and there are a lot of crackers in this. Your rhetoric in the court was especially done, and although many cringe at coloured text, you use it appropriately to add (no pun intended) colour to speech where otherwise you’d have to overcomplicate it with thick technique.

Action: (10) Ah-ha! A ten, there we go. This thread did action right in every way. You’ve literal face-crunching bone breaking blood soaked violence of the pointy hat inspired variety, interaction between characters, NPCs and the environment, and you describe people’s motions and reactions to words, sounds and sights with upmost diligence.

Persona: (10) A devilish understanding of who your characters are, and, dare I say, Savas is turning into a bit of a Caden wannabe/nemesis/fanboi – the dynamic between them would make for an excellent sitcom. I don’t need to tell you who your characters are, and how you write, I don’t need any explanation at all.

Writing (19)

Technique: (7) Solid but repetitive technique used throughout. Your coloured text usage is excellent, and your use of letters, diary entries and the like is always interesting and rewarding to read. Several awkward run on sentences and one line paragraphs are useful in moderation, but be careful not to make whole posts hammer blow anecdotes and simple sentences.

Mechanics: (6) Sadly, much weaker show here than anything previous (or perhaps I’m paying more attention out of sheer envy). Elision out of dialogue and several mistypes detract from your score.

Clarity: (6) Everything was described to crystalline clarity but, working with no many NPCs has it’s downside. If you’re going to use so many names, and I can see why coloured text helps here, be careful not to use them too much or too little, as they need to be burnt into the reader’s mind to be memorable when referred to 30 or so posts down the line.

Wild Card: (9) I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. When I see a post of yours appear I’ve read it before you’ve even cracked your knuckles. You are a pleasure to read without a shadow of a doubt, and I long to be Caden’s apprentice, hands down. Your command of the story and characters is awe-inspiring, but be careful to not let yourself get carried away knowing this will carry you through to good scores. You write well, and with flair, but it needs tightening up and perhaps, in places (hypocritical comment of the year coming up!) toning down a bit.

Total: 81/100


Spoils & Experience:

Caden Law receives 6673 xp and 1080 gold.

Savas Tigh receives 1227 xp and 1080 gold.

Your equipment spoils except the bone items are approved. You will have to run their effects past the Realm of Greeting when you next level up or update your character profile.

Thread to be moved pending Judge's Choice nomination!

[Silence Sei]

GP-Exp added.

Wow Caden, You and me leveled up in the same day, maybe that means we should quest together now that you're free! : D