United We Stand, Divided We Fall

[Whispers of Abyssion]

A hundred thousand stone steps, a thousand soaring arches, ten temples of peace and meditation. Carved by ancient hands long since forgotten, savaged over the centuries by snowstorm and avalanche, the pilgrim’s path wound treacherously through the icebound northern reaches of the Mountains of Dusk. The dwarves of Gunnbad mocked the fools who travelled it as ‘zafal ser’, which Lord Arminas Ereinon of the Warstrider Company translated as ‘those afflicted by walking too close to the sky’. Despite assurances that the elflord had applied only a minimum of poetic license, Akiyoshi Sanada felt confident that it more accurately and simply meant ‘airhead’.

The warrior from Nippon stood at the pinnacle of the trail, overlooking the courtyard threshold that adjoined the main temple compound. Pockmarked with flame scar and rubble, the gardens of the head temple – the one the elves called the Alkarin Aranion – nonetheless bustled with hasty activity as a thousand-strong company set up their forward camp. The warstriders had absorbed much of the Legion of Light in the aftermath of the Corpse War, and the logistics involved in feeding and sheltering them all in a location as remote as this staggered the mind. Aegnor, Arminas’s right-hand man, accomplished the feat with customary aplomb, which only increased his estimation of the renegade high elves.

“They know we are here.”

His voice carried over the edge of the sheer precipice, down towards the valley floor a thousand leagues below. The ‘they’ he spoke of referred to the twenty-seventh and last of Xem’zund’s Death Lords, the Winged Cambion Dartarius, and his lich lieutenant Beur. They had travelled this far, into such inhospitable lands, to eradicate the threat they posed and thus the last traces of the Dread Necromancer’s influence upon Raiaera.

“Of course they do,” one of his companions replied from a rather safer location, having not quite the head for heights. The young woman, of elven blood on her mother’s side and of Nipponese on her father’s, clutched at her staff and drew her shawl tighter across her body, scowling at the biting wind. Her twin sister mirrored the movement alongside her.

“Then why do they not act?” Golden hair cut short rather than flowing long and loose, carrying shortbow and scimitar rather than tall slender staff, the shared elfin features and brilliant emerald eyes meant that none could mistake them as anything other than siblings.

“Because they’re waiting for us to fall into their trap.” The first woman, the only arcanist amongst the trio, shuddered as she stole a glance at the budding storm of dark magic centred upon the ancient pre-elven temple. The vortex of dark cloud and roiling miasma wrenched violently at her mind, a malevolent beast growing with every passing breath.

“In which case, let us spring it.”

Akiyoshi Sanada grinned boyishly, resplendent as ever in his crimson lamellar.

“… you’re going to do something stupid again, aren’t you…”

The grin grew.

“Who? Me?”


***

Akiyoshi had stripped out of his trademark crimson armour to half-sleeve haori and pleated hakama. Straw sandals slid a step at a time across the dusty stone floor, dried gory gibbets dulling the short killing blade held loosely in his right hand. The undead made for poor sentries, but he saw no need to draw any more attention to himself than necessary.

One lethal thrust of the keen-edged Nipponese sword, and the last of the wights in his path dissolved into stale ash, its mouth a pallid pit held wide in an eternally silent scream. Its ancient bronze breastplate would have clattered noisily to the floor, had Hitomi Alatariel – the first of the elven twins – not been there to deaden the impact with her arts. Nodding his thanks, Akiyoshi waved his six-strong strike team to the next corner in the tunnels.

Aside from Hitomi, he led three elven warstriders – Nerdanel, Tauron, and Melnornion – and two former legionnaires – the Coronian Castor and his half-ogre companion Taggar. Hitomi’s sister Kasumi fought in the second group of six, under the command of Arminas’s lieutenant Eru, along with the warstriders Selinde and Daeron, the legionnaire Aeneon, and the sullen Akashiman mercenary Mibu who’d joined their ranks after the liberation of Eluriand. Akiyoshi considered it a measure of Arminas’s confidence that the elflord had allowed him authority over some of the most distinguished individuals in the company. He also considered Eru’s presence a sign that Arminas didn’t quite yet trust him completely. Such, he supposed, was fated of an outsider in the land of the elder folk.

He chanced a careful glance around the corner into the huge antechamber at the heart of the Alkarin Aranion. Dim light illuminated the scene, pouring through remnant shards of large stained windows. Gigantic blocks of stone rose in a pyramidal pagoda at the centre of the room, surrounded at its base by rune-engraved sarcophagi arrayed in battle formation. Time and dust had worn and dulled them beyond legibility, but the altar at the pagoda’s top, once the pedestal of a star god, remained carefully garlanded with intricate inscriptions.

Amidst all this lay the casualties of previous attempts to storm the chamber. Numerous shapeless heaps, collapsed in disordered randomness upon the soiled stone floors: those who had fallen in vain.

Akiyoshi allowed his gaze to roam one last time. An eerie wind whispered malevolent echoes in his ear, the only stirring in a moment that otherwise lay perfectly still. A faint hint of auburn in the shadows of the archway opposite told him that Eru’s party had also arrived and, much like he, hesitated in the face of open ground.

He withdrew a moment to ponder his options. According to Arminas’s elegantly pencilled map, a third archway at the far end of the room led out of the temple, towards the small village of Asea Aranion that had once housed priest and pilgrim. For nearly eighteen months it had stubbornly held out against the undead hordes seeking to claim the mana-rich confluence as their own, only succumbing at the third time of asking in the autumn of the previous year. He could not see it, but it had to be there, and the Death Lord’s minions beyond.

The motionless silence between them invited him to advance, drawing him in to the killing ground marked out by cold corpses and sealed coffins.

Clearly a trap.

A coarse grunt escaped his lips, partly from irritation but mostly of amusement. Violently he stabbed his short sword into crumbling mortar, where it quivered like prey caught in the jaws of a snare. Hitomi’s questioning expression swiftly dissolved into surprise as he loosened the greatsword strapped to his back.

So let us spring it.

He grinned, baring his teeth in feral aggression. Before she could stop him, he leapt out of cover.

If his movements alone did not shatter the tomblike tranquillity, the thunderous roar he let loose in lieu of a war-cry sent it crashing to the floor in shattered shards. Akiyoshi moved swiftly for a man his size, legs free for once of armour rippling powerfully with every step. The pagoda stairs fell two at a time to muscles straining with effort; a deft twist of his wrists tore free the long blade from its scabbard, and tempered steel twice the length of his arm keened eagerly in the streaming wind. Motes of dust rippled in its glimmering sheen as he brought it to bear, behind him and to one side in a slightly adapted Stance of the Sun.

A quartet of spells belatedly erupted from the archways behind him, striking an unseen object at the top of the stone structure just before he reached it. Something toppled from behind the shattered remnants of a shadow field, pallid skeletal features set in a snarling mask as it gave voice.

“The living should serve...”

Akiyoshi’s first blow clove clean through the necromancer’s sternum, lifting what remained of its upper torso high into the air as ashen lips attempted to form the rest of the challenge.

“… the dead…”

His swiftly struck second completed the messy decapitation, nearly obliterating the undead lord’s neck in the process of parting it from its shoulders.

“… not…”

The dead mage’s last words lingered for a moment later in the dusty air, dissipating slowly into the remorseless sands of time. Akiyoshi stood tall in their wake.

All around him the stillness stirred, as if summoned by the half-finished curse. Lids fell loudly from long-dormant sarcophagi, bony fingers clutching at fallen weapons heedless of the arrows embedded in their chests. Long-dead warriors glowered in angry challenge, their hollow eyes sparking into an arcane-fuelled mockery of life. One by one they clambered up the pagoda stairs, slowly working their way up on all sides to surround and butcher the proud lone samurai.

But their master lay banished at the warrior’s feet, and not all of their number had emerged from hiding. Even their base wit, dulled and sluggish from long hibernation and lack of coordination, gradually grew aware of their disadvantage. Akiyoshi could see it in the hesitation of the first wight that joined him at the top of the pagoda.

He grinned again as a blue-fletched arrow shattered the side of its skull and sent it tumbling back down the way whence it had come.

Mayhem erupted as the living took the battle to the undead. Elf, human, and half-ogre alike gave no quarter to their unnatural foes, honed skills carving effortlessly through the ragged ranks of putrid flesh and ancient bone. Between the hammer of their relentless assault and the anvil of the young man perched at the pinnacle of the pagoda, the battle was decided before it had even begun.

Akiyoshi barely hefted his blade again, all the while the necromancer’s trap disintegrated around him. By the time Hitomi rejoined him at the pinnacle of the pagoda, he sat upon the debased altar sacrilegiously scratching the back of his leg. Anticipating her reaction, he neatly avoided the blunt rapping her staff attempted to dish upon his scalp.

“Tell me that wasn’t reckless,” she growled. “Tell me…”

“Aki!”

Her younger sister urgently chopped off the rest of her angry words. Choking down furious huffs and incoherent splutters, she had little choice but to follow on his heels as he leapt to his feet and sauntered lazily over to the exit archway. By twos and by fours the rest of the scouting party joined them there, finding themselves perched on a narrow ledge overlooking the occupied Raiaeran village.

The necromancer Beur hadn’t merely baited them into a trap.

“Welcome to the feast, mortals...”

He’d prepared the ground for his master as well.

The Winged Cambion Dartarius hung aloft amidst the rapidly darkening clouds, maintaining altitude above Asea Aranion with occasional beats of his four black-feathered wings. Face hidden behind an elegant ivory mask, his voice boomed malicious and malevolent through the thin mountain air. The murderously elegant fingers upon his six sinuous hands each grasped blades of stylised thunderbolts, while static lightning danced and crackled from his lithely armoured frame. An entire army of undead grotesques seethed and roiled in the monstrous shadow he cast across the desecrated village. For all intents and purposes he manifested as an angel of darkness, sent from the depths of Haidia to punish those who stood in his way.

“Hell of a way to make a last stand,” Kasumi observed calmly.

“You wouldn’t believe that he’s simply run out of space to hide,” her sister agreed, stepping back from the ledge and gesturing for the rest to do the same. She knew Akiyoshi well enough to know what would happen next.

The samurai warrior merely grinned again, incisors starkly white against the bloody curl of his lips. Inexorably as his companions watched they elongated into draconic fangs, hindering his words only slightly as he gave his last orders as leader of the scouting party.

“Eru. Send word to Lord Arminas. The enemy is ripe…”

By the time he finished speaking, barely a trace remained of the well-built young man who had stood there a moment ago. Steel weapons fell to the stone floor with a noisy clatter as broad reptilian wings unfurled like sails of flaming crimson in the gathering twilight. His voice, deep enough to begin with, now throbbed like rolling thunder across the darkening mountaintops.

“… for annihilation.”

[Whispers of Abyssion]

The ensuing battle laid waste to the once-idyllic village, reducing it irrecoverably beyond shambled ruin. The first three sieges of Asea Aranion had been conflicts of occupation, fought over ownership of the buildings as much as the decimation of the foe. The last had been one of simple annihilation. Tall thin spires and elegantly curved dwellings, determined survivors of the Great Corpse War, finally succumbed at the fourth time of asking.

But the living emerged victorious. After two long years of fighting, Raiaera had finally dragged itself free of the Necromancer’s foul touch.

Fires bred amongst the toppled rubble, dark flames licking ravenously at wooden supports and dusty furniture. Undead constructs burnt almost as viciously as the dry crackling, and barely cinder and ash now remained of the tide of filth and decay that had infested the hamlet in their glorious last stand. But the victorious company of elves and allies had to take equally great care not to accidentally be devoured themselves, since dragonflame fed with equal hunger on the flesh of the living. Warstrider and legionnaire alike laboured hard beneath the ashen heavens, carefully cleansing every last shred of taint and corruption from the liberated lands.

The warrior walked wearily in their midst, having once again donned his full suit of lacquered lamellar plate. He wore his family’s crest prominently and proudly upon his chest: six black coins representing the money required to cross the rivers of death, signifying that he held no such fear in battle. The flaring crimson of his armour, a shade far brighter than the flames surrounding him, indicated in turn his clan’s claim of descent from the first dragons of his homeland.

Not that any of the elves who respectfully stepped from his path knew any of this. Like so many who fought in this war, he found himself a long distance from home.

He ducked his stocky form beneath a whitestone archway, set sorrowfully in a wall that no longer stood around it. Straightening tall once more, he emerged into the courtyard of just another destroyed villa. Iron war boots sounded a stentorian drumbeat from the cracked pavestones as they carried him unerringly towards the outhouse in the far corner. There, a wooden trapdoor had burnt away to reveal a set of narrow stairs, and his path took him unerringly downwards into the dank food cellar.

The large hanging shoulder guards on his armour made it difficult to manoeuvre in the confined spaces, and his gloved hand rested lightly on the butt of the shorter companion sword at his waist rather than the oversized odachi on his back. Dark round eyes, nestled deep below the brim of his full helm, glinted as they took in the single torch blazing at the end of the corridor. Somebody had recently lit it afresh. Certainly it had not been alight any longer than the battle he had just walked away from.

“Touma,” he called sternly, his voice muffled behind the armoured mask that hid his features. The name echoed distastefully from the stone walls, accompanied in a discordant symphony by the jingle of his armour. The room stank of wet rot and decay, in spite of the inferno that had ravaged the outhouse overhead.

“Akiyoshi.”

The warrior’s gaze snapped to the shadows that had spoken his name. Yet to fully adjust to the darkness, he could still make out the vague figure seated formally upon the stone floor… and the netherworldly shadows that kept it company.

Grasping hands, and bloodshot eyes, and soundless voices keening for fresh souls. Like the tendrils of some alien plant, they sprouted from the mirror-like sheen of an extra-dimensional portal anchored to the floor beneath Touma’s folded legs. Daemons, albeit lesser beings barely deserving of the name.

Realisation struck home like a lightning bolt, nearly staggering him with the weight of long years of deception. He choked back an angry roar, his gaze narrowing in the slit of exposed skin between mask and helm.

“Let me guess. How you survived the akki ambush. How you lived through the Night of Nefarious Flame. How you escaped from Choson. How you convinced Kayu.”

Each accusation sapped his strength, wrung from his throat like the last few precious drops from a wet towel. He had heard Touma’s voice in his head during the battle against the Winged Cambion Dartarius, shaking him so badly that he had lost control over his transformation and nearly plummeted to his death. It had directed him to this particular spot, asking him politely to come alone, promising to explain everything once he arrived. Now it spoke again, shadowy spirits dancing at its command, and all that Akiyoshi had assumed of his old friend came crashing down around his head.

“I won’t deny it.”

No mere illusionist, no second-rate kijutsushi. As likely as not Touma had never been such a trifle. Akiyoshi could not bring himself to guess when his old acquaintance had sold himself to the darkest of infernal powers. But his instincts told him that it had happened long before they had met at the Academy in Nippon.

“You stood by and did nothing. While everybody died.”

You consorted with daemons and brought it upon them.

“My interference would not have changed anything, but to add one more name to the list of the fallen…”

“You stood by! Did nothing! Miiko! Chiaki! Yukimi! Satori! You did nothing!”

“Indeed. I stayed safe and waited for the storm to pass.”

If Touma’s admissions piqued Akiyoshi’s ire, the calm and uncaring manner in which he justified them caused it to flare. Clanging metal echoed through the darkness as the warrior’s hand gripped his sword and tensed for the strike. He very nearly drew his blade, there and then, to end it all. All the death, all the pain… it meant nothing to Touma.

Yet the other man’s complete lack of fear stopped him in his tracks. And then Akiyoshi hit upon the harshest of truths. He could not mete out his justice, no more than he could accept Touma’s excuses. At this distance, at this range, the mind-mage could easily escape through the portal held open below him, without the sword passing within even an arm’s length of its target.

After a lengthy internal battle to control his fury, the warrior managed to grind out a single word between tautly grit teeth.

“Why.”

Touma’s eyes shone in the dark, pools of still water caught amongst the blackest of nights. The fingers of one hand curled sinuously about a smokeless pipe, which he now replaced in the folds of his flowing Nipponese robes.

“Because I had to, Aki.” Features etched gaunter than his seven-and-twenty years, cast in shadow far deeper than the misty miasma that played about his folded knees, he sighed as if regretful. “I’m telling you this now because I know you will understand. There is no such thing as evil power, or even goodly power. There is merely power that is put to purpose.”

Flashbacks. A rainy day, a hunted man. The blood flowing down his prepubescent chin, and the charred flesh tasting oh so good, oh so delicious…

He knew.

Touma knew.

Dragonflame burnt dark and hungry for good reason. Many perished before they could bring it under control, whether refusing to contemplate the necessary steps or lacking the strength to overcome them. And someday, no matter how many other lives he took in the process, no matter how many other lives he saved, it would devour Akiyoshi whole.

“I need this,” the mind-mage continued inexorably. “Someday you will see for yourself, but for now you must know… the loss of my soul, damned as it may be, is nothing compared to what I have been working to prevent. Xem’zund was only the harbinger, an insignificant speck when compared to what we truly face. Are you truly so naively idealistic that you would not accept the aid of a small evil in order to defeat the greater?”

His old friend’s gaze pierced him where he stood, composed and emotionless. Akiyoshi could barely hold it, so potently did it brand his mind.

“I brought you here today to warn you. This is nowhere close to the end.”

The mage unfolded his legs, rising slowly from his knees. His frame lanky and his limbs long, traditional Nipponese robes hung from his shoulders like washing hung out to dry. The fiends at his feet gibbered shrilly in dismay; magical miasma a mixture of arcane and incarnate swirled dustily at his bare soles. He took one step, then another, across the stony floor, and did not stop until he stood eye to eye against the warrior.

“I reveal myself today so that you see what I have become. So that you do not underestimate my warning or dismiss my words as fallacy. You know what you have to do, Akiyoshi. I need you to do it.”

Together. Together we will protect her.

Words from a long-forgotten past echoed involuntarily in the warrior’s ears. The pledge of three young men, caught in a war not of their making, looking to rescue a cherished friend from the pyres of sacrifice and defeat. With an effort he pushed away the mage’s subtle influence, but without it he tumbled helplessly into a sequence of anguished memories.

He thought of Yukimi, who had adored him so, and her gruesome death as the daemon’s claws ripped her apart.

He thought of Satori, who he had loved, and the tears on her pale cheeks as the revenant clove her in two.

He thought of Touma, who had indirectly orchestrated both their deaths through his dealings with the netherworld.

He thought of the nameless boy, who had been reborn from the depths of despair to save a nation, only to be lost again.

He thought of Kayu, whose purity and strength had served them so well so often.

He thought of Touma again, who played them off against each other and against the world, all for his own aims.

He thought of himself, and of the darkness he cradled within.

He thought of the young boy he had once been, full of pride and delusions of grandeur.

He thought of where that path had taken him, the here and the now and the pyres that burnt hungrily overhead.

He thought of Touma a third time.

And realised that they had been the same once. Perhaps, the thought continued as his gut sank like a stone in stormy waters, they were even the same now.

He returned to the present. Still he stood, face to face with the mage that he despised more than anything else in the world. Yet recognition flickered through his features, as if now he saw Touma for the first time. And reflected in Touma’s eyes, he saw himself for the first time as well. They had both believed, and they had both paid the price.

In the end, he found that he did not have it in him to condemn the man.

Together we will protect her.

He forced his hand to relax, to fall from the hilt of his short killing sword. Belatedly he realised that Touma’s life now lay within his reach. But he dared not take it anymore. Crimson armour jingled as he slowly stepped back, his stance neutral, his dark eyes smouldering with barely suppressed anger and hate.

“I’ve never liked you much. Heart colder than a snake’s scales. Darker than the depths of the void.”

Echoing frigidly, the words would have frozen the hearts of a thousand lesser men. But Touma barely flinched, his eyes flashing colder still. The warrior studied him for a moment longer before allowing fire to take hold.

“Remember this Touma. The serpent cannot devour the dragon.”

Akiyoshi turned to leave, the stylised crest on his helmet glinting gold as it caught the light from the flickering torch. Between the gilded horns nestled a rearing beast from the depths of legend, foreclaws splayed wide and serrated teeth bared in aggression.

Touma allowed a small smile of triumph to creep across his face.

“… look,” he whispered, “a dragon.”

Then he reached out and grabbed the warrior’s shoulder. Metal shuddered angrily as both men tensed, but Akiyoshi held on to his temper just in time. Touma’s smile drew thin. Then it broke apart in a sibilant hiss.

“Now listen very carefully…”

[Whispers of Abyssion]

They kneeled in neat rows upon the cold dusty earth, shackled and blindfolded and clad in tattered rags. The air hung heavy with the stink of their sweat and their musky fear. Prisoners, criminals, bandits, captured soldiers… some muttered resolute final prayers to Hachiman, god of war, whilst others babbled incoherently in pain-maddened terror.

The young boy looked upon them and frowned.

“Name the seven tenets of our path.”

“Courage, respect, loyalty,” he responded almost automatically. The frown remained on his face as he forced himself to remember. “Righteousness, benevolence, honesty, and… and honour.”

He didn’t expect any praise. He didn’t receive any. The heavy cuff caught him around the ears like a thunderclap. Stunned he fell to the earth, and only fear of his father’s disapproval brought him back to his feet. Defiantly stifling his tears, he turned up his face and stood his ground.

“Honour comes first,” the older man corrected in a frighteningly soft whisper, features dissolving into a scowl that eerily resembled the young boy’s. “Honour always comes first.”

The young boy swallowed, head ringing and cheek flaring a bright red.

“And to find honour, you must seek the proper balance between humility, glory, and respect. Remember that.”

Remember that…


***

They rose from the tangled undergrowth, as silent as any wraith. One… two… twenty cloaked shadows, each bearing an unsheathed blade dulled against the moonlight. Their leader’s staff glowed once, an insipid red flicker. In the distance, a pair of beady pupils gleamed the same shade.

The darkness between them lay empty aside from a single low-lying hut, lonely and listless upon the mountain slope. Ignored by the majority of Waystrider Company retreating from the mountain sanctuary, three of their number had bid their leave to remain behind in its dilapidated confines. Two huddled around a small fire, rubbing their hands against the chill as they whispered to one another in near-identical low voices. The third sat on his own in the other room, heedless of the meagre protection its thin walls provided against the night, legs folded beneath him and arms held tautly in his lap.

His mind fought for calm, lost amidst the shadows behind his tightly closed eyelids. His thoughts, however, erred rebelliously from his grasp. Like dandelion seeds they drifted hither and thither, tossed about by the troubled turbulence left in the wake of Touma’s visit.

He understood the need for power. He understood that sometimes the end justified the means.

So why did his gut clench with such wretched distaste?

Because in the man who had sacrificed his fellows and set aside his humanity to save the world, he saw the man that he feared he might yet become?

The man that he dared not become?

The wall crashed in. The air rushed out.

Needing not even to open his eyes, Akiyoshi hammered the pommel of his companion blade into the gut of the first figure to enter the room. In one fluid movement he continued to stand, neatly side-stepping the charge of the next black-garbed intruder by allowing violent momentum to flow harmlessly past his turned shoulder. The third shadow quickly compensated, then hesitated at the sight of naked steel as long as he was tall.

“Don’t make me swing this.”

Akiyoshi’s warning echoed into the crisp night air with crystalline clarity, certain that unlike the cellar where he’d confronted Touma earlier, he could tear the flimsily-built hut apart with but a couple of blows, and everything in his way along with it. The room froze for a moment, broken only by the heavy thud of Hitomi’s staff as it thundered into the head of the intruder who’d made it past the Nipponese warrior. The half-elven twins emerged to flank their companion, equally wary of the arc of the massive blade.

“… Dragonblooded.”

The muffled voice spat at him from somewhere beyond the massed cloaks. Akiyoshi placed the heavily accented Tradespeak as Raiaeran in origin, but coarser than the refined hauteur of Eluriand, the learned lilt of Anebrilith, the mercantile fluidity of Tor Elythis. A survivor of Trenyce, perhaps, a mercenary or…

“Friend of the Fraternity.”

A second shadow took up the cant from behind him, and at an unseen signal, those of their number who had been covering the other exits now closed ranks. The three adventurers stood back to back against the cordon, and the string on Kasumi’s shortbow whispered in breathlessly taut tension.

“Enemy of the Star Pantheon.”

The ritualistic accusation confirmed what Akiyoshi had already guessed, that those who stood before him now were not mercenaries, but wanderers. Wanderers in Starlight, or Tel Ranar’silma as they preferred to be known: an ancient and secretive order of warrior-magi answering to neither the Lady General of the north-western forests nor the Elythisian conclaves on the eastern coast. Xenophobic elven supremacists who would stop at nothing to annihilate anybody they deemed a threat to their homeland. Little more than pillagers and rabble, taking advantage of the war-induced confusion to enact their extremist brand of justice upon the land.

He’d gorged his fill on the flesh of such men in his youth. They’d all cowered in the end.

“You know who we are,” he drawled, deliberately brazening his tone to irritate the elves. But still they didn’t attack, which confirmed that they meant to talk. Even at the tip of a spear. “We have risked life and limb for your precious Raiaera. You would treat us thus? Speak your piece. Or be gone.”

He half-expected a wave of disgruntled elven mutters, which he wouldn’t have understood but were highly unlikely to be complimentary. The silence threw him for a moment, mocking his mockery.

“We know who you are, Dragonblooded,” the first voice spoke again, the same coarsely accented Tradespeak, the same spiteful disdain as if it wasted words with a housefly barely worthy of its attention. “We know who you associate with.”

Akiyoshi did not consider himself particularly intelligent or quick-witted. Events earlier that day had painfully hammered that point home. He did not possess Nanashi’s scholarly learning, or Touma’s crafty cunning. Consequently he often found himself quite annoyed when dealing with those who bandied words and hid meaning behind veils of half-truths and unspoken sayings. The expression on his face said as much, and the blade held in his loose two-handed grip edged that much closer to the speaker’s neck.

“Don’t make me swing this.”

The flicker of amusement darting through the elf’s masked features only irritated him further. To compensate, Akiyoshi placed a firm heel on the neck of the sputtering shadow at his feet. Anguished coughs died into desperate wheezes in the backdrop to their conversation.

“Your business?” he prompted again, tersely. Flickering firelight from the other room danced in the silvery crescent poised to his fore, reflecting in the cold hard alien eyes surrounding him on all sides. He had little doubt that they could kill him where he stood. He had little doubt that they considered the handful of casualties he and his companions would surely inflict scant price for the reward. The fact that he and his still stood alive, the centre of their attentions, bothered him far more than he dared admit.

“The human grows impatient.” An anonymous murmur, uttered with the same disgust that might have been reserved for a turd roach. Any one of the twenty wanderers might have said it.

“The human!” Hitomi retorted hotly, her temper – infamous to those who knew her well – starting to swell. “This human…”

Air left her lungs. Staff slipped from nerveless fingers. Invisible tendrils of arcane power tightened like a vice about her waist, and she could do nothing as they tossed her aside like so much litter. Through the thatched roof she flew, out into the wintry snows beyond.

Akiyoshi heard the soft crunch as she landed, the distant fit of coughing as she struggled to reorient herself.

Tel Ranar’silma were famed for their utter revulsion towards half-elven blood. If they considered the human Akiyoshi a turd roach, Hitomi and Kasumi were less than the parasites feeding upon his excrement. He felt the slender bones of Kasumi’s back as she dug into his shadow, her resolve cowed by the sheer display of arcane prowess.

To compensate, he increased the pressure on the larynx of the downed wanderer under his boot. Only a thin thread of sanity kept him from snapping the thin bones altogether.

The first voice spoke again, their spokesman, their leader.

“We seek the Serpent Tamer.”

Akiyoshi tensed. Ground his teeth. Spat out words from between set lips.

“No clue who...”

“The human,” a second voice took up, followed by, “The mage.” “The foreigner.” “The daemonkin.”

Touma.

“You know him, then.”

“Not well,” Akiyoshi returned, too angry to dwell upon how they had read his mind. “Not as you might like. Not anymore. And no idea where he’s gone.”

That was truth. He knew it, and from the faintest flutter of disappointment rippling through their assembled ranks he knew that they knew it too.

Suddenly the air changed.

Moments ago it had frozen solid upon his clammy cheeks, frigid and metallic like the elven eyes tracking his every movement. Now, however, it burned with lavender incense, subtle but certain as it lingered in the back of his throat. The elves sensed it too, and for the fleetest of moments even their absolute focus wavered.

What remained of the lonely snowbound shack exploded in a violent shower of splinter and shrapnel. Hitomi Alatariel re-emerged from the night, framed by a corona of translucent power, eyes glowing ivory in fury and flair. Her dander was up.

To their credit, the elves barely blinked. Something intangible, something powerfully alien, welled behind the combined inexorable weight of their gazes. But Hitomi’s reappearance had drawn their attention for the briefest of moments; though nought but a lowly half-breed, they could scarce afford to ignore a display of such power. In that instant Akiyoshi made his move.

Forward he leapt, hand outstretched and sword trailing in his wake. The leader of the wanderers saw him coming and muttered the first words of a counter-curse, warding him away with the tip of a staff glowing insidious red. But the warrior from Nippon broke through the budding power like a sledgehammer through glass. In a flash the elf snarled impotently from the floor, arms pinned by Akiyoshi’s knees, the samurai’s hand in a chokehold at his neck.

Spear points congregated at Akiyoshi’s head as the rest of the wanderers reacted. Something blindingly swift and furry swept at his head from the darkness overhead, but Kasumi’s bow sang fury and an oversized bat tumbled from the sky with a cornflower-blue arrow pinning its wings. The leader of the wanderers convulsed mid-snarl as his familiar died, biting down involuntarily upon the mystic words forming in his mouth. His arcane aura flared in incandescent pain, visible even to the non-attuned warrior.

The Nipponese paid none of it any heed, even when the spears pricked his scalp and drew thin rivulets of thick fiery blood.

“Of interest. Why do you seek him?”

Masked eyes flickered, sputtering for air.

“It is none of the human’s concern.”

“But it is.”

Akiyoshi smiled, the feral grin of a predator turning to the hunt.

“Because we’re going with you.”


***

“To be honourable one must demonstrate respect, courage, benevolence, righteousness, loyalty, and honesty. And without honour these other six are meaningless. Imagine honesty without honour. One can be too truthful and cause great damage. Courage without honour can lead us to unnecessarily harm ourselves or others. Loyalty without honour blindly follows the evil.”

“But what is honour?”

The elder Sanada looked to his firstborn, stern and unforgiving.

“To be honourable, one must decide the right thing to do and then do it. And now you must do the honourable thing.”

The young boy wavered one last time. He looked at the rows of the doomed, the condemned and the terrified. He looked at the warriors in red who stood behind them with swords poised, ready to cut through their bonds if he so ordered, or their heads if he did not. He looked at the leagues of virgin killing ground beyond, the depths of the Sanada lands, where the hunt would take place.

He thought of the lives he would protect in return for those he took.

His stocky visage shimmered and contorted. Gasps of superstitious fear echoed over the killing grounds, rolling low and weighty like the whispers of the condemned. Soon, in his place stood a young crimson dragon.

The forests cried that night with the blood of the dying.

[Whispers of Abyssion]

The light of a dozen candles danced in the depths of a hundred mirrors, mingling playfully with the shadows that scurried and writhed and swirled just beyond conscious reach. At the centre of their strictly arrayed ranks sat a lanky man, his thin robes providing only meagre protection from the cold hard stone. In front of him he spread an ancient map (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?24612-The-Adventurer-s-Crown-Tournament) inked upon faded vellum.

Touma Kamikaji took one last look at the calligraphic brush strokes. Then the breath left his lungs in a protracted sigh. The sound spread softly through the silence, filling the chamber with mystic power.

Into this brimming pool he spoke a single word.

“Lindequalme.”

The candle flames sputtered and died. The shadows in the mirrors scattered and fled. Something whispered in the windless air, and the cold speared like tendrils of ice through his veins.

Hawkish features furrowed into a semblance of vague annoyance, he gathered his legs beneath him and strode from the room.


***

Officially they had no name, no affiliation, no purpose. Informally they called themselves the Fraternity, and they followed Touma with neither qualm nor question.

Their fingers dabbled in almost every pie imaginable, operating from a warded windowless web of underground caverns hidden deep beneath anonymous sky-scraping heights. Only Touma and two others knew the exact location of the only safe point of entry and exit, which in turn could only be reached by arcane means. An underground spring provided a plentiful supply of fresh water, and the largest of the caverns stored enough food and supplies for years of siege.

A set of smaller chambers doubled as living quarters, often unoccupied for weeks or even months at a time as their nominal inhabitants focused on their allotted tasks. On this particular day, however, the long-awaited liberation of Raiaera and the final purging of Xem’zund’s influence from the high elven homelands allowed some of the Fraternity to grab a few hours of much needed rest.

Adjoining the living chambers, a low-ceilinged meeting hall basked in the roaring warmth of a fire enchanted never to die. Chairs carved from the finest Coronian redwoods surrounded a table of southern teak. A thick spidersilk carpet softened the cold damp floor. Richly embroidered tapestries, sourced from the width and breadth of the civilised world, adorned the walls. Combined, the furnishings somehow managed to grant the sparsely-used foyer the comfortable atmosphere better associated with a well-travelled inn.

As Touma emerged from his room, still clinging to the troublesome map, his eyes naturally fell upon said hall’s lone current occupant.

“Phillipe.”

“Master Touma.”

The stiff figure rose from in front of the flickering flames, folding a leather-bound tome from his creased palm into the inside pocket of his tailcoat. Silver-white hair, the hallmark of a venerable statesman, hung past the nape of his neck in a quaint ponytail. The precisely trimmed goatee on his chin and the imperious curls adorning his upper lip only served to reinforce the impression of decades of noble service. Chartreuse irises hid between the folds of a heavily lined forehead, accenting skin leathery and beaten by decades of weather. He bowed formally as Touma approached, as always the first to sense his master’s needs.

“Who has returned?”

“Master Angelus, Master Hiroyuki, and Master Ginuvo.” Phillipe Renar had a gentle fluid voice. Like the rumble of a brook through a mountain gorge, his words slid from the smooth stone walls rather than echoing and reverberating. “Lady Silmeria is home from the north but currently at rest. Master Mibu sends word that he will rendezvous directly with Master Quentin. Lady Karuta and Master Garthtaal remain in the Five Dukedoms, per your commands.”

Touma nodded, noting that Phillipe’s hand had strayed to the purple sash wound around his waist, to the slender fencing sabre sheathed there. Ever perceptive, the old gentleman.

“I’ll be needing your help.”

“You have it, of course.” Not a single trace of hesitation coloured Phillipe’s response.

“I’ll need Hiroyuki and Angelus as well.”

This time the butler allowed the smallest of frowns to touch his aristocratic features. Only rarely did the Fraternity operate in groups numbering greater than two, and Touma in particular much preferred to utilise his talents alone. Furthermore, Hiroyuki and Angelus opposed one another like magnetic poles: on the worst of terms at the best of times, always at each other’s throats.

Without need for further explanation he took it as a sign of how desperate things had become, and gave a firm decisive nod.

“By your leave, I shall see to our preparations.”


***

Darkness and dampness lurked in the corners of Hiroyuki Doson’s chambers, not dissimilar to the scrying room Touma himself had just emerged from. Undignified undulating mountains of ancient texts and scrolls from a hundred dead civilisations, thumbed to the point of decay and crammed with illegible scrawling, piled high against the walls. In the small clearing at the centre of the room sat an ornate mahogany palanquin: comfortably large enough for a single person, lacquered in slick black and bright red, and adorned with numerous jade carvings of mythological guardian beasts.

A man rested upon it. Stripped to his waist, heavy folds of wool and linen hung like limp death-shrouds from his bony frame. Sponging water from a large bowl, he dabbed at his torso with almost excessive care.

Spotted lesions enhanced the sickly yellow pallour of his shrivelled rotten skin. Atrophied muscles and deformed fingers gave him a wasted, skeletal look. Brows and lashes had long since fallen out, black blisters and the pustulent remainder of his nose pockmarking what remained of haunted sunken features. Some unseen predator had spent years and years nibbling away at his physical shell, barely leaving behind the outer trappings of a brilliantly fanatical mind.

He stiffened to abrupt attention as Touma entered soundlessly. Then, as if he could barely spare the effort, he slouched forwards once more to continue the mind-numbingly patient process of cleansing his weeping sores.

“Raiaera burns,” he whispered in little more than a hoarse cough, gaunt pupils intense pinpricks fixating upon Touma’s leanly muscular form.

“But the Necromancer is banished.”

“He is banished,” Hiroyuki agreed, though his eyes burnt with the vengeant fervour of the unforgivably wronged.

“The elves can count themselves lucky. They have survived for now, and unlike everybody else, they have had a taste of what they can expect next.”

Touma’s gaze lingered for a moment on the lacquered mask that lay unfastened at Hiroyuki’s right knee. Wrought into the features of an angrily grimacing ogre, it reminded him briefly of the mask that Akiyoshi wore with his armour, only somehow darker and more malevolent.

He then returned his attention to his friend and oldest companion. The worst of the disease lay hidden behind veiled shadow, but Touma did not hesitate in advancing until he reached a vantage that stripped away such trivialities and beheld Hiroyuki’s ravaged form in all its infected glory.

Hiroyuki continued to smoulder, in a curious mixture of gratitude and hatred.

“Next?”

With solemn ritual the leper placed the dirty cotton swab to one side, where it joined its used compatriots in a slowly growing pile. Deliberately he reached for a fresh one, grunting in coarse effort. As he did so, the gently pulsating pearl of quicksilver hanging over his right shoulder moved with him, subtly shifting the fall of shadows. Something dark and malevolent loomed, contorting his face into a visage cadaverously nightmarish.

Touma scarcely flinched.

“I’ve found what we’re looking for.”

For the second time that meeting, Hiroyuki stiffened. Wiry arm paused mid-movement, trembling ever so slightly in equal measures of pain and fear. The man’s musk, a cloyingly sweet scent that stuck to the back of Touma’s nose, filled the claustrophobic cavern.

“The Disciple?”

The mind-mage nodded. “The Disciple.”

Hiroyuki roared. Not a bestial roar, not a savage roar, but a roar of such pain and anger that it nearly shattered the stone walls around him. His arm slashed across Touma’s vision with speed unthinkable from his previous ponderously measured movements, sending the pan of dirty water flying away into the darkness.

Touma could have avoided the droplets splattering like filthy mud onto the exposed skin of his right arm. Deliberately he didn’t.

The quicksilver orb above Hiroyuki’s head pulsated: once, twice, again. Dark eyes glimmered from the shadows, arresting Touma’s once more. The mind-mage held them, and a modicum of understanding passed between the two.

“Fine.”


***

“The map shows the location of what we seek?”

Angelus Eltharion, weaver of shadows, took another long look at the curling vellum. His delicately sculpted expression inscrutable, his keenly intellectual eyes thoughtful, he then restored his attention to his human compatriot.

“Lindequalme?”

The questioning note echoed subtly and melodically upon the athenaeum’s carpeted floors, a first guess rather than an educated deduction. Still, it confirmed the answer that Touma had elicited after three long hours of analysis. The mind-mage nodded curt affirmation.

If Phillipe shouldered the conscience of the Fraternity, and Hiroyuki the soul, then Angelus claimed its intelligence. Forever at odds with its more impulsive counterparts, forever aloof and objective, but never unwilling to lend a pithy word or a haughty hand. He had the refined beauty of his high elven blood, his dark hair long and straight, the hyacinth hues of his eyes the last colours of a twilit cloud. Only the hollow gloom in his cheeks and below his eyes hinted as to his true alignment.

His robes flowed and rustled, numerous pieces of jewellery glinting in the half-light of the candelabra overhead, as he returned the map to Touma’s safekeeping. Slender elegant fingers poised in sudden halt on the way back.

“Not only treasure lies at the location shown.”

Touma did not have to speak to confirm the high elf’s suspicions. Angelus grimaced wryly – an altogether outrageous expression on a face so hauntingly beautiful – and turned away.

“This is not a good idea. We are not ready.”

“I agree, Angelus. But we have no choice in the matter.”

“We have choice. There is always choice.”

Touma inclined his head to acknowledge the point. “Yet if we do not confront them, here and now…”

He left the consequences hanging, allowing Angelus’s intellect and imagination to fill in the blanks. The shadow-mage looked askance, face paler than the norm.

“We cannot win.”

“No, we cannot. But at best we may delay it, perhaps even deny it.”

“Lady Silmeria…”

“… will be annoyed. She has only just recovered from Ar’zhanekkar’s betrayal, however, and…”

Angelus’s expression clouded over again. “May he rot in the furthest reaches of the Antifirmament for his sins.”

The silence hung heavy and sullen between them as together they once more contemplated the offending piece of parchment. Waxing and waning in time with their beating fears, its muted echoes gradually receded into the distance as would a retreating tide. But both Angelus and Touma knew that it would be back, with vengeance, like the tsunami returned to swallow the land whole.

At length, the high elf sighed in defeat.

“When do we leave?”

Touma replied, simple and succinct.

“Tomorrow at dawn.”

[Whispers of Abyssion]

They emerged as one from a ravenous rift in space and time, into the waiting boughs of a glade bathed in crimson daybreak. Almost immediately, the arrows started to fly.

Phillipe unceremoniously grabbed the back of Touma’s neck and bundled him behind the thick shielding embrace of a knotted oak trunk. But for every arrow that thundered into the makeshift cover, another came screaming in from the opposite direction. Delyn flashed in the manservant’s hands, creating a wall of whistling wind fighting to keep the barbed quills at bay.

Angelus simply took two swift steps into the shadows and disappeared from sight, swallowed whole by his element.

In stark contrast to the rest of the Fraternity, Hiroyuki simply stood his ground. Shafts fell like rain upon his exposed palanquin, a relentlessly hungry deluge of cyper and plynt smothering it from sight. Then the flammable arrowheads ignited as one, devouring the vehicle and its passenger in ghostly green flame and a mighty whoosh of sulphurous air.

A heartbeat of stunned silence. Wisps of pallid grey smoke filled the sudden morning stillness.

The leper emerged from both, utterly unharmed.

Quicksilver reformed at his command. Where a protective dome had sheltered him from the arrows and the flame, now a pentagram of rods aligned about his slowly advancing palanquin.

“Down,” he croaked, and both Touma and Phillipe obeyed without delay.

A flash of bright metallic light rent the forest in twain, followed by a powerful shockwave that would have thrown them like toys from their feet had they not heeded the warning.

Another brief breath of silence, in which even the continuing rain of whistling shafts failed to make any sound.

And then a half-acre of red-tinted woodland centred upon the ornate palanquin simply ceased to exist. Trees screamed in pain as they crashed to the leaf-strewn floor, shorn with monomolecular precision at waist height. Touma had to brace against the outpouring of psychic agony as the sentient arbour convulsed and crumbled.

Shadows flitted in expeditious retreat through the upper branches, barely escaping the devastation on their heels. One of their number misjudged a leap and slipped, muffling an involuntary scream as slender arms grasped at thin air. It hit the ground hard, bouncing slightly as bones broke and organs tore. The keen edge of Phillipe’s blade swiftly put it out of its misery.

Tendrils of dark shadow tore another such shadow from the treetops, tossing it about like a toy ball before driving it into the mulch with grim finality.

The rest managed to melt away from their failed ambush, but not before Hiroyuki bellowed a triumphant challenge at their fading forms. This time, the third and final time, the stunned silence remained intact.

“Wanderers,” Angelus remarked unnecessarily, emerging from hiding next to the corpse he had dispatched. It twitched with residual energies, masked visage curled into a death snarl filled with anger and hate. Something incorporeally powerful coalesced and began to build, but a twitch of his thin eyebrows sent shadowy tendrils spearing into the elf’s body once more. The self-destructive curse died as swiftly as it had formed, and now the cadaver stayed silent. “How thoroughly they must despise you.”

“What concerns me more,” Phillipe spoke from above his own kill, eyes full of sadness as he gazed upon the empty features of a young elf barely into his thirties, “is that they were waiting for us. Here. At this precise spot.”

Flicking his blade deftly to cleanse it of pale blood, he sheathed it neatly before turning to face Touma.

“Is this what you expected?”

Touma, thoroughly unperturbed by the death and destruction surrounding him, had his eyes focused instead on a slender watchtower to the south. Built as a sentry post upon the borders of the Red Forest, it now lingered beneath an unnaturally expanding nimbus of dark grey storm cloud, a filthy sheen of tinted glass invading the dawn sky. Lightning flickered like sparks from flint upon outcroppings of green quartz.

“Safe passage into the Lindequalme is a rare commodity,” he said by way of reply, monotone and unruffled. “It would not be a stretch to assume that the wanderers keep watch on all such Ways.”

He briefly reached inside his robes to confirm something in a flash of highly polished glass, before indicating the tower in the distance.

“Six of their number fled in that direction. Two more cover their retreat.”

“Kill them. All of them,” Hiroyuki rasped in bloodthirsty hunger, drawing a disgusted look from Angelus.

“There’s no need…”

“Actually, I agree with Hiroyuki,” Touma interrupted mildly. “We cannot afford to be harassed from here to our destination. Furthermore, call me fickle, but I have passing interest in the ritual they’re currently enacting in that tower.”

The mention of new knowledge drew Angelus’s attention, and the elf subsided with a thoughtful look.

“So we go, then?” Phillipe’s agreement came more reluctantly, a small nod that did little to hide the sorrow in his ancient yellow-green eyes.

Touma nodded, and Hiroyuki grimaced in anticipation.


***

“How many?” Phillipe asked, sweeping aside a triplet of shafts into the branches above his head.

“Seven,” Hiroyuki snarled, only for Angelus to override him immediately.

“Eight.”

“Eight?” queried Phillipe, neatly dodging splinters as another arrow smacked into the rock he had taken cover behind.

“Seven!” Hiroyuki snarled again. Angelus shook his head in resignation, stirring the shadows at his feet.

“Angelus is correct. There are eight. May we deal with them, please?”

A quintet of quicksilver beads hurtled forth from Hiroyuki’s palanquin, pulverising a blooded trunk and – almost as an afterthought – the wanderer sheltering behind it. The elf’s short shrill scream issued piercingly into the morning chill, abruptly cut off as arcane mercury smothered desperate lungs. The leper turned to glare at the other members of the Fraternity, eyes hard and triumphant.

“Seven.”

In not so many words, Angelus suggested that he might like to be quiet. Touma shrugged. Phillipe continued to stand sentinel from beneath bushy eyebrows.

Overhead, the sky flashed and vibrated. Thunder roared too close for comfort, carrying drizzle and spit into their vision no matter how they sheltered their faces. A thick blur of fog rolled down upon their position, emanating from the tower looming like an accusatory finger. One last arrow whistled overhead, forcing them to keep their heads down.

“They have retreated,” Touma announced a heartbeat later with no small measure of satisfaction. “Thirteen now await us in that tower.”

He nodded tersely. As one the Fraternity resumed their advance, picking their way through rubbled scree and broken masonry. The drizzle quickly escalated into a full-fledged downpour as they worked their methodical approach, rising wind shivering amongst the glossy black ivy clinging to the lower walls. The thick fog dampened their senses and crawled upon their exposed skin. Any other force might have hesitated, fearful of losing one another amongst the cloying mist.

Not the Fraternity.

“Phillipe, two steps to your right. Hiroyuki, watch the rocks. Angelus, the shadows at the base of the tower.”

Once again Touma clutched the shard of glass within his robes, allowing his consciousness to spread through every faceted raindrop falling from the dark skies above. He spoke to Phillipe from the monocle hanging at the manservant’s neck; to Angelus via the polished gold buttons upon the shadow-mage’s elegant robes; to Hiroyuki upon the glistening jade guardians protecting the floating palanquin. The fog may have acted to blunt their regular senses, but it also hung so heavy with mana such that he could literally breathe his powers. His mind swam with the information fed to him from all around, almost struggling to sort out the pertinent from the irrelevant.

Had the wanderers simply miscalculated?

Or had they led him into a trap?

Abruptly Phillipe looked upwards, drawn by a faintly erupting corona of light now illuminating the tower’s summit.

“What in the name of the Elder Thaynes…”

Something screamed. Something loud, hideous, inhuman, drawn out. Then more screams, from other non-human voices, rising in an answering furore. The temperature dropped sharply, caking the upper walls with sheets of ice, pounding through their heads in thunderous torrents of blood.

“Angelus.”

Shadowy corposant danced along the walls. Angelus bled from his nose and one ear, each thunderous crash of lightning – accompanied in counterpoint by petrifying wails and wind – sending fresh pulses of blood spurting down his neck. But the high elf kept calm and composed. Moments later the coruscating darkness engulfed the tower whole… and constricted.

Stone cracked. The structure reverberated to its core, then shuddered in inevitable surrender. As inexorable as a titan moving along its chosen path, the tower began to collapse inwards upon itself. Darkness closed in, a clenched fist upon the shattered spire. The screaming voices shrieked painfully in dismay… and blaringly in triumph.

Angelus’s shadows tightened again, then a third time, and finally something critical gave way with a raucous crash. Mighty blows hammered in rapid succession against the inside of the cocoon of shifting oblivion, somehow breaking a path through. An elf stumbled from the whirling shadow, clad in stylised steel and bleeding from trauma to his head. Phillipe, perfectly placed, decapitated him before he had taken more than two steps.

“Above,” Hiroyuki whispered, sending quicksilver bullets streaking into the stormy sky. Muscles strained with effort behind his grimacing mask, shoulders hunched and taut, as if palanquin and occupant strove against some unseen weight. A trickle of pustulent blood spilled from the corner of his mouth as the agonised screams intensified from all around them. “Touma, we may have bitten off…”

His voice strangled silent, and something fell from the heavens to his feet. A mana wyrm, all silvery scales and translucent fins the length of a human arm, with great bites of flesh torn savagely from its sinuous form.

Something insubstantial, something terrifying, followed in its path. Incorporeal flame shaped in the vague form of a floating skull, crackling with static from the electric discharges overhead and keening a viciously piercing cry. Phillipe recoiled involuntarily. Touma stepped forward in a blur of movement and cut it down before it could evade.

And then Angelus’s magics shattered. Violently they exploded outwards, scattering the storm clouds like so much cotton before the gale. In their wake, the jagged remains of the once-elegant spire stood revealed beneath the wan dawn. From amidst the scattered panes of dark obsidian shadow stepped four slender figures outfitted in ornately shaped steel, and from the foremost of their number issued forth a booming challenge.

“Fools! Any idea have you of the damage you have wrought?”

[Whispers of Abyssion]

Phillipe leapt swiftly to the attack, delyn sabre flashing in a downward stroke. The heavily armoured warrior to the speaker’s right stepped to intercept, the slender crescent of his two-handed lhang sweeping upwards and batting aside the killing blow. Phillipe had to throw himself clear to evade the follow-through, and their duel quickly degenerated into a rhythmic dance of parry, feint, and riposte.

Simultaneously the two wanderers to the speaker’s left nocked arrow to string and let fly at the shadow-clad wraith in the tower’s lee. Angelus had already begun his own advance, and slipped momentarily from the physical realm to evade. But the rangers had staggered their shafts, and the shadow-mage gasped, more in shock than in pain, when the second arrow grazed his cheek as he reappeared. A centimetre to the right, and it would have taken him through the eye. He responded with a harsh power-laced syllable that swept both of his opponents in clouds of misty void, and battle was joined.

Hiroyuki had his hands and mind full with the battle overhead. Mana wyrm and phantom alike danced a deadly tango against wisps of quicksilver darting through the wan dawnlight. The floating palanquin shuddered in time with the leper’s contorted commands.

That left Touma and the seer, alone together amidst the flickers of a dying storm and the rubble of a ruined watchtower.

“Realise you what you have done?” the elf asked again, tongue flowing through a slightly archaic form of Tradespeak. Of the wanderers Touma had seen that day he wore the most ornate armour: breastplate styled in the form of raptor wings reaching over his shoulders, feathered pauldrons and skirt reaching down to his upper thighs. Beneath the steel he donned a robe of thick silk that flowed with every movement, and his face hid behind a whitewashed porcelain mask with only the narrowest of slits for vision. He had knotted his ash grey hair in elaborate braids signifying his authority and his station, and numerous charms and ingredient pouches – mostly empty – crowded for space upon his belt. One hand grasped an intricately carved quarter-staff of oak tipped with gold; the other rested lightly upon his hips, dirt-stained fingers playing upon wisps of multi-hued power.

“I have some idea,” Touma returned dryly. In stark contrast to the richly attired elf, his attire consisted of only a simple Nipponese robe of scratchy navy-blue linen. Crouched low with right hand on the hilt of his sword and left hand securing the mouth of its scabbard, the stormy winds played havoc with the hems about his sandaled feet. From the glass knife concealed up his sleeve, Touma knew that none of the other nine wanderers had survived the tower’s collapse. It partly explained the elf’s irritation, but more than that…

“You were conducting a ritual. One specific to this location, requiring substantial amounts of power.”

Angelus eviscerated one of his opponents with razor-sharp claws of shadow, turning on the spot to suppress the retaliatory hail of arrows from the other wanderer he faced. Nonchalantly he reached out to caress the dying elf’s palely handsome features, savouring the moment as immortal light faded from eyes of sapphire blue, absently thinking aloud. “These mana wyrms are your guardians. The phantoms oppose you. What…”

“A barrier spell,” grunted Hiroyuki, who knew much of such magic. Wiry muscle warped rigid beneath wind-whipped bandages, the last echoes of the dissipating storm playing havoc about his static form. Fallen wyrms lay scattered upon the broken ground about him, drenched in slimy translucent ectoplasm left behind by banished phantoms.

“A barrier spell,” Touma repeated, unmoving, murky brown eyes focused upon his opponent.

The elf seemed to think for a moment.

“Know you then of what lies within the forest?”

A grim nod sufficed to signal Touma’s assent, even as he shuffled to keep the circling seer to his fore. The chime of metal upon metal rang through their ears as the warrior wanderer continued to press Phillipe. The winds of magic played upon their skins as Angelus and Hiroyuki deployed the sum of their formidable talents against the elves and their familiars.

“Know you, thus, of the damage you have wrought today.” Thrice he’d asked the question, and the air crackled with irritable power.

Touma settled his feet once more and lowered his body even further, mind focused on the critical strike.

“You were attempting to seal off the Lindequalme?” Angelus frowned, still lost in thought. The remaining ranger leapt high to avoid the pooling shadows and bounded in acrobatically, scimitar poised for the killing thrust. With a dismissive wave of the shadow-mage’s elegantly attired arm, a dozen dark spikes impaled the hapless elf mid-flight. Blood spurted, throbbed, trickled to the ground as the wanderer choked upon his death curse. “You thought you could contain what lies there, by using these watchspires as loci for a sanctum invocation. The spirits here would not rest easy under such harnessing, and you quell their resistance with your familiars.”

“Underestimate us not, traitorous one,” the seer growled in reply, still circling, still maintaining the aura of bright power at his fingertips. “The Star Goddess grants us power far beyond your juvenile ken. But now…”

“They weren’t attempting to seal off the Lindequalme,” Touma interjected softly, eyes now closed to the world. “This was a barrier spell, not a sealing.”

Comprehension dawned in Angelus’s finely crafted features. Shadows solidified at the touch of his mind, spearing towards the seer’s circling form.

“You thought you could protect Raiaera?”

The seer intercepted them with a touch of his will and a curved shield crafted from invisible force. Power and power clashed with a thundercrack.

“You thought to direct the Disciple elsewhere?”

Repelled, the darkness pooled and swarmed. Like the spire before, it swallowed the seer whole… and clenched.

“You thought to sacrifice the rest of the world…”

“Care we not for the rest of the world! For the realms of dwarves and men! For the hordes of orcs and the hermitages of titans!”

Again Angelus’s shadows shattered, torn and broken by the sheer force of the seer’s will. Voice echoing like a deity’s bellow throughout the lee of the fallen spire, the wanderer regathered the storm clouds overhead and spat his disdain.

“Let them fight.”

Lightning crashed down upon his outstretched arm, arcing outwards in strands of coruscating light. Repeatedly they battered at the shadow-mage, until one by one Angelus’s dark shields splintered and fell. Touma braced against stray discharge scorching the frozen earth at his feet, eyes weeping blood at the agonising thrum of the elf’s power.

“Let them fall.”

Angelus slipped into the darkness, heartbeats before eldritch power vapourised the fallen statue he sheltered behind. The seer’s attention turned to Touma, and immediately the mage from the east felt the hackles rise on the back of his neck.

“Matter it to the elder race when the younger ones suffer?”

Now the lightning reached for him, turned aside at the last moment by what wisps of willpower he could muster. His mind paled in comparison to the seer, a babe’s before the sage’s, barely fit to oppose it much less withstand it whole. Shreds of his sanity wilted and died, stripped away by the raw forces beneath the wanderer’s command.

“Matter it to us when the Berserker and its kin wipe you from the Pantheon’s sight?”

Brilliant light blinded Touma’s eyes. Heady ozone choked his lungs. Thunder roared with every flick of the elf’s fingers, beating upon the fabric of his mind. Each successive discharge arced closer and closer still, until the blistering heat threatened to scorch the very clothes from his frame.

“More of you there are where you came from. In the meantime peace we will have. Rebuild we will. Regather strength we…”

And then Touma simply vanished.

“You underestimate them, elf.”

Darksteel flashed. Blade blacker than oblivion carved through the seer’s wards, exploding them one after another in puffs of suppurating air. The elf reacted swiftly to the unexpected, with all the experience of long lifetimes spent in battle. Even as he failed to completely suppress the surprise touching his golden pupils, he managed to twist his torso from the sword’s path.

Blood, fine and silvery, spurted into the fresh rays of sunlight.

The seer snarled, features contorting behind his pure-white mask. Gilded quarterstaff clattered to the forest floor, followed by a pair of fingers and a chunk of flesh carved from his wrist. But without missing a step the elf wove a short ethereal spear into his off-hand grip, parrying Touma’s second stroke and sending the mind-mage reeling backwards in a flurry of single-handed thrusts.

“Care you of the future of the ants beneath your feet, human? Care you of the reproduction of turd roaches, of the feeding habits of mire worms in a marsh corrupted by necromantic power, of the…”

Each successive accusation shuddered with arcane power through Touma’s mind, rattling his teeth and sending fresh blood streaming down his haggard features. He knew that he had missed his chance, and that his swordsmanship would barely suffice to keep him alive for the next few seconds. Sheer fury glowed behind the seer’s ivory façade, and the concussive force of the elf’s gaze only preluded the blow that would finish him.

“Enough.”

From the right speared black shadow, jagged and grasping and angry. From the left poured molten silver, cascading and crushing and pounding. Caught between two opposing elemental forces, wards broken by Touma’s previous attack, the seer had time for one last scream of pure rage before he vanished, devoured whole.

Only the adrenaline-fuelled pounding in Touma’s ears, only the streaming rivulets of blood pouring down the front of his neck, remained to remind him of his foe. Heavy breathing echoed into the sudden silence, far too loud for comfort; only after a moment of wondrous contemplation did Touma realise that it was his own.

After what seemed an eternity, the coffin of black and silver melted away. A mangled mass of flesh and steel tumbled forth from within to hit the blooded ground. The seer’s porcelain mask, miraculously whole, followed the corpse, linen straps flowing like streamers in the light morning breeze. White china shivered with an ethereal hum before coming to a rest.

Angelus stepped out from the shadows, features composed but grim. Hiroyuki waved one hand in dismissal before returning his attention to driving the last of the mana wyrms from the skies above. Phillipe emerged from behind the tower, sabre sheathed, and shook his head at Touma’s inquisitively raised eyebrow and pathetically heaving chest.

“Now that was worth learning, wasn’t it?” the mind-mage asked as he slumped awkwardly to all fours, exhausted.

[Whispers of Abyssion]

Midmorning ticked past as they travelled the ruins of an ancient forest path, one abandoned centuries ago to the mercies of the Red Forest.

Touma himself led the way, using the deceased seer’s quarterstaff to combat the gnarled roots and murky quagmires undermining the overgrown trail. Every now and again he stopped to view the flickering reflections upon his shard of glass, consulting it regarding his surroundings and only moving on when absolutely satisfied that the road ahead posed no danger. Twice he led the band in winding diversions away from the main path, guiding them past ambush and danger using knowledge gleaned from stagnant pools and the rusted relics of long-forgotten battles.

Phillipe walked second in line, eyes sweeping left and right, ears primed to the wind through the blooded boughs. Whilst Touma focused on navigating the labyrinthine depths of the Lindequalme, Phillipe attended to their proximal security. The venerable swordsman kept close sentinel on their surroundings, seemingly at ease even amidst the mangled corruption. Those few air spirits in the vicinity not tainted by the Necromancer’s touch, carried there upon the wind from foreign lands, aided him in his task.

Angelus, the nasty gash on his cheek healed by Phillipe, cloaked himself in shadow as he kept pace. From right to left he floated in accordance to Touma’s hand signals, investigating anomalies and watching over the column from the relative safety of his personal realm. But even here the forest’s malevolence lingered, hungering from the shadows just out of sight of the corners of his eyes. The seer’s whitewashed porcelain mask hung amongst the accoutrements at his belt, linen straps fluttering forlornly in a non-existent wind.

Hiroyuki’s palanquin brought up the rear, floating in reverse over the rough terrain. The leper slouched upon it like a sullen sulky child, resting from his earlier exertions and watching over the path from whence they had come. Black thoughts stormed and thundered in the depths of his gaze, quicksilver beads spinning erratically about his person with every pounding thought.

Mist and marsh stifled their progress. Unnatural stillness threatened ancient anger and impending doom. Eyes full of hunger and hatred bore into the napes of their necks, as though legions of wraiths bided their time. Claws of cold and silence tightened their inexorable chokehold, waiting… waiting…

A matter of when, rather than if, the forest bared its fangs.


***

“They’ll come after us, won’t they?” Phillipe asked of Touma when they stopped for their noon rest. The limbs of the corrupt forest clustered thick and angry overhead, as rusty as long-dried blood, as if the trees themselves spurned their presence and threatened their demise.

“They will know that their ritual invocation has failed,” Touma replied calmly. “They will know where, and by now, they will know why and at whose hand.”

Phillipe blanched uncharacteristically and turned his eyes askance.

“Fear not, Phillipe.” A note crept into Touma’s voice of what some might have mistaken as compassion. “I knew you would leave him alive. If I wanted him dead, I would have finished him myself.”

Wind blew into the silence separating them. Guilt trapped the words in Phillipe’s chest, until he finally found the strength to choke them free.

“… why didn’t you?”

In his mind’s eye he saw the young elf warrior again: hamstrung and beaten, beautiful features darkened by undisguised hatred. Once more he stood over the bloody mess of his victory, over the contorted and shaking form glaring up at him from the muddy earth. Once more he saw himself shake his head and walk away, leaving the wanderer sputtering a bloody curse at his back.

Had the elf survived to tell his comrades the tale? Did he even now lead them in pursuit?

Or had he deemed it a more honourable path to take his own life, chewing through his own tongue like the last…

The venerable manservant shook his head, agony pangs swamping his chest. He had seen so many die, so young, so unnecessarily. No more.

No more.

“Promise me that this is the correct path, Master Touma. Promise me once again, so that I may follow you unreservedly.”

“Until the next time,” Touma noted, just the faintest touch of humour touching his gaze. Then it turned solemn and sincere. “I promise you, Phillipe Renar. I promise you that, to the best of my power, that this is the path with the least innocent sacrifice.”

Phillipe nodded gruffly, weatherbeaten features overcome with a curious cocktail of fear and hope.

“Lead on, Master Touma. Lead on.”


***

“Elves.”

Hiroyuki spat the word from his mouth along with a gob of thick spittle, just loud enough to catch Angelus’s attention. The shadow-mage looked up from his trance-like meditations, acknowledged the leper just long enough to express his displeasure, then dismissed him.

“Filthy, arrogant, backhanded, overbearing, insufferable…”

Angelus funnelled a century’s worth of disgust into a single glance, before closing his eyes against the tirade.

“… ignorant, big-headed, conceited, conniving…”

Only when Hiroyuki had made an explicitly rude observation about the origin of the elven race in relation to a peculiarly shaped fruit and a lonely dung beetle, did at last the shadow-mage give in to the temptation to sigh.

“I get the point, human,” he retorted resignedly, emphasising the last two syllables just to spite Hiroyuki.

As expected the leper rose to the bait, bony neck snapping to rigid attention from the divining board engraved at his folded feet. Beady bloodshot eyes flashed behind his lacquered mask, dirty bandages whipping about with a flourish as a fell wind stirred upon his person.

“Just who do the elves think they are, I wonder, to take it upon themselves to determine the centre of the world?”

In contrast to Hiroyuki’s darkly malevolent rasp, Angelus’s voice flowed like sickly sweet honey. “Corone. Cathay. Nippon.”

“What?”

“The Coronians play at civil war, petty children squabbling while the world burns just out of sight. In Cathay, the corrupt fawn obsequiously upon the Sin Emperor whilst the massed poor starve and toil. Nippon closes itself off to the outside world, bringing spite and disdain to bear against all who fail to conform to their ideals.”

“Your point?”

“His faults, his failings, were his alone, not those of his people. That wanderer seer didn’t choose his course of action because he was an elf. He chose so because he was scared. In the end, faced with the dark and the unknown, we are all the same.”

Something laughed mockingly at them from incorporeal oblivion, nearly lost amongst the rustle of Angelus’s fine robes. Frowning, the elf dug his slippered feet into the loamy earth, letting the dark magic that suffused the land sink into his sharply refined features. Fingers steepled in concentration, satisfied that he had made his point, he closed his sight to the material world once more. Now if only the shadows ahead would behave so cooperatively…

Hiroyuki frowned, partly at Angelus’s words, partly at the divinations he had just come up with. “You saying Touma’s wrong, then?”

“When is Touma ever wrong?”

“But you’re not saying he’s right, either.”

Angelus carefully fixed Hiroyuki with one inquisitive eye, the same hue as the amethyst he wore on his right wrist. “Who says that it always has to be one or the other?”

Hiroyuki glowered darkly, then spat away another glob of phlegm.

“Elves.”


***

Leaving Phillipe to keep watch, Touma slipped aside in search of what meagre privacy he dared seek. The ancient forest’s vengeful branches murmured malignant phrases into his ear, growing in intensity the further he left his companions behind. He could taste the Dread Necromancer’s aura like an aftertaste on the tip of his tongue, though it had been months since the Dawnbringer’s final battle.

For the third time in as many minutes his right thumb rubbed against the faultlessly polished shard of glass kept in the inside pocket of his robes. He knew where they had to go. He’d pinpointed its exact location half an hour ago. But something powerful, something dazzling, occluded its secrets from his scrying eyes.

Trouble you find yourself in, mortal?

Carelessly he rapped the quarterstaff against the nearest trunk, momentarily quieting its incessant whispers. His right hand receded from the depths of his garments, retrieving as it did so a slender, richly carved bamboo pipe. Touma studied the gilded characters for a moment, focusing his mind upon their familiar strokes.

Know you not of what you have done. And yet seek you the very doom we sought to bind?

“Sought to unleash, you mean,” Touma corrected, stifling amusement at the bitter note underlying the elf seer’s disembodied voice. “Maybe if I head to Scara Brae now, they’ll welcome me as their saviour.”

Humanity’s saviour, elf-kind’s doom.

“Perhaps.”

The whispers remained silent for a moment longer. Then they started afresh on a different tack.

Passing not far from here, a caravan of refugees resettling from the war. Know of them, do you?

Touma grunted his disinterest, calmly placing the unlit pipe to his mouth. Serenity suffused his features despite the malevolent oppressiveness of the trees suddenly closing in all around him. “They seek to shorten their journey by cutting through the Red Forest. Your kin have let them believe that with the Necromancer dead, these woods are safe. More fools they.”

Yet possess them I could. Use their willing spirits to regain my own. Half a day to replenish my strength, half a day to reconstruct the ritual. Maybe time enough there still is…

“You could try. I might find it necessary to follow you and eliminate the possibility of your revival, seeing as though you… or rather, your focus here… seem to be integral to the plans of your kin. One seer, one spire, am I correct? Without you, the ritual won’t complete.”

Massacre would you so many innocents, simply…

Touma’s eyes flashed in the gathering gloom, momentarily breaking the illusion of calm.

“Don’t speak to me of massacres, wanderer, or of innocence. And spare me the empty threats. You know as well as I do that you need your staff intact. It’s the only reason you’re still here.”

Furious thunder roared in his ears.

Abruptly Touma stared at a ragged procession of elf-women and children, huddled together against the crimson boughs, dragging behind them what meagre possessions they had salvaged from the war. Though neither as ancient nor as forbidding as the true depths of the forest, the trees here nonetheless threatened to simply engulf the pitiful parade, never again to set it free.

Nothing you know! Nothing!

The crackly voice made him jump, projected almost directly in his ears. Cold hard certainty in the pit of his stomach told him that none of the elves had actually spoken. They noticed him not. Heads bowed as they soldiered subconsciously against the Lindequalme’s pernicious influence, all they could do was to place one foot before the other on the muddy leaf-strewn trail.

A lone shaft of sunlight pierced the thickly interwoven canopy, bright and harsh amidst the gloom. It settled upon the leading wagon in the convoy, drawn by a pair of emaciated boven that had doubtless seen far better days. Touma’s mind focused not upon the pack animals, though, but rather the wagon’s grisly load.

Corpses. Stripped of their clothes, of their skin, of all semblance of articulation. A thick gleaming stew of blood and meat and bone and organ filled the wooden tub to the brim. Thick rivulets of viscous red trickled to the thirsty forest floor. Phillipe, Karuta, Ginuvo, Angelus, Hiroyuki, Quentin, Silmeria, Kayu…

Underestimate us not, human.

Another thundercrack, his body caught in the grasp of cold paralysis. His mouth opened and closed in soft agitation, outwith his conscious control. One hand still grasped the wanderer’s staff, knuckles taut like marble. His free arm however lay crooked over his head, hand waving back and forth next to his ear. Spittle dribbled from the corner of his mouth, the back of his nostrils spasming in rancid honeysuckle.

Much know we of the Disciples. Know we whom they serve, from whom they draw their power. Know we what they attempt.

A swish behind him in the gloom, a swish of robes against the forest floor. Robes of skin glistening rawly in the swirling mist, as the never-ending procession of bowed elves continued to pass him by.

Much know we, enough that only we can stand against them, and even then only with more time.

Warmth upon his chest. Touma blinked and raised a hand, marvelling at its wet colour. He bled, streams of hot pulsating blood.

Why you must fall is this, human. Blinded by compassion, your kind is, unable to make the necessary choice.

His hand went to his throat. Two fingers unexpectedly entered through a slit in the flesh. Fingertips nudged his exposed larynx, tendons, oesophagus. He felt no pain, only enormous surprise.

For the world to survive, cut away the weak you must.

He fell like an autumn leaf caught in a winter breeze. Wondering how he could see his own face and its empty eye sockets. Wondering why his clearly severed right arm lay in a widening pool of arterial blood. Wondering why his spine lay exposed like fishbone to the night. Wondering why… why… why…

“Enough, I say again.”

Reality reasserted itself with a mind-wrenching crash.

Instantly the mind-mage’s darksteel blade leapt into the midday gloom. In a single sure stroke, it clove the gilded quarterstaff in two. Latent arcane power, accumulated over long centuries of study and practice, simply ceased to exist beneath obsidian oblivion. The seer, reeling from the sheer force of will Touma had employed to break free of the illusion, never saw it coming.

He didn’t even have time to scream.

Slowly but calmly Touma allowed himself to stand, forcing the elf’s influence to recede from his mind. With equal care he replaced the bamboo pipe into his robe pocket, and then returned his sword to its scabbard.

“Don’t think for an instant, wanderer, that I would ever hesitate.”

[Whispers of Abyssion]

The cave mouth gaped in innocuous hunger, set like a scab beneath the blood-red canopies of the Lindequalme. The Dread Necromancer’s malignance lingered strongly this deep in the cursed forest, a foggy miasma that had not yet dissipated after his sudden defeat. Chill winds whispered his cursed name just out of hearing, racing maddeningly up and down their spines. The very air prickled at their skin, as if inhabited by small invisible electrified needles.

“From now on, nobody talks unless absolutely necessary.”

Touma’s order echoed once, terse and curt. His subordinates acknowledged in turn: Angelus with a composed nod, Hiroyuki an inscrutable grunt, Phillipe a formal half-bow. The mind-mage keenly swept them with his gaze before settling again upon the cancerous crack in the ground.

Breathing deeply, he took the first bold step through the curtain of wan crimson sunlight veiling the entrance.


***

As one they stepped into a richly decorated foyer, embroidered red carpet and pure white marble polished to a faultless sheen. Silver-coated mirrors of all shapes and sizes packed it to bursting, no two with the exact same size or orientation. Some dangled from the chandeliered ceiling high above, held there by elegant carves of gilded iron. Some even hovered in midair, by some ancient magic.

Some powerful being had obviously designed the room as a countermeasure against all forms of scrying and far-gazing. Something ancient and powerful… and expecting intruders.

Well, at least I now know why I couldn’t find this place before, Touma told himself silently. Of course, the new knowledge simultaneously raised further, more pressing questions… and he could come up with only one sure way to find the answers.

With precious little more to see or do, the band of four pressed swiftly on. Only Angelus, now the last in line, felt the shimmering shiver upon his limbs as he stepped from the hall of mirrors into the rough-hewn tunnels that led on. Glancing fruitlessly back over his shoulder, he caught the faintest whiff of honeysuckle in the air, hanging tantalisingly just out of reach.

They found the first body after ten long minutes of travel: a high elven bladesinger by his attire, dead not a week. Something had torn through glimmering silver mail like a blade through a leaf, and then had very carefully laid out the corpse’s insides as if producing a work of art. Sheer terror, writ upon the Raiaeran’s coldly refined features like a rictus mask, spoke of the agony endured in his lingering and lonely final moments.

Touma committed the face to memory, one more page in a grimoire of corpses. Then he turned away, pressing onwards without further comment.

The death toll mounted, sometimes singly, sometimes plentifully. Some of the victims had lain in their shadowy graves for eternities, the oldest a cadre of bleached and crumbling bones barely identifiable as some form of fae. Others, more recent, slumped in various stages of decomposition, well preserved by the cool dry cavern air. The newest, an adolescent human girl with straw-blonde hair and an expression of pure panic, wore gaudy robes so badly inconsistent with the dank underground decor that Touma considered questioning just how she might have ended up there.

Their deaths ran the gauntlet from the elaborately ritualistic to the brutally gruesome to the simply final, but they all shared one striking aspect: the overwhelming fear carved upon their features in their final moments. Even the Fraternity, veterans of a hundred grave-strewn battlefields they may be, felt themselves hesitating as time and again they stumbled upon jaws agape in silently eternal screams.

“The walls have eyes…” Hiroyuki muttered darkly at last, the first words any of them had spoken in an hour of descent. His voice echoed eerily, distorted by the many twists and turns in their path. The leper shivered upon his floating palanquin, legs crossed and arms folded upon the solid lacquered mahogany. He drew his bandages tighter, warding off the unseen evil.

Angelus made to scoff haughtily at the human’s paranoia. Yet once again his sharp high elven senses caught that irritating honeysuckle scent lingering in the stone around him. Probing his surroundings with a subtle arcane touch, he made to identify its source. But the tunnels repulsed him nauseatingly, pressing in upon his mind like rock titans crushing an ant. Bile rose in the depths of his stomach, and only centuries of Raiaeran discipline salvaged composure that now seemed so puny and worthless.

“Gentlemen,” Phillipe intoned solemnly, keeping his voice gentle and the disorienting echoes minimal, “watch your feet.”

As if on cue, a sucking suppurating slurp. Touma’s immaculately-tailored manservant tested a patch of eerie green glow with the tip of his scabbard, and in response it puckered and burst with an acidic hiss.

“Follow me,” Touma whispered into the disgusted silence as he took the lead once more.

The second chamber came upon them suddenly, an abrupt explosion of space after the confined claustrophobic corridors. Seasoned adventurers all, still they breathed a palpable sigh of relief as they emerged into the rocky antechamber.

Instead of lush carpeting and polished walls, the maker of this room had chosen to hew it from the very earth itself. The brutally simple sweeps of some massive jagged axe had resulted in irregular geometries, random right angles and half-finished steps: a distorted homage to chaos that pained the sane mind to look upon.

Without need for a request, Hiroyuki lofted a pair of glowing quicksilver beads overhead. By the light of their newfound illumination, the adventurers found that instead of mirrors, this set of macabre catacombs lay populated with statues.

And not just any statues. Like an eyrie of angry gargoyles they grimaced and leered, sculpted in all manner of martial pose. A wight to Touma’s right brandished a sickle-shaped sword at an imaginary foe, whilst its comrade warded off blows with a rune-wrought round shield. A death knight to his left roared in silent challenge, lance tip held proudly high. A pair of humongous giants dominated the centre of the room, great oaken clubs frozen mid-sweep…

Hiroyuki’s luminescent orbs flickered briefly, buffeted turbulently by a gust in the winds of magic. Touma’s senses screamed in sudden warning, and instinctively he braced himself, his hand flying to the hilt at his waist.

Then the light steadied once more, and nothing had changed. Or had it? He could have sworn that the death knight’s lance had not been pointed in his direction a moment ago.

He chanced a quick glance, left then right, to see if his companions had felt the disturbance. Phillipe seemed unperturbed, but Hiroyuki shivered in greater intensity, edgier than ever. Angelus, if he felt anything at all, concealed it magnificently behind an intrigued gleam as he peered at the petrified giants.

“Those are the Rowanoak brothers,” he mused, casting a piercing gaze about the cavern. “And no way could they have made it through the tunnels… ah.”

Pointing one elegant digit encrusted in jewelled rings, he drew Touma’s attention to the statue of a lich frozen mid-spell. Interestingly, the budding flames summoned to its command had frozen alongside their master, a marvel of stone-sculpting simply irreproducible by mortal hands.

“Grishnak the Portal-bearer,” Angelus introduced, before shifting his awareness to a long trail of shattered rock fragments at the lich’s side culminating in the tip of a curled boot. “Which would make that Kraz’gual the Wind. Two of Xem’zund’s most powerful Death Lords…”

“… disappeared without a trace three months before the Corpse War ended, never heard from again.” Touma frowned as he completed the tale. “In which case…”

The lighting flickered again, and this time Touma witnessed the same adrenaline surge through Angelus’s bloodstream as flowed through his own. He opened his mouth to speak a warning when three things happened at once.

Angelus sniffed the air daintily and raised a finger in concentration.

The pair of wights distinctly shifted stance to face him, in the briefest instance of darkness as the quicksilver orbs fizzled again.

A sudden bolt of bright azure slammed into him from above, frying his nervous system in one eternal moment of agony.

“More light!” Angelus called urgently, having witnessed the wights and arrived at the same conclusion as Touma. A minute grunt of effort, and Hiroyuki conjured another triplet of glowing orbs to join their brethren overhead. Phillipe, however, had seen something that the others hadn’t. The venerable manservant whipped his sabre from its scabbard in a single fluid motion.

The astral amphitere hissed defiantly and spat a second lightning bolt in the party’s direction. Angelus, forewarned by the manservant’s actions, batted it aside with a shadowy fist and shattered the death knight’s lance in the process. Phillipe in turn carved an emerald pentagram in the air, launching forth with newfound speed quite unbefitting the flawlessness of his immaculately combed silver hair. Hiroyuki’s palanquin circled menacingly behind the beast, using Grishnak the Portal-bearer as makeshift cover. Battle joined in deadly earnest.

Only Touma could not move; only Touma stood helplessly in the harsh silver light as his mind flatly refused to convey commands to his body. His thoughts, however, raced to fill the void that his limbs could not: cursing the momentary lapse that had resulted in the ambush, analysing the extent of the damage he had suffered and how long it would take him to recover, praying that Hiroyuki’s orbs would be enough to prevent the nearby wights from taking advantage of his paralysis, desperately trying to fathom the nature of their foe and the structure of its intent.

Only Touma, thus, saw the second beast emerge. The shadows at the giants’ feet tore in two, and the nearer began to move.

It had the form of a butterfly, wings of slick matte black beating slowly to keep it aloft. But rather than an avatar of beauty and life, this butterfly oozed death and corruption from every pore and orifice, in the form of a cloud of dense swirling miasma trailing in its wake. Purposefully and relentlessly it danced in his direction, multi-faceted pupils registering nothing but cold murderous intent as they reflected Touma’s frozen form right back at him.

The closer of the Rowanoaks succumbed first to the corrosive miasma, stone leg eaten through at the ankle. The stone giant fell to the floor with a quaking crash, almost lost in the intensifying din of the ongoing conflict.

An unfortunate wight, not so far in the distance, suffered next. Quite literally it melted away as the astral butterfly glided inexorably past, until only a seething puddle of liquefied stone remained of the undead elite. The trail of molten rock in the nightmare’s wake seethed in the stink of corruption and pus.

Yet still Touma could not move.

Thirty paces… twenty-nine paces…

Grishnak’s face bubbled and burned. Great noxious blisters burst into life upon the lich’s fossilised armour, eating away at defensive wards still somewhat active even after months of petrifaction. Conjured flame liquefied and dribbled beneath the foul-smelling cloud, hissing angrily as it hit the cavern floor.

Touma didn’t want to find out what that thing could do to unprotected flesh. His heart skipped two thunderous beats in his chest. He pictured the miasma crawling over his skin, the flesh of his limbs rotting away under the necrotic touch, his eyes turning to pus and spilling like tears down his fading cheeks…

Fifteen paces… fourteen…

Antenna waved hungrily in his direction, and once again he could see himself reflected many times over in the butterfly’s many pupils.

The terror on his face…

The desperation in his eyes…

The twitch of his fingers…

Ten.

Whispered shadow. Flashing steel. The faintest touch against his skin of something burning and acidic and hungry and warped. A whiff of void and ozone.

The scream in the folds of the Firmament as Touma’s blade ate the astral beast whole. He could quite believe he heard a satisfied burp afterwards to go along with it.

[Whispers of Abyssion]

They reconvened swiftly, battered and bruised but surprisingly little worse for the wear. Hiroyuki’s palanquin stank of char and scorch, and Phillipe sported a fresh welt on his cheek that had singed his perfectly trimmed beard, but as the price paid from an unexpected ambush…

“I do not appreciate using my palanquin as a lightning rod,” Hiroyuki rasped, scowling fiercely at Angelus, silvery light pulsing in time with his fury.

“I would much prefer your chair to my body,” Angelus sniffed disdainfully. Hiroyuki’s bandages visibly rankled, bloodshot eyes glowering from behind the daemonic mask concealing the disfigured lower half of his face.

“Gentlemen,” Phillipe intervened calmly, as always expertly reading the atmosphere and efficiently stepping between the quarrelling pair. He stood up from looking over Touma’s injuries, patting his hands on his petticoat as he gave the all clear. Paranoia had begun to set in, bred by long tense hours below ground, and by the constant trivialities grating at their attention. Angelus and Hiroyuki, so often at each others’ throat, felt the mental strain the most.

He frowned as they gaped at him in shock, wondering whether he sounded so out of character. If so…

He neither saw any foe nor felt any pain as the unseen assailant took a second mouthful of flesh from his face.

“Hiroyuki, barrier,” Touma snapped, still slightly dazed from the paralysing blast. Ignoring the bemused Phillipe, who still seemed unaware that he had lost half his face and yet somehow didn’t bleed, the mind-mage attempted to track the fleeting shadow. “Angelus, bind it.”

Both spellcasters leapt into action, their feud forgotten. A quadrangle of quicksilver pillars slammed into place around them, aligned to perfection and shimmering in translucent life. The shadows danced beneath their gaze, coalescing into whip-like tendrils and web-like strands. At a grandiose motion from their master they raced through the darkness after their prey.

It eluded them with ease. Doubling back sharply upon its path as if the laws of physics and momentum simply failed to exist, it slipped through Hiroyuki’s walls of solid arcane power and savaged a large chunk of flesh from Phillipe’s upper arm. Before any could react it had fled once more, this time streaking upwards and using the brightly glowing quicksilver orbs as a shield against Angelus’s shadows. Touma had to shade his eyes against the glare, and in that moment it vanished once more from sight.

Phillipe paled as he finally registered the jagged bite in his upper arm. Again it did not bleed, and still the old gentleman felt no pain whatsoever. But the astral shade’s teeth had torn through steel pauldron and knotted muscle alike with an absolute minimum of effort. They could even see the parallel razor-like trails where it had indelibly carved its mark in cream-white bone. Unnerved by the precision of what should have been a bloody and messy wound, even the stalwart butler could not fail to blanch.

“Bait,” he whispered, his face suddenly paler than his beard. “Use me as…”

“Not an opt…” Touma snapped, only to be adamantly overridden.

“It targets me because of my knowledge of the healing arts. We can predict its next move, and must take advantage of this while we can…”

“Allow me to handle this,” Angelus intervened, meeting Touma’s inscrutably composed features with a knowing look. “The hall at the entrance to these catacombs contained a Mirror of True Seeing, placed to prey upon those who enter with manifestations of their inner selves. This is my projection, and I can deal…”

The astral shade reappeared from between the twin wight statues, which in turn seemed to have advanced a step closer in the confusion. Simultaneously, something picked Touma up and tossed him painfully aside. He barely had time to realise that Angelus bore responsibility for the vicious, desperate act. Then the shadows rushed heedlessly in after their prey, cackling and booming with eerily malevolent laughter.

A cacophony of terrible ear-wracking mind-wrenching shrieks built to a crescendo. Reality warped under Angelus’s influence. For a moment, it seemed as if all the darkness in the room congregated at that single spot, crushing to oblivion the three entities – two mortal, one astral – caught in their grasp. When it could contract no further it exploded outwards, still screaming, until it filled the chamber evenly once more.

Not a trace of the victims remained.

Hiroyuki rasped into the sudden dark silence, from somewhere alongside Touma where he had been thrown as well.

“Well, that’s that th…”

“Light!”

A heavy thunk echoed as metal slammed into wood, breached by an angry hiss from the bandaged leper. Quicksilver pillars erupted into overwhelmingly luminescent glow, and not a moment too soon.

Touma found himself staring at the frozen tip of an ancient rune-wrought blade, wielded by the same death knight that had challenged him earlier. If the necromantic minion still had its lance, shattered by sheer luck only moments before…

Involuntarily the mind-mage’s eyes flicked to his surroundings, and it took every last shred of his nigh-inhuman composure not to take a step back. The entire petrified army had advanced upon them in the brief instant of darkness, centred on the surviving Rowanoak. Massive club rose high above their heads, its ugly face mashed into a silently grotesque roar. Hundreds upon thousands of wights, supported by legions of death knights and the occasional tamed beast or animated horror, converged upon them with nothing but deadly intent in cold, soulless eyes of vacant stone.

Very carefully, Touma turned towards Hiroyuki. The leper had fared worse than he, but by virtue of the sturdiness and sheer bulk of his palanquin, none of the wight’s blades had done more than scratch his diseased skin. The leper coughed up bloody phlegm and spat it at the nearest of his foes, summoning even more fluid quicksilver to his command as the diseased excrement ricocheted from the small round shield.

The mind-mage took one last look at the assembled gargoyles, and at the empty space that Angelus and Phillipe had left in their wake. Without the shadow-weaver and the blademaster, their task had just grown exponentially more difficult.

But they had come this far. Did they have much of a choice whether or not to continue?

Touma turned on his heels.

“We leave this room. Now.”

“… agreed.”


***

Their journey took them deeper, ever deeper into the darkness. Time and distance held little meaning in the shadowy confines of their catacomb prison. Their world narrowed to the pool of silvery light in which they travelled, the next twist or turn in the tunnels ahead, the steady tread of their boots as they pushed onwards, ever onwards. With no clue as to when to expect another assault, no idea as to what lay beyond the next corner, the need for constant vigilance shredded and frayed exposed nerves.

The clammy air lingered stale and warm upon their necks, so thickly laced with foreboding that they could almost carve it up and serve it at a banquet. Earth and stone pressed upon them from all directions, the claustrophobia not aided by Hiroyuki’s scarred and scorched palanquin struggling now to fit through the rough-hewn rock. Aside from the occasional drip of gelatinous slime startling them as it fell from height to floor, the two travellers had little choice but to cower beneath the barely-heard whispers in the silence: overwhelming, overbearing, grimly malicious.

Seeks his doom, the mortal does.

Underestimate us not… underestimate us not…

Bitter laughter, melodic and yet discordant, touched the edge of their hearing.

If the journey before had placed great stress upon their psyche, it now plucked and preyed upon their minds like some malevolent troubadour. Hiroyuki, already half mad, took things particularly poorly. His eyes relentlessly darted from corner to corner, a pair of beady red animals hiding behind bloody bandages and stained steel mask. His teeth trembled as he readjusted atrophied limbs, and he wept pustulant tears in the cold damp air. Leprously ruined fingers drummed restlessly upon crossed knees, and arcane power surged and swirled all around, reacting violently to every little disturbance in his surroundings.

The fact that nothing actually happened only heightened the wrongness, the sense that whoever dwelt in the cave simply enjoyed toying with their fates.

And then at long, long last, a third door reared before them. Glowering it forbade them from passing. Malevolently it invited them in.

“On your guard,” Touma ordered, quite unnecessarily. “On my mark…”

As if waiting for those words, rusted iron hinges groaned open.

[Whispers of Abyssion]

Touma disliked circumstances that involved him not knowing what to expect. He avoided them like the plague, unless absolutely necessary. It hadn’t pleased him that this entire venture, from the ambush by the wanderers to the sacrifice of Phillipe and Angelus, had been full of events both unexpected and absolutely necessary.

He did, however, possess a keen mind for possibilities and probabilities, for anticipating contingencies and subjugating emergencies. When the creaking stone doors opened to reveal a massive room of absolutely nothing, Touma merely raised an eyebrow and took it in his stride.

Like the second room of the underground complex, the sense of space as they emerged into the cool dim chamber nearly overwhelmed them. This time, however, they could not make out any boundaries amongst the shadows, no floor beyond the smooth hardness directly beneath their soles, no ceiling above their heads except the echo of their every movement. A single step swallowed the entryway behind them in the same endless oblivion, an empty all-encompassing void rejecting with cold flat numbness their every tentative probe.

And then once more came the laughter. In fits and giggles, sometimes with long minutes in between, other times mocking in swift succession. Sometimes it pitched high and shrieking, intense enough to pierce their eardrums. At others it throbbed low and rolling, lingering in the back of their heads like some vicious migraine.

Only after five minutes of fruitless wandering, bombarded by ridicule and derision at every other step, did they start to recognise fragments of words within the mindless babble.

Only after what seemed like five hours more, long enough to drive them insane as they inched about tethered by only the faintest of proximal arcane touches, did they finally locate its source.

The old man had long since misplaced his wits. No rational reason existed for his survival, lost and alone. Seated upon a bare stone throne like the king of the middle of nowhere, he had obviously done naught but laugh for long, long eternities. Touma had never before laid eyes upon a naked form so painfully thin, mottled skin stretched tight over frail bones as if all intervening layers had simply been suctioned away. Brittle hair, once a luxuriant golden mane crowning a proudly set brow, now crumbled like brittle straw beneath their as they circled warily. Hiroyuki’s silver orbs formed luminescent prayer beads as they encircled both delver and denizen, illuminating hollow sockets and filthy scabs where facial features had once existed.

“You are the Keeper of this temple,” Touma stated to the wasted cadaver, unwilling to bandy unnecessary words. Another burst of incoherent gargling, rasping echoes sawed upon their synapses. Nothing in the old man’s frame suggested the capability to create such a noise, and yet clearly he laughed at them.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Hiroyuki rasped back, his beady eyes no less dangerous as they regarded Touma. Angry impatience warred with frantic desperation, the mangled palanquin darting jarringly into the pool of light. The journey had taken much from him, but only then did Touma realise just how much.

“I’m not going in there. He’s too far gone. There’s nothing left to learn.”

“Don’t tell me that.” Battered mahogany hovered inches from Touma’s midriff, and the liberal doses of jasmine incense that the leper used to disguise his rotted flesh hung heavy in his nose. Hiroyuki squared up to his old friend and superior, quicksilver pulsating in the metal of his mask. “Don’t tell me that Phillipe and Angelus died for nothing!”

In a lesser cavern, the roar would have echoed infinitesimally. In this one, the darkness simply swallowed it whole. In return came further laughter… mocking… deriding… ridiculing…

“DON’T TELL…”

Hiroyuki’s mouth snapped shut mid-bellow, at the same time that Touma’s keen mind finally deciphered the words hidden in the laughter.

Mirror, mirror on the wall… the Necromancer’s fury eat you all…

What Xem’zund could not have, nobody could.

The shadows gathered.

They reared.


***

Darkness streamed past his ears to coalesce behind the Keeper’s throne, a force nigh physical in its intensity. Half of Hiroyuki’s ring of quicksilver orbs brightened as the shadows dissipated from their vicinity. The other half dimmed and disappeared, swallowed whole into the billowing behemoth gradually gaining corporeal form.

A dragon.

Not just any dragon. An undulating mass of reptilian limbs, shadow-forged scales blacker than ebony glistening dully beneath the pale effervescent glow. Touma found it impossible to guess at the size of the beast, but its sheer presence forced them to cower in its shade. Bright golden irises, slit with pupils of winter-cherry red, glowered at them from far above their heads. Two by two they burst into flaring life, until sixteen they numbered in total.

The shadows continued to take shape: long sinuous necks, thickly muscled trunk, tails that flowed like unending rivers into the darkness. Frozen to the spot by the sight at once both majestic and horrifying, neither Touma nor Hiroyuki dared even draw breath. Only when eight wedge-like snouts pointed in their direction, only when four of them bared viciously serrated fangs and the remainder hissed a fuming warning, did their senses return.

The orochi, all eight heads and eight tails, all mountain-like power and valley-like insanity, took a single step forward to mindlessly crush the Keeper beneath its bulk. Both men recoiled in instinctive horror. The astral beast simply feasted, both upon the finality of the Keeper’s demise and the primal fear and panic it instilled in its remaining prey.

But neither man had recoiled at the monstrous serpent.

Something even worse loomed in the shadows behind it.

One hand tucked into the folds of his robes, the second wrapped white-knuckled about the hilt of his sword, Touma’s seasoned eyes widened in utter dismay. Hiroyuki struggled to maintain a tenuous grip over his emotions and thus his abilities; the leper’s palanquin wavered, trembled, just about held firm.

Like a sky titan of old the newcomer shuddered forth, far larger than both of the Rowanoaks combined, far larger than any of the surviving giant-kin roaming the wastes of the north. It had vaguely humanoid form, but its gnarled toes easily out-sized any warhorse such that each foot loomed like a small hill. Unable to resist, Touma’s gaze travelled upwards: shins corded thicker than any of the ancient redwoods in the depths of the Old Forests, legs pillars of dark flesh with girth rivalling the great stone pillars of the Dakian Gorge, hairy chest wider than most towns and bound with great bands of bulging muscle. At long last it reached the monster’s face, permanently set in a fiercely war-like scowl, and the black iron club studded with burnished diamonds slung nonchalantly over one massive shoulder. How it could twist the physical laws of reality in order to maintain such gargantuan figure, the mind-mage dared not speculate.

And that was only half of it.

Like a reflection in a mirror, what gloom that had not gathered to the hydra now manifested at the giant’s feet. The shadow aspect shared almost all of its compatriot’s features… except it wielded instead a jagged blade shaped in the form of a stylised thunderbolt. It moved slightly out of synch with its physical twin, creating a frightfully maddening distortion that wrought havoc upon what warped sense of reality the two mortals yet retained. Together the titans formed a single whole, the life and death of all things.

Unsurprisingly, Touma could put a name to them, his worst fears manifest. As they towered both above and below him, reborn into the corporeal plane after long eons of banishment, he whispered it in abject dread.

“Kongorikishi the Berserker, the God of Benevolence, the Second Disciple of the Dark Goddess.”

His voice attracted its attention.

Like a child playing with an ant, the Disciple’s physical aspect reached down to ground level, peering at the insignificant specks that dwelt there. It didn’t bother lifting the studded club carried over one shoulder, or unsheathing the gleaming blade poised in the shadows. Rather, open palms reached out from both above and below.

The astral hydra disappeared with an abruptly curtailed shriek, erased from reality between the Disciple’s palms. The shockwave buffeted Hiroyuki and his palanquin, the sheer force involved sending them both flying. His quicksilver glow-beads abruptly failed, plunging them into pitch-black darkness both total and terrifying.

And then the Disciple turned its attention to Touma.

Pearl-white teeth gleamed despite the lack of illumination. A smile equal parts hungry and eager, equal parts benevolent and malevolent. A smile that chilled his stomach and froze his thoughts through sheer intensity alone. A smile befitting the Berserker, a smile that told him he would be the lucky one… the Disciple would at least play with him before he died.

Touma Kamikaji was no coward. He had bandied deals with daemons before the age of ten, had stood singlehandedly against tides of darkness threatening his homeland, had walked alone into the depths of Haidia to confront the truths that lay there.

But at this, at long long last, Touma reached the conclusion that enough was enough.

From the folds of his robes emerged what he had been holding in his off hand all this time… a Raiaeran seeing-glass of the finest artisanship, polished to a faultless gleam, golden frame inlaid with blooded garnets.

As Hiroyuki’s broken body arced towards him, thrown in the opposite direction from what splintered shrapnel remained of his palanquin, Touma uttered a single phrase of last resort.

Flowers in the mirror, moon on the water.

“KYOUKASUIGETSU.”

The seeing-glass shattered, and in its place swarmed utter oblivion.

The rift in reality swallowed them whole.

[Whispers of Abyssion]

Pain pierced his fugue like a needle lancing a blister. Reality spat them back out into the twilit Lindequalme, so much regurgitated vomit upon the wilted forest floor.

It took him some time to recognise the bitter laughter drumming through his mind.

Failed you have, human, the alien presence taunted grimly. Over-confident you were. Thought yourself more intelligent than your betters. The price you have paid.

Touma groggily tried to sit up, throat muscles clenching to force through a sharp retort. Instead they ended up depositing the contents of his stomach, meagre as they were, into the bed of rotting leaves smothering his face.

It took even longer before he had regained the strength to face the world once more. The bitter laughter never once faltered.

“Save your mirth, blind one,” the mind-mage hurled, quite curt, once he had regained a modicum of control over his own body. “We aren’t done yet.”

Done yet? Obviously the eldritch essence looming like a gloomy cloud over him found the notion of further struggle mock-worthy. Woken the Disciple, you have. Hastened your doom, you have. Wish you what else this fine day? The Dark Goddess herself, to summon?

Ignoring the taunts, Touma struggled to his knees. Laden with years of accumulated hatred, the crimson boughs settled silent and still about him, ominously foreboding even for these accursed lands. He located Hiroyuki’s fallen form not so far in the distance, breathing a muted sigh of relief when the bandages twitched with life. Then he reached out gingerly with his consciousness, attempting to pinpoint the unease that pulsed with adrenaline-induced haste through his veins.

It didn’t take him long at all. The ground beneath him quaked in fearful trepidation, setting the dry leaves that carpeted it to rustling like chattering teeth.

The tremor subsided, but Touma knew better than to relax. Almost before he’d unclenched his teeth, willing the instinctive tension from his muscles, the earth shuddered a second time and then a third. Each successive shock arrived with greater urgency than its predecessor, and the mind-mage didn’t need to count the seconds between them to know that precious time slipped away while he hesitated.

And what now to do? the seer sneered, bleak desolation undercutting his triumph. Wish you perhaps for an army or an ally, help to give you against your fear?

Outwardly Touma’s coolly composed mask did not falter. Inwardly, he grit his teeth and forced himself to count slowly to three. His mind strung taut like a piano string on the verge of snapping. He could even pick out the steady rhythm of his heartbeat, in between the Disciple’s footsteps from far below.

“Perhaps you think yourself wise, master seer,” he spoke at last, channelling derisive scorn. The eldritch essence recoiled, as if slapped. “Perhaps you think that you have successfully outwitted me. That I don’t know the true focus of your soul is your mask, rather than the staff you so cunningly allowed me to destroy. That I don’t know that all you intend to do is to buy time for your comrades to arrive, to give them a chance at reworking your precious barrier invocation.”

The silence told a tale all its own.

“Well know this, master seer. Not once have I ever underestimated your kind. But your kind is guilty as ever of underestimating the Disciples. Just as you underestimated the threat of the Harbinger before he overran your lands. Just as you underestimate to this day the repercussions of the Schism, and the sundering of the Font.”

At last the spectral essence made to retort, indignation rising in a tidal wave of cultured hauteur. But Touma slashed a vicious hand across its ethereal throat, choking it bitterly upon its cold eldritch fury.

“Well, now you’ve seen it, seer. Not in your dreams, not in your scryings, but in person. And now you know for yourself the terror it will unleash upon Althanas. Now you’ve tasted for yourself what you were fleeing so desperately from.”

Again the seer stuttered in protest. Again Touma cut him off, manacles of pure forceful will shackling the elf’s every attempt to give voice.

“And now know this. The only power close enough and strong enough to even blunt its advance lies in Raiaera. In the battle-hardened elite who pushed back the Necromancer’s advance. Only you and yours have the ability to hold the line until the rest of the world can be brought to bear.”

His murky brown eyes narrowed to deadly slits.

“You are hereby granted one guess as to why I allowed you to survive this long.”

At last a shred of the seer’s power seeped from Touma’s iron grip.

Serpent Tamer! it gasped in horror. Snake Tongue! Damn us all you…

Touma stepped aside deliberately. It revealed to his adversary the ivory mask hanging forlornly from a corrupted gnarled oak branch behind him. The bodiless whisper died away in dawning resignation.

“For the third and final time, I tell you…”

A burnished whisper. A flashing darksteel crescent unleashed and re-sheathed in the space of a single breath.

“Be gone.”

The porcelain mask dissolved into the twilight like so much ivory dust, and its owner’s soul departed the Firmament alongside it at last.


***

The ominous shudders beneath his feet paused for a moment, as if the monstrosity that stalked him stopped to sniff the air and contemplate the sudden departure of one of its adversaries. Gratefully Touma took advantage of the reprieve to steady himself against the corrupted oak before the shaking started once more.

“Angelus,” he growled into the growing shadows, gritting his teeth once more against the nausea and exhaustion breaching the breakwaters of his mind.

Writhing shadows coalesced into physical form behind him.

“How was my timing?” the shadow-mage asked, the faintest of perfectly arched eyebrows enhancing the wry note to his dulcet tones. “I trust I didn’t ruin the charade?”

Touma took two deep breaths to regain some form of equilibrium. Then he straightened tall, swaying gently in time with the Disciple’s encroaching beat, and turned to give his companion the smallest of smiles.

“It sufficed.”

Angelus met murky brown with impenetrable violet before inclining his head in a deferent bow.

“Do you think we shall hear from him again?”

Touma scoffed. “I care not. We have more important things to worry about. Is Phillipe…”

“At your side, Master Touma.” Phillipe’s voice rippled pleasantly from somewhere to his right. “As always.”

Touma took a moment to locate the venerable gentleman amongst the laden crimson boughs, frowning at the freshly healed puckers upon Phillipe’s weathered features. But the manservant’s devotion could easily match Touma’s murk and Angelus’s mask for inscrutability. A long look at the steady chartreuse brilliance, and the mind-mage knew better than to argue.

“I took the liberty of calling in reinforcements,” Angelus added. He nodded once into the branches overhead, then gestured with the same arrogant jut of his jaw to the intertwined cluster of trunks opposite the clearing in which they stood. Fallen leaves danced at his feet with every thunderous shudder from below.

Part of Touma begrudgingly admired the fallen elf’s initiative. The rest of him despised the game the shadow-mage forced him to play. Thousands of tiny needles prickled at the back of his eyes as he willed into his gaze the necessary arcane power to penetrate Angelus’s shrouds.

“Silmeria.”

The dar’el smiled at him vacantly, wings folded neatly against her back so that they did not scrape against the thorny twigs bracketing her perch. Hair like molten glass cascaded viscously down to the small of her back, catching the dying sun in translucent liquid flame. Alabaster skin positively glowed in the twilit shadows, her beauty a sculpted perfection distant and inhuman. She reached down to him with a pale slender arm, holding between her finger and thumb a downy feather the colour of the darkest of nights. Those of celestial lineage would have despised the hue as symbolic of death, decay, and betrayal. Touma accepted it as he had many times before, a simple charm against the foe he faced.

“Ginuvo.”

Eyes of milky opal flashed from features carved of desert coal, teeth glimmering like matched pearls, shaggy mane of bristly white hair pulled back from broadly creased brow. The muscle-bound deathseeker hailed from lands far southwest across the Roiling Seas. Never once did he seek to dispel the sanctity precluding a melee with anything quite so meaningless as words, although on the rare occasion he rested at the Fraternity’s headquarters he related expansively over fine ales on ancient war-stories.

Touma blinked at last, allowing the prickly needles to recede from his head. Blithely he ignored Angelus’s stifled smile, bracing himself instead against the Disciple’s fury channelled through the ground at his feet as it sought to unbalance him every few seconds now. He didn’t have much time.

“We make our stand here,” he told them all, quite unnecessarily. “We weaken it. We stall it. We give it something to think about and a few wounds to lick. Then we disengage before it brings its whole strength to bear. I need all of you alive after this. There’re eleven more of these lying around waiting our attention.”

Four out of five faces nodded back at him: firm, bored, empty, grinning.

“’We’ includes you too, Hiroyuki,” Touma told the bandaged broken form still half-inundated in trembling foliage. The leper had yet to move from where Touma’s desperate escape had dumped him, but the faintest hint of life in the small of his back reassured the mind-mage that he still drew breath. Spluttered mulch issued forth at length, followed closely by a garbled blurt.

“You owe me a palanquin.” Each word of the rasping growl forced like a jagged rock through tightly-constricted throat. “One that doesn’t fall apart at the hands of… that.”

“Done. Now get up and get ready.”

As if on cue, the earth gave one last sky-splitting shudder. This time it actually did tear asunder, great fissures erupting to devour the forest whole. Something darkly maleficent rumbled in triumph from below, something that never should have escaped to see the light of day.

Touma turned to them and smiled. Charisma and confidence oozed from every pore upon his person. He wore it like armour indestructible and pure no matter how unfounded, projecting the belief in their cause and the trust that they would prove victorious. Such was why a venerable Coronian ranger followed him with blind devotion, why his oldest friend still stuck with him unconditionally despite all that they had seen and survived together. Why a fallen elf shunned by his kind and a celestial paragon banished from her homelands would both die for him without the slightest of hesitation, and why a legendary deathseeker from the deserts of the far south stood ready yet again to throw himself headlong into certain devastation.

That one smile, that one arrogantly winsome smile, summed the purpose of the Fraternity.

Then clouds of rank sulphur billowed past to erase Touma’s face from view. Kongorikishi emerged from the pits of its birth, and the world descended into darkness.

[Whispers of Abyssion]

Given all the time in the world to prepare, he could not have asked for a better response.

Barely had the Disciple’s forehead crested the rift before the Fraternity let loose with everything in their arsenal. Shadows scythed and stabbed alongside quicksilver droplets heavier than any sledgehammer. Bladed gusts swept along low to the wounded earth, beams of sheer darkness crashing down from above. Of the Brethren only Ginuvo stood motionless in face of the Disciple’s advance, milky pupils tracking the monstrosity inch by agonising inch.

He did not stay still for long. When fingertips the size of small barns grabbed hold of the rim, trailing clods of dirt from grimy unkempt nails, Ginuvo leapt forward. Heedless of his footing crumbling to dust beneath him, bellowing fearsomely in a foreign tongue he brandished a double-headed battleaxe with wickedly serrated machete blades. The swirling patterns of arcane projectiles shifted subtly to accommodate his charge, then changed in complexion altogether when Phillipe and Silmeria added their presence to the frontline.

But though they stabbed and slashed and hacked at every vulnerable joint and orifice presented to them, not for a moment could they slow their adversary’s progress. Even switching their attentions to the Disciple’s baleful eyes when they too rose above the trembling lip of earth had no effect. Sparks flew from honed steel blades. Handfuls of furious fireflies fluttered about Kongorikishi’s forehead. Bile rose unbidden in the back of their throats as they fought with all their might. The sour acidity of fear lingered like liquid paralysis in the depths of their lungs.

Great belches of noxious smoke rose from the belly of the earth, enveloping them all time and again in their ethereal embrace. All the fires of hell danced in the roiling cloud, painting the Crimson Forest a sickly shade of poisonous purple.

Then something coiled and clenched at Touma’s feet. Reality shredded with keening wails as a monstrous shadow clawed its way into the Firmament. Only then did the Serpent Tongue himself leap into action.

“Silmeria!” he called, stalking forth through fiery haze as the Disciple loomed taller and taller to his fore. “Angelus! Hiroyuki! Bind that darkness and hold it!”

Air cracked beneath whips forged of thunder. Stabbing blades of shadowy tendrils darted through underworld steam. Quicksilver pillars slammed into the tortured earth about him with automaton-like precision. Conflicting arcane energies flowed painful and viscous through his mind as together they fought against the rising darkness, layered upon one another like fields of fine silk.

The Disciple rent them asunder like so much flimsy linen, with no regard whatsoever for the concentration and effort that their creation had entailed.

The dar’el swept low into the furnace of flame and fear, her brandished sabre carving a fresh path through fog and fume. Light clashed against darkness, scattering shadow and silver alike in the shockwave of their impact, and into the precious moments bought by her selfless bravery the mind-mage advanced. One step, two steps, as primeval forces tore hungrily at his meagre physical form.

The Disciple shook Silmeria aside. Its bellowed fury scattered tempests of razor-sharp blood-hued leaves and effortlessly uprooted the ancient goldentrees that they had once called home.

The black iron club crashed head-first into the ground. With one last mighty heave, felt as wall-breaking tremors as far distant as Scara Brae, Kongorikishi’s physical aspect pulled itself bodily from the gaping maw in the heart of the Lindequalme. Its shadowy twin danced a dance of death at its feet, duelling the combined magics of Angelus and Hiroyuki with its blade of jagged darkness and rapidly overwhelming both turncoat and leper.

Touma planted his straw-sandaled feet in the churning mud, side-on to the enemy and braced a shoulder’s width apart.

Hunkered low, gnarled grime-stained fingers playing about the hilt of the sword at his waist, he waited. Strands of thick black hair played about his hawkish brow, fluttering in agitation. His nose and his mind both bled profusely at the excess of arcane affluent discharged into the smog-blanketed battleground, hellish brimstone mingling with the sharp taint of ozone. Kongorikishi’s physical aspect exchanged blows with Ginuvo faster than the eye could track, and its shadowy cousin batted Silmeria aside once more like so much unwanted litter.

The Serpent Tamer closed his eyes and concentrated, feeling their fates wavering on the hot sticky wind. Individual strands flickered in and out of existence, just beyond his reach. He had to wait, he had to be patient, until…

A clarion snarl of rage, uttered by Phillipe of all people, drowned beneath the rhythmic grinding of black iron upon Ginuvo’s serrated steel. Something heavy flashed past Touma’s head, fanning the flames with the whoosh of passing air. Silmeria’s broken form battered through a trio of dried trunks before driving a deep furrow into the mud, leaving Angelus and Hiroyuki alone once more in their struggle against the shadow aspect. Once again they had to give ground, inch by excruciating inch, their magics blistering and erupting in ineffectual splendour.

The Disciple towered now, both above and below the motionless swordsman. And still Touma waited, savouring the tension taut as any drum, the fear salty as any sweat.

Time dilated, tenuous and thick like treacle.

Celestial beauty rose behind him, her perfect masque set crooked and questioning upon her body battered and torn. Edged quills strewn in her path from wings spread wide for balance, her feathered robes shredded by the Disciple’s attentions, Silmeria flew forth again.

The wielder of a pearly grin flickered in and out behind cascades of fiery sparks, single-handedly matching his strength against the Disciple’s physical aspect. Musculature bulged beneath glistening ebony skin; Ginuvo the deathseeker was already dead, and knew it, and relished it.

Venerable yellow-green eyes glinted fiercely from amidst bushy white whiskers and puckered scars upon weathered skin. A thousand sky spirits swarmed about Phillipe’s foe with every precisely-measured flash of his delyn blade, but the exertions of the past day were starting to tell on his age.

Soiled bandages coiled in the mud, poised and ready to strike. A salvo of quicksilver beads took up position around the massive bulk of the shadow aspect’s foreleg, spawning between them a pane of arcane force that would have shorn a lesser adversary clean in two. But Kongorikishi didn’t even pause; the darkness flowed like a river around a dam, seamlessly reconnecting the amputated parts as it bore down upon Hiroyuki.

The raven-haired elf conducted his symphony of choreographed shadows, tidal waves of sheer night crashing one after another into the advancing Disciple. Seeking to deflect and misdirect, to expose and annoy, their probing did much to unveil the kaleidoscope of endless possibilities running across the back of their arcane sight. But Angelus could not buy him more than a few fractional seconds of time, precious ephemeral seconds passing through their fingertips like running water…

… until Touma spotted that single elusive golden strand in the sea of argent.

One faint hope. One slim chance.

The future of the world, gambled on a fluid roll of the dice.

And the pips come up…

Darksteel whispered seamlessly from its sheath. Engulfed in abject shadow, carving through haze and flame, an arm’s length of keen blade burnished by night.

It pulsated once mid-stroke. Fingers of dancing smoke and the reek of sulphurous rock blasted past his head. Eyes still closed, focused and intent on that elusive fate that might save them all, he tasted the tentative freshness as the winds changed direction.

Snake eyes!

Then it shattered.

Shards of black metal splintered into the vicinity, meteors carving through the night. Phillipe yowled in agony as one pierced his mail undercoat. A handful more drew blood from mud-soaked bandages and spider-silk robes. Touma felt heat across his face, missing his right eye by little more than a finger-width, and another half-dozen starbursts of pain across his torso and arms as the shrapnel drove deep. He staggered briefly before adrenaline surged to compensate.

He never noticed any of it. For the briefest of heartbeats disbelief and incomprehension clouded his aquiline features. He quashed it well beneath an animated flicker of irritation.

But it did not change the broken hilt he now gripped between whitened knuckles.

The Disciple’s presence swelled. It lashed aside both Angelus and Hiroyuki via sheer force of will alone, sending them sprawling into the swirling shadows. Silmeria checked her charge in front of Touma, shielding him from the worst of the outburst with wings folded before her.

The dust cleared. She, along with Ginuvo and Phillipe, no longer could be seen. Even the broken blood-laden boughs all around him seemed pale and drained. The mud beneath his feet churned alive as if seeking to swallow him whole, and the storm clouds overhead roiled in violent purple disgust. All his senses – time, smell, hearing, touch – slowly faded from his grasp.

Only the Disciple remained.

[Whispers of Abyssion]

Death, fierce and grimacing, loomed large in his calm mirror gaze. Imminent. Ominous. Inevitable.

The Disciple’s fuming breath tore at his robes, peeling them like rice paper from his skin. Its gaze, angry and coarse, bore into his mind like the touch of a molten brand, corpulent and corrupting. Still he stood tall, a whisper of a shadow against the fury of a solar flare.

If he asked anything of the uncaring laughter on the wind, it did not show upon the emotionless mask cast upon features suppressing a grim mirthless chuckle of their own. Deliberately he turned aside and spat into the smouldering cinders of the Dread Necromancer’s demesne.

The Disciple raised one meaty fist high into the flaming night. Heedless of the doom poised overhead, Touma simply folded his arms against his chest and met once more those unfathomably alien eyes.

Abruptly the towering behemoth’s attention arrested elsewhere. A grandiose silver crescent clove those pupils of fiery red in two, and told Touma all he needed to know.

“Talons of Telperion,” he sighed at last, sundering the overwhelming tension in masked relief. Dust settled like ash as he willed the last of his strength into agony-contorted limbs. “You know, it would have been a mighty shame if you’d missed your date, tardy as you take pride in being.”

“What can I say?” Akiyoshi Sanada grinned humourlessly as he brought his blade back to his side, matching the undercurrent of scathing scorn in the other man’s voice. “Given the size of the crap storms you tend to get involved in. I thought it wise to bring along a large enough umbrella.”

One pencil-thin eyebrow arched ever so politely, beneath the grime splattered upon Touma’s fine features. The forest around him literally swarmed with armoured elves, expressions of distaste hidden behind porcelain masks as they fanned out to surround their foe. The Disciple at the centre of their attention rose on its haunches as it surveyed their ranks. If any mere mortal could have described the look it wore on its faces, the word used might have been ‘bemused’, or perhaps, ‘indifferent’.

“And my. What a huge turd-roach you’ve dug up,” the samurai continued, mock cheer contrasting disdainfully with the snarl on his masked visage. Of scholarly indications he had few, but nobody who knew Akiyoshi Sanada considered him a fool. It didn’t take much more than half a functional mind to comprehend just how overwhelmingly insignificant the power he beheld made him feel, or just how much havoc it would wreak upon the war-torn Raiaeran homelands if it could not be stopped.

Havoc that Touma had no further intention of participating in.

“Wipe my bum for me then, will you?” Just the right touch of weary resignation turned the question into an order, and he steadied his faltering frame upon Akiyoshi’s sturdy iron bulwark to drive the point home. His tattered sleeves left a long trail of dirty grime on the resplendently faultless crimson.

Disgust deepened the lines of Akiyoshi’s features, barely visible beneath antlered helm and pitch-black lacquered mask.

“Cutting your losses? Running?” he growled dangerously, his voice a hollow sledgehammer of fury. “I should cut you down where you stand.”

“I tried.” Touma’s eyes burned in a rare flare of raw emotion, just as swiftly stifled. “Fault me for not succeeding if you must, but don’t you dare call me a coward.”

For long breathless seconds that neither could truly afford hard onyx bore into murky brown, plumbing their inscrutable depths as if reaching for a truth briefly unveiled and then lost again. Then Akiyoshi’s features rippled, in time with an unseen, unspoken signal. He ripped his stare from Touma’s haggard features, torn between equal measures disgust and resignation.

“Serpent,” he snarled, once again letting the war-mask convey his simmering anger. “Someday that silver tongue will bring doom upon you and yours. For good. And I swear that I for one will not mourn it.”

Exhaling sharply into the heady evening devastation, Akiyoshi cast his glare about him. Like bloody wounds gouged into flesh, the Disciple’s rampage had ravaged the corporeal realm: churned seeping mud and uprooted trees tossed about at whimsy, broken bodies and scattered pinion feathers lost amongst the remains of the carpet of fallen leaves. The Dread Necromancer’s corruption hung thick like stale fur upon the back of his tongue. But it paled in comparison to the sickly cloying honeysuckle sweetness that curdled as rotten treacle in his throat and sinuses, sending throbs of hot blood pulsing painfully through his head. The calm silence before the inevitably onrushing storm merely worsened the effect.

In the distance the sun sank unwillingly below the horizon, searing one last defiant ray upon the gleaming crimson of Akiyoshi’s armour. But the sinuous stain of mud left by Touma’s touch, cracked and hardened into permanence by the last of the day’s feeble warmth, blemished even this last blaze of glory.

Ahead, of course, awaited only the dark and the cold of what promised to be a long, long night.

“Go,” the warrior finished in the end, indicating the mess of the previous battle and the wounded remnants of Touma’s cadre. “Take them and go. Don’t show your face to me. Not until you clean away some of that crap you always carry around. Get down on your knees and thank me then.”

The gleaming silver of his oversized blade rose once more to the Stance of the Warrior. One steel-clad boot, then the other, braced for footing amidst the treacherous mulch. A whispered benediction carried like a breath of wind through the ruined clearing.

Then he broke to the attack. Alongside him went five whole companies of wanderers, and the combined might of their swords and their sorcery. Touma watched him go for only the briefest of moments, long enough to bid them farewell.

“Look… a dragon.”

Curtly then he turned his back on his erstwhile comrade. Silmeria fluttered to join him from the broken branches overhead, her wings matted with dried dirt and encrusted blood. Angelus materialised from the shadows on his next step, slowly and wearily dispelling the last of his protective enchantments from Touma’s person. Ginuvo’s massive bulk, broken and bruised in two dozen different places, awaited them where the trees stood tall again; over one shoulder lay Hiroyuki, over the other Phillipe.

None of them looked back at the slaughter.

[Mordelain]

Workshop complete (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?25850-United-We-Stand-Divided-We-Fall-Workshop).

Whispers of Abyssion receives 1239 experience and 250 gold.

[Mordelain]

Experience and gold added.