The Catacombs of Scara Brae: Dead Sun Rising

[Caden Law]

Sortasolo. Sortanot. You'll see.The University of Scara Brae was, if nothing else, progressive: It actually had a Wizard on staff, despite heavy opposition from the well-connected twists over at the Ordo Malleus. The Provost, a hard-nosed ex-knight who still kept his axe for grinding, had a nasty habit of telling them where to shove their libraries of arcane knowledge if they didn't want someone thoroughly trained in the safe handling and maintenance of it on staff at all times.

The Wizard in question was one of only a handful of such practitioners on the entire island. The only ones actually sanctioned by the Crown to operate out in the open. Scara Brae had a certain problem with amateurs and outright criminals, particularly with the wyrmfolk brood-covens and the lethal magi sometimes employed by the Scourge. That was where the Ordo came in. But the Ordo, much like its Salvic inspirations, had a nasty habit of getting out pitchforks and torches and letting the Thaynes sort the ashes. Those who operated with sanction didn't sleep much. And the University's Wizard, who spent his spare time researching what lurked in the shadows beneath Scara Brae, slept even less than the rest of them.

His name was Judd Eisenmas, though the plate on his study's door only listed it in Sideways Diamonic and most of his students, if you could call them that, knew him by his Sorcerous Name of Redwind. He was a man with a pasty Salvic complexion, brown hair and eyes that looked red in the proper lighting. He had a stubble-beard on his chin and a permanent case of five-o'-clock shadow everywhere else. His hair was a badly trimmed mess and he was rail thin from not eating nearly enough. He actually looked right for the type of practitioners the Malleus was so hellbent on burning at the stake. One of the core reasons they didn't was the fact that Judd had spent several years working in the City Guard as the founding member of its forensic alchemy squad. He still had personal connections to Left-Handed Durris. Still went out for drinks with some of his old Guard buddies, when they could haul him off University grounds.

And he still spent long nights poring over information about something the rest of the city had seemingly forgotten: the Catacombs of Scara Brae.

Two years ago, the Catacombs were discovered by accident (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?t=10177) when a low-level Scourge decoy fell down an empty well in the Temple district. Durris had managed to convince the Queen to authorize expeditions into the Catacombs, but only a few parties ventured in and...something strange happened.

They never came out, except for when they never went in.

Judd spent the better part of two months trying to figure it out. A number of adventurers went into the Catacombs -- he knew all of their names and had several of their wills as a precaution -- but they didn't seem to have ever gone in at all. One, Teric Bloodrose, had apparently left Scara Brae more than a month before he set foot in the Catacombs. Rumor had it that this was the same man who helped to kill Saint Denebriel. Another, Xen Dasen, didn't even seem to exist at all. Judd had hair samples of him, had tried tracking spells, and still couldn't prove the man had ever existed. Another still actually sent Judd a letter once -- an Aeraul Smythe -- commenting that he had memories of going in but none of coming out.

Judd almost discounted him when the man added that he could remember taking part in some odd tournament. But too many of the descriptions he gave seemed to match obscure bits of lore that kept turning up in Judd's studies of the University archives.

Research was slow going. Judd was retired from forensics, but the Guard still called him in as a consultant from time to time. He had to contend with class after class of rookie witch-hunters looking to pick him apart; to study him as if he was their enemy, rather than someone trying to teach them about the enemy. And he taught some of the amateurs too, just enough to keep them from killing themselves. His personal library was never the same room for more than a week at a time either. It didn't move, didn't change; the books rotated. It was a concession to the Ordo. Every week, Malleus inquisitors came calling, ransacked the joint, then threw everything back in no real order. Judd had to spend days just trying to find where everything was, and then they'd wreck it again.

This week was, fortunately, less hellish than others. Judd sat alone at his desk, clad in his red bedroom robe with his Hat standing off to the side. He heard the steady patter of rain, was bathed in the flickering glow of lamplight from several directions at once, and had the security of two concentric layers of hexagrammatical wards built into the room. It wasn't enough to keep him from having nightmares whenever he dozed off, but Judd was a Wizard. He would take what he could get.

And tonight, he had gotten a phrase.

"Rises the Amethyst Sun," he read, translating from a variant of Diamonic that was so old most of the very concepts it relied on were barely understood anymore. The Althanas of today didn't have anything close to kébraffle, for instance, nor could it even be approximated in most modern languages. Judd had to translate it through several less ancient forms of Diamonic, then into Raiaeran, then into common. It was a patch job at best.

And Judd knew it was probably close to being right, since his speaking the words was immediately followed by an uncharacteristic crack of thunder and lightning outside. The storm was too soft for that. Should have been too soft for that.

Thunder again. Judd held up his hand and summoned his rod from the shelf. It was a metallic club covered in runes and oddly placed lines; a ferrourge's weapon of choice.

Judd waited patiently, not looking up from his notes.

There was no thunder this time. Just a hard rap at the door.

It was well past two in the morning. It was raining and thundering outside. Judd was tampering with forces he did not -- could not -- fully understand. And now he had a visitor.

"What could possibly be wrong about that," he wondered, taking aim on general principle.

[Caden Law]

The door did not explode.

This was noteworthy because the Wizard called Blueraven had seen a lot of doors explode over the years. He had blown more than a few to splinters and ash himself, and even kicked a couple right off the hinges with old fashioned Salvic manliness and heavy-duty boots he had no business owning. Let alone wearing. Constantly. He was about as close to perfectly familiar with exploding doors as you could get, to the point that he could tell you each and every phase of the blast -- especially when magic was involved. First, the door bulged a little bit at the point of impact. Then there might be a flash of light through the cracks or along the seams, especially if it was wood. Then the hinges would fail and the frame would warp.

Then it was all over but the bleeding. Splinters might not seem like much on their own, but set them on fire and throw them at a target with enough force and in large enough numbers...

Caden still remembered seeing his first fatality as an adventurer. It was a cannon fodder fighter the old Patton Ventures company had picked up in a town whose name Caden only remembered in notes. Young guy. A vampire's territorial blast-door trap reduced him to a spread of bloody hamburger meat all the way outside the building.

What happened to the door of Redwind's study was not like that. In point of fact, it was like little Caden had ever actually seen and it made him glad that he had the forethought of being Out of the Way when it happened. A tightly focused spray of debris -- metal shaving, dust, so on and so forth -- flayed right through the door like a weaponized sandblaster. The stream spread out almost instantly as it passed into open air, shaping into the outlines of a dozen different runes and interconnecting lines; anyone unfortunate enough to actually be standing there in front of the door would have lost a few internal organs in the process.

The runes slammed into the opposing wall, and lines of blue light shot out on opposite sides of the hallway. Caden was trapped. And the lines were already moving in.

He held up one hand, took a deep breath and inhaled, snapping his fingers as he did so.

The lines froze solid as he tore the energy out of them. The runes locked into place, and snow fell in layers along the path of every single grain of dust and metal shaving. It was a dirty trick, but it was an effective one. It bought him time to shout, "Judd! Stop being a dick!"

"...Caden?" Redwind called from his office. Caden patiently stepped up to the door, presenting himself. He had taken off the armor since Scara Brae was a lot more peaceful than most parts of the world nowadays. He still wore the trappings of brazen Wizardry though, now with the added burden of a staff of power and a soldier's sword that was still worn with some pride on his back. A rod hung off his belt, and there was a great big bowie knife opposite it.

And the scars. Caden could not take off the scars, or the Sorcerer's Mark forever branded on his cheek.

"How in seven hells have they not arrested you yet?" Judd asked. Caden could see one of his eyes through the improv peephole left by the metal spray. His old friend looked more exhausted than Caden did. And Caden had been in a damned war.

"My charming personality and the threat of divine retribution. I'm on a first-name basis with Y'edda," he replied with an easy shrug.

It took Judd a long, long second to realize that Blueraven wasn't joking.

"You're...we've got a lot to talk about, don't we."

"Bet your red Hat on it."

"Come in. I'll see to it we've got some tea. This is going to be a longer night than usual."

[Caden Law]

Wizards are secret keepers. It's one of the most defining things about them. The word arcane itself, used so often to define the powers they draw upon and the knowledge they burden themselves with, is an old word for something secretive. They are also an incredibly varied bunch, just as prone to knifing each other in the spine at the literal drop of a Hat as they are to defend each other tooth and bloody nail with no expectations of reward or thanks. Wizards are taught by individual masters, in universities, by old dusty books passed down from father to son, mother to daughter. Collectively, they are their own best friend and worst enemy. An old saying, recorded from the words of the White Lady Anon, puts it best: A Wizard Is.

Wizards are secret keepers. But it's best to remember exact wording: secret keepers. Plural. Among themselves, Wizards gossip like housewives. They form alliances, rivalries, friendships clad in adamantine and bitter hatreds that burn cities. The Wizards Blueraven and Redwind went back decades -- they both came from the same general order, anchored in the same region, and both left for roughly similar reasons at the same times in their lives. They met in Scara Brae just before the Corpse War in Raiaera and hit it off. And while they were Wizards, they were also men: friendships might get dusty, might get old, might even decay to nothing, but they are never forgotten and it doesn't take much to renew them.

Caden told Judd everything about the war. He told him everything about the trip north, about the death of Saint Denebriel, and Judd became the first -- possibly the only -- person to learn of the true death of Xem'zund. He took notes. Caden didn't mind. Judd even learned of his friend's ascension to Sorcerer, and dutifully recorded what Caden told him of the mechanics. He'd probably kill himself someday trying to obtain the same power or something close to it. He might even succeed. The Althanas of tomorrow could yet hold more like the Forgotten eras before it, but Caden didn't care.

When he was done explaining his own story, he took a long sip of tea and said, "None of that is why I'm here."

Judd stopped taking notes so abruptly his pen almost tore the paper. He adjusted his glasses, looked up and met Caden eye to eye from across a big, book-covered desk. He waited.

"Tell me what you know about the Catacombs of Scara Brae."

Thunder rolled, just as both of them knew it would. The universe operates on certain principles, after all, and one of the reasons Wizards can be bloody well lethal is that they're aware of them. Not necessarily well informed or particularly savvy about it since a lot of Wizards end up dying horribly by trying to lawyer around with the rules -- but still aware. Judd leaned back and fiddled with his glasses some more.

"Surprised you know about them. It's like everyone in the city but me has forgotten everything that doesn't involve keeping people out. I've gotten one or two parties -- literally one or two -- to go down there. The first died. The second...I don't even know what to make of it. How'd you hear of them?" he asked.

"N'Thayn'sal," Caden replied. "An alternate version of Althanas where everything that could go wrong, did, and in the worst way possible. Zombie empires, lichcraft, dying stars, wars in heaven, dead gods...the list goes on."

Judd stared at him.

"I'll tell you more later. Long story short: the Catacombs were mentioned in the tome I brought back with me. Which now rests with its original author, Greyspine. Something big is buried under this city. Big and nasty and viciously powerful."

After a pause, Judd shrugged. "Doesn't surprise me. Alright. The Catacombs are old. That's all I can say about them with absolute certainty, although I'm reasonably confident that whatever is down there is evil. Especially now that you've said that. It's a great big network of tunnels and chambers layered on and inside of each other, clearly affected by some kind of background magic. I can tell because what little I've got to go on about it hints at there being far larger chambers underground than should be possible; rooms with ceilings higher than the Palace rooftops, for instance. There're at least two full-blown civilizations down there. Maybe three, maybe more. Undead as well, for whatever they're worth. Whatever is down there is also...irradiated, I think would be a good term for it. Or maybe contaminated. Have you been to the Temple district yet?"

Caden shook his head no.

"Around the entrance -- a big, empty well and some statues -- bars keep etching themselves into the dirt. Leaves fall in strange patterns, and liquids spatter the same way. Blood too for what it's worth. Since the locals keep cleaning it all up, there's hardly any sign of whatever taint is spewing out of that thing. The best I've been able to do is guess at it being some kind of Diamonic, but even that's pushing it. You can feel it when you get close enough though, and it's...it's not as strong as it was when they first opened the Catacombs. Woke me out of a sound sleep and left me praying in a Guard privy for three days straight."

"Sounds like I'm up against worse than I thought," Caden said, though any nervousness didn't show on his face. "What did you mean by one or two though?"

Judd told him about the first team and how they were slaughtered, and about the second and how reality seemed to shift so that they'd never gone down at all.

"Weird," Caden said.

"Wyrd," Judd replied, using a Y just because he could. "Almost all of the adventurers who went down there the first time around have vanished. The only ones left are Teric Bloodrose, who you seem pretty...familiar with, who went on to kill Denebriel, and a half-orc named Aeraul Smythe. He's still on the island if you're interested..."

[Aeraul Smythe]

It was late into the afternoon the next day and the rain still hadn't let up. Life in the city went on. Especially if you knew where to look. Scara Brae was surprisingly clean as port cities and tourist traps go, but it still had places that were less than moral. Fight clubs were common in the shadows of the Dajas Pagoda, ranging from short-lived, spur-of-the-moment beatdowns that drew spectators to long-running enterprises organized and protected by the Scourge. Even the Guards got in on it from time to time. For her part, Queen Valeena didn't mind so much.

Scara Brae wasn't independent because it was nice, after all. One of the reasons that kept it from being invaded was that it had a large, combat-trained population whose members knew how to weaponize anything from corpse dust to shoe laces to beer and candle wicks -- and if the island was ever invaded, none of them would have anywhere to go or anything to lose. Bloodsport also helped break up the monotonous labor of the docks, the shouting of the shops, and the pounding of constant construction, demolition and renewal. Scara Brae was alive.

So was its most infamous, long-lasting fight club: the Zirnden. It had gone through no fewer than ten incarnations over the past decade alone. It had been burned down, torn down, busted by cops, annihilated by Scourge defectors, blown up by magi, ransacked by looters, and even ritually sacrificed to summon a demon -- and those were just some of the 'endings' that had become well known. But it came back. It always came back, whether under the old management or new; whether it had the cage or not. The Zirnden was more than a physical place nowadays. It was a concept, empowering and enduring, and it would not be brought low by the mere destruction of some shell made out of wood and metal and concrete.

The people of Scara Brae needed it. For implicit protection, for stress release, for sheer bloody thrills -- the Zirnden was there. And it always would be.

Of late, the Zirnden had been reincarnated as a large underground chamber far inland from the docks, carved into what must've been solid bedrock if the walls were any indication. It stood free and laughed blood under the weight of a Guard-owned supply house, but chief way in or out was a tunnel from the wine cellar of a tavern near the Pagoda. Caden had been over the tunnel's path and found that it actually passed right through part of the Catacombs, apparently without either interacting. He tested the walls as he passed where they should've intersected and found nothing but a slight chill.

When he actually made it to the Zirnden, he found about what you might expect of a place thriving on its own illegality. It was one part speak-easy, two floors of dining and drinking, and one enormous cage hanging over a deep, empty pit. The only ways in or out were a pair of doors bolted shut on opposing sides. The cage shuddered on heavy anchor chains, the kind that could still a galleon in a hurricane. It shuddered because people were fighting in it.

There were four of them all total. Another one lay in a broken heap in one of the corners, and the sixth actually hung backwards with his head stuck out of the cage wall. It was chaos, but there was a method to it and Caden could see as much even before he took a stand where the spectators were gathered at their thickest.

One of the dead men, and they were dead, wore a tunic marked by an anchor. So did one of the men still fighting. The other dead man sported a red hood that now hung in tatters from his burnt, broken, busted neck. So did one of the remaining fighters.

Their opponents were clearly established as a team by the arm bands they were wearing, which was about the only thing they had in common. Immediately, Caden focused in one the big one. He seemed to be in charge, and he fit the description Judd had provided.

He had most of a head on everyone else in the cage. He had the brutal musculature of an orc and the body language of a human martial artist -- although not a very good one. Years of warfare showed Caden flaws in the orc's stances almost before he shifted into them. His body language also gave away the fact that he normally wore longer, less practical clothes; Caden knew because that's what he did as a Wizard. Every kick, every sidestep, every jump; the orc was used to dressing in some kind of robe or long tunic that might get tangled between his legs or caught on his feet. He moved his hands during each punch or block, as if compensating for baggy sleeves even though his current shirt didn't have any.

He didn't fight like any orc Caden had ever laid eyes on. And that made him a few notches short of terrifying. This, he knew, was Aeraul Smythe.

At exactly the same instant Caden made the identification, Aeraul ducked under his opponent's right arm. It was a big man, not as tall as the half-orc was, but easily as muscular. One swing was literally enough to send blue sparks crackling through the air like a leashed lightning strike. Thunder rolled in the Zirnden and the cage walls glowed for a fraction of a second as Aeraul circled around.

A palm strike.

A godsdamned palm strike.

The man's entire skull visibly cracked and rippled from the point of impact, sending a squirt of blood from the opposite ear as veins burst in his eyes and half of his teeth came tumbling out of a broken, dislocated jaw. There was a wave of smoke accompanying the blow, quickly obscuring the damage it caused, and then the fighter's entire body snapped to one side and staggered a few paces as if on autopilot.

He collapsed on the spot.

Dead.

From one good palm strike.

"Well," Caden mumbled as the crowd literally roared into his ears. "Can see why Judd didn't interview him too many times."

Caden shifted to look at the other two fighters, but it was already over. Aeraul's partner, a human monk or someone dressed like it, had already killed his opponent. Caden looked just in time to see the man hit his own opponent from the cage's ceiling with what looked like a knee to the scalp. Head and neck trauma did the rest, with a lot less blood and show than Aeraul's palm hit had accomplished.

The winners were announced by a bona fide gnome with a crowd cone, running around the cage's roof and dragging out every vowel for all it was worth. Caden barely deciphered their names: Aeraul and some guy named Rowan or Rowen. They had a fancy team name in Black Sun orc-speak, which actually translated as the punchline to an Akashiman sex joke.

Caden waited as attendants brought ramps up to the doors and let the survivors out. He watched them get mobbed by fans, offered everything from spare change to free drinks to bared breasts, and then watched them as they claimed a table near the pit and started racking up a bar tab. Most of it was the human. Aeraul seemed fairly reasonable. At least, Caden hoped he was.

"Okay," the Wizard said to himself as he approached the table. "Let's see what happens next..."

[Aeraul Smythe]

Aeraul Smythe had been asked a lot of absurd questions tonight. Most of them came from half-drunk female fans asking whether or not the rumors about half-orcs were true. Aeraul wasn't aware what the rumors were and made it a point of not knowing. Half the reason he had partnered with someone like Rowan was because the human was better looking and had a habit of attracting most of the attention from fans of every race and gender. Aeraul had also been asked if he could set things on fire, if he'd like to go pro, where his horde was...so on and so forth.

But no one had ever asked him what the blue-clad Wizard did, let alone in the way that he did it.

Blueraven, as he identified himself, literally swept aside a crowd of people from the table. One second they were there, the next they were all being compressed on the far side of the room without anyone the wiser for how or why. As the Wizard sat down opposite Aeraul and an increasingly belligerent Rowan, ice literally formed in the air. It took a scholar's eye to spot how it appeared in rhythm with Blueraven's breathing. It was thin, tall enough to reach the ceiling, and leaving an area wide enough to fit the table and its remaining occupants in relative comfort.

If anyone had any ideas about attacking Blueraven for hogging their champions, they stopped the instant eyes were set upon the Wizard's wide-brimmed Hat, with its narrow point and thick supporting belt. How anyone could even balance those things must've been a form of magic in and of itself.

"We don't want any trouble," Rowan said, except he slurred it into we dohn wan enny trubblesh. Aeraul remained stone-faced at the display of power, though he was privately having a mild panic attack. It's not every day one gets visited by a Wizard. It's even rarer to be met by one with obvious power, and an absolute death sentence to time it the way Blueraven did.

"I'm sorry," the Wizard said, holding up a hand in surrender. "I didn't mean to make that big a mess of things. I'm the Wizard Blueraven and I just want to talk."

"About?" Aeraul asked.

"Your experiences in the Catacombs of Scara Brae," Blueraven replied, leaning forward and steepling his fingers.

"...I never went down there," Aeraul mumbled, in much the same way as any man who's convinced he's gone insane.

Blueraven's glasses glimmered almost opaque. He exhaled magic, materializing as ethereal feathers between his table-braced elbows. "Exactly," he said.

[Aeraul Smythe]

Aeraul told him everything. He told Blueraven details that he hadn't even shared with Redwind. He spoke above the drunken rumblings of his partner and below the external clamour of the Zirnden's patrons. He spoke at length of the Catacombs' strange atmosphere, of the countless eerie writings, and of the alien cultures dwelling in the dark. Kobolds that had degenerated into rabid pack hunters. Fungi that walked like men. Whispers in the dark, shadows that moved, and even the footprints he could only remember in hindsight.

"And the scale of it," he said at one point. "I could swear on my mother's grave, Blueraven, that the Catacombs host chambers larger than this entire city. Places that don't fit in our world. Stepping into them, it felt like we were stepping outside of time and space and going...somewhere else. I don't know how to explain it."

He actually stopped for a sip of his drink at that point. Rowan had fallen asleep on the table by now, sufficiently tanked and familiar with the story that he didn't care to hear it any further.

"And there was a laugh too. Ghostly but I could hear it. And...I think there were seven of us? Eight? People kept appearing and disappearing. I still think the thief girl was...taken by those things. We called them fungans. They didn't have bones, Wizard. I'll never forget how they moved, how they shot without eyes..."

"What's the last thing you remember?" Blueraven asked.

Aeraul thought carefully and said, "We, Teric and I, we managed to defeat this big knight-thing. It was a close fight. I broke ribs, I could swear it, and the old man was just worn to his bones from exhaustion. I don't think I've ever had to fight so hard in my life, even here. We couldn't kill it. Teric had to trick it into killing itself. Bounced its hammer off some kind of magic lock, crushed its own chest in. I took its sword after that and...and I can remember using it elsewhere," Aeraul admitted this last part somewhat hesitantly. "In a tournament or something..."

Blueraven nodded. "Focus on the Catacombs for now. What happened after you beat the guardian?"

"...nothing?" Aeraul shrugged. "Just...nothing. I woke up in bed the next day and it was actually two days earlier and life went on. I don't know what to make of any of it. What do you think could have happened?"

[Caden Law]

"Paradox," Caden said later that night, sitting alone on a bench in the middle of the city. He was just close enough to the Temple district to feel the taint that Judd had told him about. It was simultaneously dry and clammy on his sixth senses, and even on his skin for that matter. Caden felt the hairs of his arms and legs standing on end, and tasted something like cold vanilla on the tip of his tongue. Caden reached out with the same skills he used to detect and manipulate temperatures, and even with those he could feel a pattern.

And it was a damned disconcerting one.

Turning letters and even whole words Sideways is considered a vital skill to Wizardry. It keeps the uneducated from reaping the kinds of power that a Wizard can possess, nevermind the amount of paper it saves. To the uneducated eye, a Sideways word simply looks like a bar code. They can only see it the way they see murky water from a pier: only the surface and whatever happens to breach it. Metaphorically speaking, a Wizard dunks his head into the same water and finds it all crystal clear. Caden had heard rumors that some of the older, more experienced Wizards could turn whole books Sideways so that normals -- and even lesser Wizards like Caden -- could only see them as a single line.

The catch is that turning things Sideways requires some kind of surface to write on. Stone, paper, even human skin; it has to be solid and flat.

There were words floating in the air around the Temple district, hidden just out of sight of ordinary eyes. Words that Caden could only infer the presence of through his Wizard's senses and his ability to manipulate the arcane.

Every single one of them was Sideways. No matter what angle Caden tried to look at them from, they were Sideways. It was magically impossible, but it was happening anyway. All the words were in a language that reminded him of the Henge Sorcerous where he'd been Marked an equal to Forgotten magi past, but there was just enough of a difference that he could only guess at most of the meanings. Diamonic of any kind was like that: shift a single accent mark in a throwaway word and you could turn an entire love letter into a hellfire spewing death curse. Judd, who managed to top Caden when it came to written language, had been working on this for two years without fully cracking what was written around the district.

Caden, however, wasn't patient enough to put that much time or effort into it. He was on a timetable and he had put off Scara Brae long enough. The Wizard shut down his extra senses one by one, then looked around for the patterns that Judd had mentioned. He didn't spot anything until a lantern came tumbling out of a second floor window nearby; the result of a loud, spirited argument of some kind. The lantern hit the ground and shattered, spilling oil and fire all over well swept cobblestone.

It took an attentive eye to notice, but the fire and oil spread in the likeness of a claw. Each and every wisp of flame arced up into the brisk night air like claws reaching for the moon. Even the smoke, what little of it Caden could see in the near-dark of Scara Brae at night, seemed to grip at the air around it. Caden watched and waited. The fire burned out quickly enough, leaving behind a pitch black scorch mark on the ground.

And this too was shaped like a claw.

[Caden Law]

"The hells you wanna talk about at this hour?" Judd asked at an hour perilously close to dawn. He didn't have mere bags under his eyes; he had luggage for a family of ten. Like most Wizards, he had gone to sleep in the kinds of clothes you could run for your life in: a long nightshirt accompanied by thickly sewn pants and socks that could make good tender if things got desperate. As was customary for Wizards of Judd's order, he actually slept in a Hat. This one was long and sloppy, ending in a soft point and lacking any sort of brim.

Judd hadn't worn it when Caden knew him a few years back. Judging by the wards blatantly sewn into it, he wore it now because he needed the damn thing just to keep the nightmares at bay.

"Sorry," he greeted, letting himself into his old friend's ramshackle apartment. Scara Brae was cosmopolitan and urbane, but it was still a living clash of progress and a total lack of foresight on the part of anyone near a set of blueprints. Judd's apartment was a two-room proof of that: it was a bedroom with a toilet room attached. No kitchen, no bath, nothing of the sort. Bad insulation meant that, at this time of year, it was already colder inside than out. Everything was a decent quality wood, the bed was surprisingly well made, and Judd had provided a shelf of arcane tomes to accompany his small work desk.

As was the case with most Wizards -- with most men in general -- Judd Eisenmas had a hell of a time separating Work from Life. The low wick and oil of his one lamp was ample proof of that.

"I've been digging around the city. I have an id-oh. Oh," Caden said, suddenly struck by how awkward the situation was. Judd had trouble separating Work from Life, but there were apparently exceptions to the rule. "Sorry to interrupt?" he asked in a whisper.

"...I'm not seeing double, am I?" Judd's lady friend asked. She was pretty enough. Not up to snuff with a lot of the Elves Caden had been blueballed by over the years, but certainly attractive in her own right. A brunette with hair dyed green at the ends, bright blue eyes and full red lips. She was paler than either of the Salvic-born men in the room with her, and wore little more than an Akashiman yukata and her Temple necklace to bed. The necklace was hemp and beads, accented by a few golden chainlinks.

"Not at all, dear," Judd yawned. "Just a friend from work who has no concept of sleeping. D'you mind if I step out?"

"Go for it," she said, rubbing sleep from her eyes and then grinning wickedly. Her teeth practically shined even in a room lit by nothing but moon and what was being cast off Caden's wand. "But you're gonna have to make it up to me..."

It didn't take a Wizard to figure out what that meant. Caden felt a pang of envy just thinking about it.

"Right then," Judd said hastily, then grabbed Caden by the shoulder and dragged him right back out into the hallway. "Let's take a walk."

"You have got to explain that one to me," Caden said once the door was safely shut. He whistled once they were down at ground level. "Guessing by the necklace...that was a Priestess of Y'edda?"

"Novitiate, yes. It's their second rank. There's Initiate, Novitiate, some crap I can't think of, then eventually you get to full-blown priests and priestesses. But for outsiders like us, they're all priestesses."

"Do they all not wear underwear?"

"Wouldn't you like to know?" Judd asked.

"...yes, actually. For research purposes," Caden said with an absolutely straight face.

[Caden Law]

Once Judd determined they were a safe distance from his apartment, he went from lockjawed nerd to outright braggart in ten seconds flat. Caden learned more of his fellow Wizard's sex life in ten minutes than he had ever wanted to know in a lifetime.

He also learned some relatively useful bits and pieces that could be distilled like so: "Her name is Rita Venker and she's a first year novitiate, just one year younger than me. I actually taught a class she was required to take as part of her magic awareness studies, then we hit it off over a game of Ten Thrones and it just went from there. We're not married. Or anything close to it. Juggling our duties to Temple and Arcana is a bit of a chore. Most nights, we just share a bed and mumble things at each other. Now and then though..."

Judd actually sighed here.

Caden considered his past experiences with women and managed to keep the bitterness out of his voice when he said, "She makes life worth living."

Judd chuckled. "Wouldn't go that far. But pretty damn close."

"I notice you were in such a hurry to leave her in peace that you left your rod," Caden said. "Sloppy."

Judd came a hair's breadth short of tripping as the realization struck him. It was little different from a slap to the face for one Wizard to point out that another was unarmed. Without so much as a word, Caden handed over his wand and Judd took up the task of lighting their path down the dreary, foggy streets of a Scara Brae pre-dawn.

"Heavy," he noted. "Could slap someone senseless with this thing. Heavy spiritually too. And...the synch is odd."

"It's from an alternate timeline," Caden told him. "N'Thayn'sal. I told you about it before."

"So you did," Judd sighed. "What is it you wanted, Caden? What did you find?"

"Confirmed the taint. Met with Smythe. I'm pretty sure someone managed to tweak his personal timeline somehow, with the net effects being that it changed everyone else's where the Catacombs are concerned. Has he been down there since?"

"No. Obviously, he's never been down there at all but-"

"But. When I...encountered Denebriel, and when I spoke to Zundalon, I learned that Time is...malleable. It's almost like a liquid, constantly shifting around without rhyme or reason or even a discernable pattern. And once you've moved through it, you become that much more resistant to any attempt to use it against you."

"Cut to the chase, Caden. I'm tired."

"I'm thinking about taking Smythe with me on an expedition into the Catacombs. Whatever's down there, I'm pretty sure we could kill it. Somehow."

Judd stopped walking. Caden kept on for a few more paces, then looked over his shoulder and waited.

"In that case," Judd started, stopped, thought, then continued: "You might want to look into taking his partner too."

[Leaf on the Wind]

It was just short of noon the next day when Rowan Stormwind heard a knock at his door. Which was more like a sledgehammer hitting a gong, given how hung over he was from last night. Hung over and sore besides. Competing in the Zirnden was a spectacularly bloody affair for the losers, but the winners rarely got out without being banged up in their own right. And he was still recovering from a particularly nasty stab wound he'd received less than a month earlier.

He scraped himself up out of bed and almost tripped over a pile of his own clothes en route to the door. He wore nothing more than a pair of pants and the gauze wrappings around his midsection. His sword, tied into its sheathe for much of the past two years, sat gathering dust in a corner. It was little more than a cane on most days.

"I'm comin', dammit!" he shouted, then propped himself up next to the door and waited for the pounding to stop. It didn't. If anything, it got worse. It was like listening to a demented pixie play drums behind his eyes, accompanied by a desert lodging itself securely in his mouth. Rowan's stomach churned as he undid the locks. It was an uphill struggle not to vomit as he pulled the door open...

...and found himself face to face with the debatably neutral Wizard Blueraven.

"'Syou," Rowan noted. "Whaddayou want?"

"Have you ever paid a visit to Scara Brae's Agatér Cemetary? The one with the mausoleums and the above-ground crypts for the Dasherhaven family, among others? Used to be tended by a big ugly oaf named Kellian Dirthauler? Ringing any bells yet or should I step out of the way right about...yeah."

Blueraven stepped to one side and, about a second later, Rowan demonstrated his talent at projectile vomiting. Ten feet, clear off the balcony-walkway that lead to his apartment, into a row of bushes and weeds that may as well have grown there specifically to catch it. Blueraven whistled once to show that he was impressed, then Rowan staggered by him and emptied the rest of his stomach off the balcony and into the shrubs.

"I'm guessing your neighbor below doesn't appreciate you doing that," Blueraven said.

"Not my problem," Rowan spat between hurls. When he was done, he had a cold sweat going and his hands were shaking. Blueraven studied him for a moment before obviously making the assumption that Rowan had thrown up so much over the past few years that he was able to aim it clear of his own lips. How his teeth were still white was anyone's guess. "What do you want?"

"Sober now?" Blueraven asked.

"Close as I'm gonna get for the day," Rowan answered, straightening off the balcony. "Answer the godsdamned question already."

"I want to know what happened the night you tried going into Agatér Cemetary."

Rowan visibly twitched. "I didn't."

"There are no records saying you did," Caden admitted. "No eyewitnesses to vouch for the fact that the dead were walking, or a little girl was found dead and mutilated near the gates...but you and I both know differently, Rowan. So let's cut to the chase. What happened?"

Rowan sneered and said nothing.

Blueraven waited, then sighed and bowed his head to inevitability. Rowan Stormwind's type were the kind of people who lived by ironclad ways of doing things, whether they admitted it or not. As a Wizard, Blueraven could see that. And he could dread it. And he could do nothing to avoid it.

"Okay," he said. "What would it take to make you tell me what I want to know?"

Rowan didn't smile much nowadays.

But he did grin like a maniac.

[Leaf on the Wind]

Rowan got dressed. They relocated.

Picture now: Dajas Pagoda. Not the elaborate magical kung-fu arenas favored by the martial elite or the pagoda monks, but the actual pagoda itself. The one that was now rarely, if ever used for more than one or two bald-headed men practicing kata at dawn or sweeping away dust and leaves at dusk. It stood atop an artificial hill at the heart of the much larger Pagoda structure; little more than a great oriental roof atop six sturdy marble pillars, each bearing the likeness of a Thayne.

Rather tellingly, the pagoda had an empty spot for a seventh pillar. Incense burned in its place on holidays, accompanied by sacrificial offerings of silk and bags full of crushed spiders. Such ceremonies were rare. For the most part, normal people were forbidden from even coming here.

The three who stood there now were not normal people.

One was a short, bald-headed pagoda monk doing his duty. In the days when this pagoda actually saw use for fighting, it was mostly so that two people could settle their disputes in the most honest way possible: by just beating each other senseless until one or both gave up or couldn't go on. The winner was declared Right, pre-agreed terms went into effect accordingly, life went on. As the actual legal system in Scara Brae improved, this system fell out of use. But the pagoda remained, the monks remained, and there were absolutely zero laws forbidding it.

The monk was simply here as a neutral arbitrator.

The other two were combatants. The first was a tall salvic man now dressed down to what normal people would consider street clothes: boots, a white button-up shirt, pants. His gloves, Hat, coat, staff, wand, and knife all lay in a neatly organized pile to one side of the pagoda. He was wearing a pair of what looked like pilot's goggles; tougher and better suited to fighting than flimsy glasses. His rod hung loose from his belt, almost as if it were a sword.

The other was a coronian man standing about an inch shorter. He dressed in a lot of light blue and black, styled himself after an akashiman martial artist and seemed hellbent on fighting barefoot. He wore an open jacket that was short in the waist, gi pants and a tightly tied black belt, hiding his waist bandages with a sash. He had at least fifteen pounds on the taller man, and every single ounce of it was muscle. His sword hung across his lower back, still tied into its sheathe.

"What is to be contested," the monk said rather than asked. They had already been over this. What remained was ritual and tradition.

"Truth," both men said at once. The monk looked to the salvic one and nodded his head.

"I wish to know the truth of what happened to my opponent the night he didn't go into the Agatér Cemetary."

The monk nodded to the coronian.

"I wish to know my opponent's birthname."

This was an absolute excuse. But it was valid enough when the opposition was a Wizard.

"The dispute shall be contested to submission, unconsciousness, or incapacitation. I declare this legal beneath the eyes of the Thaynes and their kin. Let there be seven seconds for any heavenly contradiction."

The monk shifted through six different stances in lightning procession, each one supposedly representing a different Thayne. Mantis for Khal'jaren, crane for Y'edda, bull for Hromagh, so on and so forth. On the seventh second, he snapped back to a standing prayer and bowed his head. The coronian did so as well. The Wizard did not.

"The Thaynes are in favor. BEGIN!"

[Leaf on the Wind]

Chi pulsed to the soles of Rowan Stormwind's feet. He lurched forward, right, then left, then he was running. There was less than twenty feet between himself and the Wizard, but Rowan ran anyway. The opening strike was nothing but a fake-out: Rowan swiped at Blueraven's face, trying to grab him. The Wizard ducked away and drew his rod with a wild swing. Rowan twisted under that and came in with an uppercut that rocked the salvic man's entire body back by several staggering paces. The follow-up was an elbow to the collarbone.

Ice shattered at the point of impact. Rowan spun back one step and went for a kick to the midsection without thinking. More ice formed and shattered in the time it took to blink. Blueraven stumbled away, shards falling broken in his path, and Rowan immediately guessed what was happening.

"Barrier spell of some kind," he said out loud. "That won't work here."

And then he went for a dropkick. Blueraven swung his rod up like a baseball bat and ice walled from the floor to the ceiling where its side smacked into Rowan's feet. Just as quickly, it shattered. So too did Rowan's momentum: the ice couldn't withstand him, but it could stop him.

For a fraction of a second, he was falling. Rowan looked to the Wizard and found a pair of fingers aimed at him like a gun, power building up at their tips. He grasped thin air with his chi and spun down to the ground, crab-walking out of the way on nothing but his hands and a prayer. As he did this, there was a sound like a grenade going off and a ball of fire shot past him, hit one of the pillars and left an ugly black scorch mark in the shape of a bird.

Rowan came up with more chi still, drawing it into his hands this time.

Blazing Leaf, left hand.

Blazing Leaf, right hand.

Both attacks were little more than crudely shaped ethereal battering rams; the martial equivalent of a magic missile. Blueraven sidestepped between them and let loose with an actual magic missile and Rowan took it on his forearms with a grunt and some bruising.

"My niece can do worse than that," Blueraven commented without the slightest hint of bravado. He sounded more like a weary teacher. Rowan ducked under the follow-up magic missile and came in with a sweeping kick that the Wizard easily avoided. He followed it up with a straight kick, there was another easy dodge.

And then he twisted into point blank range and caught Blueraven in the sternum with an elbow. Ice shattered at the point of impact and the Wizard's head snapped forward into Rowan's waiting palm. More ice shattered and Blueraven hit the floor a good three or four feet away, landing hard on his head, neck, and shoulders. He lost his rod in the process.

"Let's see your niece do that," Rowan snapped.

"Hopefully not," Blueraven sighed after a few seconds, then sat up. Rowan circled him as he stood. "You're really not that good at this, are you?"

Rowan stared at him.

"Question, Hedo-san," Blueraven prompted. "How much abuse can the pagoda take?"

The old monk shrugged.

"What're you on about?" Rowan sneered, making the classic mistake of stopping. Admittedly, Blueraven had his back turned.

The Wizard performed what looked strangely like an amateur's attempt at a master's kata: feet spread with the right leading, hands drawn first to his sides, then pushed forward and then drawn back on his left. There were lines glowing down the visible skin of his neck and face, barely visible through the make of his shirt.

Whatever it was, Rowan wasn't about to let him finish it. He gathered chi into his legs once more, taking a deep breath and then launching forward. It was faster than any normal man could've ever pulled off. Olympic athletes would've had trouble managing that kind of speed. He went for a dropkick, and it was beautiful.

And, apparently, predictable.

Blueraven snapped up to the left and ice shattered in Rowan's path. The fighter reacted in a fraction of a second, gaining purchase on the air itself so that he could spin around and bring his ankle down on the Wizard's head. Ice shattered again, well short of the intended target.

Then Blueraven punched him with an ethereal fist the size of a rampaging bull.

[Caden Law]

Caden waited until after Rowan had flown all the way down the stairs and crash-landed through an old wood bench near their base. Then he calmly exhaled and shifted back into what might pass for a ready stance. Then he shook out his hands, casting off little sparks of excess energy, and went about redressing and rearming himself. The monk didn't even bother calling an end to the fight.

"Haven't seen that in a while," Hedo said instead, watching the Wizard with one wary eye that somehow glittered with amusement. "Your form's atrocious, boy, but your power's a spark short of the divine."

"You've seen Sorcery before?" Caden asked, looking to the old man with a puzzled expression. It wasn't every day that someone actually recognized his power for what it was.

But like little bald monks everywhere, Hedo was as cryptic as he was unassuming. He bowed low at the waist and declared, "The contest is over. I suggest you check your friend to make sure he isn't dead."

Then he took up a broom and started sweeping the pagoda clean without another word. Caden tried to get more answers out of him, but the little man said nothing and the Wizard gave up. He had more important things to worry about.

Thankfully, Rowan Stormwind had a body about as tough as his skull. He had indeed broken a bench -- completely shattered it in a dozen different directions, actually -- but the fighter was alive and honorbound to talk. If nothing else, he seemed to take that part seriously. Caden helped him up, waited for him to shake the cobwebs out from his landing, then badgered him with questions over the course of a short walk back to apartment that Rowan called home.

As it turned out, his story was less useful than Aeraul's: "We never even made it through the front gate," he said. "I remember there being a...a walking corpse of some kind? And then everything goes black. I looked for the folks who were there with me, but they'd either all left the island or never even got there."

"Who did you meet with that night?" Caden asked.

"Some guy named Erasmus...Andreas Erasmus. Called himself Uriel. Tall as I am, kinda pudgy, wore a lot of armor. Only thing I managed to dig up was that he was in a bar brawl a couple nights before I met him. There was a girl, a witch, with guns. Lee, Lay, Lie, something like that. I was too busy staring at her ass to get her name down. Paid a little too much attention, seemed a little excited...kinda weird even without all the crap that did or didn't or could've happened that night. Totally would've though, if you catch my drift."

As Rowan explained this part, Caden couldn't help but consider how familiar the witch sounded. He had probably run into her (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?p=85425) at some point, but couldn't -- and didn't want to -- remember the specifics.

"Sure," he said. "Go on."

"Other than that, there was an old guy. Had a thick beard, used a freaking sword cane. Aeraul actually met him once. Teric Bloodstone or Teric Bloodrose or Teric Bloodsomethingorother. You okay?" Rowan stopped, Caden kept walking for a few seconds. "You okay, Wizard? Look like you've seen a ghost..."

[Caden Law]

There is, quite literally, a spell for everything.

Need a spell tailor-made to cook eggs on a Sunday? How about some magic to make sure your dog gets walked every morning at exactly 8:00 AM? Or something to keep all the dust out, to zap flies trying to get within ten feet of you, to preserve your life against a dagger in the back or give your voice the perfect intonation for public speaking? There are spells for all of these things and more. The sheer variety of them, and how spells are utilized, is one of the driving forces dividing the various disciplines and sub-disciplines of arcanology.

Warlocks literally spend their every waking second planning to kill and avoid being killed. Plenty of them take it a step farther and plan for the day after their luck runs out. Witches devote much of their magical talents to everyday spellcraft and long term curses; feeding a village and blighting that little punk down the road with a bad case of acne and Permanent Virginitis. Diviners spend much of their time poking the fabric of existence with a stick and, on occasion, being poked back. Wizards, however, are the universe's rules lawyers.

A competent Wizard not only recognizes that there is no such thing as a coincidence, he goes out of his way to engineer them using crackpot ideas like narrative causality and reality warping roleplay. There is, in at least one Wizardly tome, a literal Rule of Dramatic Effect. One ancient Wizard-Bard actually lived by the Rule of Epic Guitar Solos, to the point that he used a combination of a billowing storm, a mountaintop, a long leather coat, a pick crafted from a dragon's tooth and a liviol guitar with spidersilk strings to bring down an entire fleet of airships.

Caden Law wasn't quite so well versed in this kind of chaos magic. But he was at least skilled enough to get away with the Screwloose Spiderweb Epiphany Monologue. It was fairly simple stuff that didn't even take a lot of supply, time or place to get the hang of. He started with an inn room and worked from there.

Intentionally bad lighting was a must. Caden used candles, cheap with guaranteed weak flames. He needed a board of some kind, preferably cork with a lot of wear and tear. Caden found one by trawling taverns and watchposts. He needed thumbtacks, and there were always thumbtacks on hand in Scara Brae. It was a side effect of the island having one of the best functioning steel industries outside of Alerar, especially in the wake of so much war on the mainland. He needed paper, lots of it, and in tiny pieces. Caden spent most of an hour and a half just cutting pieces of paper into perfect 3x3 inch squares. He needed string. Caden bought four balls of differently colored yarn.

He needed to be sweaty, tired, and filthy, so Caden put on a few extra layers under his trenchcoat and then went jogging all over the city. He stopped frequently for water, if only to help him sweat more. He needed to not be so overdressed, so he took off all the extra layers, his Hat and his coat when he got back to the inn.

All that and it needed to be night, and he needed to be alone up until the last minute or so. Caden put up a Do Not Disturb sign on his door, then ordered some room service for a few minutes before he expected to finish the spell. Then he cracked his knuckles and got to work.

"Teric Bloodrose," he said, writing the name on one of his improvised sticky notes and then tacking it to the very center of the cork board. "Seems to be at or near the heart of a vast chronal disturbance of some kind. Magicide Blade? Demigodkiller. Has apparently disappeared in time twice or more now. Survived Denebriel's...whatever she was throwing around."

He took out another note, wrote his own Name and stuck it next to Teric's. "Blueraven. Timetravel. Obviously close to the heart of the disturbance too. Unpatronized Sorcerer."

He added Rowan and Aeraul with similar mentions.

"Judd Eisenmas. Wizard. Somehow aware of the twists in Time."

"Anton Wyrmtongue, the Warlock Formerly Known As Banebram. Timetravel. Living paradox. Demons."

"Saint Denebriel. Dribbler of the Timeywimey Ball of Doom. Repeatedly self-made orphan paradox. Sufficiently dead." Knock on wood. "Unpatronized Sorceress."

"Zundalon the Cantor. Involved with Denebriel. Apocalyptic necromancer. Sorcerer empowered by Khal'jaren." Caden stopped. Went back to his own sticky note and wrote Chewtoy/Pawn of the Gods. on it.

"Jolstice Aron. Wizard. In possession of the N'Thayn'sal Greyspine's Grimoire."

"Drusilia Liadon. Mage Hunter. Marked chronal inconsistencies with the Siege of Anebrilith. Wonderful rack." He added a note for the other siegebreaker as well: "Godhand Striker. Scarybigsonofabitch. Killed Xem'zund with an armbar. Possibly dead, possibly alive. Paradox?" He looked at Drusilia's name and added a Paradox? to her as well.

He started adding others, their reasons being increasingly less well defined.

The first party that Aeraul had mentioned: Xen Dasen - Never existed?

Megryn Brintam - Never existed? / Taken by Mushroom People?

Monica the Not-Quite-As-Forgotten-As-Her-Title-Indicated - Existed at some point, if only because Judd still had a signature from her. Whoever she was.

Andreas Erasmus - Existed until he didn't, apparently. Missing since the night that Rowan's party didn't go into Agatér Cemetary.

Leigh Tyrfing - Quite literally written down as Tig Ol' Bitties. Fisappeared Dorever, ypparentla. This was actually a required part of the spell.

Joshua Cronen - Canadian?

N'Thayn'sal - Worst of All Worlds. Aborted / Being Aborted. Temporal Bad End.

Along with random figures like Xem'zund's Necrisition, Derris Warson, the Wanderers in Starlight, Nalith Celiniel, so on and so forth. There were literally dozens of people in Scara Brae alone who had appeared once, then never seemed to have existed at all.

When he could think of no more, Caden started connecting the notes with string. Blue for strong, real connections. Yellow for implicit ones. Red for guessed. Purple for conspiracy. He made it a point to use as much purple as possible.

"...is actually a man because..."

"...knew how to wiggle..."

"...Living Saint..."

"...pirate robot ninja zombie messiah..."

"...armbars, armbars, armbars, dammit..."

"...to beard or not to beard? That's the real question about you isn't it..."

"...had a beard too! Of course it all makes..."

"...Drow with a D-Cup, just like the witch..."

"...increasing anti-magic tensions..."

"...suddenly, messily, all over the place..."

"...Letho Ravenheart's mom..."

"...two goats and a prayer to Sayahu fin Col..."

"...the White Lady Anon..."

"...Tön're..."

"...lost continents..."

"...I think this is actually starting to make sense now..."

"...shit. No it's not..."

"...stars going out..."

"...stars are actually..."

"...New World Order..."

"...like everyone's being puppeted..."

"...pieces on a board, or characters in a story..."

"...who is it making you do what you do?"

"...Letho's mom again..."

"...blasted, stupid, bloody canadians...what are they?"

"...armbars..."

"...time twisting and turning, leading to..."

"...Teric is fifty-something...yes, fifty-something. Sounds about right..."

"...Rayse Valentino..."

"...who's Letho's father?"

"...history...switching out...being erased..."

"...like it's all just...some...game..."

"...hm."

The clock struck almost two hours after dusk. Caden finally became aware that his candles were going out and it was raining again outside. He tried to stay focused. He was close.

"History twisting in knots...Teric Bloodrose is...50-something...Letho Ravenheart is...40-something...should be impossible but...Teric is Letho's father, because Teric's history is missing but Letho's has nothing to contradict the theory and both of them have beards and Godhand Striker armbarred causality into making it happen and and and..."

Caden closed his eyes. Took a deep breath.

"Why the hells did I think this was gonna work? ...and why did I even think I needed to do this, anyway?"

Right on cue, there was a knock at the door. "It's unlocked!" Caden called, and the door opened. It was the servant girl who normally worked the tavern floor; inn owner's daughter, dumb as a cart full of bricks but her heart was in the right place. Which is to say that it was in the left side of her ribcage. She was about as nice as a viper, but...

"You ordered something about an hour ago, Mister Wizard, Sir, but you never actually told us what. Sorry about that. Did you want something?"

Caden pointed to the cork board. "What's the first thing that jumps out at you from this?"

Silence.

"...purple string?"

"No, no. Come here. Yes. Into the room, miss....?"

"Mija. Sir."

"Yes, Mija. Into the room, that's right. No, leave the dress on, thankyouverymuch. Now. Stand here. Like this. Yes. Look at the board. The board, dear, and try not to look so spooked out. I'm not some bird-themed rapist, you know. I'm a Wizard. Now look at the bloody board and pick something."

"...you're mental."

"Absolutely."

"Denebriel."

"Thanks," Caden said, then took out his purse, fished around in it and had the grace of multiple gods in flipping a half dozen gold coins right into the overexposed cleavage of the girl's tavern wench dress. She was literally too stunned to say anything. "That'll be all, kudos."

He ushered her out, shut the door and leaned against it. As he started to slump, the candles went out. As he neared the floor, lightning struck outside. As thunder finally went rolling through his eardrums, epiphany struck Caden Law's brain like a sledgehammer.

"Time isn't just liquid. We're all bouyant in it. Certain people displace Time just by existing. The more powerful they become, the more Time they displace. And since Time and Space are essentially one and the same, things like the Siege of Anebrilith happen twice at the same time -- even though one of them ended months before the other even started. It all ties back to Denebriel. It all ties back to Denebriel. She was such a paradox that permanently killing her caused ripples through Time and Space that we can't even see. I was closest, but I'm technically unhinged from Time to begin with so it had less effect on me. Teric sank one of the death blows on her, so it warped his entire personal timeline.

"He really could be the father of someone like Letho Ravenheart. He could be anyone's father at this point...but...wait. Why wasn't Rayse Valentino affected? Especially since so many other people seem to have been completely...removed from history by the shockwaves."

He banged his head back against the door and asked the inevitable question: "And how does any of this tie into the Catacombs of Scara Brae?"

This time, there was no answer.

[Caden Law]

The Wizard Blueraven was left with two distinct problems that he couldn't seem to reconcile.

Denebriel was dead. Caden had seen her die. He had, with the senses of both a Wizard and a Sorcerer and even a mere mage, felt the ripple of power that heralded her passing. He had seen the unbridled terror of a death absolute and unrecoverable in her eyes. And when he spoke to Xem'zund, to Zundalon, the ages old Necromancer had basically confirmed it. He was still pretty sure that the Thaynes themselves, at least one of them, had been on hand to make bloody well sure she died. In all of Time, insofar as Caden knew, Denebriel had been unique. She murdered her own father repeatedly. She had probably done or attempted the same thing to other Forgotten Ones, maybe to her other ancestors as well. But Denebriel was still special, still unique.

If people were bouyant in the sea of Time, Saint Denebriel of Salvar had been an iceberg.

With the iceberg gone, Time was still splashing around like crazy. Caden couldn't be sure if he had only noticed the worst of it or if he was only aware of the foreshocks to something bigger. As a timetraveller himself, the Wizard had some protection, but how much? And what about everyone else in the world? Was the case of Teric Bloodrose unique, or did everyone go through aborted days, weeks, months, even years without realizing it? How many people lived their entire lives only to go to sleep one day and never be born at all the next?

How did any of it tie into the thing in the Catacombs?

Caden had a good idea what it was; that it related to Draconus or N'jal in some twisted way. The Greyspine of N'Thayn'sal had been frustratingly vague about just what it was that turned the islands of Scara Brae into literal bowls of blood and death. Greyspine himself had never actually seen the devestation firsthand, reporting only an awful miasma that he learned about from fleeing refugees; and the godsawful thing they blamed for it.

Caden looked to the moon, shining through a gap in the clouds. He could still remember dead bodies visibly burning on the one in N'Thayn'sal. Bodies of what or who, he could not say and did not want to.

Didn't Althanas have multiple moons? he wondered that night, feeling a chill run down his spine at the thought. Recognizing Liquid Time was making him even more paranoid than usual. And Caden Law was a Wizard. They're a paranoid lot by necessity; murder is considered a natural way to die for them.

"I need some air," he mumbled to himself, then got up and dressed quickly. He armed himself as well, on general principle if nothing else. One does not tamper with the powers of Coincidence lightly. Caden had heard stories of other Wizards trying it and finding themselves point blank with demon-summoning cults later the same night. One poor bastard, and Caden had actually known this one, died of a falling piano in the middle of a desert. Which wasn't particularly coincidental so much as it was cosmically hilarious.

He left his armor neatly arranged under the desk, along with his staff and most of his other belongings. Then, one hand resting casually on the hilt of his sword, the Wizard Blueraven strode out into the night.

He soon wished he hadn't.

[Savas Tigh]

You never know just what might be lurking right under your nose.

Case in point: The man known to most of his friends, his employers, so on and so forth, as Yanov Cross. Yanov was, by most accounts, a mild-mannered gent who could stand to bathe more but who had his reasons for not doing so. He was an urban ascetic by most accounts, who made his living as a street sweeper and spent time studying to be an apothecary in the library. He had yet to find a master, but he was the optimistic sort of fellow that made everyone think they too could find a way to change their lives even if they were perilously close to the middle.

Yanov was close to thirty years old, unmarried and with no expectations of finding That Special Someone any time soon. He was a refugee from both the Civil War in Salvar and the Corpse War in Raiaera, knew at least three or four languages and he had a wit sharper than any street sweeper should. He had a thick but short beard, vivid green eyes, a number of scars, and he dressed without rhyme or reason. Some days he could be found wearing monastic-seeming robes, others you might find him wearing pants and a shirt but no shoes, still others he was wearing a kilt and boots.

Every other morning, you could find Yanov 'practicing' with the Dajas monks, though it was more along the lines of the sweeper watching and copying them. Somewhat poorly, but he seemed to be picking up on the language they spoke to each other and he showed a sincere interest in what they were doing. The monks didn't mind him so much.

He was quirky. He was harmless. He was likable. He was forgettable. That was how most people might see Yanov Cross if they ever even bothered seeing him at all. He was the kind of person who could sit at the very edge of Scara Brae's Red Lantern District at close to four in the morning and remain completely unnoticed. He was just there, on a bench, scribbling into a beat-up leather book while whores and street fiends stalked the night. A working girl walked to within six feet of him, stared straight at him, and never once realized he was actually there.

"Cloudy tonight," one pimp said to his partner. Both men had a little orc blood in them, which was probably why they were stuck pimping in the first place.

"Got a bad feeling about it," the other said. They passed Yanov without paying him any attention at all. "Don't think the Guard's gonna raid again, do you?"

The first pimp scoffed and they moved on. Ten minutes later, a trio of half-dressed girls walked by. Every single one of them was armed with a knife of some kind; tools of the trade in a town where a few of their friends had gone missing recently. The prostitution business in Scara Brae wasn't especially organized or tight knit, especially not with groups like the Scourge constantly trying to take over while the Guard was forever headhunting anyone who came to prominence, but word could get around quickly. Girls got in and out all the time.

It was just that most of them got out in one piece. As opposed to thirty or forty, most of which had been meticulously de-boned and a few of which had been chewed on. Goblins were the immediate culprit there, but the murders persisted even with crackdowns on the locals. There had been some talk of shutting down the Red Lantern District, but it was too...useful. Nobles had appetites. Merchants did too. Plenty of ordinary men and women did.

Yanov stopped writing long enough to reach for a piece of jerky he had laid on a silk handkerchief beside him. It was tough and chewy and tasted clean. Her name had been...

Yanov stopped and looked off into space, trying to remember it.

"Lee? Leigh? Leia? L-somethingorother..."

He looked back to his notes and set the jerky down. Then, very calmly, Yanov closed his notes and took a deep breath.

He dove forward, throwing himself to the ground and frantically scrambling back to his feet, even as solid stone shot up through the bench and shattered it into splinters. Yanov's eyes shot to one side and almost immediately, the humble sweeper felt his heart skipping beats.

"Hello, Savas," said the Wizard Blueraven. "Remember what we said about that truce?"

[Savas Tigh]

A savvier mage might've tried squirming out of it; buy time somehow, feign ignorance and try to use the environment for protection. The Dark Wizard calling himself Yanov Cross was not that nice. He spent a fraction of a second weighing his options, then replied only with a trigger phrase.

"Early worm gets the bird."

A fraction of a second later, the leather book exploded in a flash of green light and purple smoke. Savas was already running like a lunatic down the street, screaming for help as he went. Caden faltered back but the explosive spell was weak; hardly even focused on doing more than causing disorientation. It was necromancy though. The magic of it positively stank of mint and felt cold to the touch.

"SOMEBODY HELP ME!" Savas kept screaming, even as the Wizard came surfing out into the street on a wave of geomanced earth. He followed after Savas without so much as a word.

Picture now: A man in a long-sleeved shirt, a kilt, and moccs running for his life from a full-blown Wizard with murder in his eyes. One who now stinks of the taint of necromancy and who didn't look all that pleasant to begin with. Savas ran away, but only a fool would judge this for a retreat.

He dove down the first alley he could find, gambling on the presence of a window or some other escape outlet. The window wasn't there, but he had a straight shot to another street and took it. Caden followed him, upending several street walkers in the process. Savas ran into a parlour and Caden followed him through; and together they raised merry Hell on everything inside. Furniture was overturned, a wall blew wide open, at least one bystander was injured. Caden caused most of the damage.

Back out with Savas leading the way through a window, glass shattering across his shoulder and face, and it was starting to rain by the time he hit the street. Caden leapt out after him with more athleticism than you'd expect of a scrawny academic. Savas continued to run away and Caden sent a wave of earth after him. It tripped the Dark Wizard up, stalled him in place, and set him up perfectly for a killing spell.

Caden snapped his fingers and sent a Thermal Lance. Raindrops literally exploded like tiny firecrackers on contact with the spell. It took Savas square in the back, just left of the spine, and would've blown open his ribcage and hollowed out the chest cavity if not for the runes that the Dark Wizard had sewn into his shirt. Lines flashed briefly, individual threads lighting up in protective swirls and sigils and words of power, and then Savas went spinning down the ground some ten feet away with a scorched black hole in his shirt and a big pink burn mark on his skin.

He landed with a rush of adrenaline and a mad urge to laugh, kept in check only by bowel clenching terror and ruthless strategy. He got back up quickly and dodged several more Lances and coldfire blasts. An arcane missile here or there, all with the raven motiff. It was a near miss every single time. Savas was simply out of his weight class against someone like Caden Law. Not that he was going to let a little thing like that stop him.

There was another reason the Red Lantern District stayed open: Solidarity. Attack one local, you attacked all of them.

Caden went for another killing blow and missed again. This time it wasn't because Savas dodged. It was because a rock hit him in the back, dead center between the shoulderblades. Another rock came flying, Caden handwaved it aside and kept attacking.

Then someone threw a damn molotov and all Hell really broke loose.

[Caden Law]

"I guess I wouldn't be having an adventure if I wasn't being chucked in jail early on," Caden commented as Judd stepped in with the Captain in tow. It was noon now.

And it had been a very rough, very memorable morning. For most of the people involved. For Caden it was a Tuesday.

He had been beaten, damn near set on fire, stoned, clubbed, almost stabbed, kicked a few times for good measure and then some. The only reason he wasn't lying in a gutter was because he had given as good as he'd gotten. The Red Lantern District had actually shut down for the better part of two hours while the Guard and certain members of the Malleus tried to reassert some kind of order and authority. The jail was full of people who'd been involved. Caden actually shared a cell with seven of them, men and women, who were doing their best to keep a good distance from him.

"Should I bother being upset with you?" Judd asked as Durris started sifting through his key ring.

"Probably not," Caden replied. He was literally a tapestry of bruises and blood stains. The only reason he was unarmed was consent. "Could've been worse."

"The Malleus wants to Excruciate you with hammers," Durris replied. "Flaming spiked hammers. Meat tenderizers covered in oil and set on fire. And then they'd like to burn what's left. And did I mention the fire?"

"You did," Caden helpfully replied. Durris opened the cell door and sighed.

"And while they're demanding that, other people're demanding this."

Caden stepped out of the cell and Durris held up a chunky looking badge marked with the Scarabrian aquillados -- the double eagle. It was attached to a thin, sturdy chain, ideal to wear around the neck, fix to a belt or staff. Judd was actually wearing one as a pendant.

"By order of Queen Valeena and the requests of several nobles and officials at the Dajas Pagoda, I hereby induct you into the City Guard of Scara Brae." He shoved the badge into Caden's hands. "If you're gonna be stupid enough to blow up any parts of the city now, at least try to look official doing it."

As is rarely the case in any Wizard's life, Caden Law was utterly speechless.

"It doesn't come with an official rank and since you're only visitng, you probably won't get paid...but hey," Judd shrugged. "It does come with a responsibility though."

"Buh?" Caden sounded.

"Start assembling your party," Durris told him. "You're to carry out your investigation into the Catacombs as soon as possible. Following that, you're to get the Hell off my island and never come back. Any questions? None? Good. Now get out of my jailhouse before I put you to work on the privies."

[Savas Tigh]

The Dark Wizard calling himself Yanov Cross didn't make it home until just before dawn. By that point, he had exhausted himself in running, then jogging, then just walking brisquely all the way around the city in a zig-zagging horseshoe pattern. It took him twice as long to get from the Red Lantern District to the quaint little hovel he called home just outside the docks. The jagged escape route gave him time to change random items of clothing all over the city. Setting up a disguise route was one of the first things the necromancer did when he started getting established in Scara Brae.

His job as a street sweeper simply helped to find the best places to hide a random shirt here, or some shoes there; knives in a case in someone's gutter, that line of clothes that always seemed full...

The identity of Yanov Cross lived out of a cellar owned by his employer; an ex-Scourge dust dealer who had 'gotten out' into the less lethal business of urban maintenance.

Savas could never help but notice that his cellar apartment had no door leading up into the old man's townhouse. It also struck him as a bit too convenient that the cellar had functional plumbing, as if it had always been meant for people to live there without attracting attention. The only windows were barred and there were mounts for shutters on the outside; heavy ones. The door that Yanov used was new, evidenced by the older, heavier hinges on the outside of the stairwell; the new one was all the way below ground, at the stairwell's bottom.

He guessed that it had been some kind of slave pit. The spirits cleared out as soon as they saw him coming and they hadn't been back since. It was a shame, but it was to be expected. The weaker, more fearful spirits always fled when a necromancer set up shop, staying only if he had the chance to set up territorial boundaries of some kind or if they had a damned reason for being there. Literally.

For all the people Savas had taken apart here in Scara Brae, none of them were anchored here. There was the occasional echo from one of his souvenirs, but he couldn't afford for Yanov to be seen entering his cellar apartment with someone and having them never come out. Especially not when he lived beneath an ex-Scourge who probably had a soft spot for Savas' favored victim type.

"Honey," he announced as he shrugged out of a vest he'd picked up near the Temple District. "I'm hooooome..."

No response.

"Frigid as ever, I see."

Savas shut the door behind him and bolted it twice before pricking his finger and daubing a few drops of blood on the handle. Lines flashed in deathly geometries all over the knob, the locks, the bolts and the door's hinges; a ward going hot. It was an old fashioned Lifestealer's Lock, designed to tear some of the life from anyone who tried to force the door. It was simple stuff. If Savas knew more of what he was doing, he could've taken it all the way up to a level where the spell would then poison that same bit of life energy and vomit it back into the victim's body and soul, causing much more permanent -- and probably fatal -- damage.

His apartment was roughly octagonal in shape, accounting for the outhouse-sized restroom that dominated one of the walls. The bed was spartan, there was a desk and some oil lamps scattered around. Savas had started collecting things almost as soon as he'd moved in, and now he boasted a grim little hoard of reagents and tools; an assortment of the strangest things he could get his hands on. And some of them were downright macabre.

There were vials and beakers of fluid all marked in a code that Savas had invented himself. He had a small stack of journals, all leather bound and mostly full now. He had some quill pens, some pencils, a few erasers and the like. And he had pieces. Of people. Jars of hair and teeth, none of them even one quarter full. Every tooth had been delicately carved with a rune or sigil of some kind. There were bones, mostly animals but plenty of what looked human as well, and all of them had been carved to some extent too. There was only one long bone that hadn't been chipped or notched or etched into somehow, and it lay almost revently on a bundled up towel with a note card saying For Later beside it.

And there was a skull.

A bona fide human skull. Covered in more runes and arcane formulae than any normal person would know what to do with. Next to it were jars of homemade paint, most of them listing their ingredients in jaggedly written labels on the side. As Savas ignited the first lamp he could reach, he could feel the skull finally focusing on him.

And he could feel it through a cabinet door that was more than an inch thick. Savas was a strong believer in privacy. He had yet to work out how to fashion his own demesne so he resorted to old fashioned tricks like solid oak cabinets and multiple enchanted locks. He went to it now, undid each lock using nothing but blood and Words, then opened the cabinet.

The skull was indeed looking at him, its empty sockets burning like venomous little yellow stars. They hurt to look at.

"What did you learn today, Wormaxe?" the skull practically sneered, its Voice coming without the slightest hint of movement or even actual sound. It was like yellow noise on the brain and the soul, echoing in the space between Savas' ears and his belly button. He could feel it quivering through his lungs.

There wasn't one iota of concern for the fact that he was bruised and his knuckles bloody from where he'd thrown in with the crowd to take down Blueraven. In all likelihood, the dead Wizard Blightcrow probably knew all about that. He wasn't saying though. Savas was lucky enough to get anything out of him at all.

So he stepped backwards from the skull, kicking off his shoes as he went, then took a stance. Punch left forward. Block left back. Turn. Block right forward. Block left back. Turn. Punch left forward, right forward, left forward. Exhale the word, don't shout it. Repeat in reverse. Exhale the word. Resume the stance. Bow to the skull. It was a routine that Savas was easing into, slowly but surely; his compensation for the fact that he had almost no talent for evocational spellcasting. He could enchant specific spells into things and use them until the object wore out, and he could improvise thaumaturgy by writing it quickly, but he couldn't simply point and shout, FIREBALL!, and reduce something to ashes and pleasant memories.

So he was learning a martial art courtesy of the Dajas monks, and none of them even seemed to realize it. Savas had the long term goal of turning the katas -- forms like the ones he had just used -- into a type of somatic thaumaturgy; magic by movement, rather than complex thinking on the fly. It was slow going.

"Acceptable. Five more times before bed. Have you settled on a name for it yet?"

"Dark Messiah," Savas proporsed with a blocky toothed grin.

The skull couldn't give him a flat look, but it was not for lack of trying.

"Like you've got something better?"

"Dread Somathurgy, Black Bodhissatva, the Neverdying Kinethesis..."

This time it was Savas' turn to stare and say simply, "Shut up."

"Not tonight. It's time, Wormaxe, for you to know something about yourself."

Savas took a seat at the foot of his bed, never taking his eyes off the skull. He could almost imagine it grinning, with the way the shadows seemed to shape about its teeth.

"Let me tell you about the time you went into the Catacombs of Scara Brae (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?t=18345)..."

[Savas Tigh]

The look on Savas Tigh's face when Blightcrow finished his story was one of stark disbelief mixed with contempt and horror. Slowly but surely, his lips twitched back into place and his eyes narrowed and his breathing steadied.

Without a word, the necromancer went through another of his unnamed forms. Twenty moves in all, most of them kicks and blocks that carried him in a circle around where he started. When he was done, he exhaled raw green vapor and his eyes had a slightly purple look to them. Both effects faded in short order.

"So you're saying something in the Catacombs wiped out my past?" he asked.

"Before you ventured to Raiaera to serve our fallen lord, yes. But something happened that completely rewrote your history, setting you on a course to go straight to Raiaera. Your very essence changed. Look at how you can't do evocation and then ask yourself why not?"

"What could have that kind of power?" Savas asked.

He could almost picture Blightcrow shrugging, if the skull had shoulders.

"I can't see that well. The dead experience time much differently from the living, but it's like trying to see the bottom of a lake from its surface: sooner or later, the light runs out. Older spirits have less trouble, but ones like me, who haven't been dead that long..."

"...what should I do?" Savas warily asked. He had yet to fully tame the dead Dark Wizard's soul, even if he had successfully caged it. For every shred of advice Blightcrow gave him, Savas had his nose in a book or carried it out only hesitantly and with great effort to protect himself. So far it was all unnecessary. Wizards never settle for so far. The ones who do tend to die even more horribly than the ones who don't.

"Find a way to join Blueraven's little expedition. Go down there and punch out the big bad's teeth. Do something. Profit. Seems pretty simple."

Savas grimaced.

"Well, when you put it like that...."

[Caden Law]

Caden spent most of the afternoon helping Judd with his files and getting his own affairs in order. He wrote letters, left instructions in case he didn't come back, laid the framework for a few ritual curses if anything went wrong...theorized about how to come back from the dead...that sort of thing.

Wizard business in a nutshell.

He had dinner with Judd and Rita. The would-be priestess took a shot at practicing her arts by tending Caden's wounds, which weren't exactly in short supply. It bears mention that healing magic, even the divinely powered stuff, is not the neat, clean, prissy little laying-on-hands-and-shoving-some-energy-around deal that a lot of people make it out to be. Not when done right, anyway. If it was that neat, nobody would've ever bothered pioneering conventional medicines and anesthesia wouldn't even exist.

Rita did a good job healing him, but Caden was left with new scars to the already existing tapestry covering much of his body. It was a testament to her skills that the new ones were so faded that they could hardly be seen. It was a testament to the Wizard's endurance that he remained conscious and silent from start to finish. She shifted his blood around in the veins, and molded his flesh like dough, and pulled out the genuine essence of his injuries as a putrid yellow-white mass that Judd collected into a bowl before pouring into the fireplace.

Caden felt heat racing through his body from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, then he felt fine. As quickly and viciously as the pain had come, it was gone in an instant. He almost collapsed, stripped down to nothing but his underwear and covered in sweat and his own diluted blood. He stood after some minutes and threw up into the fire, then collapsed and lay shuddering for more than an hour while Rita knelt by him and whispered prayers. Judd cooked. They ate dinner. Caden dressed himself and left, wearing his newly acquired badge like it was another piece of armor.

He made it back to the inn at half past sunset, crashed onto his bed and didn't move again until someone pounded on the door at noon the next day.

"Wizard Blueraven!" the man greeted, though it sounded more like a statement of authority than anything else. "You have been selected to stand before the Queen Valeena, long live her!, at the ninth hour after midday tonight. Your presence is not optional, it is required. Should you fail to come-"

Caden shut the door on his face. He continued on, slightly muffled by the door. "There will be consequences!"

The Wizard went back to sleep. Consequences be damned.

[Caden Law]

Castle Valeena was, very arguably, one of the least impressive such structures Caden had seen in the past decade. It wasn't even as big as the full Dajas Pagoda compound, and there were taller buildings in the city proper as well. He had seen mile high warlocked spires fashioned of solidified black magic and suffering in Evernorth, scaled a corpse god's pyramid in the Red Forest, and stalked the halls of Denebriel's personal Cathedral in Knife's Edge. He had, in point of fact, personally toppled most of those structures.

What made Castle Valeena remarkable in spite of itself was how utterly practical it was when compared to most of the fortresses Caden had seen over the years. It was just big enough to be majestic to anyone who'd lived on Scara Brae most of their lives. The walls literally jutted out like saw teeth with clearly visible murder holes and arrow slots on every single one of them. There were six enormous towers anchoring the entire structure's outermost wall, and a central keep that rose above all of them.

And the whole damn thing was situated on a steep hill covered in artificial streams, all of them interrupted only by a shallow wooden walkway that was clearly designed to withstand only a set amount of weight. Caden was willing to bet that there were wards or old-fashioned traps hidden away in the beams. There were bunkers facing out all over the place on the ground, most of them positioned so that two others had direct line of fire to cover them with arrows. Caden was willing to bet at least a few of them were connected by tunnels of some kind.

This was a castle meant not to withstand sieges, but to bend them over backwards and do horrible things to them while their mothers watched. It was a symbol of raw, hamfisted authority that even the most savage goblins could understand and fear, even if they didn't respect it or the soveriegn who spent most of her days and nights practically entombed within its sturdy walls.

Caden was lead in by a quartet of scarlet-clad knights, wearing loose clothes and funny hats with big feathers in them. All four were armed with rapiers on their belts and imported Raiaeran riflestaves on their backs. One wore a short cape down to his beltline. A pair of Y'eddan priestesses accompanied them, and the six guided Caden through a cathedral located just past the front gate. The air positively stank of incense and there were open cages hanging empty from every chandelier, with plenty of empty nooks and crannies, hooks and bits that you could fit the traditional idols of the other Thaynes into. The cathedral was small, sporting no pew or speaking stand. It was more like a hall of sanctity that one wouldn't desecrate with bloodshed unless they really wanted to suffer the wrath of a capital-G God.

Past that, a courtyard full of Guard and Knight trainees sparring each other. Some were friendly. Others were bloody enough to warrant the presence of the Temple priesthood -- including Rita, whom Caden noticed and waved to in passing. A number of archers practiced close by as well, and their target...

...was a man clad in the same uniform as Caden's escorts. In unison, the archers let loose and the man struck down or avoided every single arrow. The ones remaining all hit to within a few inches of the bull's eyes on the targeting blocks behind him.

"Where were you lot when we needed you in Raiaera?" Caden mumbled.

"Busy with our own realm," the leader of Caden's honor guard replied. "The Scourge has attempted to end the Queen's life nine times, and the goblins even more. Only through constant vigilance do we endure."

"Peace be a harsh mistress," Caden replied.

"You have no idea," said the leader.

Through wrought iron gates and doors of the heaviest wood and steel Caden had ever seen. Down long winding hallways and claustrophobic stairways, up a grand total of eight floors literally designed to annihilate any one attacker's stamina from sheer running around, and finally Caden arrived.

Finally, the Wizard Blueraven was lead to a door bearing the aquillados of Scara Brae. It was a huge double door, guarded by two more scarlet knights who didn't even seem to blink. The priestesses opened the doors to a truly massive chamber; the kind of room you could fight a desperate defense in; the kind of room you could murder an uppity noble in. And the moment the doors swung open, Caden was treated to a sight almost as impressive as the room itself.

The Queen, golden-haired Ballari Andra Valeena, now nearing her 43rd year of life and her 30th year on the throne. A woman whose beauty was, in her younger years, enough to send men questing and killing for just a glimpse of favor. Even as the years wore into her like waves on a shoreline, Ballari remained a picture of grace and elegance that would make a young man look thrice whether he was single or not. Her smile practically glittered. She wore a dress, even a torn one, the way that brides wish they could wear their wedding gowns and generals wished they could wear their uniforms. Every inch of flesh exposed from the neck down was like a glimpse of some sacred treasure.

And there was a lot of it on display.

Some of it was bleeding.

Caden had stepped in on one of the Queen's less known liesure activities: sparring with her guards. Plural. She was taking on three of them at once. Even as the doors finished opening, the Queen disarmed one of them with a flick of her wrist and sidestepped both of the others. She downed the first with a roundhouse kick and flipped his sword into her hand, then split the other two up and, without even looking at them, addressed the newcomers.

"Welcome...to...my...court...Wizard."

Both knights jumped back, then the one on the left charged in. Ballari parried him, broke one of his cheekbones with a rapier-hilted punch and snapped his knee like a twig with one wall placed kick. the knight went down in an unconscious heap and Ballari immediately began circling the remainer.

"My sincerest apologies for this, but routines must be adhered to."

The remaining knight went offensive. Ballari took him down so quickly that Caden didn't see how she did it -- and this was happening right in front of him.

When she was done, she cast the swords away and dusted her hands off, then pointed to the balcony. "I'll be with you momentarily. I just need to change my clothes."

...thinly veiled play at intimidation: successful, the Wizard wisely did not say.

[Caden Law]

Behold now, the Queen.

As much larger than life as she was, Ballari Valeena was...tiny. A little beneath the average height for a woman, well below the average weight -- even more so if you took into account the kind of muscle that develops from intensive sparring activities. She returned to Caden on the balcony of her suite and, for the first time, he was actually struck dumb by how small she was. Her dress and robes literally dwarfed her. Like a Victorian Queen, her outfit boasted a high collar and an absurdly wide skirt that must've been supported by some kind of wire framework. She wore a small jacket bearing the aquillados on its back and breast, and she wore a crown too. It had three rubies. As Caden sized her up, he couldn't help but notice a lot of the minor details that anyone else would've missed.

First was the movement of the skirt. The framework had a gap in the front, and the cloth itself was folded enough that you had to be paying good attention to see the slit concealed in it. Ballari could've discarded her skirt in an instant, and she was probably wearing practical pants of some kind underneath. The body language and details -- the unexaggerrated swaying of her hips, the lack of any sound as she walked, the lack of added height -- all indicated that she was wearing simple-soled shoes, probably fit for running or fighting if need-be. She wore thin gloves, but a Wizard's eye showed Caden patterns of defensive spells in the threading.

Something was off about the crown. Caden wasn't sure what, but he said so anyway: "What's the enchantment?"

Valeena gave him a cryptic smile and refused to answer. She changed the subject instead to, "You should know this isn't a social visit, Wizard. Before you go into the Catacombs, I have both a warning and a request of you."

"Oh boy," Caden mumbled.

"The first is something you're probably already aware of: Don't trust anyone. I have reason to believe my government has been infiltrated by some corrupting influence. I don't know who or what or from where; it could be connected to the Cove goblins, the Scourge, a lich who menaced the island some years back, or any number of others. It could even relate to the Catacombs somehow. Keep your guard up at all times -- all. times. Even when you're alone."

Caden pointedly resisted the urge to tell her that paranoia was a literal part of his job description as a Wizard.

"My request ties into that. I want one thing of you, Wizard, in return for your deputization and the authority invested in you because of it." She waited until he was looking her square in the eye. It took a while. Then, Ballari asked him a simple question: "Is Judd Eisenmas trustworthy?"

Caden didn't answer her.

"Well?"

"What do you mean?"

"Can he be corrupted? Is he one of the so-called Good Guys?"

"Why ask me that?" Caden shot back. "I could be one of the Bad Guys for all you know."

"You're a decorated war hero with personal involvement in the deaths of two demigods. If you could be corrupted at all, it would've happened years ago. I want to know if Judd Eisenmas meets that same standard."

Caden thought about it.

"Before I tell you, I'll say this."

And now he waited, until the little glimmer of superiority faded from Ballari's eyes. As lethal as she seemed to be, Caden really had faced down worse. He was still alive. They weren't.

"Judd Eisenmas is my friend. If any harm ever comes to him, you will answer for it. Whether you did it or not. There is no god that will keep you from me, no army that can stop me, no barrier you can put in my path. I will end you. I will tear down your castle, I will rend your crown down to coins and I will shatter every gem and jewel and ruby you can adorn yourself with. I will turn your name into a byword for suicidal arrogance. I will take your soul, tear it into pieces and cast it into the sea, bidding the unquiet ones to do with it as they will. Do you understand, Ballari Andra Valeena?"

"Yes," she said almost the instant he finished speaking. Superiority had given way to contempt, but it was an honest contempt that the Wizard could deal with. Judging by the skills she had displayed earlier, Ballari could've killed him on the spot. Maybe barehanded. Maybe with a weapon hidden in her clothes.

He couldn't have done half the things he mentioned, but that didn't make his threat any less real. A Wizard's revenge is not something to take lightly.

"Then I'll tell you this: Judd is a better man than I am."

Ballari seemed...relieved.

"Good then. I had originally tolerated him in city positions to keep tabs on his whereabouts. Now that you've confirmed his strength of character...I believe I can allow him to teach true Wizardry instead of forensic alchemy and countermagic."

Caden stared at her.

"What? I needed to check his credentials, Blueraven. You're his only reference for such a task. My island is a tiny country in a time of global tumult. Corone has fallen to civil war, Salvar lies in ruin, Alerar is becoming more and more aggressive, and Raiaera threatens to become a resurgent mage-state full of eldritch bard-cultists and hardened veterans. My people haven't got the numbers or the land or the resources to cope with an invasion by any of them or their proxies or dissidents. I'll take anything I can get to make up for that, even if it means opening my own Wizarding school."

"No wonder you've held onto power so long," Caden replied. "How heavy is that crown, anyway?"

"Lighter than your Hat, I'd wager, though heaviest of all on the day I first wore it," Ballari answered. "The history of three hundred years of Valeena kings and queens rests on my head. I can never forget that, any more than I can forget the knife in my father's back. Good evening, Wizard. I expect your expedition to begin as soon as possible. Captain Roján will show you out."

[Caden Law]

It took an hour before Caden's knees stopped shaking. He walked from the castle back to the city, leaning a little on his staff every so often. The confrontation with her hadn't done much to exhaust him, but he still hadn't fully recovered from the Red Lantern incident. His knees hurt.

Sometimes it felt as if the war was finally catching up to him. Which war didn't really matter since both had left their unfair share of scars. All Caden could do in those times was to close his eyes, grit his teeth and keep going. Keep going and keep hoping that all the times being flash-healed by magic, by warped by the passage of time and power, being point negative with the darkened powers of necromancy; keep hoping that none of those had taken too much of a toll on him either. The fact that he had basically served as a magical lightning rod, battery, and discharger on a dozen different occasions wasn't helping.

Caden sometimes still felt the tingle of Tembrethnil's Scourging, and there were times he still tasted the cold mint of his own death in the mountains of Salvar. There were, on very rare occasions, times when he could almost feel the fabric of reality bunching up between his skin, his blood, and his soul. He wasn't sure if that was from the powers he'd channeled against Denebriel, Xem'zund, or in reviving that girl -- Lillian? Lillith? -- during the same battle. It could've even been a distant side effect of unpatronized Sorcery.

He tabled that line of thought for now. More important things needed tending to. Caden reached the Temple district and stopped to catch his breath as he leaned against a wall. He looked out over the courtyard where the Catacombs entrance lay, hidden in the empty well surrounding an ancient fountain statue. He could feel the swirl of something dark radiating out from it, just inches farther than it had been a few days ago.

Caden slumped. He pushed himself back up and kept walking.

It struck him then: "...I never did get to ask why she keeps guards."

Or, he did not say, Why her eyes were so afraid when I talked about destroying the crown.

The Wizard shrugged. He went to Judd's apartment and knocked at the door. When nobody answered, he found a bench outside and sat down. He leaned on his staff some more.

He fell asleep.

Judd Eisenmas didn't come home that night.

[Caden Law]

Rita Venker, however, did come home.

And, with the practiced caution of someone who shares a bed with a paranoid delusional maniac capable of blowing up a city block, she used a stick to wake Caden up. A nice long yew stick topped with cushioned silk on one end. She poked him in the shoulder with it until he woke up, then greeted him with a smile.

"Sorry, Judd decided to pull an all-nighter. Can I help you?"

"...I'm hungry," Caden replied. "I'll get something to eat back at the inn. No worries."

"Oh, no. It's okay. Come on in, it'll keep me from having to eat alone," she said with waving hands. She was a tall woman. Taller than Veshua and Neesal, shorter than Era. She had an athletic figure, fit for a gymnast or runner but not a fighter or martial artists. She wasn't very well endowed, just pretty. She wore a long beige pancho over short white toga and gray tights. Her hair was brown, decorated with feathers and beads, and she had teal eyes.

Teal eyes.

Caden had seen stranger things in his time.

"Sure Judd wouldn't mind?" he asked as he stood.

"I could probably burn the place down and Judd wouldn't mind. We don't really keep our valuables at home," she shrugged. "And, I mean, really. Goddess of marriage and chastity, mine isn't." She held up a hand, showcasing the utter lack of a ring.

Caden stared at her.

"...kidding. Mostly."

"Some things, I do not need to know."

"Judd's alright with it as long as it's for Temple purposes. He even took part a few times. With other girls!"

"...and some things, I-wait. What. No, don't. Yes. What. Stop that."

Caden couldn't tell if she was laughing with him or at him. He gave up in short order, saying only, "And this is why I don't mind being single. Except for when I do. Godsdammit."

[Caden Law]

Nothing happened.

Caden sat and ate with Rita. They spoke about Judd for a little while, then she quizzed him about the wars in Raiaera and Salvar. Rita was a lifelong native to Scara Brae, never having left the island's shores for any reason. Everything in her life was geared to the Temple and she was an apt student there. Y'edda was the chief deity of Scara Brae, but others got time in and Rita knew plenty of how to channel her prayers into spellwork. It was how she healed, after all.

"Y'edda's favor doesn't let us heal other people," she said at one point. "But we can run from and escape just about any injury. Sister Lai-Na actually managed to outrun her own beheading after it happened. I've escaped a few bruises and burns but nothing near that impressive."

When they were done, Caden bowed to his host and left. He went back to the inn, took out his grimoire and started doing the work of drawing up a list of supplies and their expected costs; the gritty, inglamourous part of adventuring. It was the part Caden was probably the most familiar with, in spite of all his other skills and experiences.

Earlier in his career, Caden had been a part of an adventuring company out of Dendrestok. The company had a positively atrocious mortality rate. Only Caden and a handful of veteran core members survived most of their jobs. Everyone else was literally fodder from the moment they came in to the moment their bodies (or what was left of their bodies) left. Caden had survived so long mostly by being the resident Numbers Guy; the one who kept it all running while others gave speeches or slung swords. It was only when it finally clicked that he could cast fireballs and shift around the terrain that Patton saw him as more than a desk jockey.

Incidentally, Caden left Patton Ventures about a year to the day later. His first trip to Scara Brae had come not long after that. It seemed like a lifetime ago, but the skills were still there. It was just thought, pen and paper, and no Wizard worth his Hat ever lets such things atropy.


Expecting a four-man party. Maybe five. Myself, Aeraul Smythe*, Rowan Stormwind*, plus one or two others**. Which means I need to make a trip to the local Bazaar with everyone and outfit them***.

* Not that they know they're coming along, but they will. They need it just to set their own lives straight. Literally.

** Fodder. Much as I hate to say it.

*** Armor, possibly weapons, definately misc gear. Fodder'll probably need plate since...yeah.

Expected Misc Gear

- Alchemist's Light/Fire (get this from Judd)
- Lanterns or Alch-Torches? (ask Judd)
- Armor: Chain, minor plate, good leather. Silk underneath.
- Insulation?
- Packs.
- Footwear (Salvic boots)
- Utilities: At least one ten foot pole, fifty feet of rope, glowing ink or chalk, picks?, a grapnel or two, road spikes, hammer and chisel...
- Several spare pairs of glasses and goggles for me.
- Weapons: Expecting varied conditions. Aeraul and Rowan both strike me as swordsmen and brawlers alike. Katars and rapiers if possible. Knives are a must.

May want to prepare some spells in advance via the Zurenarrh Scroll techniques, which means finding adequate scrolls and

There was a knock at the door.

Caden put aside his grimoire and grabbed his wand without thinking. He aimed. Waited.

Another knock, less patient.

Caden kept waiting.

Several more knocks at varying speeds and levels of force. It was human. Probably one of the innkeepers wanting to ask him why he kept coming in late, all things considered. Caden kept his wand in hand as he got up and answered the door.

There, in the hallway, stood the Dark Wizard Wormaxe.

"Well," Caden said as he took aim. "This simplifies things."

[Savas Tigh]

Never give a Wizard time to prepare.Wormaxe met Blueraven with a snapping fingers, triggering the runes in a number of teeth he had laid on the floor in front of the Wizard's innroom door.

The full form of the spell was called Beekiller's Muteblind Howler. It was an inversion of Tokan Selum's Flashbang Fist. Properly executed, it caused a colossal head -- usually but not always a skull -- to come mutely screaming at a target, violently disorienting them, stripping away their ability to make any kind of noise whatsoever, and blinding them completely for about ten to fifteen seconds on average. It was a Flashbang without the flash or the bang.

Savas Tigh's version wasn't anywhere near that theatric. It was just a shaped blast of purple-green light that inhaled Caden's sense of sight and his ability to make sound. It had the added effect of giving him a cold shock and knocking him back several paces, while simultaneously destroying the teeth that Savas had used to cast the spell.

Then and only then did the necromancer Say, "That it does."

He stepped in, closed the door behind himself and then went at Blueraven with fists flying and legs kicking. In a fair fight, he would've lost on the first or second move, if that. Caden still had his wand. He was simply too surprised and disoriented to make use of it. Savas knocked the weapon from his grasp with a punch to the wrist, then followed it up with six punches taken straight from the Dajas monks. There was nothing magical about any of them and there didn't need to be.

For all his skill and lethality as a swordsman and a Wizard, Caden Law was just a blind guy right now and he didn't know the first thing about fighting unarmed. It was a gaping hole in his defenses that he'd never thought to fill since he had always reasoned that he would always have magic. Acquiring Sorcery, a power that couldn't be cut off by any means he knew of, had only heightened that arrogance. Savas now educated him on the error of his ways, and every single bruise was a lesson that the Wizard Blueraven could've gone without learning.

Six punches and then a kick to the midsection. Caden doubled to one side, then Savas chopped him across the neck and that was it.

The whole ambush had taken less than ten seconds.

When he was done, Savas took a good look at his handiwork and finally let out a breath he didn't even know he was holding. He almost wanted to jump up and down and start cheering.

"BIND HIM!"

"...you just had to spoil it, didn't you," Savas sighed, then got right to work.

[Savas Tigh]

Eventually, Caden woke up. When he did, the very first thing out of his mouth was, "You are not sitting in my lap. You are not sitting in my lap."

"I'm sitting in your lap."

"Fuck you, Wormaxe."

"This is all quite gay, yes," the skull chimed in from its place on the desk. "I wish I didn't have to watch."

"It was your idea," Savas snapped.

"You say that like I have to enjoy it."

"Just kill me and be done with it already!"

"N'yet," Savas replied, finally turning his attentions back to the Wizard.

And yes.

Savas Tigh was sitting in Caden Law's lap.

Caden had been strapped down to the bed with a limb tied to each post, ropes on every joint, his waist, and his chest and neck. He had been blindfolded with a rag, and there were bones lying at seemingly random points on the bed, floor, and his body -- all of them designed to siphon energy from him before he could cast a spell. Savas had even gone far enough to open up Caden's shirt and write a suppression spell on his stomach, less than a metaphysical inch from his soul.

He had even gone the extra step of tying bones into Caden's hands to keep him from summoning up any of his tools or weapons.

It was, if nothing else, overkill on a level that any Wizard could respect.

Savas himself sat on Caden's hips, and his only saving grace in doing this was the presence of a pillow between them and the fact that both men were fully clothed. Savas wore his monastic robe over a pair of trousers and a long sleeved shirt. He had a dagger in one hand.

"Do you know why I'm here, Caden?"

"I'm hoping it doesn't involve raping me."

"It doesn't."

"Then I'm too busy thanking gods to care."

"...right. Well, I know you're trying to get a group together to explore the Catacombs. I want in. That's all there is to it."

"No."

He took the knife and pressed its edge against Caden's neck.

"...no," Caden said again. "Go ahead and kill me."

"I wouldn't stop there, you know," Savas replied. "Death is only the beginning. And you wouldn't be the first mage I've captured and enslaved."

"I can vouch for that," the skull bitterly added.

"...Kholia?" Caden asked.

"In the skull. Thanks. Really."

This made Blueraven pause.

"Look at it this way, Blueraven: either you can help me out while you're alive or I can murder you here and now and turn you into a slave forever. Pick one."

"What are the terms?" Caden asked.

"Bring me with you into the Catacombs of Scara Brae, swearing not to harm me or allow me to come to harm. Treat me as an apprentice and comrade. Do not interfere in my actions."

Savas could almost feel the Wizard glaring right through the blindfold. This was twice he had been roped into a deal by Wormaxe, and twice he had been in no position to argue or fight his way out of it.

"I hereby accept you as my apprentice and comrade, with all the benefits it entails."

Savas waited.

"I will bring you with me into the Catacombs."

Savas looked expectantly to the skull.

"Good enough," Blightcrow said.

At that, Savas took off the blindfold and started to cut the rope. He got through one hand, went for the other, and Caden decked him flat out without one word.

"What?" the necromancer spat a few seconds later while Caden burnt and froze the ropes in turn, breaking himself loose and then shaking off all the power absorbants that Savas had laid on him. He held out one hand even as the Dark Wizard tried to scramble away. "How did-"

"You asshole!"

Caden basically smacked him across the face with a damascus-tipped baseball bat.

"You inhuman, godless fuck!"

"Ahhhhh," Blightcrow sighed in relief as Caden started laying into Savas with kicks to the ribs and stomach. "The confines of a master-student relationship, as defined by a cynic from the boonies."

Savas tried to say something. Caden cracked him across the head with his rod. The world went black and there was blood everywhere after that.

[Savas Tigh]

To be a Wizard is to play merry hell with precise wording, definitions, intentions, and just about everything else for that matter. They're rules lawyers arguing over the fabric of reality.

Savas may have roped Caden into a second deal with the devil, but he was sloppy about it this time. They really did have different definitions of apprenticeship. For all his barbarism and his own personal experiences Savas went with the ideal of a master who didn't raise his hand in anger to a student; an enabler who simply provided knowledge and protection, then got the hell out of the way. His own masters had all basically conformed to that idea, sans psychological abuses that the necromancer still hadn't rooted out.

Caden's idea of a master-apprentice relationship was shaped by the ironfisted realities of his time in school and his subsequent apprenticeship to the Wizard Greyspine. Jolstice Aramson had spent the better part of a decade literally smacking, hammering, blindsiding, and pretty much curbstomping Blueraven into an effective Wizard. He dispensed choice bits of wisdom here and there, yes. He handed the young Caden a great deal of academic knowledge too. But he also left him with bone-deep bruises and a justifiable sense of paranoia for any kind of authority figure. Among other things.

When Savas woke up, he was slumped in a corner, unbound and covered in dry blood. Nothing felt broken. He could feel nasty bruises on his head and sides, but nothing that he couldn't focus through and ignore. He had been completely disarmed of anything remotely useful in magic or physical confrontation. Most of it lay on Caden's desk, as did his pet skull. Caden himself was at that same desk, appearing to have a staring contest with someone who, by definition, didn't have eyes.

The scary part was that he seemed to be winning.

"Dick," Savas said, gurgling up a little blood as he spoke.

"Harm means death or permanent injury," Caden replied. "Kholia says that you bound him and hold rightful ownership. He also says that if I try breaking his skull, he'll be able to cross over and manifest a new body based on his experiences on the other side. Is that true?"

Without thinking, Savas answered, "Yes. To all of that." He spat out a tooth that wasn't his. It had been lying under his tongue. Almost instantly, power rushed back into his own skull and left him even more disoriented than before. He had a migraine that could flatten bull elephants.

"Then don't take him out of your home unless you absolutely have to. And work on reinforcing his binds while you're at it. Have you been trying to establish a demesne?"

"...working on it," Savas admitted. "Would be easier if I had my own place."

"Then start robbing the people you murder, dumbass. Don't be so wasteful of the parts either. Scara Brae's got a wyrmfolk minority and they've always got Warlocks on hand. You could probably make a fortune just selling to them."

This struck Savas dumb. Truly and utterly dumb. He stared at the senior Wizard -- senior by power and experience, if not in age -- and felt his jaw open of its own accord. Caden still hadn't looked away from the skull.

"If you're going to be evil, you're not going to be stupid evil. No apprentice of mine holds an idiot ball. I expect you to be a magnificent bastard par excellence. You will conquer at least one region in my lifetime or I will kill you. Your only alternative is to find redemption. I will not help you in either. In point of fact, I'll probably go out of my way to make both paths harder for you to achieve. Is that clear?"

"What in the hell is wrong with you?" Savas asked.

"The fact that I'm being hounded by a rank amateur with aspirations of becoming an evil overlord. And y'know what else, Savas? You missed out on the best one-liner ever. You're going to have to work overtime to make up for it."

"What."

"Early worm gets the bird, stupid."

"What."

Caden finally deigned to look away from the skull. He still hadn't blinked. He looked at the Dark Wizard and the mark on Blueraven's face lit up. A dozen or more tribal lines followed it, each one spreading out across the skin of his face. All of them were thick, blue, and symmetrical. Even from across the room, Savas could feel power radiating through his Wizarding senses.

"Go home, Wormaxe. Take the skull with you. I expect you to be here, clean and sharp, at noon. Any later and I will make you hurt for it."

"...what the hell did I get myself into?" Savas Tigh asked.

Only the ghastly laughter of the dead necromancer, Kholia Horren, answered him.

[Savas Tigh]

Savas rose with the sun the next morning. Blightcrow told him nothing as he got out of bed and washed himself with a bucket of boiled water and a towel. When he was done with that, the necromancer took a knife to his beard and meticulously trimmed it into shape. He had become too accustomed to it to ever cut the whole thing off, but neatness had been a clear expectation from his newly acquired master.

He dressed like an ordinary civilian for once, although the pants were stretchy in the right places and the shirt was tight exactly where it needed to be to avoid hindering his movement. He wore a beat-up pair of moccs on principle, and then adorned himself with a large knife and a plain leather vest. He bound his hair in a short, neat ponytail. Then he left.

Savas spent the morning sweeping and practicing forms with the Dajas monks. At noon, and no later, he went to the inn where Blueraven was staying.

The Wizard was seated out front on a bench, wearing every one of his trappings but the armor and the goggles. To start with, it was the closest Savas got to an indicator that they weren't going down underground just yet. He greeted his newfound master with a question: "What are we starting with?"

Blueraven answered him with a smouldering look and a blistering silence. Savas took a step back and felt himself shifting into fight or flight mode almost on reflex.

"When I spoke with Blightcrow, while you were unconscious, he mentioned that you've been trying to create a martial art to compensate for your lack of evocation."

"I have," Savas admitted. "Haven't got a name for it though."

"Don't," Caden told him. "Assign it temporary names if you must. But don't give it a real one. Names confine things. Limit them. That's why mages take on Sorcerous Names as they grow in power. More than anything else, it serves to define and limit us."

Savas nodded.

"I'm not going to ask to see the style you're coming up with. But I expect you to be good with it. Both of the men I'm recruiting today are seasoned martial artists. Observe them. Learn from them. Crosstrain with them if you get the chance. Don't be afraid to instruct them either. The more of us who can cover for each other, the better we'll all be."

"What about you?" Savas asked. "Will you be training them in anything?"

"If they need it. Aeraul, the orc, seems to be a burgeoning pyromancer. Rowan, the man, seems...I don't even know. You might have more luck with him."

"How long will we have?" Savas asked. "I'm assuming we're not going down today."

"Two days. Time enough to get to know each other. They'll follow me. You all will."

"What makes you so sure of that?"

Caden shifted slightly, looking off down the street. "Aeraul's a scholar. We defer to those who know more by default. He strikes me as the type who's had experience adventuring, but less so than me. I already beat Rowan and he's the type who bows to that kind of thing. I'm your master by default. I lead. Aeraul will probably be my second. We'll see if we have to recruit anyone else."

"Why not gather an army?" Savas asked. "Go down in force and all that."

Caden looked at him. "An army would get slaughtered so much that we'd be crawling over the bodies and trying not to hit the ceiling. The Catacombs are big, but parts of them are also very, very small and cramped. A small group is an agile one, and less likely to draw attention from whatever's down there."

Savas nodded. Finally he asked, "What do you want me to do?"

Caden stood, staff in one hand and the other resting on the hilt of his sword. He wore the deputy badge like it truly belonged to him. "Follow me. We're going to get the other two, then...we do a royal number on my change purse."

[Aeraul Smythe]

Recruitment really was as easy as Caden thought it would be. They found Aeraul reading a book in one of the courtyards near the Dajas pagoda. They found Rowan nursing a hangover and a black eye at the Zirnden. Aeraul signed on almost immediately and Rowan didn't even need another beating to coerce him. Both men accepted Caden's leadership from the outset, and for the exact reasons he had mentioned to Savas at that.

Once they were together, Caden made Savas buy them all lunch at a shabby little coffee house just inside the docks. They ate outside. At Caden's insistence, they were all sober.

"What should we call ourselves anyway?" Rowan asked, only slightly miserable now that his hangover was subsiding.

"Raiders?" Aeraul suggested.

"Too generic," Savas replied. "We could use one of our names for it?"

"Don't look at me," Caden said before sipping some coffee. "Last time I lent any of my names to anything, people were getting mutilated to death for months."

"Years," Savas corrected, accompanied by wary looks from Aeraul and Rowan. "What?"

"Nothing," both men said.

"Saviours of Light?" Aeraul asked.

"Too godsdamned elfy," Caden snapped.

"The Battling Bastards of Brae?" Rowan.

"No," everyone said. "Just. No."

"...pricks," Rowan muttered.

"Catacombs Raiders?" Aeraul.

"Jinxed," Caden replied.

"Dawnbringers?" Savas.

Caden just looked at him.

"Warden Company?" Rowan asked.

A round of nodding. It was a step in the right direction.

"C-Company. C for Catacombs." Savas.

Nobody even answered that.

"Sigma Company?" Savas.

"Gustav Company?" Rowan.

"Skull Company?" Savas.

"Fireside Company," Aeraul said, then held up a finger and pointed. "Most of us seem to have some association with fire. Caden's a Wizard, probably does fireball spells. Savas, you're...whatever you are, but you seem Wizardy yourself. I'm a pyrokinetic-to-be. Rowan-"

"Blows crap up sometimes," Rowan said. "Good enough for me. Anyone else in favor?"

"I can live with that," Caden said.

"...long as I don't die with it," Savas mumbled.

As one, they toasted. Fireside Company was born early in the afternoon on the twenty-sixth day of the Month of Crumbling Leaves.

[Leaf on the Wind]

They didn't shop so much as they went to war on Scara Brae's Bazaar district. Caden paid for it. Where he got the money and how he carried all of it, none of them could hope to say. Every single one of them came out of it with new clothes, new weapons, and new gear; some of it in good enough quality that they honestly didn't know what to do with themselves.

They were adventurers after all. You either hit it rich or you get used to being poor. None of these guys lived in mansions.

Aeraul came out of the Bazaar looking like a true sword noble; the kind of royal who became royal by taking it from other people the hard way. Ages ago, men like that razed and raised empires. He dressed in sturdy leather pants and a matching shirt with elbow-length sleeves. Over that, a padded greatcoat woven around chainmail, with solid steel plating strategically placed to cover organs and major arteries alike. It came with a sturdy pair of shoulderplates and a high, heavily protected neckpiece. Topping this were mostly-plate gloves and Salvic-patterned boots; thick and water-proofed, well-insulated and ridiculously tough.

He'd gotten new weapons out of the deal too. Like a steel jian that had delusions of being a claymore, and a pair of steel butterfly knives built like brass knuckles; ideal for a man whose fighting style was based on grappling. He wore the sword on his back and the knives on his belt, which was thick and long enough to wrap around his waist several times before buckling.

Prior experience left him wanting, and getting, a Corone-styled steel longshield as well. It was actually long enough and wide enough that Aeraul could concievably hide behind it if he huddled low enough, but still small enough that it wouldn't hinder him in battle. It had a rectangular shape.

Rowan ended up looking like some kind of crosscultural thief. His new pants were hakama-inspired, but they looked like baggy shorts that turned into tight pants around the knee. He actually had a shirt now, accompanied by a huge chainmail-reinforced sash wrapped around his lower torso and covering him up to about mid-chest. A chainmail-reinforced vest added to his protection, as did a pair of sturdy shoulder pauldrons and elbow pads that were all strapped into place. He topped it all off with Akashiman-styled gauntlets.

He wore a second sash around his neck like a scarf. It had enough slack that he could've concievably turned it into a full head-wrap if need-be.

Rowan also acquired some new weapons: steel katars, two of them, each sturdy and about a foot long in the blade. He still wore his chokuto, but now carried it on his back with a strap that doubled as a bandolier for close to thirty throwing knives. He carried more in a pouch hanging from his belt, along with several regular knives.

Unlike the rest of them, he opted for thinner footwear: moccasins. Sturdy, waterproofed moccasins, but still just moccasins.

Savas came last. He was the most difficult to shop for on the grounds that he was the least well defined when it came to his skills as a fighter or mage; he was basically behind everyone at something vital. Eventually, he settled on a pair of Scarabrian 'cargo pants,' which were like trousers with external pockets on the thighs and hips, and built-in knife holsters on the lower leg. He added a plain shirt underneath a bona fide utility belt -- something almost as wide as Rowan's sash, covered in armored pouches designed to hold vials and small scrolls safely and securely even in a fight. Over this he threw on a padded jacket with metal plating fixed to the forearms, shoulders, and upper arms, along with a hat that was metal-lined.

It wasn't an actual Hat, like Caden's, but it would do in a pinch for stopping small debris and lesser projectiles.

Like Aeraul, Savas wound up with a shield. It was smaller and lighter, but Savas lacked the martial skill or physical strength to use anything like Aeraul's. He wound up with a sword that was basically a rondel on steroids: steel, straight, thick and almost dull at the base, but tapering to an increasingly sharp edge and point near its end. It looked like a spike with a hand guard. He also ended up buying a single-bladed battle-axe, wearing it on the opposite side from the rondel.

Caden forced him to buy a pair of gloves too; short-fingered with steel spikes on the knuckles and a matching plate on the back of each hand. Like Aeraul, he opted for a pair of heavy-duty Salvic boots.

He topped all of this off with an arrow quiver on a thick sling. It had a cover strapped to it. And it was the perfect length for every single one of Savas' bone wands.

How any of them managed to look remotely coordinated came down to the miracles of a few Bazaar shop workers who were obsessive-compulsive about that sort of thing. Everyone ended up with dominant and subordinant colors: Aeraul was red and gold, Rowan was teal and white, Savas was mostly black and green. Even the weapons conformed to this pattern, to a pragmatic extent. It bears mention that Rowan was the only one who actually made it look good though.

"I blame him for this," Savas eventually said, pointing at Caden. The Wizard looked more or less innocent, in his big blue longcoat and pointy blue Hat.

"It's okay," Aeraul replied. "They're all blind down there anyway."

"That doesn't help anything."

"We'll kill anything that can actually see us," Rowan added.

"...okay. I feel better now," Savas said.

Once they were done with all that, they bought the actual gear. Backpacks, picks, lanterns, torches, alchemic lights by the bucket load, rope, blankets, blank scrolls, chalk, ink, and an actual ten foot pole. Everyone picked up water skeins, with Aeraul doubling down on principle, and Caden made sure they picked up less perishable food as well.

"How long d'you think we'll be down there anyway?" Rowan asked at one point.

"Long enough to lose track of time," Aeraul answered.

"As long as it takes," Caden added.

"Long enough to justify buying all this crap," Savas mumbled.

"You're not the one paying."

"And you're not the one stuck with the pole," Rowan sighed. Caden already had a staff and everyone else had shields to contend with.

When they finished, you would've thought they were a mercenary band preparing to go raid a lost temple in the middle of nowhere. You wouldn't have been too far off the mark either; the difference between a mercenary band and an adventuring company is a few strokes of ink and a very blurry zig-zag. Their destination was, however, very close.

"Why didn't we get any crossbows anyway?" Rowan asked as they left the Bazaar.

"Because three out of four of us have ranged attacks of some kind. Wands, knives, plain old spellwork. The only one who doesn't has a big godsdamn shield."

"I was hoping to get a wand or something too," Aeraul added, somewhat dejectedly.

Caden looked at Savas and warily asked, "Mind if it's made of somebody's rib bone?"

"...I'll pass..."

"Yeah. Pretty much."

"Now what?" Rowan asked a few minutes later, as they neared the same coffee house where the Fireside Company had been born.

"Now we've got two days to get used to moving and fighting with all this stuff. Savas and I need to put together some spells in advance of our little dungeon run, among other things. You two are welcome to join us. I'm just going to be telling him what to do anyway."

Cue the hard work montage...

As an aside: Assume that all items were bought and paid for using Caden Law's money. Up to half of his currently available funds (14782 GP) plus half of whatever gold he would've gotten from this quest. All items are Steel, Leather or Silk. All items are Above Average quality.

[Aeraul Smythe]

Two days went grinding by. The four of them started as two sets of strangers and ended up as a coalition of neurotic graverobbers. It was about as good as you could expect. They crosstrained, they exercised, they swapped stories. Aeraul and Rowan were informed of what Savas was, and both of them shrugged it off because they were adventurers.

And adventurers are the splotchy grey zone between good and evil, civilization and anarchy, yesterday and tomorrow. They all had a purpose in coming together and that was all that mattered for now.

Together they ran makeshift obstacle courses. They sparred in clustered alleys and wide open courtyards. They gave each other advice and they taught each other what they could. Aeraul conjured an actual flame for the first time in his life, without any meditation or battle rage fuelling it. Rowan shaped his chi into an echo of his body, however weak it might've been. Savas simply learned how to use a weapon and avoid getting his head kicked in or chopped off.

And Caden, surprisingly enough, learned a little something about enchantment when he made the chalk glow in the dark.

They prepared spells, barriers and explosives for the most part. They trained their minds and their bodies. And when the third day came, every single one of them was gathered in the Temple district before the sun came over the horizon. They met in front of the Temple of Y'edda, with Rowan passing around a cantine of plain old tea like it was a parting shot of Salvic vodka or Dheathain whiskey.

"I'm going down first," Aeraul said simply, and although he was only the second in command, no-one argued. He had gone down once before, before two of them had even come to the city, and he seemed to have the most at stake personally. Shield in hand, the big man mounted a ladder left by some Guardsmen just the day before. He lowered himself down underground one rung at a time, with only the fading twilight of dawn and a lantern hanging from his belt to keep him company.

Half-way down and the world may as well have been pitch black beyond the reach of his lantern's light.

It took him almost fifteen minutes to get to the bottom. It was like the ladder itself stretched out to infinity in some futile bid to slow or stop his progress, but Aeraul kept going until his boots smacked cold, familiar cobblestones in an octagonal chamber that still haunted his dreams two years after he didn't set foot here.

The air was damp. Cold. His breath fogged on the first few exhales. The ancient torch stood unlit at the chamber's center, still a four-faced stack of skulls leading up to a shallow bowl full of burnt ash and twigs. Exactly as Aeraul remembered it.

For a time, he was alone down there in the dark. He took a deep breath and made the most of it; first by finding the entrance to the tunnel his Raiders had supposedly taken last time around, then by setting up his shield to help block it. He took the lantern off of his belt and drew a butterfly knife as he stared into the dark...

...and felt it, very distantly, staring right back at him.

Something still breathed in the Catacombs beneath Scara Brae.

Something still waited.

[Aeraul Smythe]

One by one, the others started coming down. First Rowan, then Savas, finally Caden. It took them almost an hour to get everyone down single-file. Aeraul never budged, even as his lantern slowly ticked away seconds and ounces of oil. All the while, the Catacombs breathed.

"Can you feel it?" he asked none of them in particular. Rowan completely missed the point. Savas just nodded.

"Yes," Caden said, which was all the validation Aeraul needed after two years of thinking himself insane. "You've got the shield. You lead. Savas and I will take the middle. Rowan in the back. Be ready for anything."

Aeraul picked up his lantern and, through sheer force of will, killed the flame right on its wick. He hung it from his belt now. It fell to the others to provide the light, and none of them disappointed: Savas took out a jar full of Alchemist's Light, shook it active and fixed it into a metal cage atop a torch handle. Caden hung strap-clad viles off his staff's end. Rowan just used a torch.

One by one, they filed into that first tunnel and in the strangest of ways, it almost felt like coming home. Caden was the only one who didn't get the sense that he had been here before, somehow and sometime long past. Deja vu struck the other three from the moment they crossed the threshold into the Catacombs proper. They got to the very first junction, the place where the tunnel branched off, and stopped.

"Last time we came down here," Aeraul whispered, as if someone outside the Company was listening. "We took the left. Monsters that way. Probably monsters on the right too. What say you all?"

"Left," Rowan said.

"Don't care," Savas.

"Right," Caden. "No point killing the same thing twice. Usually."

"Right," Aeraul agreed. He took the right turn this time, and each of the Company men followed him with a weapon or an eye on the left. One by one, without an ounce of hesitation, they went into the unknown dark.

[Aeraul Smythe]

The further they went, the more it seemed like the dark was literally eating away at the lights they carried. The air moved in subtly shifting breezes, much like some ancient thing inhaling and exhaling over the course of minutes. The ground became softer as ancient stone gave way to naked dirt, accompanied not long after by something that Aeraul was immediately familiar with.

"The grass glows," Savas mumbled from the back, because someone had to.

That was one of the more mundane oddities of the Catacombs. They hosted their own ecosystem, complete with glow-in-the-dark grass that didn't actually cast enough light to see by. It was all the same eerie, pale shade of blue, darkest near the core of each blade. It always crunched and squished under foot without ever actually being damaged. And it always shifted away from the air currents at floor level, as if trying to hold onto something in the dark.

The tunnel began to grow wider, and though the Company's lights were strangely weak, they still cast enough to see shapes on the walls; details from an age that no living tongue could adequately describe.

Statues.

Most of them had been worn down by the passage of time and factors unseen; their finer features obscured and cracked away. One was covered in some kind of glowing blue moss that actually managed to be dimmer than the grass on the floor. Closer to the floor, the moss showed signs of being scraped recently.

"D'you think anyone came through here recently?" Rowan asked.

"There were at least two tribes of completely different species down here last time," Aeraul answered. "I'd bet your life on it."

Something skittered down the tunnel from them, a lighter shade of darkness than the pitch black surrounding it. It was gone before any of the Company could react, which was saying something considered how fast some of them were. They waited for a little while after that, then continued on.

The tunnel of statues eventually gave away to the remnants of a large stone doorway and the empty, ransacked chamber beyond it. Broken bits of pottery lay all over, along with piles of muddy dust and mold. There were slots in the floor meant for the feet of statues, and empty torchmounts on the walls, and almost every square inch of the floor sported grass or mold. Spiderwebs scattered about.

And bones.

Broken, gnawed on bones and the worn down remnants of them.

"Looks like somebody had a last stand here," Caden eventually said.

"Ages ago. And very recently as well," Savas added. Everyone looked to the necromancer, who suddenly seemed to have Default Expert hovering over his head in unwritten ink. It took him a few seconds to adjust to their expectations, then he explained, "Only some of these are old. And I do mean old. This one, right here," he poked a jawbone with his boot and it basically disintegrated on the spot. "That was a soldier some eons ago. I couldn't even try telling you the age. But that one over there, near Rowan's foot? Two years. Maybe three."

Rowan immediately snapped away from a tiny pile of bones, all of them once belonging to the same hand. Savas stalked over and bent down, examining them in some detail.

"The owner and the hand met their end separately. She was taken," he pointed towards the back of the chamber. "All the way down there. We'll find a tunnel. We can't see it from here because the lights won't reach, but it's there."

"...do I even wanna know what happened to her?" Rowan asked.

"Probably not," Caden cut in from the middle of the room. The Wizard stood upon the only bare patch of floor anywhere in the room, where there was still a thick stone stand with eight sides centered around a deep inset. The stand had bloodstains on it. One of them looked disquietingly like a screaming face. "Wasn't much of a last stand after all. Looks like something valuable was interred here."

"Feels like it," Savas agreed. "Our handless wonder and her friends came looking for it and hilarity ensued. Suddenly, and violently..." He looked around at all the mounds of mold and dust. Corpses, he now realized, and all of them shared in that realization. "And all over the place."

"How far did that first party get, Aeraul?" Caden asked.

"We already passed where they died." He let that sink in a moment, then said, "I always felt like there was someone else down there with us. We might do well to assume the involvement of some third or fourth party."

"Which leaves us dealing with what..."

"Local undead and golems, fungus people, degenerate kobolds, and now the unknown," Aeraul answered. "Scourge?"

"Possible. Either way-"

"Duck," Aeraul said.

Caden didn't waste time asking questions. Not only did he duck, but the good Wizard stepped sideways too. Savas followed his master's example with the added benefit of a shield. Less than a second later, arrows came whipping through the dark. Rowan ducked to one side and smacked an arrow out of mid-air with his torch, then polevaulted over to where Aeraul was now huddled behind his shield. He actually had to do a baseball slide along the ceiling to pull it off.

"Didn't take long for the welcome wagon," the nimble fighter commented as Aeraul started forward. Rowan fell into line behind him.

"Get used to it," Aeraul told him as he belted the knife and drew his jian. "The dead don't rest easy down here. Neither does anything else."

[Leaf on the Wind]

"Multiple attackers coming from where Savas said the tunnel would be!" Aeraul shouted as he broke from a quick walk to a full-on run behind his shield. "Rowan, follow me!"

"Aw, hells," Rowan muttered, doing exactly as told in spite of himself. For all his experience in the Zirnden, he still favored not charging into a hail of arrows. Even when they were shattering on impact with a shield six or seven feet in front of him. "We got a plan?"

"Do what the Wizard says," Aeraul told him.

"Which one?"

"The less evil one."

"Covering fire!"

Magic missiles. Rowan didn't see where they came from; Caden and Savas were both well behind him at this point. From the left came birds, purple and blue and pink and red, shedding feathers like stardust as they went. From the right, skulls. Laughing green skulls clad in purple smoke. Both magicks echoed through the dark, vanished into it, and the bursts of power left on their impact were just barely visible several seconds later.

"We're behind you, no sudden movements to either side or high jumps."

"Is he talking into your head too?" Rowan asked.

"He's talking into my head too," Aeraul said.

"...do you get an echo?"

"That's just you," Aeraul told him.

"Well screw all of you then," Rowan muttered, then slowed down for exactly three strides; time enough for Aeraul to get some distance ahead of him. Then, without so much as a word, the fighter jammed his ten foot pole into the ground just a few inches behind Aeraul's trailing foot and vaulted right over him. He went sliding along the ceiling for several more feet, time enough for the Wizards to launch another volley of magic missiles -- time enough for that same volley to pass right under him by less than a foot.

Then he dropped to the ground, leaving the pole to fall where it may. Aeraul saw him coming and slowed on reflex with only one or two muttered obscenities. The whole maneuver put Rowan out front with a big blazing light in hand and no way of seeing his enemies or guarding himself from their attacks.

Which was exactly what Rowan wanted.

People don't fight in the Zirnden for fabulous prize money. Only the scum really fight for the fans; the girls aren't that attractive and the guys usually haven't bathed in weeks. Someone like Aeraul might fight for martial prowess or just to vent frustrations. Someone like Rowan though?

He fought purely for the thrill of it.

Chi focused in his legs, smoothing out strides that would've been rough and stabilizing his feet where they should have slipped on grass, moss, mold, or even bare dirt. It flowed through his legs, his nostrils, his throat; controlling the pace of his breathing and allowing him to focus on more important things. He couldn't dodge. By every account he had heard, the locals were blind or close to it; they just weren't used to light of any real intensity.

One of the key strategies of war was to attack with the sun at your back. Rowan did that sideways, in reverse, upside down, and every other way you can think of. He juggled the torch from one arm to the other, sometimes leaping from side to side and holding it steady in place as he hid in its glare. Arrows whistled by, some even came close enough to pass through the torch's flame and one or two were so close that he could feel the air splitting around them.

And the entire time, there were missiles flying right by him on all sides.

Rowan managed to keep this up for two full minutes before he finally caught sight of his attackers. He threw the torch at them and drew both katars.

The torch missed. But it didn't need to hit. Rowan saw shapes in the dark; some of them big, some of them smaller, none of them especially human. Not that it mattered much.

Rowan had never used katars before, but there's a first time for everything.

[Leaf on the Wind]

Rowan was top notch for the standards of the Zirnden. He practically had a lifetime of martial arts training. He was a street warrior in the most literal sense, and he had made more than a few gold pieces by being a street acrobat as well. He had, in point of fact, been an unintentional teacher to several of the Scara Scourge's more acrobatic thieves and nightrunners. That last one landed him in jail once. He had fought with everything from elves to orcs, dwarves to rejects from higher planes of existence.

None of them were as frustrating or hard-hitting as the things beneath Scara Brae. They had almost no response to the torch once they'd cleared its path, and were even quick to spread out from where it had landed. In the eldritch dark of the Catacombs, it didn't take much to get completely out of the light's reach. Rowan attacked the nearest one with a lunging left hook; he missed. He spun into a sweeping roundhouse kick in the dark; he missed. Tracking more by ear than anything else, he dove in with both blades leading and still missed.

This time he ducked down into a sweeping leg kick and actually hit something. Chitin shattered on impact and something blubbery and soft spilled out from around it, but this had the net effect of stopping his kick short. Rowan switched to one knee and made the most of it. He stabbed with both katars, guessing again, and hit home: more chitin broke, the katars sank in and there was a gush of something foul smelling all over Rowan's arms and forehead.

He fell back with a scream of surprise, tearing the blades free with him. Something warbled distress in the dark and Rowan looked away to see three or four sparse bursts of blue-green light moving in eerie patterns. More warbles answered the first and Rowan reflexively rolled to one side, then put all of his chi into a handspring that carried him up to the ceiling. Arrows shattered on the ground below. Rowan jumped down and another arrow whistled to a shatter on the ceiling where he'd been standing.

"Come on, you sons of bitches!" he laughed in spite of himself, lunging forward on pure guesswork.

Punch, punch, punch; Rowan wasn't compensating for the katars' added weight and reach and it showed in his footing and balance. Hammer blows that would've cracked skulls instead wobbled and glanced off targets that he could still gauge by ear; targets he could've probably hit otherwise. Each miss left him exposed for a fraction of a second longer than they would have otherwise.

A bone sword slipped in under one of his arms and slammed into his midsection. The cutting edge shattered, bits of it sticking in the cloth and the padding while most of it simply failed to make headway on the layers of chainmail under Rowan's clothing. The force of the blow was enough to not only take the fighter off his feet, but send him spinning violently through the air. He hit the ground running in three directions at once, fell over and wound up staring into the torch a few inches shy of oh-gods-my-head-is-on-fire range.

"...not how I planned it," Rowan muttered.

Contrary to his expectations, he was not immediately filled with arrows, smothered in blubbery fungus, or otherwise beaten and stabbed to death. It was also a good thing he'd chosen to stay down the way that he did. It gave him a bit of protection from the blast wave.

Two years ago, Aeraul Smythe had(n't) encountered the Fungans of the Catacombs. He had apparently passed on the knowledge of their explosive properties to one or both of the Wizards. One of Rowan's attackers took a blast of raw heat to the midsection and pretty much ceased to exist as all sorts of volatile elements in its body cooked off, mixed up, and then detonated in a great big flameless blast of raw force and heat. The room shook. The shockwave bounced off the ceiling and knocked the wind right out of Rowan's lungs, but it didn't deafen, kill, or send him flying the way it could have.

If the other attackers survived, none of them stuck around to share that first one's fate. Rowan blearily saw shapes passing him by at the edge of the torch's light. With his head so close to the ground, he could barely feel their footfalls moving away as the rest of Fireside Company approached.

Eventually, he sat up.

Aeraul was glaring at him, his eyes a phospherous blue in the dark.

"...what?" Rowan asked with an unrepentant shrug. "Like you never wanted to shank a mushroom before?"

[Savas Tigh]

When the dust finished settling and the party regrouped, Rowan got off with nothing but a light slap upside the back of the head. By the half-orc. Savas felt his teeth rattling from sheer sympathy. He and Caden spent a few minutes checking for bodies, but found nothing. The exploded fungan hadn't even left behind a telltale splattering of gore, and the others that Rowan claimed to injure seemed to leave behind even less.

"Can you sense anything?" Caden eventually asked, holding his staff high to examine a spot on the ceiling. Burnt in rings, all of them concentric, right above a matching set on the floor. The fungan had exploded here.

"No," Savas admitted, heaving his breaths as he did it. The only thing he smelled was the background stench of the Catacombs. The only things he felt were the movements of the same vast, ancient power that had been so pervasive around the well above ground. Down here, the only difference was that it felt heavier and carried an unknowable purpose with it. "Whatever we just fought either doesn't leave a soul or I'm getting too much background interference. Either way, I'm not chancing a summoning down here."

As heavy as the power of the Catacombs felt, the fabric of reality felt thinner and lighter than anywhere Savas had ever set foot. He was genuinely worried about summoning up something more powerful than he could control. That was one of the reasons he had left the skull of Blightcrow back 'home.'

"Don't think we should stay here too long though," he advised.

The senior Wizard nodded and turned to the other two, "Think we should try going deeper here or head back and take the other path? I figure at this point we're still close enough to turn around. Further in though..."

Rowan looked to Aeraul. The big man shrugged. "Deeper this way," he said. "I'd rather not take the same path twice."

There was a round of nodding and the group packed together again. Aeraul and Savas took the lead, each one brandishing either an alchemic light or a torch, while Caden and Rowan hung back to cover the rear. In rows of two, they advanced through the rest of the empty chamber and into a tunnel that had, by the look of things, been very roughly cut into it. The further they went, the narrower the tunnel got, until it finally became just tight enough that Aeraul had to take the lead on his own.

The walls were brown and blue, mixing like a watercolor. The texture was jagged and rocky, and there was grass all around their feet. Moss grew only lightly near the tunnel floor, in odd swirls and chunky patterns that had no rhyme or reason.

A rat raced across all their feet and chittered off into the dark. Only Rowan actually got a good enough look at it to confirm, "It had...no eyes...not even leftovers..."

"Even bioluminescence seems optional down here," Caden replied without missing a beat.

"Down here, some things probably don't need eyes to see," Savas mumbled.

They continued on. And eventually they heard drums. Squealing sounds, like a pig crossed with nails on a chalkboard. A few distant explosions, and not one of them gave Fireside Company a moment's pause.

Adventurers aren't known for living to retirement age.

[Savas Tigh]

Bit by bit, the supernatural darkness gave way to something more empty; not the total supression of light so much as its expected absence. The air still felt heavy, clammy, and cold, but the power and intent seemed to become confused or weakened or something as the four of them moved deeper into the Catacombs. And, eventually, the tunnel came to an end. They emerged into a gigantic cavern, one that simply had to be too big to realistically fit beneath the city above it. They stood on what seemed like a short precipice joined to a long, narrow path that looked like it went on forever.

Almost reflexively, Caden and Savas killed their lights. Aeraul was not far behind them, and it was more from information overload than anything else. Rowan took the hint and put out his light as well. A few seconds later, there was an explosion; a great big fireball that looked like it was going off underwater, accompanied by enormous bubbling clouds of neon green and purple smoke. For a fraction of a second, it outlined the shape of an enormous tower in the dark, mushroom-tipped and violently shaking from whatever impact triggered the blast.

There was a horrible crunching sound, like the bones of a titan snapping, and then the tower's silhouette fell. This was accompanied by an enormous wave of dust and debris; one that literally washed up to the cliff wall below Fireside Company and splashed high up into their faces. An ungodly roar followed it, wholly separate from the blast or its shockwave.

There was a war going right below the streets of Scara Brae and nobody knew it.

"If anyone has any suggestions," Caden half-shouted over the dying echoes of the roar. "I'm totally open right now."

"Go down the path and try not to die," Aeraul said in a similar tone. He almost sounded like a full-blown orc when he raised his voice like that.

"What he said," Rowan uselessly added.

"Something is wrong here," Savas declared. "Something is very wrong! We should tread lightly in this city, else we draw the attention of-"

"Got it, let's move," Caden cut him off, then got a running start down the path next to them. Rowan ran along the wall overhead, Aeraul brought up the rear, and the necromancer was shoved along somewhere in the middle.

All at once came a million chittering battlecries; something too loud to just be any one set of clicks and calls, and something too diverse to be one creature making them. And there in the dark -- the powerless, vacant dark, occupied only by dust and echoes -- the sound formed into something greater than any of its constituent parts. Fireside Company mostly lacked any ability to see it, but they didn't need to. What they heard was enough on its own to tell them everything they needed to know. An attacker had brought fire and wrath here, and it was being met in kind.

Noise split through the air like a living creature; a beast the size of a mountain that only seemed to lumber because it was too loud to do anything else. It struck into the forevernight and there was death echoing right through the very fiber of its being. It reached through buildings that Fireside Company only knew were there because it reached through them; and it grabbed foes that they only identified because it was grabbing them. Even when the chorus of battlecries ceased, the echo remained in all its awful glory.

Underscoring its existence was the sound of internal organs being crushed to the consistency of jelly and paste. Armored bodies collapsed, weapons gave out, magicks were useless. There were screams. Horrible inhuman screams like nothing in nature. They were dying screams.

When the last echo finally faded out, there remained only a silence that was somehow even worse. It was the ominous quiet of the reload; of the time when you dig yourself out from beneath your best friend's corpse and check to see if all your bits and pieces are where they're meant to be. And like all such armistices, this one didn't last. By the time Fireside Company made it down the path to ground level, there were spells of all kinds going off all over what they now recognized as a city unlike anything on the surface.

It was a city of mold, fungus, and abhumanity at its most eldritch and incomprehensible. Mushrooms towered high towards the cavern's ceiling. The ground was covered in glowing blue grass that pulsed green from time to time. There were animals -- real animals running through streets that could've easily fit in Scara Brae itself during antiquity. There was a lizard the size of a full-blown aligator, with blank white eyes and a dozen rows of teeth. There were creatures resembling cats and rabbits and dogs all rolled into one, and there were bits and pieces of the city's people lying everywhere in sight. The fighting was thickest nearer the border and the core. Peripheral areas, like the one near the Catacombs tunnel, didn't matter so much.

"What are they doing?" Savas blurted out, and was ignored accordingly.

Not long after their arrival, the Company witnessed the war up close and personal. A humanoid ran by them without noticing, and when it turned around the creature was swamped by dozens of smaller, meaner things resembling kobolds. Chalk white kobolds with freakish pink eyes that glowed in the dark.

"They-th-they..."

"No time to waste on feeling surprised," Caden chided. Savas almost screamed at him.

"This what you were telling us about?" Rowan asked his old Zirnden partner, even as he and the rest of them ducked behind a 'building' that had been burned down to its stump.

"Not that I know," Aeraul answered.

"We have to get out of here before either of them carries out the Working. Neither side has any idea what they're going to do, they're tampering with powers they can't understand, they're-"

"What're you on about anyway?" Rowan asked.

"We're here," Savas answered. "Right where they want us to be. The war is just a layer of conflict between bigger powers."

"And you know this, how?" Rowan asked, looking skeptical even with his face lit by nothing but glowing grass and mold from the ground -- sparsely at that.

"Because I've never been here before," Savas answered like it explained itself.

"...what."

"Don't ask," Caden cut in. "Just take his word to heart for now. We're in over our heads. Think we should go back?"

Something skittered on the walls nearby. Caden immediately turned his staff to bear on it.

It was not one of the senior Wizard's wiser decisions.

[Savas Tigh]

There is horror and there is Horror. The difference between the two is more than a matter of punctuation. Lower-case horror is what happens when you spot a dead body lying mutilated in an alleyway. War is a genuine tapestry of this kind of horror, and even in the dark of the Catacombs, it was on proud display; body parts were still raining down in bits and pieces of every size. None of them looked particularly human, and all were almost pleasant compared to what greeted Fireside Company the moment Caden Law shined a light on it.

Horror.

A deep, primal, soul-aching Horror that was writ large on the basic instincts of every single one of them. Even Savas, the resident corpse mongler, took a step back at the sight of Horror. It had eight legs, each one ending in tiny feet that could've been hooves or hammers or knives or fists; it was impossible to tell. Its body was almost centaurian in layout; the legs all fixed to a lower body that was taken from or maybe just inspired by a spider or some other arachnid or insect. Its upper body was muscle tearing out underneath layers of chitin, some kind of purple bile oozing out through the cracks like sweat. It had four arms, maybe more on its back, and all of them ended in great big double-hands; inner fingers that looked dexterous and impossibly jointed, sheltered by huge apish fingers that were only four to a hand. Each outer finger was anchored by a spiked knuckle and tipped with a claw that looked like a spider's fang puncturing out into open air and tearing through skin doing it.

Last was the head, which was at least temporarily hidden away inside of a chitinous mandible shaped like a hood or cloak with a mask built into it. The mandible snapped open to reveal the Horror's face.

No eyes. Only empty sockets where they should've been, equally distributed beneath the brow, on the cheeks, and the lower jaw and forehead. There were slits for nostrils, set out in a triangle, and maybe there would be holes or actual ears on the side of its head. It had a mouth.

And when that mouth opened, it was like staring down a tunnel lined with nothing but jagged, crooked teeth leading all the way to a stomach full of glowing green ichor.

Horror shrieked at the men.

It broke Aeraul where he was standing. Something in its Voice hit him like a body blow and knocked the half-orc over with dreadful ease. He was reduced to a screaming wreck on the spot. Rowan tried to attack first, cocksure as ever, and Horror simply bowled him over with its uppermost arms. A hammer blow downward; Rowan changed directions on impact and hit the ground hard enough to leave a shallow imprint around his waist. He didn't even scream. It all happened so fast that Savas only finished processing that the Horror was standing on a completely vertical wall as Rowan was being driven down.

"Welp," Caden suddenly said. "Time to save the day, Wormaxe."

"This is the least of our problems," Savas replied in a daze. He went for his wand -- any of them -- and Blueraven lead the attack. He held nothing in reserve.

A colossal Sorcerous Fist slammed into the Horror and drove it into the wall. Almost on impact, the Fist turned into a hand that grabbed the Horror up and tore it away from Rowan. Savas followed after with a pair of Dead Bolts -- necromantically-empowered magic missiles, more or less. Horror shrieked again and squirmed as Savas' magic filtered through Caden's and struck the thing square in its torso with little or no effect. It squirmed harder still as Caden gave up on crushing it and simply started slamming it into the ground as fast and hard as he could.

"We don't have time for this!" Savas cried as the thing grabbed onto the ground and sank its entire hand into the dirt. Caden replied with geomancy, but the Horror in the Dark was tougher than rocks and aether combined. Even as he tried to twist its hand off with the ground and crush its body with Sorcery, it just held strong. "Can't you feel it building?!"

"If you're not going to help me kill this thing then shut up and help the others!" Blueraven ordered. The lines on his face were blazing like a blue star now, and every single breath sent ghostly feathers falling around him.

Savas turned away and found Rowan already starting to stand on his own. The fighter was stiff-legged and weak-kneed, saying nothing and looking at things that weren't there. "What hit me?" he occasionally asked.

Aeraul was just plain gone. Savas tried to get the half-man moving and all he got was frothing catatonia. Aeraul said nothing, never blinked, and didn't even seem to be breathing. It was like someone had struck his will to live.

"We do not have time for this!" Savas finally shouted.

Less than a second later, Blueraven's Hand shattered like cheap glass. Blood burst from his actual hand without a single wound, and the Sorcerer bent sideways in shock and pain. By the time he recovered, the Horror was almost on top of him.

Savas rolled the dice.

Imperfected Beekiller's Muteblind Howler, blasting up right underneath the Horror and striking it in senses that it did not have. It manifested as an enormous skull shooting out of the ground, blazing like a dead star in the night, and it still managed to stun the Horror and strip its Voice of the power that had left Aeraul catatonic. The half-orc recovered with a string of gasping coughs and almost threw up as he scrambled to his knees.

Blueraven geomanced his way out from in front of the Horror and locked its feet down while stabbing it at every angle he could manage with earthen spires. None of them did any good, but it was the thought that counted.

"I remember this now!" Savas called, drawing out a pair of alchemic lights and another carved tooth. "I remember!"

He threw the lights. Glass broke easy on the Horror's armored body, marking it out clearly so that it could not hide even if all their torches and spells cut out right then and there. That wasn't why Savas did it though.

He threw the tooth. It pinged off the Horror's upper back and suddenly froze in mid-air as he snapped his fingers.

Ironstone's Collapsing Breath triggered in an instant. Unlike his last spell, it was one that Savas knew almost perfectly; he had used lesser versions of it to help bind Blueraven just few days earlier. Channeled through necromancy, it literally collapsed life in on itself. In this case the alchemic lights doubled as a conduit straight through the cracks and openings in the Horror's armor. When Collapsing Breath ripped the light from the Horror's body, it also tore the fluid out of the thing's veins and severed its life-force in the process.

The end result was a messy geyser of blood and darkening fluids that sprayed high into the dark and splashed back down uneventfully a fair distance from where it started. The Horror stood still for a few seconds longer, then collapsed in every direction at once. It was like deflating a water balloon covered in crusted mud. Bits broke off, leftover juices gushed out, bare muscle and tissue was exposed, and eventually all that remained were two things.

First was the ruined carcass of what used to be a nightmarish thing from gods only knew where, lying in a shallow mess of its own faintly glowing ichor.

Second were the memories, which were perfectly clear and always would be.

"We have to get out of here," Savas said before anyone could start celebrating. "We stumbled into the middle of a war between I don't know anything else -- all I just do-gah!" He actually slapped himself hard enough to draw blood. "Someone is trying to carry out a Working down here. Reality is stretched thin and the only reason we're not all feeling that-that whatever it is in the tunnels is because they all draw on it as much as they can. There's nothing left, there's-"

"Right. Savas. Shut up," Caden said. "In common, please. While we're running. That means you, Rowan and Aeraul. Savas, you lead."

The necromancer immediately went for the path they'd taken to get here.

And just as immediately, he found it was missing.

"Oh, gods," he mumbled.

Aeraul snapped around, looking over his shoulder. Before anyone could say anything else, he spoke.

"The Penitent is here."

[Aeraul Smythe]

"The Penitent?" Caden asked.

Barely a second later, Savas started screaming and Rowan had to slap him out of a panic. The necromancer was sputtering madly about some kind of spell being prepared and all Aeraul could do was stare at a fixed point far off in the dark. There were explosions going off in what he now knew was a city; fires burning like the funeral pyre for a great, unknown civilization. With it came an enormous sadness, mixing equally with rage and hope and joy and the whole panoply of emotions felt during any war's last stand.

And through it all, through more than a million minds across no fewer than three species, Aeraul felt one set of emotions more strongly than any other.

Triumph.

"Wait for it," he said, holding up a finger. Savas was starting to go crazy again.

"I don't think we have that option," Caden said. "And I'm out of ideas. If the path's gone, we'll just have to go to plan B."

"What's plan B?" Rowan asked. He had Savas in a bona fide sleeper hold with a hand clenching his jaw shut. "Run around like chickens with our heads cut off?"

"Close enough," the Wizard shrugged. He cracked his knuckles before adding, "Don't knock it. It works. Just focus on what you're running from, not what you're running to."

"I'm starting to think we should've elected a better leader," Rowan told him.

"There," Aeraul said, completely ignorant of the entire conversation. He pointed at one of the tallest, brightest fires in the distance. It was little more than a mound of blazing fungus, sporting a few tell-tale stems that could've been mushrooms of some kind not seen above ground. "Look! That's him!"

For a moment, nothing happened.

And then, up the side of the mound with absolutely no regard for the fact that he should've been burning alive, a man appeared. Tall and thin, and covered in long scars and more than a few open wounds that didn't seem to bleed. The details of him were obscured by distance, but there was some kind of half-wheel coming out of his back. It was covered in spikes, and bits of burning meat hung from some of them. He wore only tattered rags, like some kind of mad street prophet or a summer flagellant in Ethereal Knife's Edge. His face was partially obscured by an enormous metal plate or visor, one without any obvious anchoring point. He might have been bald.

He held a staff longer than he was tall. It was shaped like an enormous key, with a jagged blade on one end and an enormous ring on the other. Crisp blue light fell from the staff like snow, visible even against the red-and-orange backdrop of the very fires he stood in. He raised the staff high and screamed, loud and high and grating right to the soul.

All at once, the fire he was standing in froze solid and then collapsed.

Aeraul felt minds blinking out.

At the same time, Savas stopped panicking quite so badly and said, "He's-he's buying us time...we have to find a way out..."

"He's not buying time for anyone," Aeraul said.

"Looks like he's gathering power," Caden replied. "But. Yes. Enough standing around. Plan B, boys. Move."

[Aeraul Smythe]

As awful as the situation was, Fireside Company made it to an exit tunnel without further incident. They were followed the whole way by the distant, darkened sounds of the atrocities that follow any war; a mad laugh so loud it seemed to stalk after them like a hunter, and the screams of the dying and the damned. Only the laugh sounded anything close to human, and even that was...off, somehow.

Once they were all in the tunnel, as safe as they could be under the current circumstances, Caden willed the rock shut behind them. The Wizard then collapsed against the nearest wall and Savas wasn't far behind. Neither man was particularly out of shape, but only Aeraul and Rowan were truly athletes. They had the stamina for running a mile or more without even breaking a sweat, let alone three or four times that in heavy gear on uneven and terribly lit terrain.

"Alright," Caden rasped between pulls off his water skein. "What the hell was that?"

"You're asking me?" Aeraul shot back. The natural darkness was giving way now, and the torchlight wasn't going quite so far. At the same time, the light it cast and the details shown were all changing; becoming brighter, more vivid, clearer than even daylight should have been. The same was true of the alchemic lights and even the glow of Caden's staff.

"You knew his name," the Wizard replied, straightening up as he spoke. They were standing in a tomb. The walls weren't claustrophobic, the ceiling wasn't very low, but it was still clearly a tomb. The doors to coffin chambers lay scattered along the walls, their rows interrupted only by broken statues covered in neon fungus.

"I remembered it from somewhere," Aeraul replied. "It's familiar. I can't remember where or why, I just do."

"Could it be related to that timeywimey crap you were talking about the other day?" Rowan asked.

"Yeah. It could. You encountered him during the trip you didn't take down here. Now that you're so close to the site of whatever didn't happen, you're starting to remember it."

"...that hurts my head and I'm going to stop paying attention now," Rowan announced.

"Makes sense," Aeraul replied without missing a beat. "If that's the case then we should try finding the magic-protected gate I told you about, the one at the end of my waking memories. It could be that Teric and I made past there after all."

"It could also be that you made it there and had your souls carved out by a transpatial abomination that sent you back in time and place so that you could lure more unsuspecting prey into the bowels of its vile, cold, dark, vile smelling, vile lair," Savas blurted out, then cheerfully asked, "Did I mention vile?"

"You were beaten as a child, weren't you," the half-orc said rather than asked.

"Regularly," Savas replied in a heartbeat. "More to the point, we should probably not linger here. If Blueraven can move some rocks to hide us, that Penitent and his army can probably move them to reveal us."

"Also true," Caden admitted. "And Savas, you were talking about a ritual back there. Head in order enough to say what it was?"

"Not especially, but I can try," Savas said. "Notice the dark now and compare it to what we saw back there. My gut's telling me that the locals tapped into whatever powers this dark and drained it until they had something more...ordinary. In the process, they weakened the fabric of reality enough that they could probably summon. What, I don't know. Someone back there was trying to summon something big as a parting shot at the Penitent and his...people. I think. It doesn't matter now though. We all know who won that showdown."

"Do we?" Aeraul asked.

"...probably," Savas shrugged. "Either way, we need to stop and eat soon. How long d'you think we've been down here?"

The other Wizard closed his eyes for a few seconds and then reported, "Ten hours, twenty-seven minutes, thirteen seconds."

"What?"

"Welcome to Time in the Catacombs, gentlemen. Keep moving. We'll stop later."

[Caden Law]

Crossposted with the Holiday Vignette contest (http://althanas.com/world/showthread.php?p=177769). Largely because it's been forever and it makes for a nice break from the Grimmy Grimness of this whole mess. Posted here with no regard to EXP or whatever. :)Somewhere beneath the city of Scara Brae, a man was wondering, "How long've we been down here now?"

There was a long pause in the cold, eerie dark. Fire crackled in the middle of a long, ancient hallway that Time had, quite literally, forgotten. Four men, including the first speaker, sat around that feeble little flame. They were tucking into rations packed what felt like a day or two ago, at most. One man had a hand by the fire, balancing his food on his other wrist and holding a cantine of water at the same time. Another huddled in his coat and armor, thin blue lines lighting up and fading out on every visible inch of skin. He was the one the question had been addressed to. He didn't answer it immediately, choosing instead to let the silence hang a while. The fire danced between them all, like an absent woman who would have livened things up and improved morale just by being there. It moved at the behest of a wind only barely tangible on the skin; it blew stronger in the soul, and the longer they were down here, the weirder it felt.

"Take a guess," he finally ordered.

Rowan, the first speaker, stared at him for a second before asking, "Can't you just answer a damn question?"

"He could, but it's funnier to watch you squirm," a third speaker joined in. He had a heavier beard than all the rest of them put together. Even the half-orc's facial hair was thinner than his. Like Rowan's target, he was a Wizard. Of them all, he was the closest to the fire and the one who looked most like he wanted some kind of actual shelter or safe haven to crawl away and hide in. He kept looking over his shoulder, into what he knew was hungry darkness leading to a dead end that they had already sealed off.

"I'd say you're the one squirming, Savas," Aeraul finally said, his voice rumbling like an earthquake even though he struggled to speak softly. His eyes glowed in the dark of the Catacombs. He still looked as if he was recovering from the things he had seen on the other side of that dead end.

"Least I'll admit it," Savas replied. "Though I am kinda curious too. How long have we been down here?"

Caden, the fourth man in this merry little band, took a bite out of his ration and said, "Time has no meaning here."

"Tell us anyway."

Caden waited. Then rubbed at the bridge of his nose, beneath his glasses' frames, and answered, "Four months, give or take a few days."

Aeraul looked unsurprised. Savas looked as if someone had slapped him. Rowan's expression was utterly unreadable.

"Should be...well. It would be close to the Festival of Lights back home in Salvar, or at least in Evernorth. What part of the country were you from, Savas?" The lesser Wizard didn't answer. Caden resumed talking. "It's week long holiday where we're from. At the end of each year, the whole village gets together and everyone holds up a lantern and all the younger people dance; especially the unattached ones. It's mostly so that everyone can get a running tally on who's not dead at the end of the year, but you can use it to count who's dead just as easily. It was an Ethereal holiday back when I still lived there. I don't know if they've changed it or not since the fall of Denebriel and her Church. The Wizards always followed it with about a week of straight ritual and prayer."

"My Order did that too," Savas finally said. "Usually involved White-Eye and Starwind symbolically duelling each other. Whenever they tired out, they'd get one of the other seniors to take their spot for a little while. Same strategies every single year, same effects, same everything. If there were any differences from year to year, I was too young and stupid to see them. Always ended in a draw."

"Weird," Caden replied. "Mine always locked us all up in a room for most of each day, making us pray and recite passages of Ethereal scripture. I think it was scripture. I'm pretty sure it was. Only rituals the seniors ever took part in involved getting drunk and hitting on the prettiest married folks they could find."

"Successfully?" Rowan asked.

"Never," Caden and Savas both said on reflex. The two men looked at each other and something unspoken passed through the fire between them. They nodded. It fell to Caden to clarify, "Wizards might get lucky in love from time to time, but that's the exception. And it's usually a pretty epic one."

"Heard about one chick who managed to win over a guy by tearing out a succubus' essence and weaving it into her own," Savas cut in. "The only reason she stayed faithful was pure love. Burned the succubus parts right back out of her the moment they concieved."

"...how'd that end?" Rowan asked.

"Messy," Savas said with a warped grin.

"There's also the story of the Wizard who proposed to the same woman seven times a year for seven years in a row," Caden added. "Forty-eight times, she said no."

"And the forty-ninth?"

"Her new husband shot her through with an arrow before she could answer."

"Wizard romances are depressing," Rowan concluded. "You guys need to get laid more."

"Toast to that," Caden said. All four of them raised their drinks accordingly. "What about you two? Either of your peoples do anything special near year's end?"

Rowan and Aeraul looked at each other. The half-orc nodded. Rowan took that as a cue. "Coronian holidays never held much interest for me. It was always King blah's favorite whatever or Yay let's celebrate traditions nobody follows anymore. Only real stand-out was Saint's Eve, and we imported that one from Salvar if I'm remembering right."

"That's the big day for the Ethereals," Caden said. "The night that the big saint bitch was born. Never been too fond of it, myself."

"Right. Well, in Corone, it's an excuse to dress up like an idiot and run around doing stupid things. Pranks, very light gift giving, the occasional drunken fling in somebody's bushes; stuff like that. Growing up, that was the only real holiday I liked from Corone. Lost my virginity on a Saint's Eve, in fact. To an initiate nun. And her twin sister." This was met by one Wizard whistling and the other doing a slow clap. "Totally worth it. Aside from that, I didn't really get into the holiday spirit until right before my sixteenth birthday. That was when I left home, joined a dojo in Akashima, and really started immersing myself in the place I'd actually been raised in. They have a holiday over there, right about this time of year, practically tailor-made for someone like me. Shaowa Kal Sul. It's basically a week-long purification ritual.

"It starts and it ends with a hot springs bath. They take down all the walls separating men and women for this, and everyone is equal. Monks hand out towels and robes as people get out of the water, nuns give out soap and snacks, so on and so forth. After the first bath, people are expected to go find a stranger -- someone they really do not know at all -- and just...live with them. Their hosts are expected to basically adopt them, giving them a new name for a week, and treating them like family. The guests are free to do whatever the host's family would normally be allowed. The only people exempt from this are the old, the very young, and the rich. The very young are expected to stay with their grandparents, or some other trusted elder if they have to. The old are supposed to be hosts. So are the rich.

"It works out because it means the old folks get to meet new people, learn their stories, and for just a week, have a family even if they don't really have any blood relatives. It keeps them occupied and gives them a chance to talk, you know? And the rich get to meet the people they're pretty much lording over, knowing them as people and being reminded of what those people have to live with. Everyone else gets wisdom, social contact, and the chance to kneecap a corrupt local out of it. I've known a few friends who met longtime lovers this way too."

"Do marriages survive that kind of thing?" Caden asked.

"Easily. Akashima's big on reincarnation and soul mates. If a love is real, you know what they say? It'll hold together even after you become someone else. There's no real prohibition on messing around during Shaowa Kal Sul, but most committed people just won't do it. They'll actually seek each other out and start their relationships back up from scratch; nervous introductions and awkward first kisses and everything. It's crazy."

Talk gave way to quiet for a while.

Eventually, Aeraul said, "My mother's tribe just gathered everyone up at the end of the year and counted who was still breathing. Then they went out and killed something big and ate it."

Silence.

"Good holiday," Caden said.

"Very simple," Savas added.

"No worries about gift-giving or clean-up, I'd bet," Rowan chimed in.

"I guess I could claim some Coronian holidays too, but the truth is that I've never really been in one place long enough to feel truly at home. Father was an advance scout for the Deccan Adventure Company. Didn't really see him often, mostly grew up in boarding schools and a monestary. Did some work as an adventurer myself, then eventually ended up here. Still don't know all the local holidays, but it's hard to keep track of them anyway. Scara Brae has so many blasted peoples living in it..."

"That's part of the charm," Caden pointed out.

"It is," Aeraul agreed without a moment's hesitation. "I love it here. Well, not here," he gestured around to the tunnel they were sitting in. "Screw this place. But the city? I've been all over the world and this is the only city where nobody stares at you for being a big green guy dressed as a scholar."

"Or for wearing a pointy hat and goggles," Caden said.

"Or being a vicious cannibal," Savas added.

Caden backhanded him without a word. Savas fell over and sputtered something obscene into the dark.

"Can't say I sympathize," Rowan admitted. "I've been here almost two years now. Seen the top of the city and the bottom too. Bedded enough of its women to have a good sample of the local flavor. Seen better."

"You do realize you're bragging about sex to at least two guys who haven't been laid in the better part of a decade, both of whom can tear out your soul and set it on fire." Savas mumbled something about just eating said soul. Caden ignored him. "Right?"

"Right. Know what else I realize?"

"What?" Caden asked.

"I'm spending Shaowa Kal Sul with three weird bastards in an ancient crypt full of godsawful monsters and abominations trying to kill me."

"Good holiday," Aeraul replied, raising a toast.

All four men raised their drinks by the fire's pale light. For the most part, they wouldn't have it any other way.

[Caden Law]

"Oy. Blueraven," Rowan finally said. "How long have we been down here now?"

"You don't wanna know," Caden told him without missing a beat. Together with Savas and Aeraul, they had moved from a network of unconnected tunnels -- each one only accessable with dumb luck and copious amounts of geomancy -- onto a massive staircase that seemed to lead to go on forever. Each step was almost two feet tall, and the staircase itself was wide enough that one of the streets above would have comfortably fit on either side of it. Statues lined the walls. Huge, grim statues, most of them decayed by the passage of time or defaced by faintly glowing blue mold.

Things chittered in the dark, and all light was swallowed in a matter of feet. It was strangely comforting after so much time spent fleeing the site of the Penitent's slaughter. Savas cleared his throat. Aeraul remained silent, leading the way by a few inches with a lantern held high...for all the good it might do.

"It might be helpful to try and make some allies down here," Savas said.

Fireside Company continued on in silence for a little while. He added, "We're alone in the middle of some kind of war."

"Not our problem and I doubt any of the combatants would have us," Rowan replied.

Chittering sounds. Caden glanced over his shoulder and fell behind by a few paces.

"We're outnumbered and our supplies are limited. It's only a matter of time before we get run down."

"Assuming we don't succeed in our mission first," Aeraul finally said. "Then it's just a matter of getting out."

"We've got no mission, last I checked."

"Find whatever's down here and kill it," Caden interrupted.

"That's a bit vague for my tastes."

"Your tastes don't matter, apprentice," Caden reminded him, even as he was drawing out his sword. Savas immediately stopped climbing the stairs and glared back at him, axe in one hand and the other groping about for a bone wand. Aeraul was the only one providing any light right now. Rowan sighed and drew out his katars, placing himself between the two magi while Aeraul took a step back and braced his shield.

"I'll have you know I killed my last master," Savas informed him as he got hold of the wand and drew it out. It was a curved number; a rib bone that had been carved so intricately that it was hard to tell it had ever been a part of someone's chest cavity.

Caden grimaced as power gathered in his staff.

"After you," he said.

Savas gave his wand a flick and a swish. Purple light rippled out of the tip.

Rowan sidestepped and Caden ducked under the spell and something exploded in the air behind him with a messy wet shriek and a spray of gore. Something small and clad in broken chunks of crude armor hit the stairwell. Rowan turned and plunged both daggers into another attacker, plucking three feet of smooth blue scales and fever yellow eyes out of mid-air. Caden rushed by both of them and fired off a spray of magic missiles up the staircase, triggering a chorus of hissing shrieks -- all of them angry.

"I was wondering when they'd make their move," Aeraul said.

"Better never than now," Savas said as he fired off spells into the dark below.

"Just so everyone knows, we're surrounded," Rowan announced.

"We know," Aeraul said. "I was also wondering when you'd notice."

There were kobolds in the Catacombs of Scara Brae. Lots and lots of kobolds.

[Leaf on the Wind]

Picture an anorexic, vaguely humanoid raptor with vacant blue eyes, the pupils fogged and gray from disuse. The tail should be shortened, the ribs widened a little bit, and the arms almost disproportionately long, ending in strong little hands with dulled nails. Add clothing. Nothing special, just enough that it's more than rags. You might or might not see armor, but it would only be leather or bone at best. Little horns might be present in any number of patterns. Take away individual self-preservation, at least in any form that makes sense to a human mind. Now arm it with primitive weaponry -- nothing metal, very little stone or wood, but plenty of bone.

Now multiply that by too damn many.

Welcome to the Catacombs of Scara Brae, where a young man named Rowan Stormwind was running up a wall in the dark, screaming his lungs out and spinning from stride to stride with his arms at or near full extension. Bodies were dropping around him. Pieces of bodies were dropping all around him. Chi rippled from katars' edges, formed pale blue and green leaves at his feet. It was feeble light in the supernatural darkness of the tunnels; nothing strong enough to see by, but plenty to draw fire.

Rowan backflipped off the wall and almost hit the ceiling. Kobolds followed him in a jagged tide of lashing blades and snapping teeth. He spun twice in mid-air, latched onto nothing with his chi and jumped back down. He should've hit stone. He landed feet-first on top of another small body, crushing ribs and rupturing lungs; a gasp of surprise and then nothing beneath him but fresh meat. Sight was almost useless here. All of his senses were almost useless here. He could only barely track the others over the racket of the mob, and only because Caden was a one-Wizard warzone in his own right while Savas was just barely loud enough to stand out amidst a background of explosions and shrieking and death. Rowan was not a mage. He tapped chi. You could argue a million different ways that it was the same thing, but his magical prowess amounted to feeling the power of others -- and the Wizards were throwing around energy like it was nothing. Lightning blue ravens cackled and crashed through the air, reducing small reptilian bodies to flayed and mutilated carcasses in their passing. Bone dice rolled and enormous violet skulls lit up the dark, their ghastly jaws slamming shut on what might've been families. Corpses stood still afterwards, then dropped in the dark.

Aeraul was the only one that Rowan could not track. He was a six foot six wall of muscle and low-end pyrotechnics with glowing blue eyes, but he was practically invisible compared to the rest of them. Rowan sensed the passing of a steel blade close to his head or back every now and then, usually accompanied by the wet slap of a bisected body across one of his shoulders, but he had adjusted quickly enough to go unfazed by it.

Here and now, it was chaos in the dead veins of the earth. Rowan didn't even have to fake technique. He just lashed out and knew there would be a kill at the end. There were that many kobolds.

"MOVE UP THE STAIRS!" Blueraven's voice literally thundered, rattling dust and grime from Rowan's ears and shaking the tunnel itself. He heard Aeraul roaring, saw nascent flames along a whip-fast blade. Burning corpses lit the air for a few seconds before darkness swallowed them. Rowan lunged forward, katars leading. He killed three or four on the way.

And then katar met steel twice in rapid succession, Rowan jumped and felt the air boil beneath him as Aeraul took a swipe with his shield. Something small a ragged screeched its last and teeth clattered across the soles of his shoes by the time gravity kicked back in. He dropped. Looked up. Glowing blue eyes glared down at him and he heard a voice like a growling bear.

"Get moving," Aeraul said, then bullrushed right on by. Rowan sputtered a few obscenities under his breath, stabbed another kobold out of thin air and then ran back up the stairs.

They passed a cackling Savas on the way, the space around him barely lit by tooth-dice on the ground. He was covered in gore, with intestines roped around one of his knees and the body that owned them lying behind his foot. He was throwing spells from wands in both hands, his axe long-since relegated to a spot on his belt, and his hat was hanging lopsided, covered in dents and dings and scrapes. Aeraul grabbed him by the scruff of the neck as they passed, but the Wizard never stopped throwing spells into the undernight. Out of all of them, Savas was the only one who was enjoying himself. He didn't even care if his magic actually hit anything; he was on a spellcaster's contact high, funneling power into ritually carved bones without regard for the fact that every spell was chipping them, breaking them down bit by bit.

"THIS! IS WHY HE DOES IT!" Wormaxe bellowed and laughed. "The thrill of evocation! The pulse of magic in action! The ripple of energy through my fingertips! This is better than sex!"

"I did not need to know that," Rowan muttered as they passed by the other Wizard. Caden had carved out his own personal last stand on the stairs, whipping around with staff in one hand and sword in the other. He was a sight for tired eyes, weary eyes, shocked eyes. The Wizard Blueraven, even with all his scars and armor, his staff, his Mark, and everything else he did to seem impressive, normally wasn't. Caden was the sort of tall, scraggly geek who could be safely overlooked in the confines of both a tavern and a library. Before trying to fight him in the Pagoda, Rowan had actually reasoned that Caden wasn't all that powerful. He had seen plenty of Wizards in his time; old and powerful, young and cunning, but none with that many scars out on display. It spoke less of experience and more of recklessness. Magic is dangerous stuff for anyone involved, after all.

Seeing him in action now, Rowan actually felt a little terrified. What the Wizard lacked in physical intimidation, he more than made up for with real power and the skill to use it. It was like a martial art. Any fool could throw a kick or strike a pose, but someone like Rowan knew how to make a kick hurt someone and he could stand on one foot, his other leg bent up and his arms spread wide for an hour or more. That was how Blueraven did magic. He was so far above and beyond Savas' wand-boosted spellcasting that Rowan couldn't compare the two. Ghostly ravens spiraled around him, and thunder rolled from directions that could not be named or pointed to. He Spoke and his Voice rattled that huge tunnel like it was being crammed into something too small to contain it. He cast a spell here, two or three dozen died in less time than it takes to blink. He cast a spell there, and lightning butchered a line straight through kobold ranks.

And then he did something that was even more terrifying.

"Siege Arcana."

Near the tip of his staff, shadow collapsed into a sickly red light winding around a cold black sun as big as a man's torso. The air in the tunnel rushed into it, simultaneously freezing and boiling as the three Raiders, now with renewed vigor born of their own fear, beat a hasty retreat from their not-so-nominal leader. The attacks didn't stop, but they also didn't matter. An arrow went right at Blueraven's face, snapped like a twig and collapsed into the spell still building at staff's end.

Without another word, Blueraven swung the staff down with one hand, cracking the tip against stone stairs so much older than the city above. The spell held still for a fraction of a second, then shot down the stairway into the kobold mobs. What followed was genocide in a pocket. Siege Arcana glassed tunnel walls and slagged stone steps smooth, annihilating more of the tiny terrors than Rowan even wanted to think about. The spell hit something, somewhere, far down below, and detonated in an explosion of bright blue, red, and green fire that looked like bubbles underwater. The explosion collapsed back into itself in an instant, caving in part of the tunnel below.

Silence reigned, followed by a few bodies dropping down and boiling away on molten glass. Chittering everywhere. A mournful cry. Nothing.

The kobolds were gone as quickly as they came.

Rowan exchanged a long, quiet look with Aeraul as Savas laughed and triggered an alchemic light. Blueraven stood still a while longer, his Sorcerous lines fading out as he powered back down and caught his breath. The darkness was mundane for now. It was like the spell had crushed the oppressive supernatural airs right out of it. From a dozen huge stairs up, Rowan could see the coldblooded look on Caden's face as he turned back to the group, barely illuminated by Savas' light.

"Playtime's over, boys," the Wizard rasped in his actual voice. "We need to get back on track."

[Aeraul Smythe]

"It would be nice to know what the track is," Rowan muttered as the abhorrent darkness began to creep back in, layering itself over the natural dark like a damp, filthy blanket.

As much as Aeraul agreed, all he could think to say was, "I'd just be happy to take a bath. A good, long bath. With a sturdy enough washcloth to scrub my spirit clean."

"Don't think those exist, do they?" Rowan asked.

"Elves," Caden answered with a vague, tired wave of his hand. He had already sheathed his sword.

"Elves?" Rowan asked.

"Elves. Name something convenient and they've probably invented three different versions of it, all better than anything you could come up with, and they'll be sure to let you know without letting you use it."

"...wow. Elves are dicks," Rowan said.

"Can I write Captain Obvious on my hat and make him wear it?" Savas asked.

"No," Caden said.

Dirty looks exchanged in the dark. Really dirty, because all of them were now covered in kobold gore, mud, muck, and worse things that don't bear mention. Rowan huffed and Savas chortled, still high off whatever energies he had been throwing around, while Caden and Aeraul both tried to catch their breath.

"So," Savas finally said. "Who's hungry?"

In the increasingly faded alchemist's light, he held up a severed kobold leg and bit a chunk out of it. Raw. The toes were still wiggling and there was still blood oozing from the stump.

Rowan threw up.

Aeraul belched unpleasantly.

Caden sighed and said, "At least cook it first."

"I like my meat rare," Savas replied, pointedly taking the time to chew and swallow his food. He spat out a scale.

Caden snapped his fingers and the leg flash-boiled. "You're welcome," he said more to Rowan and Aeraul.

"You just killed the flavor!"

"Shut up, Savas," Caden said. Aeraul could sense exhaustion from ten feet out, even through the increasing haze of the Catacombs. Exhaustion and resignation. "Alright..."

Determination.

"Alright. Everyone, take five and stay close. I hope I'm not going to the well too many times on this..."

"On what?" Savas asked, except it sounded more like Obwuff? due to a mouthful of dead kobold. Rowan still couldn't look. Aeraul himself could only barely stomach it.

"Screwloose Spiderweb Epiphany Monologue," Caden replied, wiping gore from his shoulder as he spoke. "Chaos magic. Divination. I'm not very good at it and these really aren't the right conditions, but..." He conjured up enough heat to set a corpse on fire. Anywhere else, the blaze would've provided enough light to see for dozens of feet in every direction. It would've lit the tunnel clear to the ceiling. In the Catacombs, it was just barely strong enough to outline the four Raiders and some of the piles of bodies littering the stairs around them.

"I could just try necromancy," Savas suggested.

Caden remained silent. So did the others. Aeraul could feel a sense of insidious glee coming from the lesser Wizard, like a thieving child in a candyshop where the owner's suddenly gone blind, deaf, and dumb. It worried him more than any of the feelings Caden was giving off.

"Could you understand what they might tell you?" Caden asked after a long, long while.

"All the dead speak just one language," Savas answered. "It's one of the more convenient things about dealing with them."

Caden thought about it. Rowan even seemed to be thinking about it. He had the least experience of all of them when it came to magic as defined by the formal systems of scholastic arcana. Nothing in Akashima quite measured up. But even he knew that ncromancy was bad. It wasn't like the death sorceries of his native country. When a Wizard went knocking on the doors of the dead, it wasn't just for a Hello. It was for keeps.

"This time," Caden said.

Aeraul felt Savas' monstrous sense of glee and anticipation as clearly as if it were draped across his shoulders and worming a hand into the collar of his shirt. He was pretty sure that he would've felt the same even without empathic powers.

[Savas Tigh]

What Savas lacked in academic credentials, he made up for with a potent mixture of talent, creativity, and overkill. It didn't hurt that he had been studying under the tutelage of an enslaved Dark Wizard for a few months before his entrance into the Catacombs.

The ritual was going to be crude in some ways, advanced in others. It was, much like the Holocaust of Worms (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?20799-The-Red-Requiem-in-Cresting-Summer&p=166667&viewfull=1#post166667) had been, all about mystical energy being bullied around through sheer willpower. For all the finesse he had acquired over the course of long nights dissecting the dead, vivisecting their souls, chipping intricate patterns into bone and testing the limits of sinew and blood, Savas did not have access to his usual working conditions. Like a good Wizard, he simply made do with what was available.

And what was available were a lot of corpses and the myriad items he had brought into the Catacombs with him. Working alone under the detached supervision of Blueraven, with Rowan and Aeraul watching from what they really believed was a safe distance, Wormaxe piled the bodies into a mound near the top of the stairs. He did so in pairs for the most part, never more than three or four, and only a few times just one. When he finally ran out of intact bodies, and only when he ran out of intact bodies, did the Wizard resort to segmented bodies or severed limbs. The pile ended up being six feet tall, almost ten feet wide; a gory, horrific mess, and he had been thorough about stripping the dead as he was building it. Their clothing, their broken weapons, any personal effects; all that stuff lay in a small garbage pile at the top stair.

When he was done with that, Savas opened up a few of his vials and emptied them in the process of making a thin, stylized circle around the pile. When the various liquids touched, they began to glow orange and red and purple. Savas ritually broke every single empty vial, forming what amounted to cardinal compass points without any idea for which way was true North, South, East, or West. He had the distinct impression that such directions meant nothing here anyway.

He took out a scroll, reading it to himself by alchemic light, and then folded it again and carefully wedged it into the mouth of the dead kobold at the top of the pile.

Then he took a deep breath and walked to the point that was opposite the top step and the mouth of the stairwell. He bowed low and muttered a benediction to some dark, dreary god that most people had never heard of, then lowered himself into a pose of supplication. He stayed there for minutes as the light pulsed through the circle, fading away.

When it was gone, he sat up in the dark and drew out a small, almost antique-seeming knife. He gestured to the pile and Said, "Hear my call, denizens of this old crypt."

It was barely perceptable, but the shadow -- the vague presence -- actually shuddered away from Blightcrow and his pile. Only a mundane absence of light remained, cold and dry as any other tomb should be. Savas filed it away in his mind for future reference, well aware that at least his mentor was doing the same. He swallowed hard and cleared his throat before Speaking again, "HEAR MY CALL, DENIZENS OF THIS OLD CRYPT!"

"Should he really be antagonizing them like that?" Rowan mumbled. Aeraul jabbed him in the ribs.

"The Wizard Wormaxe seeks your aid," he Said, bowing back down into his previous pose. "Please."

He waited.

The air shuddered, as if shaped by the long, stuttering breath of something old and powerful.

Savas waited.

And when the wait ended, it was sudden, and it was ugly. A presence unlike anything the Catacombs had put out so far. It was an alien thing, slithering across the senses like the vile touch of a rapist taking his time. It stank of blood, and it brought to mind the idea of stained ivory and eyes popped like grapes.

Coincidentally, eyeballs started popping in the sockets of the dead. Eye by faded dead eye; pop, pop, pop. Little bits of viscera squirted out each time, but never actual blood. When not one eye remained, the bones broke. All at once. Every single bone, and maybe most of the teeth too. There wasn't a single nanosecond between each individual breakage, and the sound ran together in one disgusting crack. Not long after that, scales began to grow into each other, from kobold to dead, mutilated kobold. The pile began to move. It wobbled, it undulated, it started to shudder as things shifted and poked around inside of it. Savas dared to look up, and he saw ghastly, deformed hands reaching out into the dark only to be pulled back in by something bigger, meaner.

As he watched, the pile rearranged itself completely. The tip collapsed into the center. The base lifted itself up, first on a hundred tiny, broken legs, then on just two huge ones that looked like malformed treestumps covered in scales, each one bearing hundreds of toes layered on top of each other. More arms stuck out, kobold arms this time. They flailed around at random as the pile began to compress into itself, taking the shape of a great bloated torso mounting first a hundred arms, then just six, then just two that joined together as if bound by a strait jacket.

Sixteen heads burst out from between where shoulders should have been, each on stretched and bleeding necks. The mouths all ran together first, opening narrowly around a shared chin that looked more like a tongue. The communal mouth closed, swallowing this tongue, and then opened again to a dozen or so throats that were gradually merging together. Dozens of bleeding eye sockets split open across this freakish head, each one soon accompanied by a pale little light.

Rowan threw up. Again. Aeraul passed out where he was standing. Even Blueraven looked a few shades greener than he should have. Savas remained commitedly unphased. He even met this abomination with a blocky-toothed grin.

What would you ask of me? the thing wondered with a Voice that needed no actual speaking. It answered itself, It matters not.

The first rule of necromancy, the one that any serious master teaches to his students no matter how much a threat they might someday become, is that what you summon up might not be dead, and it's never going to be friendly. Even if you were to call up the ghost of your own mother, she's as likely to grievously wound you as she is to nag you about your beard. The living are stronger, pound for pound, but the dead are almost uniformly cruel.

The thing reached for Savas and its stubby, malformed hand violently burned as it touched the boundaries set by the circle. This gave it pause for only a moment, and the thing tried again. And again.

"I'm not that stupid," Savas informed it with a contemptuous sneer.

So you are not, the thing seemed to agree, even as it probed the circle for weak points. I would have your soul for aeons. Nibbling to my content, and playing games with you until you couldn't take it anymore.

"I'll eat you first," Wormaxe told it.

The thing paused.

It stopped testing the circle at that, freakishly tilting its head to one side. So you would. What would you have of me this hour?

"Your name."

It rumbled in its gut. I am of a Nameless Time, a lost fragment of something far bigger. I can no more be named than the individual hairs on your head, and I am a far smaller part of my originator than that.

"Then tell me the name of your first self."

I cannot, anymore than the hair can name you when it is plucked and left lying at your feet. My first self is too big to bend down into this world.

Savas grimaced at this. "Then what am I to call you?"

When last I walked the world above, the Ghosteater called me the Undulent Sin. It matters not what I am named.

"Then I name thee Fleshtwister," Wormaxe declared, but felt none of the power that ordinarily comes with such an act. For a Wizard to name a thing, especially one so old and primal, is to have power over it.

That is taken, it said. By one far worse than I, unhindered by the light of day.

Savas looked to Caden, who was already reaching up into his Hat for the grimoire. Savas looked back to the thing and said, "The Trace Below."

His senses were not yet refined enough to watch the name slide off of the thing, but it wasn't for lack of trying. This entity, which fit no real description that Savas was aware of, was out of his league. If not for the circle, he would've been helpless.

"...Undulent Sin it is," he conceeded, feeling a subtle shift in the balance of power between them. Undulent Sin smiled with its eyes. Literally. "What awaits us down here?"

Things you should not tamper with, but things that you must. The Penitent stands at the threshold, the chamber lock destroyed by one of your own. He comes.

"Who?"

The Claw in Shadow, the Fang at Sea. The byblow of the Dying and the Dark, misbegotten wretch, the Child of the Black Dawn. He comes.

Frustrated, Savas tried a different tact. "What is he?"

Something too terrible to have burnt on the moon, Undulent Sin said, its head turning to regard the other Wizard before Savas willed its attention back to him. He is the Dead Son Rising. And he comes for you all.

"Tell us something useful. What are you doing down here?" Blueraven interrupted, his Voice carrying the full weight of Sorcerous authority. Undulent Sin quivered at the sound of it, but its eyes resolutely focused on Savas.

I am. I have always been here, except when I was not. Starkiller put me here in an age when Time was unbroken, before the Sainted Paradox performed her Workings. I was given no task, no charge, left simply to exist but not as I saw fit. Like my brother who hunted you in the Cursed Forest of the Elf-Fathers, I was bound by the limitations of self and flesh. I called to the underground for both, and it delivered. Mine are the packs in the clustered night, the fungi that walk as men, the sound that rages as a god. I was here before them, I will be here when they are gone. But I grew bored once my myth had spread far enough. Tired. I rode the armors, I rode the living, I was the dead. I tired of it all. Maybe someday I will ride again, but this is the first in an age.

"...so you're like the Skinwalker of Lindequalmë," Wormaxe guessed.

He got no answer this time.

"Who is the Penitent?"

A fallen Priest of Y'edda. He cast his true name to the void between stars, favoring a life of renunciation and penance for transgressions unknowable. He wields the Terminus Key, the Key to the End of the World, a gift from Mother Eight Shadows. His is the path of annihilation, of the Black Nirvana. He seeks no reward other than the satisfaction of the end. His followers are many, monstrous, and malicious. Like a force of nature, the Penitent comes to the cities of the Underworld, ending wars by ending peoples.

"Does he have anything to do with the breakdown of Time?"

He followed after the orcman and his party during their last visit, an invisible presence not yet confident enough to stride in the open, but sadistic enough to laugh at the misfortunes of others. He has the backing of Mother Eight Shadows' children, an army of spawn not unlike the Horror of War. Some know the dark arts, the dead arts, the unholy arts. Others do not need to. Although they support him, theirs is a fickle and unreliable allegiance. They are more like crows trailing a storm than devout followers.

"What is the darkness in the Catacombs?" Blueraven cut in. He had a hand over his mouth and even his Voice sounded unsteady at this point.

Undulent Sin quivered. Ripples went through its joined flesh, bits of bone poking through where wounds had gone unhealed. Only Savas could see that with a straight face. Even the more senior Wizard, a veteran of the Corpse War, had to turn away.

It is the breath of the thing these Catacombs were meant to bind, ensnare, contain. It seeps through all barriers, especially with the sundering of the lock. It is pervasive, not so much the absence or opposite of light as it is an alternative to it. It is a power for those willing to channel it; a power without a price, for the owner lies dead, sleeping...for now.

"How?" Savas asked without missing a beat. "How do I draw on that power?"

This seemed to take the thing aback. It undulated again, shape changing as it grew taller, thinner, more humanoid. Eye holes merged until they numbered just five, each one huge and empty and glowing.

"Savas..."

"Shut up," he told his nominal mentor with neither contempt nor pride. "I need to start becoming magnificent in my villainy, remember?"

Undulent Sin waited until their bickering had passed, then answered, Reach for it. It differs not from the breath of the dead in most ways. It is simply More. So much More that your arcane senses grow numb to it.

"Are there any potential allies down here?"

A persistent one, your master is. Tarnished like old silver, enduring as perfectly smithed steel, still delusional enough to think he has a chance.

"Of what?" Blueraven demanded.

N'Thayn'sal is more than a mere chain of events, Sorcerer. It lives even as it dies. It is the end and it will come, no matter how many errant heralds you strike down. Inevitability is the harshest of all mistresses...

Wormaxe cleared his throat. He didn't really need to. Blueraven looked stupefied enough that he likely wouldn't be interrupting again any time soon. "Answer his earlier question. Do we have any potential allies down here?"

If it mattered, I would tell you to find the Halberd's Point, Undulent Sin told him. Savas tensed. It matters not.

With a contemptuous ease, the thing shattered Savas' binding circle. Broken magic fell and glittered everywhere like rainbow-tinted glass, fading away before it could ever touch the ground.

Now I shall have my fun with you, Spoke the Undulent Sin.

"No. You will not," Said Wormaxe. "Back to the shade with you."

First there was laughter. It was loud beyond hearing, registering less as sound and more as blank pressure on the inside of the skull. It could only be judged as laughter by the way Undulent Sin wavered back and forward, a sick imitation of a man watching comedy. Then there was silence as the thing realized what was happening. Its laugh ended so abruptly that it was like the noise had been ripped out of the universe and cast away. It leaned in to regard Savas, and the Wizard Wormaxe met it eye to eye without the slightest hint of expression.

I know your name, little one.

"Come for me and I'll eat you," Wormaxe told it.

They stared at one another for moments longer as the flesh began to glow along the joining seams. Then, body by malformed body, the kobolds fell apart as the force holding them together was banished back into the Catacombs from whence it came. There was no great explosion of power, no parting shots of word or spell; it just ended. The construct fell apart until it was just another rancid pile of meat and gore, accompanied by a scroll that hovered still in the air for several seconds before catching fire. Not even ash remained when the blaze went out.

Then, and only then, did Savas let go of the breath he didn't even know he was holding. He was glad to be on his knees still, if only because his legs had the strength of a jelly mold right now. He looked to Caden and the senior Wizard was unreadable at best. He looked to Aeraul and the half-orc was only just now starting to sit upright with a blank look in his glowing eyes. He looked to Rowan, who had thrown up so much that he looked ready to pass out just to stop it.

And then he looked to himself.

Everything was still basically where it was supposed to be.

He even had the tiny knife in his hand, its blade now charred black by the power that had gone through it.

"Hah," Savas said, because he could think of nothing else to say and he couldn't muster the sense of triumph to truly laugh. For the first time, he had to wonder how long it would be before he could laugh at all.

[Savas Tigh]

"So what the fuck was that all about?" Rowan asked in between bites of plain, dry bread. They'd found a relatively safe-seeming nook between two large, decayed statues. Caden had refused to let them go any further until they had all taken the time to recover from their ordeals. Especially Rowan, since he had the weakest, emptiest stomach of the group.

"I was trying to get answers that would put us back on track," Savas replied. "I didn't know what I'd be summoning up, but that's just one of the risks of the job. I'd expected a communal spirit or something like that; all those dead kobolds merging into one in the afterlife, since they seem so selfless and communal in the mortal world."

"And you ended up calling that thing by accident," Caden added. "Sloppy. I wouldn't try calling up something like that intentionally."

"You wouldn't try summoning up anything. And I'm good at that kind of work. Remember (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?20799-The-Red-Requiem-in-Cresting-Summer&p=164977&viewfull=1#post164977) Plagueheart (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?20799-The-Red-Requiem-in-Cresting-Summer&p=165821&viewfull=1#post165821)?"

"Don't remind me, (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?20799-The-Red-Requiem-in-Cresting-Summer&p=165823&viewfull=1#post165823)" Caden answered, resolutely sipping water and wishing it was Salvic vodka.

"I knew what I was doing," Savas replied. "It was my job when I served in the Corpse War. I'm good at it."

"So you are," Caden said.

"So I am," Savas agreed. Then took a bite out of dead kobold. He was the only one who was right at home down here, in the dark, in the grime.

"I wish you'd stop doing that," Rowan mumbled.

"What did you talk about with it anyway?" Aeraul asked. He still looked unnerved. That was the second time the Catacombs had slipped, or perhaps more accurately, smashed, right through his psychic defenses like they weren't even there.

"History and geography," Savas shrugged. Aeraul stared at him.

"We're still parsing over the words," Caden answered. "It said it was from a Nameless Time. That implies there are more than one. And it was aware of the inconsistencies with Time. And of the future."

"You're still upset about that, aren't you?" Savas leered.

"Like you wouldn't believe. It claimed to be a tiny, forgotten part of something ineffably bigger, too big to fit into our world. I believe it."

"It also mentioned my personal hero," Savas said. "Ghosteater."

"Who?" Rowan asked.

"One of the possible names of a Dark Wizard named Tön're Aullum-Seu," Caden answered. "He was basically the original Evil Overlord, as the stereotype goes. I don't remember if he predates the Forgotten Ones or was one of them or what."

"There's also the possibility that Ghosteater was Tön're's apprentice or just a contemporary," Savas added. "There's enough lore on it to go any way you want."

"So why are they important?"

"Do you know the origin of Harroween? (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?21104-Twisted-Koans-and-Burnt-In-Thoughts&p=167022&viewfull=1#post167022)" Savas asked.

"...ah," said Rowan, connecting what few dots he truly knew. It wasn't like Scara Brae or any other nation tried to hide the fact that the holiday had grown out of some unspeakably horrific disaster. They were just vague about what the disaster was.

"Supposedly, Ghosteater managed to ascend all the way to Thaynehood. It scarred the whole world in ways that can still be seen today, if you know where and how to look," Caden said. "The White Lady Anon, another old time badass of a Wizard, lead a rainbow coalition against him. Every Wizard she could get her hands on, good or bad or just plain amoral, faithful or not. It was the kind of force you just don't see outside of myths about the Wars of the Tap and the Forgotten Ones. They fought the Thayne Ghosteater head-on."

"...did they win?" Rowan asked.

"Depends on if you're telling the story to a child or an adult. For children, the Thayne was beaten, although not without a fight. For adults, the Thayne wiped out almost an entire generation of Wizards, which is one reason why we've got so many inconsistencies in our records. And it's impossible to say which version is right. Children are too naive, adults too cynical."

There was a lengthy pause as three of them ate and one drank.

"Do you think he could be down here?" Rowan finally asked.

Caden and Savas both shrugged, which was answer enough.

"I'm more worried about the Penitent at this point," Aeraul said. "Was he mentioned?"

"Fallen priest of Y'edda who lost his name and wants to bring about what that thing called the Black Nirvana," Caden answered. "Real peachy guy, I think."

"He's a man. He lives, he can die," Savas said with the casual conviction of someone intimately familiar with death. "It really just seems to be a matter of getting through his hangers-on."

"...we must've been looking at two different Penitents back there," Caden mumbled. "I saw Death Lords leading armies with less power than that. On his own, he might've been a credible threat to some of the armies I saw during the War."

"Just means we have to be thorough about killing him," Savas shrugged.

"What else did that thing go on about?" Aeraul asked.

"He mentioned that we might have a place of potential allies down here. Somewhere called Halberd's Point," Caden answered.

"You noticed that too, huh," Savas said.

"What's Halberd's Point?" Rowan asked.

"Once upon a time, every major city in Salvar was named after part of a weapon. Knife's Edge is just the biggest, best known. There was another called Halberd's Point. It was a major hub of magic back in the day, host to one of the first formal academies arcana, before the Church went pitchforks-and-torches on anything that didn't have Ethereal sanction. It literally vanished in the span of a night, from top to bottom, border to border, leaving behind nothing but a perfectly empty circle where not even snow would fall for the better part of two years."

"...and now it might be underneath Scara Brae," Rowan concluded.

"Might be."

"It could've been lying," Savas noted. "Things like that always lie."

"Except when the truth can cause more damage," Caden replied. "Either way, we have to figure out if it's even worth looking for the place before we go getting our Hats in a bundle. Odds are, we need to stop the Penitent first and then hammer the rest out later."

"How would we even find a place like that, anyway?" Rowan asked.

"One of two options," Caden answered, counting them off with his fingers: "We stumble into it."

There were knives at all their throats.

"...or it stumbles into us," Savas finished. "That works too."

[Caden Law]

Cells

Dark, dreary cells, lit by nothing more than glowing blue mold in the corners.

"So how did you know that was going to happen, anyway?" Rowan asked. He was the least experienced of the quartet, but he was finally starting to gain the easy sense of relaxation that comes with adventuring. Sooner or later, everyone basically goes numb to the kind of soul-aching, blood-curdling, heart-rending terror that comes and goes in this business.

"Happens to me all the time," Caden answered. "I've been in orc cages (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?13962-Between-the-Numbers&p=111977), elf (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?15069-Intricacies-of-Asymmetry&p=115589&viewfull=1#post115589) cages (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?20221-Ain-t-No-Rest-For-The-Wizard&p=158050&viewfull=1#post158050), double elf cages (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?20799-The-Red-Requiem-in-Cresting-Summer&p=164953&viewfull=1#post164953), a Salvic jail cell (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?19237-The-Laws-of-Wizardry&p=149202&viewfull=1#post149202)...I've even been strapped down (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?18090-The-Wizard-That-Did-It&p=137726&viewfull=1#post137726) a few times (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?19768-The-Henge-Sorcerous&p=154274&viewfull=1#post154274). This kind of thing probably happens to me at least once-per-adventure nowadays. I kinda get weirded out when it doesn't. And at least this beats the orc cages. Not as nice as some I've been in, but I think there might actually be a bucket and an only partially soiled pillow in here..."

"...you have a very odd sex-life, don't you," Rowan said.

"I wish."

"So, generally speaking, where are we right now?" Rowan asked.

"Judging by sheer impossibility, probably Halberd's Point," Caden said. "This is how it always starts. Just wait. By the time we're done, one of us will have made a tragically doomed love connection, I'll probably be a bloody mess, and this place is going to be rubble."

"Not very optimistic either," Rowan noted.

"Optimism doesn't pay in this business," Caden declared. "Neither does cynicism, but at least it's not as tiring."

"Could be worse," Rowan sighed, receiving no response from any of the group.

Their captors had been fairly thorough. Every single one of them were disarmed, stripped down to their pants and, in Caden's case, glasses. They'd been shackled without chains. The shackles were power dampeners, apparently. Rowan couldn't use chi, the Wizards couldn't cast their spells, and Aeraul couldn't conjure up an inkling of whatever power he relied on to generate smoke and fire. They had access to certain innate abilities, such as Aeraul's empathic awareness or the Wizards' ability to use proper punctuation while speaking, but nothing to write home about.

"So...now what?" Rowan finally asked.

"We wait," Caden sighed. "Sooner or later, we'll be visited by one of three or four archetypal jailers: Hot Chick Who Won't Sleep With Me, and I do mean Me, you guys might have more luck...oh, and the Brute Who Might Be Stupid Or Insane, the Cool But Variably Creepy Old Guy, and...that might be it, actually. Am I forgetting anyone, Savas?"

"How the hell should I know?"

"We shared a cage back in Lindequalmë, remember? (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?20799-The-Red-Requiem-in-Cresting-Summer&p=164977&viewfull=1#post164977) I'm assuming that's not the first time you've ever been locked up."

"...actually, it was."

"Seriously?" Caden sputtered.

"Well, come on. I kill people and eat them. Do you really think I haven't learned a thing or two about subtlety in my time?" Savas asked.

"...well, gee, who the hells expects a murderous cannibal to have any subtlety?" Caden asked right back.

"The same people who also expect him to never give up."

The darkness was thinner here than in other parts of the Catacombs. Not quite thin enough for the mold to illuminate from cell to cell, but still thin enough to see the actual lights moving around. Savas was up to something. Caden pointedly did not call him on it. They were in some kind of jail; four cells, maybe more, separated by a thin hallway. He could just barely see the bars; iron for everyone. Old, trusty iron. He couldn't tell, and didn't want to know, what the shackles were made from.

"You alive, big guy?" Rowan said.

"Irritated," Aeraul answered after a few seconds. "My mind's been one big wreck after another. I didn't even sense them coming up on us. I still don't sense them now. You saw how many of them there were. I can still sense all three of you, but them? Not even a wink."

"They could be emotionless?"

"Doubt it," Caden said. "They might just be operating on a different wavelength, like how hot and cold are just differing levels of energy. Have you tried meditating?"

"Yes."

"And?"

"These stupid shackles are blocking my concentration. I'm starting to get angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry."

"I can vouch for that," Rowan said. "I saw him rip a guy's face off once."

"That was an accident," Aeraul growled. Rowan said nothing. Caden waited.

Waited.

Waited.

"Any second now, just wait," he mumbled.

[Caden Law]

The door to the jail cells opened. Their apparent captor strolled in a few seconds later.

She was, more or less, what Caden had expected: short, lithe, so pale that her skin looked more gray than white, and full of curves in all the right places. Her hair was cropped short, almost transparently white, and her eyes were colorless. She wore an abundance of leather; tight pants and a corset that she was basically spilling out of, along with shoes, a jacket, and a choker or collar decorated with jagged little teeth that looked like they belonged to a kobold. She carried a chemical light, similar but brighter than the alchemic lights that the Raiders had brought with them. It was built like a miner's lantern.

What Caden focused on most, once he stopped committing the rest of her to memory, was the fact that she carried the keys to the jail cells on the pommel of a short sword she wore at her side. No convenient key rings this time, not that he'd ever had much luck with them to begin with.

"Y'know," Rowan started. "I really hope that thing you mentioned earlier only applies to you. About the beautiful women not sleeping with you, I mean."

"What he said," Aeraul agreed.

"You can both kiss my goat's ass," Caden replied without missing a beat.

"I wouldn't touch any of you that way if my life depended on it," said their jailor, in perfect Common. Aeraul and Rowan were both shocked. Caden just laughed.

"Told you. Fuckers." His laugh trailed into a triumphant and only slightly bitter smile. "So, what brings us all here? And do you happen to have a name or should I just start harassing you?"

She regarded him coldly. "For someone in shackles, you're entirely too happy right now."

"You'd be amazed at how often this sort of thing happens to me," Caden replied. "After a while, you just kind of get used to it. So. Got a name, Sugartits?"

Absolute silence.

"Sugartits?" Rowan finally blurted out. "Since when is that even in your vocabulary?!"

"I've been called worse," the woman admitted. "I'm the Warden. That's all you need to know about me-"

"So why're we here?" Caden asked, leaning against the bars as he spoke. If she was at all intimidated, the Warden didn't show it.

"One of you performed an act of necromancy in the tunnels. Another of you positively stinks of it in general. We recognized the green one from old rumors."

"In other words, Rowan's just here because it's not his lucky day," Caden said.

"I'm assuming he's the white-haired one, and no, he has no significance whatsoever."

"Ow," Rowan said.

"So where are we right now?" Caden asked. "The name of this town, I mean. City? Sorry, we didn't exactly get a good look at it."

"Kevyraz."

Silence.

"Kevyraz?" Caden asked. "The Kevyraz?"

"I'm unaware of any others," the Warden said.

"Thought you guys said this'd be Halberd's Point?" Rowan asked. "What's the difference?"

"Kevyraz is one of the Eight Elder Cities," Caden said. "The places where the Elder Thaynes supposedly allowed the birth of civilization as we know it. Kevyraz was one of the places where magic first took hold..."

"And not the happy sunshine kind either," Savas finally said.

Exactly one tenth of a second later, the bars to his cage and the wall separating him from Aeraul both collapsed to dust. The Warden reacted in a blur of drawn steel and bad intentions; Savas was three steps ahead of her, running to stay at her side. He bounced harshly off Caden's cell bars, threw an elbow and cracked the Warden across the back of the head. She staggered but did not fall, turning quickly to skewer him.

And then her neck and most of her head vanished in the bend of Aeraul's arm. All he had to do was flex. It was the quickest, most nonchalant sleeper hold any of them had ever seen, cutting off bloodflow to the Warden's brain and rendering her unconscious in a matter of seconds. No noise. Nothing. She dropped the lantern, then the sword, and then Aeraul dropped her. She went down in an undignified heap.

"Well," Savas said. "That was fun."

"You have an odd definition of fun," Aeraul told him.

"I'm a mass murdering cannibal with aspirations of world domination and my own zombie empire," Savas replied with a smile. "Damn right I have an odd definition of fun."

The half-orc stared at him.

"...you guys can let us out any second now," Caden said. "Really."

[Leaf on the Wind]

"So what's the plan?" Rowan asked before they'd even gotten the shackles off. The Warden had been unceremoniously disarmed, partially disrobed in search of other weapons or items, and then chucked into one of the intact cells. The Wizards silently went through three rounds of what looked suspiciously like Rock-Paper-Scissors before Caden handed the sword off to Aeraul. The half-orc looked worryingly pleased to have a weapon again.

"Normally, I'd favor just blowing up the entire building as a distraction, summoning my gear, and then running like Hell, but I don't think we'll be able to do that this time around," Caden said. "The Warden's not exactly cooperative and it's probably only a matter of time before someone notices she hasn't checked back in. I know I'd at least have some kind of timed routine for prisoners and patrols, even if I was too bloody stupid to use the buddy system. So we're going to gamble."

"And how are we going to gamble?" Rowan asked, even though he already knew the answer.

"We're going to kick the front door down and do some very unpleasant things until we get our gear back, then we're going to do some more unpleasant things and get the Hell out of here," Savas said as he took the lantern and a coin purse. He had already spent the past few minutes scraping patterns into the coins, using nothing but another coin that had since been deformed into a stumpy abortion of currency.

Rowan grimaced. It was a rare day where he had to play sane man, but this was it. "Isn't that a bit suicidal?"

"Got a better idea?" Caden asked. "They took us through the element of surprise. It's on our side this time. Don't pull your punches because they're human-like. They'll be going for our blood the second they realize we've gotten out."

"It won't work," said a woman's voice. The Warden had finally come to after almost five minutes of what looked like a death sleep. "This building is surrounded by high walls and some of our best bowmen. They can see through the Darkness and things like it, including smoke. You'll die within a few seconds of getting the door open...and did one of you have your hands in my pants?"

Savas had a world-class poker face. Even with three men glaring daggers at him on general principle.

"Alright," Caden said. "We'll work around it. I'll lead with a Siege Arcana, the rest of you be ready to take advantage of it. Savas, I'm going to need you to blow down the front wall right before I cut loose."

The lesser Wizard nodded, then went to work with his deformed coin, etching into the wall and the door. Caden took a deep breath and gathered power, tapping into the Sorcerous energies racing just between his skin and his soil. The leylines of his body began to shine then, internal power triggered by external energies, external energies being shaped and refined by internal power. The glow started at the blue Mark on his right cheek, and then a matching one appeared on the left. Crows' feet shined beneath his eyes, and every breath sent a spray of blue and violet ghost feathers through the air. The lines spread down his neck, to his shoulders, chest, upper arms and elbows, tracing the paths of the veins beneath his skin. Near his hands, blue took on a green tinge; the lingering taint of the enormous dark powers he had already tapped into over the years. He opened his eyes once and they were glowing. This was going to take more effort than usual. Magic always took more effort without a wand, rod, or staff of some kind. More effort meant more power. More power meant that Caden had gone from being relatively forgettable to standing out in a room occupied by two body-builders and a bloody-bearded maniac.

It was only then that the Warden said, "You're one of the Chosen, aren't you."

Caden looked at her, but it was Aeraul who spoke first. "Chosen?"

"The Chosen of the Thayne," the Warden said. "Their holiest champions in the mortal world. You're with Father Dust, aren't you? Seeing you now, you have the look of a scholar gone mad."

"Gee. Thanks," Caden Said, his Voice rattling the dust off some of the bars. Even the lingering darkness seemed to shuffle around in the wake of that Voice. The Warden went from sitting upright to prostrate on her knees and forehead in seconds. Caden stared at her.

"Why didn't you tell us?" she asked.

"Kinda hard to get a word in edgewise with knives at your throat," Rowan answered.

"Who is your patron?" she pressed. "Is it Father Dust? You have the sweet scent of Mother Sombra and yet you stand resolute like Father Wolf..."

Only now did the Warden finally bother standing up on her knees, putting her hands on the bars as she stared past all of them, her eyes deadlocked on the lines blazing all over Caden's skin. She looked like a woman in the midst of a religious awakening.

"Who is it?"

"Nobody," the Sorcerer shrugged. "I may as well be Unchosen," he added as an afterthought. The words hit her like a sack full of hammers. She dropped back down and started rambling through a string of prayers and verbal self-abuse. Most of it boiled down to I'm not worthy I'm not worthy I'm not worthy. It would've been funny if it wasn't so disturbing.

"Stop that."

The Warden stopped. Cut herself off in mid-syllable, in fact.

Caden shared glances and shrugs with Rowan and Aeraul.

"What is the significance of the Chosen? And of the Unchosen?" he finally asked.

"They are the peerless few to whom the Elder Thaynes delegate power and responsibility. They are the thrice-blessed champions of the highest gods, judged worthy to wield powers long forgotten by lesser mortals," the Warden said. "Kevyraz may be the realm of Mother Sombra, but the Chosen are the Chosen and all are welcome here. You are the first in an epoch to set foot within our walls, and we have not treated you well, nor are we worthy of your presence. Noone is."

"And what is the Unchosen?"

She answered with a trembling voice. "The Champion of Mortality, of Humanity, of all peoples beneath the Thaynes' eyes. The Unchosen is a mortal judged worthy to wield that power with no check but their own conscience, unblessed and unchallenged by the gods. In all this city's history, you are only the third Unchosen to come here, and the second to come without an army proper."

"Who was the last?" Savas suddenly asked.

The Warden looked to Savas, then to Caden. Gone was the initiative that had probably served her well in her career as a jailor. She was now just another fanatic being visited by her faith's most revered prophet, no different from the men and women who had bent knee to Saint Denebriel or the Death Lords who'd been most swayed by Xem'zund's power and rhetoric. Caden stared at her, and Rowan and Aeraul both saw something undescribable pass through his eyes. It was an emotion that could only be approximated as pride, grief, and introspect all slamming into each other.

"Answer him," Caden ordered.

"Priestkiller," the Warden said. "Bane of Falsehoods, Bearer of Truth. We were just a waypoint in his pursuit of a demon called the Harrowing."

Caden and Savas exchanged a silent look.

"The Harrowing?"

"A creature as vile as it was arcane. Stories say that it had possessed the entire priesthood of Kevyraz, channeling their power as an anchor that it could pull itself from the Place Between All Places, the prison fashioned for it by the Nameless Lady and her Army of Lights. Priestkiller vied with the beast on even terms and drove it back by severing its ties to the material world, but not before Kevyraz had been locked away beneath the world, squeezed out of Time and Place beneath the soil of a new land. Mother Sombra preserved us as we gouged our way through the earth, until at last we had found the rest of our prison."

"What do you know of the Catacombs?" Caden asked.

"...not much more than anyone else, my Lord. I am sorry. Even our greatest magi and prophets have only been able to define it as a puzzle assembled from disparate Times and Places, crammed into the very edge of the material world. Horrible things dwell in the tunnels beyond our city. Mother Sombra has made us strong enough to survive them, but ours is not the place to ask why. The Dark Breath is everywhere, even here, and the Harrowing walks along the border between every light and shadow. We must be vigilant, lest Hells take us. Hells or worse."

"Do you know anything about the Penitent?" Savas asked. The Warden waited for Caden to nod before she answered.

"The Champion of Mother Sombra, Chosen to act as the jailkeeper of something that lay dead and sleeping. I know not what. Nobody does," the Warden answered. "He alone is tasked with bearing the Key to the Gravechamber at the heart of the Catacombs....what troubles you, my lord?" she asked.

"The Penitent's gone rogue. Mother Sombra brought us down here to stop him from releasing whatever it is he's supposed to be keeping locked up. Which means that we need to get our stuff back and get the hells out of here. What's your name, Warden?"

"Eysha Haverghast," she answered without even blinking. "What do you require of me?"

[Aeraul Smythe]

Eysha had the whole mess sorted out in less than an hour. Aeraul hefted his sword again, carefully checking it against his memories to make sure that the weight distribution was correct. The others went through similar rituals as they redressed themselves, replaced their weapons, checked over reagents and the like. The rage went away, bit by bit, as Aeraul fought down a lineage of murder and mayhem in his blood. Mental shields reasserted themselves, for all the good any of them might be against the terrors of this awful realm.

News spread fast. The people of Kevyraz went from mysterious hostiles to jubilant admirers in record time. The Sorcerer was something between a living relic and a head-of-state for these people. Caden played the role for all it was worth, securing them safe passage through Kevyraz' territory and an enchanted map for each of them. Aeraul spent time studying his, watching the tunnels outside the city shift and change position at random. Some erased themselves, others appeared from nothing. The people didn't have much to offer in the way of supplies; they were as resource poor as the rest of the Catacombs, but they did provide moral support and the first decent beds any of them had access to in what felt like weeks.

Caden privately informed him that they'd been down here for almost a year or more. Then he blinked and said thirty seconds, a century, two days, and finally an hour. Aeraul didn't know how he was coping with the inconsistency of Time in the Catacombs.

Being in the retinue of an Unchosen made Savas, Rowan, and Aeraul celebrities in their own right. Savas exploited it for bones. Rowan exploited it for easy dates. Eysha was hardly the most beautiful woman in Kevyraz. Aeraul simply used it to learn. The people in the city were immune to his psionics because their minds were long shielded by Mother Sombra, the result of some ancient pact that had been inherited by virtually everyone in the city. He studied a book of meditation. And he used it.

Aeraul rediscovered his center by the end of their first 'day' in the city. While Caden presided over some ceremony or other, while Rowan slept in a bed with three women, while Savas carved hexes and curses into dead bones; while all that happened, Aeraul Smythe found a nice, quiet spot and left himself behind. He sat in what passed for a park, meditating for a long while until his mind had gone as blank and dark as the tunnel air in the Catacombs themselves. He stared into the abyss inside himself, and nothing remained to stare back.

When he stood again, it was with renewed vigor. When he next practiced swordsmanship, the smoke and fire both came easy. His sword traced candleflames in the air, small but intense, and his every exhale was smoke. Aeraul fenced with people who weren't there, and he won more often than not. When he was done, he dressed himself one more time and went to find the others. They weren't due to stay in Kevyraz for long.

By hook, crook, or dumb luck, all of Fireside Company ended up at the same gate. Eysha stood with them, as did a handful of men-at-arms; all pale, wearing bonemail and faintly glowing spidersilk. All were armed with similar sword-spikes to Savas' rondel, although theirs had been crafted from some kind of bone, with heavy shields to match. Every single one wore backpacks and carried bone bows and arrows.

"Fireside Company got bigger," Caden shrugged. "I couldn't talk them out of it."

"It is our honor and duty to aid you in your quest," Eysha replied without missing a beat, followed immediately by a chorus of aye! from her men.

"It does mean we've got people to hide behind," Savas noted.

"That too," Eysha agreed with zeal in her eyes. "We will help you navigate through the Catacombs en route to the Dreamer's Door. We know ways faster than those you can see on the maps. Faster and more dangerous."

"Great," Aeraul sighed.

"Are you up to it?" Rowan asked. "No more fainting like a little girl?"

Aeraul casually glared at him and said, "I'm up to it."

Nothing more, nothing less.

"Then let's go," Caden said. "We've got places to go, monsters to kill. The world's not gonna save itself."

[Savas Tigh]

The tunnels remained as disquietingly dark as they were the last time Fireside Company passed through them. The difference now was that they went with guidance and purpose. With Eysha at the forefront and Caden just a handful of steps behind her, the rest of the Company went in double-file with shields ready and lights at full. The Kevyrazian lanterns were stronger than their surface counterparts, shining bright enough that even the Catacombs' dreary forced darkness couldn't drown them out all the way. Passages came and went with a quickness, and without the numerous distractions that had plagued them before. The only kobolds this time were already dead. The only fungus was clinging to a wall, safe and blue. Here and there, a chittering sound. Savas minded those the most, but nobody else seemed especially worried, not even the locals.

They passed statues that had Aeraul on edge, ancient writings scratched into the walls by long dead fingers, and more than a few stray bits and pieces of the things that called the Catacombs home. At one point, they went right by a hole in the wall leading to an underground pond or river, complete with bellowing frogs and an eight-legged thing that could've passed for a gator. There was a boat out there on the water, a pale blue light glowing on its bow, but only Savas caught sight of it.

They went through a bona fide temple that had been lost to time and darkness, huge and ruined shell that it was. Stone benches lay scattered about, most of them broken or knocked over. The centermost area looked ripe for human sacrifice, with a few rat-stripped bones and ancient, faded bloodstains to show for it. Further on, there was a heap of dirty clothing lying on the ground. Pests had made the most of it.

After a while, the Catacombs turned into one long blur. The echo of footsteps and the monotony of breathing became the only sounds worth keeping track of -- and Savas did keep track of them. Attention to detail is one of the only things that all Wizards have in common, be they good or evil, grand or pathetic. They notice things that most people just plain miss.

Like when one of the Kevyrazians stopped breathing but kept moving. Savas watched Caden and knew that the more senior Wizard had noticed it too. He glanced over to Aeraul and saw it register with him by proxy. The Orc's breathing deepened, the glow of his eyes shifting so subtly that Savas barely even caught sight of it himself. Rowan was the only one of the core group left out of the loop.

They kept on for a while longer, with Aeraul pointedly deciding to bring up the rear and pulling for Rowan to join him. Caden remained in the front with Eysha. Savas stayed exactly where he was in the middle. A second man-at-arms stopped breathing. Savas saw this one happen, pinpointing it with his ears. It was the man in front of and to the left of him. The other was somewhere behind. The change happened so quickly that it almost didn't register. When the man was between steps, his lantern jostled a fraction of an inch more than it should have and he exhaled without taking another breath. His posture stiffened for a fraction of a second and then he kept walking. Not even the cadence of his steps changed.

"There's a bridge up ahead," Eysha announced, just as they entered a long winding staircase. The Company ascended in single file, and Savas paid close attention to the sounds of the men as he went. Nobody else's breathing stopped. Just the two, then.

He made no effort to hide the fact that he was reaching for a wand. It was perfectly logical considering the number of fights they'd been involved in since coming to the Catacombs, and the map indicated that the bridge was going to be exposed. He had his shield ready. In the way that Wizards do, Savas locked down his fears and tensions, boxing them up and putting them into a neat, tidy little corner in the back of his mind.

One by one, the Company arrived at the bridge. Caden stopped them there under the pretense of letting everyone catch up. The Company formed up in a circle. One of the non-breathers stood resolutely by the edge of the bridge, the other had taken point near the stairwell exit. Savas picked his target and, for once in his life, trusted someone else to do the rest.

Savas shot from the hip and it was good. A direct hit on the non-breather at the edge of the bridge. There was a look of stunned disbelief before the man's mouth opened to reveal monstrous teeth that looked like tiny ivory spikes. Savas shot him again, twice in less time than it takes to blink, and then a third and fourth time just to be thorough. Each spell manifested as a dark purple bolt of energy with a faint green core. Each one splashed into the creature's chest and spread out across the rest of its body, blowing away bits of bone armor and crushing the chest cavity in the process. By the last hit, the creature had been knocked back to the edge. Savas shot again and again, blasting a hole in the monster's armor and then tearing open its skin. Its footing was lost and gravity dragged it over the edge without so much as a faint scream or gasp of surprise.

The other one reacted as quickly as the first one went down. Rondel in hand, it lunged and hissed, and Aeraul bisected it from right hip to opposing shoulder with one hand, boiling the wounds shut and setting silk cloth armor ablaze in passing. He followed up with a straight palm strike that broke the creature's neck and jaw while knocking its upper section in one direction. A finishing kick sent the lower body flying opposite.

Between Savas' first spell and Aeraul's final kick, the entire exchange took less than two seconds.

It took longer for the rest of them to process what had just happened, excepting Caden.

"What was that about?" Eysha snapped.

"Two of your men had been possessed," Caden answered. "Be ready. I doubt we're going to get off that easily."

As if on cue, both of the monsters came back up into view. One was still smouldering, the fires now gone, but both were enveloped in the same bloody red aura that seemed to drip upwards. The one who had been cut in two was joined back together, smoking black ichor oozing from the wound. They hung in mid-air like puppets, their eyes still terrifically human right up until the instant that they exploded. Hollow lights took their place -- hollow and familiar.

And now, Wizard Wormaxe, spoke the Voices of Undulent Sin, still needless of the lips on its increasingly gaunt heads. I shall have my fun with you. Horns burst out of their heads, accompanied by toothy crowns. All of you. Their fingertips turned sharp, their lanterns burst, the liquid light turning red as it evaporated into their auras. Noses decayed in short order, hair fell away, and clothing and armor alike seemed to become more ragged. Undulent Sin didn't even bother with the weapons. It didn't need to.

Scream for me.

[Savas Tigh]

Undulent Sin came at Savas from both sides. Ever the pragmatist, Savas spat an obscenity and fired off spells at one while trying to get his shield in position against the other. It didn't matter.

A miracle happened in the Catacombs of Scara Brae.

Fireside Company did not abandon him.

As one body plowed through a hail of spells, the other was stricken by a blast of lightning and fire, slamming it into a wall that snapped shut like the gnashing jaws of a wolf. Caden followed up with an improvised Stone Maiden Mausoleum, his Marks blazing like a line of stars in the process. As the first body, the unscathed one, closed within striking distance, Rowan slammed it from the side with a lunging dropkick. Chi discharged on impact, blowing a hole in the creature's aura. Aeraul swept in from the other side as Rowan rebounded away. The oversized jian whipped up and sank deep across the creature's back, then tore out the front with a slight pull. Aeraul followed up with another cut to the throat, then another to the mouth, slicing out teeth and bone alike. The creature staggered onto the bridge without its feet ever actually touching the stone below, still intact by virtue of whatever black puss had glued the other one together.

Savas brandished another wand, this one thicker and heavier -- practically a Wizard's Rod fashioned from an oversized thigh bone. Power sparked along its tip, draining darkness from the air as he aimed at Undulent Sin's remaining body and said only, "Clear."

Savas fired. It was similar to an artillery cannon going off. Dust billowed around him, the bridge rattle, there was even a faintly visible shockwave around the tip of his wand.

Undulent Sin left the bridge in an instant, pushed along by a black and purple comet twice the size of a proper cannonball. Several hundred feet later, the spell lost cohesion and exploded. The blast triggered its own shockwave, barely visible as a thin green line in the darkness.

Savas grinned. "No wonder everybody's tapping into the Dark," he said. "Pity you can't take it with you..."

You need not worry about taking it with you, Undulent Sin declared, a fraction of a second before bursting out of Caden's Mausoleum. The body was in tatters, but power was already knitting it back together in a long-limbed, pointy-fingered nightmare parody of its former self. It jumped from the wall, ran along the bridge without actually touching it, then dove at Savas with such speed that none of the others could have stopped it if they wanted to. And in the heat of the moment, Savas realized that they did want to.

Savas had his shield up and Undulent Sin broke the thing on impact. It was another miracle altogether that his arm hadn't broken with it. He gave ground without moving his feet, pushed back by feet as the creature made ready to skewer him with its other arm. Savas jammed his wand under the creature's head and fired again.

Bloody vapor sprayed everywhere, propelled along by a planar shockwave that helped paint the Wizard's face and beard red. The rest of the body stumbled for a moment and then collapsed, twitching and flailing on its last demonic impulses. Aeraul gave it a field goal kick right off the bridge and Caden hit it with a Siege Arcana on the way down. Shards of broken, molten glass flew into the dark, and Undulent Sin's second body ceased to exist.

The first one came roaring back, covered in arrows by the Kevyrazian men-at-arms, its assault stopped only momentarily when Rowan hit it with a flipping kick to the sternum and stabbed it in the face with one of his katars. He rebounded away once more, guiding himself over the edge of the bridge and back onto it through judicious use of mid-air leaping. Savas had discarded his shield by that point, taking up his axe instead. He hit the Sin's body with a jagged uppercut running opposite Aeraul's; hip to shoulder again, quadrasecting the possessed man-at-arms in a spray of black gore.

This did not stop Undulent Sin for a second.

I'm going to enjoy your screaming, your pleas of mercy, it Said, lashing at him again. Savas fell back again, to the ground this time.

And then there was a flash of light as Caden geomanced a binding circle around the entity's body, snaring it in a trap that had the permanence of stone. Savas grinned wickedly.

"Do you remember what I said to you before?" he asked.

Undulent Sin raged against walls that were not truly there.

"I'm gonna eat you up."

Wormaxe snapped his fingers and triggered four bone dice all carved with Ironstone's Collapsing Breath. Four enormous purple skulls lunged up out of the aether, all of them overlapping in impossible ways, all of them faintly transparent, all of them screeching like injured banshees, and all of them slapping shut in the same horrific instant as Wormaxe took the power -- the twisted life -- that formed Undulent Sin and crushed it like a grape. The lights in its eyes literally ruptured, and ichor spewed all over the confines of Blueraven's binding circle. The skulls slammed back down into the ground and only a corpse stood still, barely intact and glowing about as brightly as a dying candle.

Not...over...

Wormaxe brandished yet another wand, this one bearing a number of teeth jammed into it at odd angles. He pointed and gave the order, "Drop it, Blueraven."

You...IDIOT!

Aura flaring one last time, eyes bursting back into view, Undulent Sin made ready to lunge.

Wormaxe tore the remaining power right out of its busted shell, draining every last bit into his tooth-wand and absorbing it for himself. An empty corpse fell in its wake. Veins throbbed bright, glowing red and green on the Wizard's right hand before the power began to diffuse. Everywhere was the sound of a slowly dying scream, echoing as far into the Catacombs as the wind could carry it. Wormaxe shuddered on the ground, cringing as his system took in what amounted to spiritual poison and, for want of a better word, metabolized it.

He belched. He visibly fought down the urge to vomit. Blood oozed from his eyes, nose, ears.

When it was all over, the sound that dominated the bridge was Wormaxe's labored breathing. A half-dozen bows were drawn on him. Another Wizard had his staff ready for a killing blow. Aeraul and Rowan were both no better.

The Voice that laughed out at them then was perfectly familiar, and wretchedly human about it.

"Told him I'd eat him, didn't I?" Wormaxe asked with a bloody grin and eyes that glowed red in the dark.

[Aeraul Smythe]

There was a long pause after the battle ended. Men and women cleared away from Savas, most of them trying to keep one eye on him and the other over their shoulder as they went. Only the Wizard Blueraven remained, slowly setting down his lantern and drawing his sword. Wormaxe stayed put, laughing his wretched Laugh and belching greenish-red vapor every so often. The lesser Wizard was practically drunk off demonic power, his face flushed and his even his Voice slurring. Physical coordination was at an all time low. The bleeding had stopped, but veins still pulsed red and green in the dark, and his eyes hadn't yet lost their glow.

Blueraven put the sword to Wormaxe's chin and calmly asked, "Are you, you?"

"I am the Wizard Wormaxe, Savas Tigh, once the Bonekeeper and Seventh Ritual Aide of Death Lord Hasseract the Damned, now the Apprentice Diabolus of the Wizard Blueraven. I am the owner and master of the Dead Wizard Blightcrow. I am the Devourer of the Undulent Sin. I. Am. Home."

The sword very slowly drew away, accompanied by Wormaxe's bloody laughing. Blueraven exchanged long looks with the other two members of Fireside Company, but neither had much to offer then. Awful as he was, Wormaxe had proven himself just now. Aeraul and Rowan, for all their martial prowess, hadn't. Neither had Eysha Haverghast and her Kevyrazian guardsmen. And Blueraven had certainly done worse things in his own lifetime. The rearranged geographies of Knife's Edge, Tembrethnil Forest, and Anebrilith-Beinost were proof enough of that.

"Right then," he said as he sheathed the sword. "Get up, Wormaxe. And see about getting the blood off your face."

"Give me a moment," Savas said, his Voice fading back out in the void between syllables. He labored to stand and regain control of his breathing and his coordination. It took him several tense minutes to rein in whatever he had just consumed, crushing the remnants of Undulent Sin through sheer horrific force of will. He threw away the broken remnants of his shield and examined the bone wand that had allowed him to eat a monster like that.

It crumbled in his hands.

Savas settled for a lantern and a lesser wand. He fell back in line with the rest of the group, gradually seeming to return to whatever passed for normal over the next few minutes. Caden and Eysha again took the lead, though Haverghast's guardsmen were now content to give the Unchosen and his retinue a wider berth. Savas was firmly in the middle now. Rowan and Aeraul brought up the rear.

The bridge passed over a vast chasm of pitch black nothingness. It was not the only bridge, either; there were dozens more to either side, above and below. Thin blue and gray lines traversing the darkness, some of them lit with blue torches, others with red, and some just seeming to be visible for no discernable reason. It wasn't that the Catacombs were any brighter here, or any less dark at any rate. It was just that the darkness behaved differently. Along the far walls, there were decayed statues. Some of them depicted giants of men, human or otherwise. Others showed beasts, and a handful showed disasters and forces of nature that had a disconcerting amount of liveliness and personality to them.

Eventually, Aeraul looked up and muttered, "Feels like I've been here before. (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?10177-The-Catacombs-of-Scara-Brae&p=108438&viewfull=1#post108438)"

"Deja vu?" Rowan asked.

"Deja something," Aeraul said.

"Chalk it up to the ripple effect I told you about," Caden called from the front. "You've never been here, but you have, and being exposed to it again probably makes the memories clearer."

Aeraul rumbled without words and said no more. The group continued on until they reached the end of the bridge, passing two-by-two up another spiral stairwell. This also seemed to go on forever, or very close to it, and every single one of them had an eye on everyone else. Fortunately, noone stopped breathing this time. The stairs could have gone on for miles, but Eysha lead them out at another bridge. This one seemed to be farther above most of the others than it should have been. It was, in fact, well above the single largest bridge they could see.

Insects glowed about in the void. The air stank of rot and decay, so old as to have lost most of its pungent impact. It moved back and forth, changing direction every few minutes, as if something in the distance was breathing. Along the great walls, there were more statues. There were, in fact, animals. Deformed, mutated, freakish animals, but still animals. Closest was an eyeless lizard-thing the size of a crocodile, slowly creeping down the side of the wall at a glacial pace as it chewed on the remnants of something bony and twitching. Aeraul looked far down and saw an army of kobolds flooding across one of the more distant bridges like a living carpet of scales and bad intentions. Arrows flew from and to them, some on fire and some just glowing for no discernable reason. There were high-pitched warbles and shrieks echoing into the Catacombs, not quite powerful enough to come alive, but certainly loud enough to carry if you were paying any attention to them.

"Never a dull moment," Aeraul said.

Eysha lead them to a stop above the biggest bridge in the tunnel. She motioned one of her men forward and took out an absurdly long rope. Without a word, she and her men somehow managed to loop it all the way around the bridge from side to side, tying it into an absurdly sturdy knot before leaving the rest to dangle down onto the bridge. It was four or five hundred feet. The rope seemed to make it all the way down. As a man, Fireside looked to Eysha and she seemed to understand why before they'd had a chance to blink apprehension at her.

"My men and I will go down first, if that's alright."

"Peachy," Caden said, looking to Rowan. "You can run on air. Mind going last?"

The fighter shrugged and that was that. One by one, over the course of what felt like an hour or more, Fireside and its escort of Kevyrazian guardsmen made their way down to the biggest bridge in the tunnel. It was a surprisingly peril-less journey to the bottom of the rope, although none of them had a very easy time descending five hundred feet without so much as a spare knot to grab onto. True to word, Rowan was the last one down, choosing to jump the edge and run on air until his feet hit the stone. Eysha set fire to the rope once they were down, explaining that the Kevyrazian guard knew a different route back to their city. The rope had simply been for expediency's sake.

"How the hell was that expedient?" Rowan asked.

"The alternative is a week's journey through the tunnels, not counting waypoint stops for rest and resupply," Eysha answered, and that was that.

"I know this place," Aeraul said. "And we could've saved a lot of time by taking the other tunnel at the start of this mess."

"And what would've been the fun in that?" Savas grinned. He still had blood on his teeth.

From here on, the half-orc joined Caden and Eysha at the front. He strode with a purpose and the rest of them struggled to keep up without running. The bridge went for miles, but it still ended exactly as Aeraul seemed to expect it would: the supernatural darkness twisted into the mouth of a large tunnel shaped octagonally, sporting twin rows of tortures spaced exactly eight inches apart. Each one grew brighter than the last, but the light never passed more than three inches from their flames. The lanterns carried by Fireside Company and the guardsmen did better with less. The deeper into the tunnel they went, the worse it smelled, until even Savas was holding his breaths and trying not to gag.

And then it all stopped.

Aeraul lead the way, sword drawn, into a grand chamber with three doors and eight sides, the walls dominated by torches and glyphs. The instant they crossed the threshold, the darkness was gone. The whole chamber was lit so brightly as to be pale orange at worst, with a ceiling so high that a crossbow bolt would've fallen short trying to hit it. The floor was perfectly level, hard-packed dirt covered in intricate dust swirls that were terrifically reminiscent of claws. Infinite claws. Only two things stood out, at least to begin with.

First, and initially most prominent, was the wreckage of a terrible battle. An enormous set of armor lay scattered about, partially destroyed. An oversized mace was thoroughly lodged in its chestplate, having gouged straight through to obliterate whatever was originally inside. The armor itself was now empty. A faint spiderweb pattern lingered around it, interrupted here and there by what looked like footprints.

Second were the bodies lying not too far from the armor.

Caden saw one and stopped cold. Aeraul saw both and went blank-eyed in shock.

There were three of them, each covered by a fine layer of dust and all eerily recognizable despite corpserot and the predations of insects. One was a girl who might have had a tail once (http://www.althanas.com/world/member.php?1458-HikariAngel), her hands little more than oversized paws ending in broken claws, her mouth and eyes meticulously sewn shut with thick leather. Her arms and legs had been broken before the end. There were two great puncture marks just above her breasts, wounds that would have gone straight into the lungs and heart. Another was an old man, his wiry beard still intact (http://www.althanas.com/world/member.php?5602-Bloodrose). He had gone quickly and unexpectedly, evidenced by the stab wounds in his back. He showed signs of injury besides that, but it was hard to tell what had been done while he lived and what had been done afterwards.

The third was the biggest. He wore steel plate on his shoulders and forearms that had rusted over by now, and a lot of leather that would've been good for an adventurer. He had a broken sword in one hand, and clung to an oversized claymore in the other. Even dead, decayed, and mutilated by the predations of the Catacombs, his skin was still green.

Aeraul Smythe stared at his own corpse and quietly checked out of his own head. He stood still for a long, quiet time while Caden identified the other one as, "Teric Bloodstone. He and Rayse Valentino were my partners to kill Saint Denebriel. I knew he'd come here before, but this..."

"We should probably just be glad time works differently down here," Rowan concluded. Nobody disagreed with him.

"I can't tell how I died," Aeraul finally said. He hadn't even blinked. "But there's something else."

The half-orc drew his sword, slowly and methodically. He threw away his shield and took out one of the butterfly knives, shaking it in hand a few times to get a good feel for the weapon. Then he took a very, very deep breath and called their attention away from the bodies, pointing to an enormous humanoid skull, its canine teeth arcing down to frame an enormous iron and jade door. Chains lay piled at its base. At its center was an enormous key hole, but the door itself had already been unlocked. It was open just a crack. Enough that, if you paid attention, you could hear the rumbling of something breathing on the other side.

"It may be prudent for the lot of you to go on ahead," Aeraul said, turning to look over his shoulder and a prescient look in his eyes. As one, everybody else looked in the same direction.

And there, in one of the open doorways, they saw it and it saw them.

Chitin cracked open. Empty sockets gazed upon Fireside Company and great hulking arms flexed as leg after leg silently tread on the chamber's dusty floor, each one held aloft on a tiny foot that could've been a hoof or a hammer. Its mouth opened, revealing row after row of sharp, crooked teeth before a slithering green tongue dripping ichor down the beast's own armored chest.

The Horror of War had found them again.

[Aeraul Smythe]

Horror shrieked at them with a Voice as godsawful as anything in war can be. Men, women, and children all died in the echoes of that Voice. Crimes against life were laced into every single second of it. Three of Eysha's men simply fell screaming to their knees, collapsing all the way to the ground in poses of terrified supplication. The others froze still, as if anchored to the spot in something between abject terror and religious awakening. Eysha herself was locked in with this second group. Rowan lost seconds trying to overcome that hellish sound too, while Savas and Caden both calmly made ready for battle.

Aeraul simply stared until Horror had finished its greeting. Then he calmly told the others, "I've got this," and took a running start, shouldering by Rowan and one of the guardsmen.

Orcs bellow and roar before any given battle. Every trope, tribe, nation, and race of them gives into that archetypal savagery the moment they know that it's the only thing they have left. And in those moments, when the only thing that matters is the axe or sword in hand and the enemy ahead, an Orc's war-cry is life run amok. It is bravery, reckless and insane. It is kin to a force of nature crammed into the vocal chords of a mere mortal.

Aeraul did not bellow, nor did he roar. He screamed like a man possessed, but he did so with the harsh light of reason burning bright blue in his eyes. He had a running start past the remnants of the Arcaknight, through the center of the chamber, and Horror was actually stunned enough that it didn't quite meet him half-way.

"NO MORE!" Aeraul raged, diving beneath a swing of two arms and jumping over four legs an instant later. He landed on his shoulders and somehow rolled back around to his feet, thrusting the jian forward into Horror's back right leg as he came to a stop. Steel pierced chitin in a way that magic simply could not. "NO! MORE!" And then it ripped right back out, spraying green and purple ichor and trailing both steam and smoke as it went. Horror shrieked again, its pains paralyzing all of them but the Wizards and the man who dared to attack it.

"YOU DON'T BELONG IN THIS WORLD!"

Backhands that could collapse a castle wall. Aeraul roughly sidestepped them and stabbed Horror near the base of its humanoid torso. Both lower arms grabbed at him and he abandoned the jian to leap back out of the way. By the time his boots hit dusty ground again, he already had the second butterfly knife out.

It shrieked again, hard enough to blast dust off the ground, loosen dirt, shatter the mind of one of the guardsmen and send him running down a hall to nowhere. Aeraul lunged through it with blood trickling from his ears. Horror charged and it was all the man could do to duck underneath it and storm his way through a series of blind cuts over his own head while he bent low to avoid getting snagged on its carapace. Horror kept charging, staggered to a halt and bled viscera all over the ground in its wake. Aeraul was already jumping onto its arachnid back, anchoring himself with one knife while stabbing away with the other.

He hadn't counted on the creature being able to reverse every single one of its joints, let alone that it would heave up onto its hindmost legs to turn around. It was a miracle of gravity that he lost hold on the anchor knife and fell away before Horror's fists could hammer him to a green-skinned pulp. Aeraul landed in a crouch and rushed out from under the beast. Less than a second later, Blueraven hit it with an enormous phantom fist, driving it all the way across the chamber before Savas started bombarding it with green skull missiles from two wands.

"Give me that!" Aeraul demanded, swiping the rondel right off Savas' belt. Without so much as a backwards glance at the Wizards, he went right back into the frey with Horror already tearing its way out of the rubble of a wall and rending Caden's Sorcerous Fist to do it.

Horror swiped at Aeraul with three arms and the man jumped them. It punched at him with the fourth and he turned it into a glancing hit. The next moment, he had buried the rondel guard-deep into the Horror's humanoid chest cavity. Its chitinous hood snapped shut on reflex, muffling the sound of another shriek. Aeraul stabbed right through that too, drawing blood from the beast's head for the first time. He dropped away then, struggling to reach ground without being ripped apart by flailing arms and stomping legs. He yanked the jian clear with one good kick for support, then backstepped away as the creature half-opened its hood; the other half was anchored by the knife.

"JUST DIE ALREADY!" Aeraul screamed at it.

It shrieked once more, forcing its hood open all the way. The butterfly knife snapped, part of its blade left embedded where a row of eyes should have been.

Sorcerous Lightning homed in on that chunk of exposed metal and the Horror of War shrieked nothing but agony as arcane electricity surged through its body and cooked it from the inside out. The rondel in its chest and the knife still lodged in its thorax were excellent draws for power, conducting energy from the head through every single internal organ of interest in the process. Steam and smoke churned from cracks in Horror's natural armor, all those legs staggering unevenly as it tried to stand against the force of nature.

By the time Caden finished his spell, Horror simply collapsed in an indignant heap. Thick black ichor churned from its mouth. It was alive for a few seconds more, then it wasn't. Horror fell to the ground and didn't move again, save residual twitches from the energies rushing through its insides.

The beast dead, its spell seemed to break on Rowan, Eysha, and just one of the remaining guardsmen. The other four were weeping wrecks, their sanity gone and their lives effectively over. Savas was shaking. Caden looked numb. Aeraul looked more alive than he had since the moment they set foot in the Catacombs. He was breathing hard, but there was a look of vindictive satisfaction in his eyes that was second to none. It was accompanied by a glimmer of clarity as he turned back to the Sorcerer and shouted, "We're not alone!"

[Aeraul Smythe]

The world turned purple and white. An instant later, anyone still standing slammed into the walls farthest from the skull door, driven along by a shockwave of raw power that felt like cold, dead fingers jamming into places best left undescribed. Not even the Wizards were spared this time. Aeraul had it the easiest, since he was the closest to a far wall, but the flash still left him blind through his eyelids for precious seconds while a deep, ruthless sounding Voice worked its way through prayers in a language no mortal tongue was meant to shape.

When Aeraul's eyes cleared, almost all the lights in the room had gone out. Even the lanterns of the Kevyrazians had been blasted out. Only those torches burning closest to the skull door remained lit, their flames turning redder and redder by the moment. Faces howled silently in the fire.

Between them, between the fangs, before the door, there stood a man. He was tall, even hunched forward, and freakishly thin in spite of himself. He was covered in scars and a tiny handful of open wounds that would not bleed, wearing only tattered rags that might've been a monk or preacher's robes at one point. An enormous iron half-wheel arced from his back to the base of his neck, its spokes convergering on his spine and sinking into skin that had long since started to grow up around it. The same was true of its ends at his neck and tailbone. Strips of metal had been bolted to his arms, legs, and chest, each one bearing inscriptions in a dark language. An enormous metal visor covered most of his face above the mouth, all the way to the top of his skull, with an eight-spoked wheel painstakingly etched in. It looked almost like a spider's web.

In his right hand was a staff like a key, longer than he was tall, its ends a jagged blade and an enormous ring. There were inscriptions all over it; names from a million different times, a million different places, a handful interrupted by the mad mantras of men who had never existed. Tremors shook him from toe to head, ending in a rancid smile with rotting teeth, each one studded with a tiny piece of gold or silver.

"You look quite well for a dead man," Said the Penitent with an all too familiar laugh. "Aeraul Smythe."

There was something in that Voice that brought Aeraul screaming to his knees in spite of himself; a direct punch to the soul, one bypassing his every defense even in the wake of his conquering the Horror. It was all he could do to get right back up.

"You didn't know when to quit the last time either," the Penitent informed him, his Voice again crushing the half-orc to his knees. "You are all, of course...too late. The Hour of Dawn is at hand. He comes, and there is nothing any of you can do to stop it. Repent, gentlemen, for you are all about to die. And die. And...die."

He slammed his staff to the ground again, blasting Aeraul right back off his feet and sending Caden back down for the count as well. Savas shot up from behind the Horror's decaying corpse and let loose with a barrage from his wands, but every single spell met with nothing but an unseen barrier that snuffed them all out before they could even invade the Penitent's personal space. He kept up the barrage for a few futile seconds before the Penitent's laugh demoralized him to a stop.

"Shouldn't we be on the same side, necromancer?"

"How can I rule the world if you destroy it?" Wormaxe answered.

The Penitent cackled hard enough to knock him back a few paces, then snapped his long, crooked fingers. The air in front of Wormaxe exploded like a purple firecracker, sending a bolt of energy straight into his chest and bowling him flat in an instant. He didn't even make a sound on his way down. It was the opportunity Caden had been waiting for. With the Penitent focused on Aeraul, then Savas, Caden had built up enough internal power to form and fire off one of his strongest spells without even using the incantation.

Siege Arcana was essentially a suicide attack at any range below fifty feet.

Caden threw it anyway, still laying on the ground, by aiming his staff and launching the spell from its tip. Dust rippled up, froze and glassed in the same instant. The Wizard's boots steamed at the spell's passage, and recoil was enough to push him back against the base of the wall. Siege Arcana spiraled up and crashed into the Penitent's barrier at chest height, taking with a trail of molten iced glass and dust.

The world turned white, black, red, and finally smoked out normal. The temperature in the chamber went all over the map as a shockwave of cold and heat and pressure plowed into everything in sight, accompanied by the awful pull of gravity and then a second shockwave on top of that. It was a miracle that none of Fireside Company was killed in the process, even if two of Eysha's men suffered minor injuries.

The smoke cleared entirely too quickly.

The Penitent still stood without a scratch on him. He inclined his head, twitchy and ragged and sightless, towards the Sorcerer.

"You wounded the Dread Necromancer with that?" he asked, the weight of his Voice only barely nudging Caden compared to what it did to the others. "I was warned well in advance of you, little blue bird....but...you're not living...up to your own hype. None of you are."

Rowan dove down from behind the Penitent and tried to stab him. Prescient as a seer and with speed and agility that didn't look natural, the Penitent sidestepped it, spun around, and caught Rowan in the stomach with his staff while the fighter was still upside down in mid-air. Power erupted at the point of impact, sending Rowan tumbling end over end until he slammed into a wall and flopped to the ground.

"I Saw that coming," he Said, then gestured with one hand as he turned away. "Just as I See that we'll be meeting again soon. It doesn't matter. None of this matters. He's coming, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. You can't even delay it.

"Guardsmen, carry out the will of Mother Sombra. And that includes you, Eysha Haverghast."

He left them there, passing through the door and leaving it open behind him. One by one, the extinguished torches relit themselves. The Kevyrazians were all on their feet by then. And every single one of them had a purpose in their eyes.

[Caden Law]

The hallmark of any Wizard, good or bad or just amoral, is that he follows the mantra of the ends justifying the means. He will do what must be done, even if he hates himself to the core for it.

If things had gone differently, Caden was sure that he might have been able to break whatever compulsion the Penitent had thrown down on the Kevyrazians, what few of them were still able to stand. There wasn't time for that.

So he closed his eyes and made peace with it. And then he remembered the lessons taught to him by the Corpse War, by Raiaera, by Salvar, and by a century-old half-dwarf named Dueril. The staff was a hindrance; he needed to conserve whatever power he could for later. He left it on the ground. All that mattered now was the sword. Caden whipped the sword from its scabbard and took a man's legs off as he was preparing for the killing blow. The other Kevyrazians all noticed, stopped what they were doing and changed targets -- Caden was the only one standing, the only one even truly conscious at this point, and he was clearly the biggest threat. He met them all with the same dead-eyed look.

"I'm sorry," he said, and meant it.

Steel met bone seconds later. The outcome was obvious. Caden shattered a guardsman's rondel, then took his head off and walked right by the body as it fell, moving to his next target in the same moment as he finished dispatching the last. Two of them, formerly driven insane but now horrifically purposeful, closed on him from opposite sides. Caden parried one and then dodged forward, past the other's blade, stabbing him through the heart in passing. He had the bowie knife out in an instant. The first guard rushed by his dying comrade, rondel leading the way, and Caden took him down with a parry of swords and a great big bowie knife driving through one of the shoulders, down into the heart and lung at an angle.

He killed three men in ten seconds. Caden turned then, ducking under an arrow and then hurling his knife with just a shred of magical guidance -- an inversion of the spell he normally used to pull wand or rod or knife into his hand. The bowie flew through the air like a missile, embedded itself into the chest of another Kevyrazian and killed him before he could hit the ground. That left Eysha. Beautiful bipolar Eysha, who looked most conflicted of all, whose geas would have probably been the easiest to break, whose reflexes were the best. Keys dangling from her metal sword, she caught Caden off guard and duelled him back several paces before he flanked her. She went for a kick and he blocked it with a knee. She went for a pommel strike and he parried her wrist with his forearm. She tried to stab him with a punch dagger and Caden grabbed her wrist and shoved her away.

He followed up with a plain old thrust straight through the sternum.

Eysha looked utterly baffled for a moment, and it was all he could do to tell her again, "I'm so sorry."

Twist.

Push.

Pull.

Kick.

Eysha went down without a scream. She shuddered a few times on the ground, then died, her passing unwitnessed and unmourned.

[Caden Law]

There wasn't time to check on the others or do much of anything else for that matter. Sorcerous Mark lit bright, lines racing across his skin as Caden bolted through the crack in the door, sheathed his sword and called his staff and knife back. Both clattered and smacked through the door before finding their way back into his hands. The knife was holstered. The staff stayed out. Caden never broke stride for a second during all of this. He had long since grown accustomed to flying by the seat of his pants.

There were two chambers after the door. The first was nothing more than an enormous hallway littered with giant broken suits of armor and the rotting corpses of Horrors past. There were a handful of proper spider-magi among the dead. Flames burned in mid-air where torches once rested, and there were broken statues everywhere. The ceiling was covered in Sideways writing, scripture, telling of a father drowning his misbegotten son. The mother protested. The son fought back, dragging his father in with him, and fools drowned fools, both bodies left drifting in the water, and mother's tears threatened the world.

"Son of a bitch," Caden sputtered as everything clicked. "You'd think they'd write this shit out as a warning to future generations..."

There was another door at the end of the first chamber, this one framed by spider's fangs and covered in dainty, easily broken chains. Only the lock looked as if it had provided any challenge, and only because it had been blown apart by who or whatever initially opened it. Caden bullrushed through that door too, gathering power with every step he took.

The second chamber was littered with even more battle wreckage than the first. There were broken suits of armor everywhere, slaughtered Horrors and spider-magi lying by most of them. There were human skeletons in the wreckage too, clad in armor so ancient that it predated any traditions Caden knew by name. Nearer to the middle of the chamber, which was so much larger than the first that it shouldn't have even fit here, there were fresher bodies -- things that had been alive until very recently. Most were spider-magi or Horrors or things similar to them. A precious few were draconic-seeming, like wyrmfolk blown up to hulkish proportions and covered in tattoos written in ancient Diamonic script.

Beyond them, there was a dead dragon.

Not a wyrm, not a puny riding beast, not some pale imitation -- a dragon. And it had been killed so recently that the body still bled in the dark, and the life had only just gone out of its eyes. It had not gone quietly or easily, judging by the damage to the chamber around it. A Horror had been pulped between its fingers. Spider-magi bits hung from its sword-sized teeth. One of the wings had been blown clear from the rest of the body, and the stump was still steaming.

Caden rushed by the beast and only then did he finally catch sight of the Penitent. He was standing in front of the final door, hefting his key-staff like a spear before driving it one-handed into the lock. Magic burst all around him, ancient curses flaring to life and dying out from what looked like nothing short of divine intervention. The Penitent, his Voice so heavy as to bear physical weight, his power so great as to destroy civilizations, was a true Chosen. In another time and place, he might have vied with the Forgotten, or brought an entire region to its knees for whatever mad purpose he deemed necessary.

The only thing left that could stop him was another Chosen.

Or, at least, an Unchosen.

Caden dove head-first through a perfect storm of curses, and he felt familiar fingers trying to pluck him away; the caress of a goddess whose name he knew, whose measure he had taken, and whose intentions he had found wanting. He remembered Redcrow (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?19768-The-Henge-Sorcerous&p=155129&viewfull=1#post155129) and the choice (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?19768-The-Henge-Sorcerous&p=155130&viewfull=1#post155130) that he had made (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?19768-The-Henge-Sorcerous&p=155132&viewfull=1#post155132) at the Henge Sorcerous. He remembered the question and he remembered his answer.

One apocalypse or a thousand? Redcrow had asked with the conviction of despair in his eyes.

"THERE WON'T BE ANY APOCALYPSE!" the Sorcerer Blueraven answered him, both then and now.

Power flared and, as a man marching through a hurricane, Blueraven plowed right through curses and divine interventions and the Penitent's own wards. As the Chosen began to turn the key, slowly but surely destroying wards with strength beyond measure, Caden took staff in hand and swung six feet of resonant shard like a prevalida baseball bat. He cracked the Penitent across the side of the head and sent him staggering down to his knees beneath the key, which stopped turning in an instant and did not go back or fall out of the lock.

"Sooner than I Saw," the Penitent rasped, sounding as dizzy as he must have felt. Caden went in to try and thrust the staff's blunt end into his throat, but the Penitent caught it and held firm. Spider-webs spread along the staff, all of them glowing purple and black. "It's because of your passage through Time, isn't it? That...is why you were able to defeat Denebriel, correct?"

The webs stopped at half-way. They began to recede as Blueraven grit his teeth.

"I'm not some one-trick pony, you jackass."

"No. You're merely...doomed. That...is...all..."

The webs pulled back completely as the Penitent fired some kind of force spell from his palm. Caden let go of the staff and had his knife drawn before he even realized that he was lunging in to make the kill. It was Kholia Horren all over again. (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?15069-Intricacies-of-Asymmetry&p=120780&viewfull=1#post120780) Caden stabbed and stabbed until the Penitent's chest and neck and lower jaw were practically bone-riddled hamburger meat. Then he sank the knife into the Penitent's throat and reached in deep with necromancy, grasping for power and-

Finding nothing.

Whatever was animating the Penitent, it wasn't any form of life or magic that Caden knew. He stared at his reflection in the Penitent's visor and felt his heart drop through his stomach.

"Exactly," the Penitent told him with a hoarse chuckle.

Point blank, the Chosen hit him with enough raw power to blow down a building. Caden flew back, passing through and being accelerated by the curses, the wards, the divine interventions. He arced high and bloody, then came back down roughly on the back left leg of the dead dragon, where hip met tail. It was not a cushioned landing. He slumped to the floor as the Penitent stood again, dusting himself off without regard for the damage that the knife had inflicted. He plucked it from his neck and threw it away. He kicked away Caden's staff while he was at it. Perhaps it was another divine intervention that sent that staff tumbling down beside him, but Caden was too dazed to make sense of it.

He tried. He really did try. Half-blind and unable to stand straight, the Wizard still cast magic at the Penitent -- Thermal Lances, Magic Missiles, Arcane Blasts, Lightning, everything he could muster on short notice. None of it got through. What passed through divine intervention was struck down by the sheer number of curses going off around where the Penitent stood. What got through the curses died against his own wards. There was nothing Caden could do but watch.

The Penitent turned the key.

The Catacombs shook, and Scara Brae above shook with it.

The door fell open, collapsing down into the floor to reveal a final chamber. Darkness rushed out like some ancient breath, smelling as foul to the nose as it looked to the eyes. It was strong enough to push Caden back against the dragon's corpse -- strong enough to push the corpse back a few inches. It was old power, stale power, and it had been polluting the Catacombs since the place was built. From where he leaned, Caden couldn't see much of what was in that last chamber. He saw bones bigger than the dragon's corpse. He saw chains older than civilization. He saw the Penitent walking inside.

He heard Words, ancient and terrible Words, ones that didn't exist in any language that had ever been written or spoken. The syllables didn't even matter. Only the intention was important, and it translated readily at a gut level.

Wake up. Give me release.

Caden felt power shifting from that chamber. He saw old bones moving, heard old chains rattling. All the genocide had been nothing more than a chain of sacrifices, and the Penitent had held all that power in a place that Caden couldn't touch, couldn't siphon no matter how he had tried. He gave it up willingly now, as a humble match gives its flame to ignite a torch, knowing full well that it would be consumed in the blaze.

Caden felt it when the Penitent was snuffed out, perhaps finding that Black Nirvana that he so craved. A wave of energy shot out of the chamber, cracking walls and shaking Scara Brae beneath its foundations.

"He's coming," Caden mumbled to himself. "The Dead Son rises."

The chains broke.

[Caden Law]

Geography changed.

The city of Scara Brae shuddered and then sank by layers; thirty feet here, thirty more there, fifty that way, fifteen again, maybe five or ten more just to be thorough. This went on for the better part of twenty minutes, with only the dockside district staying where it was supposed to be. It was as if someone had literally yanked the rug out from under the city's foundations. Buildings teetered and collapsed. Temples gave way. The streets were a byword for chaos as everyone, be they Guard or Scourge, mage or Malleus, monk or scholar, guildsman or merchant, noble or peasant, scrambled for their lives. Miracles happened then and there, but they were few and far between as all Hell seemed to break loose. Ships foundered and docks broke like toothpicks, but the city went unflooded. It was a small consolation.

The middle of the island exploded, expanded, quaked and actually shoved its Western half out several dozen miles. Lake Valeena wrenched into a crescent, shockwaves sending tens of thousands of tons of water crashing into any houses along its Western coast -- and those were the lucky ones. Houses on the Eastern shore of the lake were simply obliterated, reduced to splinters and dust as the Catacombs of Scara Brae came thundering out into broad daylight. The magic that had so long preserved them as a safe bubble between dimensions, allowing so many thousands of miles of tunnels and underground cities and other such things to be crammed underneath the island's namesake city, had been compromised. To put it lightly. The Catacombs themselves had existed long enough to develop their own sense of self-preservation. They could not exist as they had.

So they changed.

They became the single largest artificial structure on the surface of the planet, a half-mile high pile of clashing architecture and insane angles, of granite and stone, wood and iron, and the bones of things best left unnamed and unknown. Creatures flew screaming from gaps in the walls, almost all of them encountering the light of day for the first time. The spirits of the dead came howling into the world of the living, only to be snuffed out by the light of the sun, by the waves of raw power screaming out of the Catacombs as they quaked and changed. It was like a volcanic eruption, spewing debris all the way into low orbit near the epicenter, while wave after wave of dust and rubble launched from the fringes.

Scara Brae sinking as it did was a blessing in disguise. Every building still at or above sea level was wiped clean off the map. Ships were knocked over backwards, snapped like twigs, sunk outright. Waves blew out to sea, taking men and women with them who would never see land again. In the other direction, castles were simply knocked over where they stood, unprotected by either geography or the arcane. The nearest mountains were blasted clean on their Southern faces, and a quarter of Brokenthorn Forest was smashed flat and stripped clean.

At the heart of it all, at the top of the pile of what used to be the Catacombs, there stood a beastly thing that had not walked the world since Time immemorial. It was nothing more than a skeleton, held together by stray scraps of meat that were sturdier than adamantine. It was already big enough to shove over a castle on its own, surrounded by a black miasma of darkness -- the same vaporous darkness that was now spewing out of the former Catacombs at every angle. It had eight legs, every single one ending in skeletal hands tipped with claws big enough to skewer an elephant. Colossal wings arched from its upper back, and a tail longer than the rest of its body lashed behind it. Its head was mounted on a short, sturdy set of vertebrae, with great bone horns shooting up out the back. Its jaw was filled with teeth that made the claws look dull.

White bones blackened under the glare of the sun, sizzling until they looked like charcoal. Bits of flesh randomly appeared all over, growing like uneven patchwork as it -- he -- started to regenerate.

FATHER! he Screamed, and there wasn't a soul on that godsforsaken island who didn't hear him. I'M COMING FOR YOU!

Wings spread, then swept downward, generating lift against every law of physics to the contrary. The Dead Son rose, with difficulty at first, but it didn't take him long to get the hang of flying again. He swooped around the Catacombs twice, darkness forming a halo in his wake. He roared, and the island trembled.


Scara Brae has been destroyed. I scryed it myself. The entire island's gone, nothing more than a bowl full of dirty seawater and dead bodies.

The Year of the Black-Silk Son has begun. This is the end of the world, isn't it?

Gods have mercy on us all.

[Leaf on the Wind]

It wasn't until after the tectonic shift that the rest of Fireside Company finally caught up with Caden. The interior of the Catacombs had gone lopsided, broken, just plain rearranged in ways that made it less like navigating tunnels and chambers, and more like scrambling around inside of a cave network. Even with sunlight beating down, the darkness left by the Black-Silk Son lingered like smoke. The Wizard had propped himself up against the corpse of a dragon, staff in hand, glasses missing, Hat lopsided, eyes distant and face moist with both blood and tears.

None of them were much better off. The Penitent had beaten them all, one way or another.

"I struck out," he said to them without preamble.

"What happened?" Aeraul asked, just before looking up to see the thing their failure had released into the world. The big guy had never looked so demoralized, not even when his mind was being blasted out by the Horrors of War.

"I couldn't stop him. He released that...thing. The bastard son of the Elder Thaynes, Draconus and N'jal. Whoever wrote the Book of Lore lied in chapters one and two. (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?294-Codex-of-Thayne-Lore) Maybe they just had it wrong. I don't know. All that matters is that when the Elders were bumping uglies, Draconus and N'jal mated...and that thing's the result. Draconus didn't like it and tried to kill him. He struck back. That's why Draconus suffers from rot and decay. He did it."

"Tall order," Savas replied. "Does it have a name? And can we just swear allegiance to it?"

"Sijal Kar, according to the writings on the wall. Greyspine's Grimoire identified him as the Black-Silk Son. It's a fair bet to say he takes after his mother...but no," Caden answered with a bitter little laugh. "There is no joining that thing. He's going to reduce this entire godsforsaken island to a bloody bowl of corpses by day's end."

"Why didn't Draconus finish the job?" Aeraul wondered. "Why just bind him?"

"Sijal had his mother's help then. And he was stronger. Right now he's just an echo of his full power. He's atrophied to this over the course of aeons. I don't know how long it'd take to recover. I don't think it even matters. Nothing matters. N'Thayn'sal is here," said the Wizard. "N'Thayn'sal is here and we're all about to die."

Rowan smacked him in the mouth. Caden burst into laughter, ragged and tired, then collapsed against the dragon's corpse. Rowan spat at the ground and drew his katars.

"If we're all gonna die," he said. "I'm at least gonna die fighting." He looked to Aeraul and grinned. "It's been fun, bud. Catch you on the other side, eh?"

"You can't be serious," Aeraul muttered.

"More than I've ever been in my life," Rowan replied, saluting with a katar in hand. He turned away and spent a moment bouncing from foot to foot, gathering power to his legs until he was glowing teal from the knees down. "Good-bye."

He jumped.

Chi provided traction in mid-air. Rowan fumbled at first, found his footing, and didn't look back for a second. Stride by stride, carrying him little faster than any other merely mortal athlete, he ran up through a hole in the ceiling and kept going, gaining altitude, rushing headlong towards a death that was utterly beyond absolute certainty. None of them had the strength of will or character to watch him go.

[Caden Law]

"If you've got gods, make peace with them," Caden shrugged, slumping to the floor. Savas was staring at him. Aeraul was staring at him. Rowan was gone. Sijal Kar's Voice roared, surpassing the mere limits of sound, of molecules vibrating; it was a racket on the soul, demoralizing as anything else.

"So, we're just giving up then?" Savas finally asked.

"Pretty much," Caden answered. "I'm out of ideas and my power's nothing to a god. He's not like Xem'zund or Saint Denebriel. He's the real deal. I couldn't even beat his freaking herald."

Silence.

Aeraul started to walk away, if only to try and get a better view of whatever spectacle was about to play out when Rowan finally got to where the dead godling soared. Savas' expression was entirely unreadable.

Eventually, the Dark Wizard pointed out that, "I haven't conquered a continent yet."

"...what?" Caden asked.

"If I'm going to be evil, I'm not going to be stupid evil. No apprentice of yours holds an idiot ball. I am expected to be a magnificent bastard par excellence. I will, in fact, conquer at least one region in my lifetime or you will kill me. My only alternative is to find redemption. I expect no help in either. In point of fact, you would probably go out of your way to make both paths harder for me to achieve," Savas parroted. "That is what you said to me, isn't it?"

"Plans changed," Caden sighed. "Nobody foresaw a mad godling busting out of its crypt."

"Yes they did," Savas answered. "You did. You assembled us for the express purpose of stopping the godling in question, did you not?"

"I did. And we failed. What's your point?"

"No teacher of mine holds an idiot ball. No teacher of mine gives in to trivial despair. Only by learning from a magnificent bastard can I become one. If I am to conquer a region in my lifetime, I'm going to need for the world to be intact, more or less. There is no alternative. I expect your help, but only because you're a do-gooder, Blueraven. A godless do-gooder whose mission in life is to abort a terrible future. But sometimes you fail. Sometimes the future comes whether you want it or not. You said yourself that he's as weak right now as he'll ever be.

"Just this once, you're going to have to strangle that ugly tomorrow in its crib. Now get the fuck up, Wizard. Get. Up."

Caden glared up at his apprentice as the reality of the situation finally dawned on him. The worst part wasn't even that a mad god had gotten loose because of his failure. No, the worst part was being lectured by a cannibalistic serial killer who had blackmailed him into being a mentor, who had reminded him of his own words in the calmest, most thorough way possible.

"Early worm gets the bird," the senior Wizard muttered as he pushed up and stood, straightening his Hat. He spent a precious few moments putting on his goggles and gathering up his power. "Alright, Wormaxe. I don't know what I can do, but I'll at least try to give you a distraction. Keep him here somehow. I can't guarantee anything."

"Neither can I," Savas replied. "That's what makes it fun."

"...you scare me sometimes," Caden finally admitted, just before taking the Rod from his belt and throwing it to his apprentice. At that, the Sorcerer stepped foot onto a freshly conjured cloud -- a nimbus of raw arcane power. "Do your worst, Wormaxe. Do something heroically apalling or apallingly heroic. Whatever you do, make the world weep."

Faster than Rowan could ever take off, the nimbus catapulted Blueraven up through the hole in the ceiling and out into empty sky, not a cloud in sight besides the hellish black halo generated by the Dead Son. Going at full speed, he caught up to the fighter at no time. Without so much as a hello!, Caden reached out and grabbed Rowan by the scruff of the neck, dragging him along for the ride. Laughter, absolutely maniacal laughter, was the first response.

A few seconds later, "Change your mind?" Rowan asked over the winds.

"Something like that," Blueraven admitted. "Whatever you do, piss him off."

Blueraven thrust his staff forward and let the fighter go. With leftover momentum and a surge of both chi and adrenaline, Rowan overtook him anyway and went to try and flank around their opposition. With Sijal Kar's speed and size, it was like trying to outmaneuver a tidal wave while waist-deep in the water. Caden went to the opposite side. He waited until the Black-Silk Son came round to face him.

And then he unleashed a blast of arcane lightning, pale blue and violet feathers lighting off it at every angle, in haloing its passage from the tip of Blueraven's Staff of Power to the tip of the dead god's nose. It wasn't enough to do damage. Nothing Caden had in his entire arsenal of dirty tricks, suicidal gambits, and old fashioned spellwork could have done that. It was enough to get Sijal Kar's attention though.

YOU DARE?

The battle was joined.

[Savas Tigh]

Savas held the Rod in one hand, staring at it.

It was, in fact, the first properly made spellcasting tool he had held since his days as Bonekeeper, a Nameless henchman to ritual curses that never worked properly. Just touching the thing set his extra senses, his arcane senses, on edge -- numb as they were because of all the background power being put out by the Dead Son above. He knew at once that he wasn't properly attuned to wield the Rod. And he also knew, just as quickly, that it didn't matter one way or the other. Savas was awful at evocation. It was why he carried so many bone wands, burning through each one and replacing them in turn. It didn't matter.

Whatever he was going to do, it wasn't going to be some piddly evocation. A spur-of-the-moment spell is not enough to kill a god, which raised the unfortunate question of, "How do you kill a god?"

He considered it for a few seconds, then looked up.

Sijal Kar dove after Blueraven, and Rowan was little more than a dust mote with attitude clinging to the Dead Son's back near the base of the tail. Where mere 'mortal' dragons breathed fire or blizzards, or whatever other element they'd become accustomed to through the passage of centuries and circumstance, Sijal Kar unleashed raw entropy that manifested as clouds of pitch black darkness. This close to the source, the clouds were full of violet lightning and waves of dark flame that fell and petered out hundreds of feet below. Even when the Dead Son wasn't attacking, he vented that same darkness from his nostrils and mouth. It was like an exhalation of vile, polluted power.

The gears in the Wizard's brain ground together.

The Catacombs had been -- still were -- full of Sijal Kar's exhalations.

"...huh," Savas sounded to himself. "Hey, Aeraul. Hey! Aeraul!"

"What?" the green man snapped. He had found a seat by now, and looked reluctant to give it up. Savas ignored his ire.

"Got a theory to run by you."

"I know jack shit about how magic works," Aeraul replied. It was the first time Savas could remember hearing the half-orc curse, and it was more effective than every obscenity the other three Firesiders had ever spewed out in their lives. Even here and now it stopped him cold and left his jaw sagging open. "What?"

"Oh, oh, nothing. It's just...you know how you might run out of air in some situations? Like an airtight chamber, or the overturned hull of a ship underwater? The more air you breathe in, the more tainted it is when you breathe out, and sooner or later you've used up the entire supply?"

"Yes. What of it?"

"What if all this," he motioned to the darkness still lingering at waist height all around them. "Is the equivalent of tainted air for that thing?"

The light seemed to go off in Aeraul's head. Sijal Kar screamed. It sounded like an earthquake descending into the roar of a T-Rex, heightening into the song of a whale, degenerating into the scream of a man. It was loud enough to shake the entire island. Aeraul waited until the racket had passed before asking, "Is there anything I can do?"

Elsewhere, completely on cue, destiny lined one up as the Eldest showed the Youngest how the game was played. There had, after all, been divine intervention in the release of the Black-Silk Son.

From on high, a sheathed sword fell. It fell past the moon, it fell through high orbit and didn't burn up. It fell straight through air currents that should have landed it somewhere in Corone or Salvar, and it fell through pockets of cold wind that should have iced it over from end to end. It tumbled through a gap between Sijal Kar's wing bones, and passed between two of his ribs as he lunged after the Sorcerer and ate a black hole to the face. It fell, it fell, it fell.

Until finally, it smacked into the very edge of the hole in the ceiling. It landed on the floor, sloped as it was, and went rolling and skidding down until it smacked into an uprisen piece of stone near Savas' feet. It bore an inscription.

Seek, strive, never yield.
Never give up. Never surrender.
Fight tooth and nail to the bitter end.

Somehow, against all odds to the contrary, there was a note attached.

Don't even think it.

"...ah," Savas said, somehow keeping a straight face in spite of himself. "You know what, Aeraul? I'm pretty sure there is something you can do. Just give me a minute to figure it out..."

[Savas Tigh]

"Whatever you do, don't unsheathe it yet," Aeraul ordered as he and Savas made their way into Sijal Kar's old prison chamber. Predictably enough, it was an octagonal room, the ceiling now blasted wide open and most of the walls damaged in the godling's passage. There were enormous chains all over the room, most of them damaged alloy that resembled prevalida or even adamantine. There were staggered steps down to the center of the room, and decayed webs were everywhere. Decayed scales too.

This place had been meant to bind and suffocate the Black-Silk Son until even his skeleton collapsed to nothing. Perhaps then, Draconus would have finished the wretch off personally.

"Why not?" Aeraul asked. He had taken to carrying the weapon by hand, scabbard and all. It looked like it had been made specifically for him.

"My gut's telling me it isn't the right time yet," Savas answered. "It's a Wizard thing. And I think...yes. The scales. Help me gather up some scales. Don't ask questions, just do it."

The two of them worked quickly and quietly. Outside, thunder went off as Caden hit Sijal Kar with another high-end spell -- something that looked positively nuclear at this distance -- to no effect. Rowan was still in the fight, even if all he could do was annoy the godling by getting between its shoulderblades and stabbing off patches of skin before they could finish growing.

When Savas and Aeraul had finished putting together the pile, Aeraul took out a knife and a wand. He carefully chipped a string of Diamonic script onto one of the scales, then threw it and the wand onto the pile. Using the Rod as a medium, he spoke a few quick Words of Power and waited.

The scales lit up, bright green flames consuming them from the bottom up, and then there was nothing but a heavy wood and metal box topped off by a burlap sack. Savas nonchalantly blasted the lock off the box, then threw it open to reveal a familiar skull, one covered in inscriptions and carefully sheltered by the cushions that Savas had stuffed in there with it.

Candlelight eyes flickered on in empty sockets, weaker than they should have been. Sijal Kar's very presence was enough to drown out lesser forms of magic. It was a testament to Savas' talent as a binder that Kholia Horren's soul remained anchored and intact as it was supposed to be.

"What an interesting turn of events this is," the dead Wizard Blightcrow greeted him.

"Your Voice changed," Savas noted.

"In case you didn't notice, the whole godsdamn world changed (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?22261-Althanas-3.0-Completion-Report) while you silly bastards have been putzing around in here. It's been months since you set foot in the Catacombs."

"...ah. Well. Hopefully you've been well."

"I'VE BEEN STUCK IN A BOX FOR MONTHS! MOST OF A YEAR! A GODSDAMN BOX! I WENT SO FAR INSANE I CAME BACK FROM THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION! TWICE!"

"That's nice," Savas sighed, then patted the skull on its forehead. "We've got bigger things to worry about right now. Do you remember the spell I used to lure and bind you? (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?21104-Twisted-Koans-and-Burnt-In-Thoughts&p=170015&viewfull=1#post170015)"

Another Siege Arcana went off, accompanied by a rain of broken glass shards. Some of them still steamed. Aeraul and Savas both took shoulder under an intact section of the ceiling.

"How could I possibly forget?" Blightcrow asked. If the skull could sneer, it would have.

"I need you to help me refine and amplify it. To aim it. And to use it as a weapon. Are you up for the task?"

Candlelights glittered in Blightcrow's empty eyes. Even without lips, the skull managed to smile.

[Leaf on the Wind]

Siege Arcana for the third or fourth time and Rowan had gotten better at ducking and covering when the burnt and frozen chunks of glass came tumbling by. His armor had been stripped down to the chain by now, and he was bleeding all over and every breath came out glowing. He held on tight and laughed into the ear of a god, and the god raged at him in impotent frustration. It was the single most intoxicating rush of adrenaline and triumph that Rowan had ever known in his life; one that probably ranked up there in the annals of Stupid Shit Done For Good Reasons. Compared to Caden, he was little more than an irate flea between Sijal Kar's shoulder-blades. All he could do was intensify whatever anger the Sorcerer was causing; adding jeers and trash talk to explosions of power that could have demoralized an army.

For all the effort they were putting in, the best they could do was keep Sijal Kar circling the old Catacombs. Caden's maneuvering, driven more by intellect than desperation, was a mad series of twists and turns, straight shots and chicken runs. He dove right through the Black-Silk Son's jaws twice, passing down through its ribcage and dodging aft-claws and tail alike on his way out. It got easier as time went on. Except for the part where the godling was starting to grow huge patches of skin and muscle; scales the size of battle shields, and muscles that could have pulled loaded galleons onto dry land and up the side of a mountain. No internal organs had formed yet. Veins were beginning to shape here and there; limp, empty things still void of purpose. Caden's passages through the mouth and ribs included blasts of magic that tore skin away from the gaps between bones, prolonging what they both knew was inevitable.

And the reason it got easier, the same reason that Rowan had less and less trouble avoiding the godling's flapping wings, was because Sijal Kar was getting bigger. He had started out large enough to literally shove over a castle with sufficient effort. He was now big enough to wrap his tail around that same castle and rip it down. His fingers were as large as a bedroom. His hands would have been able to hold an elephant the way a man holds a grape -- and Sijal Kar could've burst one just as easily.

I GROW TIRED OF THIS GAME!

A shockwave rippled through the air, visible distortion with enough raw force that Rowan almost fell away in spite of himself. Caden's nimbus was snuffed out for a few seconds, leaving the Sorcerer to come cannonballing up between the Dead Son's horns. He went right over Rowan's head, passing between the wings, and finally reassembled the cloud as he neared the base of the tail. Holding his Hat down with one hand and leading the way with his staff, the Sorcerer barrel rolled down past Sijal Kar's back hip, under his tail, and out of sight.

Barely a tenth of a second later, a ghost of something both arachnid and draconic bolted right through the fighter and almost knocked him off again.

It is only a matter of time before I regain the power to be in multiple places at once! Only a matter of time before I regain total control of my form! I CRIPPLED THE ELDER GOD DRACONUS! AND YOU REALLY THINK YOU CAN STAND AGAINST ME?

I WILL FLENSE YOUR SOULS!

Rowan answered by jamming his katar under a nascent patch of skin. He ripped it right off and let the wind take care of disposal. Sijal Kar roared again, spewing darkness like fire with its awful Voice.

"You just love hearing yourself talk, don't you?" Rowan asked.

A tenth of a second later, claws raked the vest right off his back, tearing through chainmail like butter. His sash went with it, hooked by the same claws and stripped away just as quickly. His chokuto, the sword he had carried with him for years, was also gone. Impact threw him forward, fast and far enough that he slammed right into the back of Sijal Kar's neck and was able to hold on again. He looked over his shoulder and there, standing where he had been, was a malformed humanoid dragon thing with bones visibly poking out under the surface of its skin. For every second that went grinding by, the thing looked less deformed, more athletic, better assembled.

Actually, Sijal Kar said from a dozen directions at once. I do.

"Well," Rowan mumbled. "This changes things." He stood back up, anchored solely by chi at this point. "To tell you the truth, I was starting to get bored."

He held his arms out to either side and grinned.

"Come at me."

[Caden Law]

"BLUERAVEN!"

Caden almost lost control of the nimbus as he passed between two of Sijal Kar's claws. Another hand shot out at him and swept the cloud right out from under his feet. Driven by leftover momentum and gravity, the Wizard entered freefall while the Dead Son writhed and raged in his wake. The bigger he got, the faster he was, but also the less agile he became. Anger blinded the godling's reason, and divinity is nothing if not shaped by reason.

"What is it, Wormaxe?" he asked, relying on his apprentice's Name to establish a speaking connection between them.

"I've got a plan but I'm going to need you to put a target marker on him. A lightning rod. Something. Anything, so long as it can act as an anchor for his power."

Caden considered it as he started to reform the nimbus cloud beneath him. Like a bodyboarder on the waves, he rode it down several hundred feet with Sijal Kar's colossal jaws snapping shut at his heels. Caden looked back, waited for the Black-Silk Son to open his mouth again, then hit the air brakes and maneuvered himself past the beast's house-sized tongue, into the gaping hole where his throat should have been, then down into the empty cage of its chest.

"Like what?"

Darkness built. Caden hit the brakes again and passed out through the bottom of the ribcage, trailing darkness and fire and lightning as he went. He barrel rolled up over the base of the tail in time to see Rowan trading blows with some kind of mutant humanoid-dragon. The darkness followed him the whole way, drifting off like smoke as he finally escaped it.

"Something that pisses him off would be nice. Something that draws the darkness."

Caden thought about it for a moment, then arced up and away from the Dead Son to the halo still flowing in the skies above the old Catacombs. Sijal Kar followed after him, roaring the whole way, but Caden did his best to ignore it.

Through the darkness, and he was observant this time. It followed him. More to the point, it followed his chestplate, feebly stabbing at it like the claws of some old, tired predator remembering the one that got away.

"Right then," Caden said as he shot up and then backflipped into another freefall over the course of three or four hundred feet. Sijal Kar was having more and more difficulty maneuvering to keep up with him. The Sorcerer released his staff for the time being and instead focused all his attention on stripping off the chestplate. It wasn't easy. It wasn't easy when he was just standing there in a quiet room and it sure as Hells wasn't going to be easy now, but he managed. He held the armor out with one hand like a broken shield or kite, then summoned the staff back into the other.

Nimbus at his feet. Sijal Kar reaching down from above.

Air brake and spin, blind, between two hands that were now big enough to crush castles on their own.

Up between skeletal arms longer than battleships, covered with scales as big the roof on a house and naked strips of muscle that could've dragged down a mountain. Blasting through the thin, filmy skin that was growing between the bones of the left wing. Flip twice. Back down.

Caden was not a tournament fighter and his staff was anything but a lance, but he still slammed Sijal Kar's humanoid personification like a jousting master, hurling it clear over the godling's nearest shoulder.

"ROWAN!" he Shouted, holding out the chestplate.

Bloody and wielding only one katar at this point, Rowan complied without a word. How he put that chestplate on with one hand, against gravity and windsheer, with all the unpredictability of Sijal Kar's movements, Caden did not know, nor did he want to speculate. By that point, the Sorcerer was long gone, pushing forward, between Sijal Kar's horns, so that he could hurl lightning into one of the godling's eyes.

"Wormaxe! It's done!

"Whatever you plan on doing, DO IT!"

[Savas Tigh]

Savas Tigh sucked at evocation.

Having the Arcanist's Rod in one hand and a succession of bone-wands in the other allowed him to cheat like it was going out of style. He pulled energy in with the rod, using it to overcome his own natural shortcomings, while using the bone wands as a conduit for what amounted to a darkly arcane blowtorch. Disregarding the spells he had already carved into the wands was enough to destroy them after a while, but Savas wasn't about to let a petty little thing like that stop him.

He had a lot of wands.

Blightcrow rode the whole way through in Aeraul's hands, with the big man carrying him around while the dead Wizard barked instructions to his owner. The whole process took better than ten minutes -- time that Caden and Rowan spent fighting for their lives like rats in a hurricane. It was a challenge for Aeraul just to stay focused, but he managed.

"There," Savas said as his last wand shattered. Without even blinking, he took out a fist full of bone dice and rolled them into the darkness still washing about at waist height. He took vial after vial from his belt, casting them into the dark with ritual precision. Glass broke, and broke, and kept on breaking, until finally...

"Wormaxe! It's done!

"Whatever you plan on doing, DO IT!"

"Ready?" he asked, twirling the wand a few times before stopping it cold, tip down and handle up. Before Aeraul could answer him, Savas clarified, "That was a rhetorical question."

Wormaxe drove the rod straight down into the floor. A shockwave rippled through every square nanometer of supernatural darkness from the top of the old Catacombs to its barely extradimensional bottom. To an observer with the right eyes, it would've resembled the shockwave before an implosion -- and that's exactly what happened next. Like water rushing out of a bucket with holes in the bottom, the darkness of the Catacombs flooded right out of every single open tunnel, door, hole in the wall, and all the cracks and crevices that marred its walls. Savas didn't do more than place some metaphircal guidelines and deliver the starter push.

The most disconcerting part was that the darkness did not react with anything it touched. There was no howl of wind resistance, there was no change in air pressure, there wasn't so much as a grain of dust shifted by its passage. Only light seemed to have any effect on it, triggering the formation of a dark and lopsided halo around the uppermost section of the Catacombs, and even that was temporary at most.

Sijal Kar looked down to see his wasted breath come rushing up like poison, and the undead godling finally realized what was going on. Only when he roared did the darkness seem to truly react, shattering outward into a thin sphere all around him. And, drawn by the Draconus-touched chestplate that Rowan was wearing, the darkness collapsed just as quickly as it had spread. Sijal Kar was completely enveloped in the cloud, sent flailing about through the sky with nothing but the Sorcerer's power to hold his ever-growing body in place.

Caden was not up to that task. Sorcerous constructs shattered like poorly made glass and it was all Blueraven could do just to keep himself airborn.

"And now," Savas said as he lifted the rod up for another go. "Phase two."

The rod came down.

"The Holocaust of Worms.

[Leaf on the Wind]

Sijal Kar picked up the pace, trying like all Hells to outrun his own misspent power. Rowan looked up, his head barely above the dark cloud enveloping most of the godling's body.

"...fuck me," he said, immediately wishing he had kept his head down.

If every Wizard gets to cause a natural disaster-level event in his formative years, then Savas Tigh had officially one-upped his mentor's Scourging o (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?15069-Intricacies-of-Asymmetry&p=122000&viewfull=1#post122000)f Tembrethnil (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?15069-Intricacies-of-Asymmetry&p=122002&viewfull=1#post122002) by causing two of them using variations on the same basic spell. The first Holocaust of Worms (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?20799-The-Red-Requiem-in-Cresting-Summer&p=166667&viewfull=1#post166667) had destroyed a false sky, annihilated huge swaths of the old Obsidian Spire that Xem'zund once called his personal refuge, and blasted gaping holes in the Red Forest of Raiaera. The one that took place over Scara Brae was bigger. By all rights, it should have been worse. The worms -- unliving constructs of disease green ectoplasm, motivated by a godsawful intellect with a dark and loathesome will to match -- started the size of houses and only grew bigger from there. They ate holes right through bright blue sky, tumbling out into daylight like all the nightmares of children made real.

And every single one of them fell onto Sijal Kar. Even those that missed seemed to literally eat their way back up to him, leaving behind gray and black and red holes bleeding in the sky behind them. They passed into the darkness surrounding him, they lunged into his still empty eye sockets, up his man-sized nostrils, between his gigantic teeth, and all over the rest of him, and they ate. They ate like nothing that could ever truly live, tearing away at the flesh of a mad godling and annihilating themselves in the process. For every worm that fell, six more erupted out of the sky above. Try as he might to outrun them, Sijal Kar couldn't. The spell spawning them chased him from an adjacent dimension, just far enough removed from the Firmament that he couldn't directly attack it himself.

And while the worms could feast on his flesh, they couldn't do more than gnaw the soot from his bones. As powerful as the Holocaust of Worms was, and as much as it diminished Sijal Kar's power, it wasn't a deathblow.

Rowan realized this the instant he saw that they couldn't break through the bone. He had guessed the purpose of the darkness by then, if only because the godling put so much effort in keeping its head above it all, and the rest was nothing more than a leap of faith.

Or a drop of faith, anyway.

Rowan blindly sought out a gap between ribs, then dove down between them. In the space where Sijal Kar's lungs should have been, he slammed his feet into bone and readied himself for the fight of his life with nothing more than a katar in one hand and the dim glow of revenant worms to light his way. Sijal Kar did not disappoint.

There were claws. Manifestations that made his first opponent seem weak. Rowan's katar broke on his first counterattack. From there it was just a matter of staying alive. Sparks flew from his chest, here and there, as mortal blows met steel and almost ripped it away. It didn't take long for Rowan to adapt, protecting his chest even when it meant taking blows to the chest or the arms or the legs. He was outclassed and fighting almost blind.

He was also a veteran of the Zirnden fighting in one of the most insane cages ever assembled.

The darkness didn't make a sound.

The worms only chittered.

Sijal Kar gagged on his own rage.

But Rowan Stormwind laughed like a godsdamn maniac.

[Aeraul Smythe]

"You...might want to hang on tight," Savas advised as he sagged down to his knees. A few seconds later, he spat out a mouthful of brightly glowing blood and almost collapsed, but for a hand holding him up. The bone dice had exploded. The contents of all the vials he'd broken had burned away, leaving arcane sigils literally scorched into the ground at regular intervals. Every single line he had burnt into the stone was steaming.

Stone started to rumble.

"...what did you do, Savas?" Aeraul asked. He was answered by a hoarse laugh that turned into coughing and gagging; blood on the ground, at any rate.

"The Working we engineered to send the darkness to its maker had two purposes," Blightcrow answered for him. "Second was to grab as much energy as possible from the Catacombs themselves, using it to fuel the magic currently rending Sijal Kar to the bone. Savas expended every last scrap of power from Undulent Sin doing it. It's probably the only reason he's alive right now."

"...that's not all, is it," Aeraul said rather than asked.

"Of course not. With all that's happened so far, the binding magicks that allowed the Catacombs to remain intact were bleeding out. Savas drained them to the point of anemia. I suspect there might be powers left here after all, but not nearly enough to support a half-mile high pile of labrynthine tunnels and extradimensional chambers and cities."

"This whole place is about to collapse," Savas rasped. "Toss me the skull and take your place, half-man. You've still got your part to play in all this."

Aeraul looked at Blightcrow, then did as he was told.

"Good luck," Wormaxe told him, just before the former Catacombs completely collapsed.

[Aeraul Smythe]

It was not an implosion. Rather, it was a whole chain of explosions that rung up from the Catacombs' western base to its eastern midsection; two or three dozen cities all quite literally tearing their way out into broad daylight for the first time in recorded history. Bodies went flying everywhere. A house started in Scara Brae, came close to escape velocity, and landed somewhere in Dheathain. Every single one prompted a brand new avalanche, some of them stacking on top of each other, and a handful literally overshooting the ones beneath them. Dozens of miles around the Catacombs' base were buried under falling cities, falling tunnels, collapsing bridges, temples the size of palaces, and rivers and lakes spilling out into the open world.

The net result looked more like a tree falling, if viewed from enough distance. And it fell in the same direction that Sijal Kar flew as the Holocaust's remnants bore down on him and his own black power bundled up into an opaque cloud in his chest. Trailing between them was a Sorcerer on a fading gray cloud. Somewhere at extremes, there was a Wizard and a warrior.

And at the very cresting peak of the falling Catacombs, there was a green-skinned man with resolute eyes and an air of tranquility that was utterly at odds with his surroundings.

Gravity kicked in and Aeraul Smythe quite literally rode a collapsing mountain down to ground level, even as shockwaves of dirt and dust rippled off below him. He had climbed up onto the very roof of Sijal Kar's old prison chamber as the collapse kicked into high gear, and he held fast even though wind sheer and acceleration both should have torn him right off and sent him falling to his death. He held the sheathed sword in one hand and anchored himself with the jian in the other, utterly refusing to be moved from his post.

Sijal Kar went down somewhere southwest of Lake Valeena. He did not go quietly. The explosion looked a few kilotons shy of a mushroom cloud, and the clashing shockwaves actually ripped the 'head' off the falling mountain. Aeraul closed his eyes as the entire world quiet literally flipping beneath his feet. He lost his balance first, then he lost hold of the jian and went sliding skyward before his free hand found purchase on the very edge of what may as well have been a freefalling island in the sky.

The island's granite edge hit dirt and grass. Something caught harder to one side than it did elsewhere. The island turned and, in the span of maybe a minute, became the world's largest collapsing wheel, propelled along by the remaining shockwaves from the falling Catacombs. Buffetted by wind and debris on all sides, it was all Aeraul could do to start running opposed to the wheel's direction, still holding onto that damned sheathed sword as he went.

He felt a sense of absolute determination coming from above. His ears heard birds shrieking. He threw his empty hand up and jumped.

There was Blueraven, coasting along on the remnants of his power as Sorcery burned dry and Wizardry -- nothing but raw Wizardry, culling power from the air all around him -- took up the slack. Blueraven grabbed Aeraul by the forearm and dragged him along for the ride like a great green-skinned kite, even as his Sorcerous cloud decayed into a great big ice-slide, held aloft by pillars that looked like the uprisen beaks of ravens. His staff lead the way, tucked under his other arm like a lance, while the Wizard went sliding along speeds that would've set records if anyone had been recording them.

Near Sijal Kar's still-smoking crater, he ran out of power for even that. The Wizard made the most of what he had left, angling the slide upward and rocketing into the sky with Aeraul in tow. They parted ways there, and Aeraul didn't see what happened after that. He was cresting hundreds of feet off the ground, mind racing as he tried to think of a way to survive a crash landing at several hundred miles per hour.

Instinct guided him to grab the sword then. It came free with a click that shook the man to his core, right past all the things that actually made Aeraul a man, clear to the bundle of instincts beneath. He bent forward, throwing his legs out for wind resistance, forcing himself into a flip. He tucked in, still flipping.

Feet out at the perfect moment.

Aeraul went right past the lip of the crater and went sliding along its smoothly angled wall. He couldn't have done better if he planned. It was nothing short of divine intervention that his feet didn't break, his legs didn't snap like twigs, and his boots didn't grind away to nothing -- even if they were smoking by the time he got half-way down.

At crater's heart, still with a black cloud wafting in his ribcage, the Black-Silk Son raged. Manifestations appeared everywhere, and died just as quickly. The power was going out of his eyes as he suffocated, vomiting up everything from excess energies to abstract concepts; colors that didn't exist came spilling from between his teeth as the worms feasted and the darkness smothered.

Aeraul finally drew the sword, throwing away its sheathe as his feet came sliding onto level ground and he was finally able to run again. It was a big weapon, even for him. The blade was like a great curving tooth, pitch black save for a silver-and-purple edge and tip. There was a stone like a snake's eye laid into its base, and a crossguard polished to mirrored perfection. The hilt was large enough for both Aeraul's hands with about three inches between them, covered in a familiar spider's silk, silver wire, and ray's skin.

And as Aeraul held it, as he charged and Sijal Kar finally deigned to notice him, something stranger still happened.

For the first time in his life, the half-orc was able to call up flames without having to think about it. They were larger, more intense, than anything he had ever been able to summon after hours of meditation or even in the heat of a battle frenzy. They were blue and red, swirling into a tornado around the blade, and purple-white light flared where the colors met.

NO! Sijal Kar gagged, his Voice so diminished by the poison in his lungs and the worms on his bones that it scarcely shattered the crater wall in Aeraul's direction. But it didn't touch the half-orc himself. GET AWAY FROM ME!

Titan's claws reached out, tore enormous rocks from the ground, and sent them flying like pebbles. Aeraul weaved between as best he could. When he couldn't, he finally struck.

Three tons of solid rock split in half in front of him.

He didn't slow down for a second.

Sijal Kar tried to fly away, but he lacked the power even for that. He tried to strike out one last time, and Aeraul lunged right through the gaps in his fingers, nonchalantly cleaving one off in passing. The godling collapsed.

Aeraul cut him twice.

The first split him in two from snout to tail's tip, breaking the entire spine in half in the process. The second cleaved his head-halves clear from the stumps with enough volcanic power that they were sent tumbling dozens of yards from their points of origin.

Aeraul finally went skidding to a stop at the tip of Sijal Kar's broken collar, vertebrae the size of fishing boats bisected to either side of him. He held Draconus' Tooth out to one side, the flames blazing from its blade like a newborn star, even though the weapon didn't make much of a sound for all the power invested in it. He had time enough to look around, to see the darkness fading and to hear Rowan's exhausted laughter. Aeraul actually started to laugh with him, as the shock of everything finally caught up to him.

And then the world turned black.

[Caden Law]

I have now been at ground zero for the violent deaths of three striking demigods. Three. Count 'em, History.

Even if that last one was more of an actual god, now that I think about it.

I think it's safe to say that I live in interesting times. Maybe someday they'll write stories about the Wizard Blueraven?

At any rate, it's been a long few weeks so I'll just hit the high notes. I'm tired. We're all alive.
I repeat: We're all alive.
Even that godsforsaken idiot I call an apprentice.
We killed a fucking god. I couldn't stop the Penitent, but we still killed the Year of the Black-Silk Son in its crib. There are no casualty estimates right now, neither in Scara Brae or elsewhere, but I'd wager it's in the tens of thousands at least...counting the populations in Kevyraz and the other formerly underground cities. The entire island's been rearranged. Scara Brae is mostly below sea-level now. But this land isn't a bowl full of dirty seawater and dead bodies. It's not a clean win but it's still a win. I'll take it.
I don't know if it'll actually 'take' though, so to speak. From what I've observed of Liquid Time throughout all this, and before, it's like...things only happen if the Gods will it? The world itself is inconsistent to the point of insanity. And now that I see it, I don't think I'll ever be able to unsee it...
There was a lengthy pause here. Several hours. Then more.
I guess it'd be rude of me to not mention what actually happened to us after the battle, wouldn't it? Obviously, we all survived the impossible. That doesn't happen every day. Not even for me.

Yours Truly - Came through with broken everything. It took me slow-freezing several hundred yards' worth of land and sea before I was even able to mend enough bones to move properly. I was able to avoid resorting to necromancy, but only barely. I didn't finish recovering for a week. I'm still not fully recovered. I'm sore all the time and I've got a whole cartload of new scars to show for it.

Wormaxe - Survived. I have no idea how. His pet skull wasn't even broken, even though Savas claims to have been grievously injured during the fall. I'm assuming he ate souls of the dead or something, but I honestly don't know and don't care. He's got fresh scars for this too. We all do. He either lost my rod or stole it, but at this point I don't care. If he took it, good on him. It shows initiative, if nothing else. His old home was destroyed, but he seems happy to...adjust. Or something.

Rowan - Survived. Came through with the least scars of all of us, but he lost the most blood and what injuries he did get were definitely the worst. I think he only survived because he knows how to live on chi the way a Wizard can live on ambient energy.* Lost everything but the clothes on his back. I feel bad, but he wrecked my chestplate, so not too bad. Maybe I'll buy him a new sword for his troubles or something. Not that he ever even used the one he had.

* I have no idea what the distinction is between chi and magic. I'm assuming it's Akashiman snobbery, but he fights differently from most mages I've seen so there might be something to it...

Aeraul - Killed a god with a toothpick, by every account I've heard. Valeena apparently had people scrying the fight as it wound down.** From what I've heard, it sounds like he was gifted with Draconus' Tooth, arguably the most formidable sword in Althanian lore. I've recorded what he told me of its use and effects, and quizzed one of the scrying magi on it, but I don't think I'll ever know the whole story and it drives me nuts.

After Aeraul killed Sijal Kar, the dead god's power basically imploded. Scara Brae suffered an eight hour eclipse. I don't know if the rest of the world was treated to such a thing or not. I'll probably find out wherever I end up landing next.

And it turns out that Draconus took the sword back right after the job was done. Aeraul told me that he remembered feeling it leave his hand right after the eclipse started. He described it as vanishing so quickly that he felt air popping in to fill the gap. We managed to find his old jian, at least. He literally yanked the thing out of solid granite.

** Valeena survived, incidentally. A few of the more troublesome nobles in her court did not. Draw your own conclusions. Whatever the case, she had people watching and that helped us talk our way off the chopping block for participating in mass murder and crimes against everything from Letters A to Z. Once the truth came out, Aeraul and Rowan were basically instant heroes to the point that they're just plain sick of it by now. People have been giving me a colder shoulder than usual but nobody's gotten violent yet. Savas somehow managed to slip away unnoticed. I envy him.Another lengthy pause, marked by a few blotches of ink on the page. Caden wrote more after that.
N'Thayn'sal won't happen. I know that for sure now. I've averted too many apocalyptic events for it to go down as it could have, but something the thing called Undulent Sin told me has been giving me more nightmares than usual.

"N'Thayn'sal is more than a mere chain of events... It lives even as it dies. It is the end and it will come, no matter how many errant heralds you strike down."

I still have the information from the N'Thayn'sal Greyspine's Grimoire. I know where the next three or four dozen apocalypses should start. But what about the ones I don't know? How many more Penitents are out there, dredging up dead gods to unleash on the world? How many more cities am I going to destroy before all this is over?

...I was joking with Rowan earlier and my record came up. So far I've... Scourged Tembrethnil
Transmuted an entire city
Destroyed most of Knife's Edge
Rearranged an entire island
Rowan thinks the only way I can top myself now is to crack the moon in half.

Except that there's something inside the moon. I saw its body burning when I was in N'Thayn'sal. I tried laughing at that but I couldn't.

My only real condolence is this: It isn't due for another year. Or more, maybe. Sijal Kar's coming was actually supposed to happen years ago. Maybe all the things I've been doing, combined with the ripples from Denebriel's death, have rearranged the schedule?

...and maybe the Thaynes just want to survive.

I don't know. All I know is that I've got time for a beer and there's a newly opened pub down the street from my inn. Fireside Company, together again, plus Redwind and his...other, I guess you could call her. Not even all this could get those two married.The journal ends here, for now.

The story does not.

[Aeraul Smythe]

Aeraul didn't get any peace until days after Fireside Company's last get-together.

"There's an opening at a place called the College Arcana, over in Raiaera, if you're interested. We could use a melee instructor," Caden had told him. Aeraul refused then, and he still refused now, but it was enough to give him pause. He was nearing thirty years old, and he was growing tired of the pitfighting and he had already grown weary of Scarabrian hero worship. He was, by nature, a scholar. Not of the arcane, but of people, places, things. He was the kind of scholar who went out and studied the world, and studied himself in the process. And he had been idle for far too long.

On his first day of peace, Aeraul ventured out to the crater where Sijal Kar's bones still lay, slowly but inevitably bleaching as the last traces of godly power seeped out of them. The crater had already turned into an enormous bowl-shaped garden of poisonous plants, none of them particularly natural. There were spiders and dragonflies everywhere, in species that weren't native to any place in Althanas. Aeraul stood at the edge of the crater and drew his sword for the first time in days. He twirled it a few times, getting a feel for the balance, and it felt...inadequate. Less than the weapon he had wielded to kill a god.

He went through a number of kata that afternoon and well into the night.

He ended the entire routine with a thrust at the crater. Flame burst from the guard of his sword, sweeping down the length of its blade and passing out into the air in bright red waves of water on an invisible sea. Second by second, the decorative paints and markings on the blade burned away, until only tempered steel remained. Aeraul gave it another few twirls, but the weapon still didn't feel right. He waited for the heat to die down, then sheathed it and went home again. What was left of it.

He started packing the next morning.

[Leaf on the Wind]

Rowan woke up one day in a bed occupied by himself, two women, no sheets and even less clothing. He stared at the ceiling for a minute or two, grinned to himself and got up. He didn't care to think about how he'd gotten through so many women without any bastards, nor did he really remember the names of his latest conquests. They were pretty and he was heroic and that was good enough for a night.

He went through a morning routine of stretching and kicking at things that weren't there. He mustered enough chi that his veins glowed teal through the skin. Then he dressed himself in red silks; pants and an open shirt, accompanied by a teal scarf wrapped high around his stomach. The outfit clashed horribly, but it did a bang-up job of showcasing the network of scars on his chest and neck. He sported more on his arms and legs, and a particularly large one that ran across his right cheek.

They were his only real souvenirs from the Catacombs. Rowan still didn't know what happened the night he didn't go into the cemetary. Anymore, he didn't care.

He walked the streets unarmed and barefoot, watching at ground level as the city of Scara Brae reassembled itself from wreckage. There were huge ramps and stairwells leading up to the docks now, and the Queen had suspended Malleus policies to reinforce the land separating the city from the ocean above it. Redwind and Blueraven had been actively working with a dozen or more rookie geomancers and masked Warlocks to solidify the ground, keep it from every being pushed over. There was an sea wall under construction as well, set to cut right through the docks so that the city would have some protection from tidal waves and the like.

In the span of two hours, Rowan ate a sandwich, chugged a beer, and watched a shop come together from nothing but sweat, blood, tears, and elbow grease. He saw bodies being fished out of rubble, packed away on carts and shipped off to the Temple District for whatever funerary rites they could be given prior to cremation. Too much of the city had died, and too quickly at that, for anything else to be practical. There had been outbreaks from corpserot all over the place.

He walked in the shadow of the Dajas Pagoda complex, cracked and covered in ruins that just made it seem more ancient and mystical, but otherwise intact.

He passed by a brand new Zirnden, little more than a pit walled with wood slats and covered by a flimsy looking dome of wire and badly bent metal. Some things would never die.

He passed by a park where old monks and young people were going through the motions of kata. It looked like group therapy. The younger participants, male and female, all had the same tortured look in their eyes. The monks looked almost parental in this light.

Eventually, Rowan came to a shop that hadn't been there five seconds ago. It was one of those creepy little places that a Wizard might go to, complete with a lopsided sign hanging above the door. There were two or three dozen lines etched into the sign, framing the words Danny DeMon's Bazaar of the Bizarre! (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?8383-Tourism-for-Wizards&p=86289&viewfull=1#post86289) with two signs nailed to the underside: One clearly read Not even mad gods and unnatural disasters can put us out of business! The second was more lines. Rowan thought about it for a moment, eventually assumed that the lines were Sideways writing, that this was a bad idea, and that he was going to go through with it anyway.

He put a hand to the door and felt a jolt run through his arm as he pushed it open. Rowan stepped inside.

The door slammed shut and the shop wasn't there anymore.

[Savas Tigh]

To be any kind of necromancer, you have to start out as a graverobber. It is, quite literally, Step One. Most people who take up the Dead Art don't start making fresh corpses until they've burned through existing supplies. Savas was a slight exception to this, but only by virtue of circumstance. He turned to the Dead Art after first hearing the whispers of Xem'zund in his mind. Everything before that had just been affinities for darkness and fire, talents that had long since atrophied or been consumed by the way his power had grown as a thaumaturge.

But the man still knew how to plunder for corpses.

And there was, at least, absolutely no shortage of those. Neither in the city of Scara Brae, nor the wreckage of the old Catacombs, now known to most people as the Labyrinth of Scara Brae. Not that it was a very functional labyrinth by any standards. Maybe the interior was more of a maze; Savas hadn't gone in yet and he had no plans to do so. There were already stories of things moving in the dark passages beneath the Labyrinth's surface, and that wasn't even half of it. Whole civilizations had existed in the old Catacombs. Most of them now lay strewn about the island of Scara Brae, ruins from ages that the daylit world had never even seen. There was a mushroom city lying broken on the mountains, and a whole section of Brokenthorn Forest had been annihilated by virtue of a kobold tunnel network falling on it. Kevyraz itself now lay scattered in pieces all over the island, and any survivors had either assimilated into the city proper or gone to ground in the Labyrinth. One of the Eight Elder Cities had been ripped apart and Savas was partially responsible for it.

He felt more smug than anything.

How many Dark Wizards got away with genocide before they'd assembled their first army?

"Here," Blightcrow informed him. The skull rode shotgun in a satchel that Savas had borrowed from a wrecked Guard armory. "Twenty feet down. You'll be better off using a ritual."

Rod in one hand, wand in the other, Savas nonchalantly started scorching a ritual circle into the rubble under his feet. It was slow work, but he had kept a stash of unmarked ribs at his apartment. It was easy to carve the necessary spellwork for a magical blowtorch into one. Not so easy to refine the spell so that the wand wouldn't break from the power the rod gave him. Savas was still getting the hang of most things, but he was a fast learner if nothing else.

The entire ritual took him the better part of an hour, even with Blightcrow's guidance. Wormaxe was just glad that he'd chosen to do it at night. Fear and reconstruction had kept most of Scara Brae's would-be explorers too busy to come looking for anything in the Labyrinth's ruins. When he was done torching in the lines, Savas broke open a few vials of alchemist's light, went to the Western edge of the circle, then placed the wand down and snapped it in two with the rod's tip.

Over the course of seconds, the lines of the spell absorbed the light, glowing green with pulses of purple light courtesy of the broken wand. When the glow ended, several tons of rock and dirt simply rolled out of the way as if it was being polite.

What lay at the bottom was an enormous wing, severed almost at the joint from the dragon it belonged to.

Of all the graves Savas had robbed in the past few days, this one was easily the biggest catch. It didn't hurt that there was a stray long bone lying next to it, still covered in meat and gristle from whatever had taken it out of the dragon's body.

"I think I can work with this," Savas announced to nobody in particular.

"Provided you can get it into the front door."

[Caden Law]

It was almost a month since the Day of the Dead Son, and looking at Scara Brae now, you'd be hard-pressed to tell that the place had been hit by one of the worst disasters in recorded history. The truces that had held the people together through the initial surge of rebuilding were starting to break down. Scourge knifed Guard called in Malleus crucified Warlock butchered citizen was gyped by Scourge and the whole cycle was starting up again in bits and pieces. Harbor industry came to life in a blur of building and rebuilding, helped along by the fact that news traveled so slow from continent to continent. Nobody even knew about the disaster until the ships were already unloading, and by that point the worst damage had at least been covered up if nothing else.

The scars were still there though, if you knew where to look. Piles of rubble here and there in the street. Several Temples had been completely repainted with ash of the dead as a color base. The Fountain at its heart had been utterly demolished, filled in with newly engineered cement, smashed down and then filled in again. Temple occupancy had gone through the roof as people turned to their faith in times of hardship. Malleus membership spiked, but so did the number of students learning actual magic.

In a pale, disaster-driven imitation of Ethereal Salvar, Scara Brae acquired its own corps of truly Sanctioned magi. Most were geomancers and the like; people whose talents could help with reconstruction. Others were witchkillers who could fight fire with fire. The Wizard Redwind taught all of them sooner or later, and it wasn't long before they were calling him Scara Brae's own Archwizard, though he never accepted or answered to such a title. How he kept it from going to his head, Caden didn't have a clue. It probably helped that he was an explicit pacifist where possible. Caden passed him notes where it was convenient.

The Zirnden came back in full force. For about a week, it actually ran inside the Dajas Pagoda, seemingly right underneath the monks' noses. Then it was back in the taverns, back in the sewers, back wherever it could hide from the watchful eyes of the barely disapproving authorities. The captains of both Watch and Guard would make renewed pledges to hunt the Zirnden down and destroy it at least. Come game night, both would be found in the audience, gambling on the outcome of any given match while drunk to high Hell and back.

Caden returned to the Temple District a few times, just to watch for patterns in the air and on the ground. Water spilled unevenly. Leaves fell everywhere. Blood spatters were plain old droplets. Nothing to report, nothing to see, nothing to worry about.

He went to the Labyrinth and poked around for a little while. There were signs of fresh graverobbing, of old fashioned dungeon raiding and even Greyhawking (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?21104-Twisted-Koans-and-Burnt-In-Thoughts&p=167069&viewfull=1#post167069), another Ethereal tradition that had gone global in the wake of the Saint's death. Assuming it hadn't been global in the first place. Caden ran afoul of a tomb raider here and a traumatized fungan there, but it never came to blows. It ended in laughter more often than not. He didn't turn anyone in, nor did he worry much about the things that might come out of the Labyrinth or the people who might be lost in there. As awful as it was, he had enough on his plate to deal with right now.

He paid a few visits to the crater too, where Sijal Kar's bones had finally collapsed to little more than inert lumps of black dust surrounded by variously lethal and unnatural plants. Caden set fire to the crater each time he visited, and the plants became less and less poisonous until they were simply unnatural. The spiders and snakes were gone for good by his last visit. He saw a native Scarabrian wildcat eating one as it fled into the night, and knew then that the godling was truly gone for good.

Eventually, Caden started putting his affairs in order to leave. He ventured this way and that, taking notes of the city's progress and also taking stock of his own losses.

His knife never turned up. All of his armor had to be repaired, especially the chestplate. Damn thing had holes in it the size of a fist by the time Caden got it back from Rowan. The blacksmiths had to reforge the whole thing from scratch. His rod was off in Wherever Land, and Caden didn't mourn it all that much. It had originally been a stopgap anyway, back when he was still trying to find his staff.

He hit a few of the shops as they reopened, raided some of the Warlock dens alongside the Malleus, took notes from Judd and all that. Then he found a trustworthy courier and had the whole pile shipped out to Beinost's College Arcana, including notes on spacial manipulation and the concept of Liquid Time. Maybe someone would find use for it. Maybe not. Either way, Caden washed his hands of all that and spent his last few days trying to relax. He had dinner with Judd and Rita. Rita tried to hook him up with one of her Temple Sisters, who smelled Khal'jaren on him and politely declined. Caden lost nothing; she was a butter mind and he was cynical enough to be picky.

On one of the nights before his scheduled departure for Raiaera, or wherever the winds might take him, Caden stopped off at a busted-up little hovel just below the Docks District. The ground floor was empty; its owner had disappeared during the disaster. Caden didn't ask too many questions about it. He went to the door to a cellar-level apartment and started knocking. Loudly.

Eventually, Savas opened. He was no longer bothering with the cover story of Yanov Cross. Judging by how pale he looked, he probably hadn't even left the cellar for days, except maybe to get food or rob tombs.

"Apprentice," Blueraven greeted him.

It was with a special kind of disdain that Wormaxe answered, "Master," Speaking through grit teeth with murder in his eyes. Whatever hostility there still was between them though, it wouldn't manifest tonight and they both knew it. The skull had taken a prominent place on Savas' new desk, alongside a suspiciously familiar rod that lay on a 'cushion' of tanned leather.

"...now where'd you get that?" he wondered.

"Stole it," Savas answered with absolutely no shame whatsoever.

"...I meant that," Caden said, pointing to the enormous wing hanging on one of Savas' walls. It was so big that even folded, there was barely enough room to accomodate it.

"...stole it," Savas answered again with a shrug.

Caden wandered over and inspected it while Wormaxe grabbed an axe off the wall. For a few seconds, it looked as if the lesser Wizard was going to terminate the apprenticeship in one of the Five Traditional Ways, but Wormaxe stopped himself with a sigh. Caden was too useful. And Savas was willing to bet that he had some kind of defensive magicks in place anyway.

"What do you plan on doing with it?" Caden eventually asked, studying the patterns that Savas had begun sewing into the leathery skin between wingbones. "Looks like you're setting it up to anchor a crapload of spells."

"I am," Savas answered. "But my main goal is to make it so that I can fly."

"With one wing?"

"Dragons are hardly aerodynamic. Blightcrow and I spent three days looking that thing over before we found the magic that enables one to fly. I've been trying to modify the process enough to enable some kind of flight under my own...power. Sort of. It's complicated and I don't feel like explaining."

"You could also charge it up for some pretty nasty melee attacks," Caden noted. He rapped a fist on the thicker parts of the wing. It was no different from smacking a steel pole. "Or generate wind magic. Among other things. Have you decided on a handle yet?"

"As is, it'd be impractical to fit any kind of handle on it," Wormaxe answered. "I need to work on mass compensation first. I can't even hold the damn thing without both arms right now."

"That would be problematic," Caden admitted. "And I'm assuming you got something else too. You're not the type to settle for just one chunk of a dragon when you could cram more in your armpit."

"...fuck you," Savas replied, just before opening up what looked like a broom closet and taking out a very long, smooth, bleach-white bone. It was probably as long as he was tall, if not more so. And it was heavy, so much so that when he dropped it, the floor sounded like it might break. Before Caden could so much as whistle or ask a question, Savas explained, "I'm going to try and build a staff of power out of it somewhere down the road. I couldn't get any leftovers from Sijal Kar-"

"So you settled for the next best thing on site. Shrewd."

"At least I didn't go digging for Horrors," Savas shrugged. "I can think of a dozen parts of those things that might be useful for enchantment or necromancy or worse."

"Assuming you could find one that didn't flash decay," Caden said. Savas laughed at him. "...right. I'm guessing you have ways of undoing that."

"Necromancy, you twat."

"...right," Caden said again. "Well, as impressed as I am, I came here for two reasons. One is to tell you that you shouldn't try setting up a demesne here. The Malleus are fully aware of you and it won't be long before you wear out whatever good will you earned by saving the day, assuming you haven't worn it out already. I expect they'll come in with every witchkiller trick in the book, up to and including stuff passed down from the Salvic traditions. Unless you want to die screaming, have your head cut off and buried at a crossroads while the rest of you is fed to dogs who end up being drowned at sea, it'd be a wise idea to get the hells out of here as soon as you can."

"Noted," Wormaxe said. "And point two?"

Caden took off his Hat, reached inside and pulled out his Grimoire. He put the Hat back on and Said, "Let's sit down. We're gonna be here a while."

Evil, violent, cannibalistic and just plain crazy as he was, Wormaxe was still Blueraven's apprentice. And at the end of the day, for all the good he did to make sure that the sun kept coming up and the world kept turning and the gods all stayed right in there heavens, Caden Law was still a Wizard. And a Wizard is, almost always, amoral.

It isn't about Good or Evil.

It's about magic and knowledge.

[Caden Law]

According to the traditions I was taught, there are five completely accepted ways that a Wizard and his apprentice part paths. The apprentice 'graduates' and is acknowledged by his master.
The apprentice dies or is otherwise disowned and disavowed as a Wizard.
The master dies or is otherwise disowned and disavowed as a Wizard.
Apprentice kills master.
Master kills apprentice.
I have a distinct impression that one day, Wormaxe and I are going to settle on #4 or 5. Until then, he is my apprentice. And I am tasked by my own Word to guide his development for better or worse. I told him I wouldn't settle for a half-ass. That he would either conquer a continent in my lifetime or I'd kill him.

He seems to have taken that to heart in the worst way.

Gods have mercy on my blasphemous soul for the knowledge I have given him, let alone the awful things he will do with it. I fear I'm creating the next Xem'zund. The only solace I draw from it is that I might be able to aim him at another disaster down the road; that I may, by the skin of my teeth, trick him into saving the world.

Among other things, I've given him all my notes on N'Thayn'sal. It was with a morbid sense of pride that I observed the anger in his eyes when he failed to find his own Name anywhere in there.

I should also mention that Fireside Company has officially disbanded. Rowan disappeared a few weeks back and Aeraul left the city for parts unknown. When I leave, Savas is going to be the only one still here. I have no idea where I'll end up. I know I'm not going near Corone. I've had enough wars and that place just doesn't feel magical enough to produce an apocalypse. I could be wrong. On the bright side, I think Savas might head that way. With any luck, he'll get killed. With any bad luck, he'll thrive the way I did in Raiaera.

Time will tell.A harbor bell rang at high noon.

Caden's ship had come in and it was time to leave. He took one last look at Scara Brae, committing the place to memory, then shouldered his bag and got a move on.

[Savas Tigh]

There was an insane assortment of formulae, the likes of which normal eyes can't read. It looked like row upon row of lines, little different from poorly printed barcoding. In truth, it was all Sideways writing.

The Wizard called Wormaxe had been a busy, busy boy lately.
I am nothing if not brazen.

But I am also conflicted.

On the one hand, the five tome stack of notes I took from Blueraven's Grimoire make mention of a place called Beinost, which has plenty of empty space to go around and a dedicated Magic District. I could go there, set up shop, and probably establish a fully warded demesne far enough in advance that anyone stupid enough to try and stop me would suffer dearly for it.

On the other, I could go to Corone, where civil war reigns supreme and death is the order of the day. War always does a bang-up job of upsetting the balance of the spirit world, and the local authority would presumably be so fractured that I wouldn't even have to bother putting much effort into hiding from them. There would also be an abundant supply of corpses, enough that I could stop doing my own dirty work.

There are problems with both. There are lots of problems with both.

I could always try going back to Salvar, or see what fortunes I could turn up in Alerar, but I don't expect much luck in either region. Dheathain's a bit too pompous and I hate deserts, so Fallien's right out. Blueraven's notes make mention of Kebiras, but I am not going on an odyssey just to end up in some kind of orc-addled shithole where everything and its mother is out to kill me. Aeraul was all the experience I'll ever need with orcs.

...and oddly enough, I hope that one's doing well. Rowan too. They struck me as relatively decent people. I'd eat their hearts for strength any day.

My main concern is just trying to move all of my belongings at this point. Scara Brae is woefully inadequate when it comes to arcaneries, and I've not yet got the hang of compressing matter and negating weight. I'm assembling a Trunk of Holding, with some of the notes on Hat construction and Blightcrow's help to guide me, but it isn't easy. Nor will the end result be very lightweight. I fear I'm in for an ugly journey regardless of where and how I end up.

On a lighter note, I've begun experimenting with wing enchantments. Specifically: I've killed a whole shitload of birds, chopped the wings off and rigged them up to a wood bo. Tack on some enchantments reminiscent of my efforts at bonecarving. First test run is tonight. Let's see how this goes!Over the course of a week, Scara Brae developed a new urban legend. The story went to and fro among the back alleys and the dark corners, among the dirty orphans in the street and the cold-eyed women beneath the red lantern. There were a hundred different versions of it, but all kept one thing in common: a man, or something like a man, jumping higher than any man could or should as he went from rooftop to rooftop in the dead of night. Sometimes, the story would say, the man jumped so high and so far that he didn't land until he went from one district to another.

Such stories were inevitably dismissed by skeptics.

There were, after all, plenty of other, more important things to tell stories about.
Note to self: Buy goggles.

Always knew there was a reason he wore those stupid things......and this, it bears mention, is as good a place as any to mark the end of Fireside Company -- the end of the saga of the Catacombs of Scara Brae.

There are stories to tell. There's a labyrinth to explore. There's a great big world out there, with the odd chance that the four of them might meet again someday.

But for now, this is enough.

[Caden Law]

A Minor Dedication: To Teric Bloodrose, who damn near stuck it out with me during the first Catacombs thread way back when, and who proved invaluable in killing off one of the Big Bads of To Rule All Flesh.

'Cos goddammit, that was a huge-ass thread and it's a shame it didn't go to its originally planned conclusion. Kudos for letting me bunny your character into a murderous Sean Connery.


Thanks for reading!
And now the spoils...for all four characters, listed here for recordkeeping purposes when I get around to updating them.

Caden Law: -Arcanist's Rod, -Masterwork Bowie Knife, all Raiaeran armor is now Average

Savas Tigh: +Arcanist's Rod, +Dragon Wing, +Dragon Bone, +Battleaxe (Average Steel), +Ritual: Holocaust of Worms, +Ritual: Energy Funnel, +Fighting Style: Dark Messiah (Below Average)

Aeraul Smythe: +Steel Great-Jian (Above Average Steel), +Above Average Pyromancy (Saiko Hirei), +Fumomancy (Saiko Hirei), +Chi Control? (TBD During Character Updates), +Improved Empathic Resonance, +Mental Shielding (Above Average)

Rowan Stormwind: -Chokuto, +Improved Chi Control, +Fighting Style: Above Average Falling Leaf

Scara Brae: Barring a retcon of Liquid Time, Scara Brae has been geographically warped by the emergence and subsequent destruction of the Catacombs. Most of the city itself has sunken below sea level, with the Docks and several other parts remaining high enough above the water that the city hasn't been flooded; like New Orleans, basically. The city was essentially destroyed and immediately rebuilt, with many noteworthy landmarks surviving and being repaired or modified to accomodate the changes. The population now includes refugees from the old Catacombs civilizations, mostly the pale, human-derived Kevyrazians and the chittering, relatively peaceful Fungans.

The city's Status Quo is gradually reasserting itself now that the disaster has passed, although there are now full-blown Sanctioned mage squads operating as Warlock hunters for the Ordo Malleus, as well as the beginnings of a small school of forensic magic and alchemy among the City Guard.

Politics: Queen Valeena took advantage of the chaos to bump off a few problematic nobles. Use that however you will. Magic has also become a trickier deal among the people of Scara Brae: any magic that can build things or maintain them is WONDERFUL! while any shows of destructive magic are likely to get you lynched if you're not careful. Religions -- all of them -- have experienced huge surges of attendants, polarizing the populace even further.

General: The island has actually gotten bigger, specifically stretching out to the West by a few miles.

The Labyrinth of Scara Brae: The not-nearly-abandoned-enough ruins of what used to be the Catacombs beneath the city. Exploded out from under it, ripped apart, collapsed, and ultimately ended up being a ten mile long pile of dead cities, broken tunnels, shattered temples, and Gods-know-what all stacked on top of each other and strewn about in every direction. There are probably still monsters, monstrous peoples, and old magicks still lurking inside. There are probably priceless treasures, bits of lore, and who knows what too. Raid at your own risk and pray the place is dead enough that you don't end up lost forever in its depths.

Lake Valeena: The Lake is now shaped like a crescent, its tips pointing East and South, respectively.

Brokenthorn Forest: Has been devestated. The Northeastern edge of the Forest has been smashed flat, with nearby castles bowled right over like they weren't even there. A kobold city has crashed down at the heart of the Forest, and it's anyone's guess if those blind, vicious little bastards survived it.

Windlacer Mountain Range: The Southern faces of most of the central range have been blasted clean and then littered with rubble and debris. An entire fungan city crashlanded in the peaks on the North side of the range. No expeditions have been made to see if anyone survived.

Sijal Kar: The crater where the misbegotten son of Draconus and N'jal died has become a major attraction for daytime tourists and researchers and nighttime cult activity. The crater has also taken on his name, along with an insane collection of plants, spiders, and dragonflies that are not natural or native to any part of the world. Very few of these creatures are poisonous, but some are worryingly large. While the godling himself is thoroughly and utterly dead, hope remains among some that traces of his power might yet endure...

Potential Plothooks or Notes for Others: Bits and pieces of the Catacombs basically went all the way around the world and back again. It is not unreasonable to have a chunk fall into another region. The sudden, violent expansion of the island has probably triggered severe oceanic activity, including tidal waves on the shores of neighboring continents. The death of Sijal Kar triggered an eight hour solar eclipse over Scara Brae -- it's possible that other parts of the world also experienced this.

As always, all this crap's public domain to Althanas. Do as ya will.

[Lord Anglekos]

I just want to start with that it was an honor to read and be able to Judge this thread, Caden. The amount of work and quality put into this thread really deserves attention, and I only wish you could write faster so we could have more of these great, world-changing threads decorating the walls of Althanas. That being said, onto the Judgment!

STORY: 29/30
Practically perfect. The very ending was not as great as the rising action or introduction part, but still wonderful besides.

CHARACTER: 25/30
There were a couple of places where I thought that the four main character's personalities were too similar and distinguishing between them was only capable due to origination, but overall this still remains one of your strong points; bringing forth huge, powerful personalities and having them just grab the attention of the reader and not. Let. Go.

WRITING STYLE: 23/30
Unfortunately I caught a few unnecessary errors here and there; for example using the wrong sense of "there" when you should have used another. This dropped your score a few points lower than it needed be. Still, you're a great writer, and your grasp of the English language obviously is above and beyond the par.

WILDCARD: 10/10
Fantastic, exemplary patience and effort. There are no further words needed for this.

FINAL SCORE: 87
Caden Law gains 4100 EXP and 350 gold, as well as loses 7391 gold.
Savas Tigh gains 2500 EXP and 700 gold.
Leaf on the Wind gains 2200 EXP and 700 gold.
Aeraul Smythe gains 2200 EXP and 700 gold.

All spoils are approved, pending RoG updates; good job, Caden. You deserve it.

[Yari Rafanas]

EXP and GP added.