The Laws of Wizardry

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Greyspine's Laws of Wizardry

1. A Wizard must have a Hat.
2. All Wizards inevitably gain a staff.
3. A Wizard is only as good as his word.
   Addendum: Vendetta sworn is vendetta pursued at all costs.
4. A Wizard never stops thinking.
   Addendum: No, not even when he's doing that.
5. A Wizard can never truly go home.

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Ten years ago, a young Wizard looked up from a book read by campfire's light. His gaze followed the highest flickers of flame and fell solidly on the sagging gray hat of his scar-riddled mentor. He considered his words carefully -- a rarity even back then -- and brought himself to ask, "Why can't a Wizard go home?"

It was a long time before the older Wizard deigned to look at him. Longer still before he finally answered, "Pray to the Ethereal Sway that you never find out."

A false dawn came to Salvar, bringing with it the promise of warmth and better times.

But in the remote desolation of the Salvic tundra, so far from Knife's Edge that even the League States hardly had any presence there, winter's cold hand refused to loosen its grasp. The days were still unbearably short and the winds would still chill you to the bone. On better nights, the snowfall was just slow enough that you could camp out in a field and expect to be buried by only six or seven inches come morning. On worse nights, you wouldn't even dare to stop moving for more than a few seconds.

Life was wild and hard and unforgiving in the far north. Barbarian tribes, only sometimes human, still held sway over most of the area. The fauna out here could dwarf your average fruit stand in Knife's Edge, and that wasn't even accounting for the beasts that moved in groups. Plants became more and more unusual the further you went from civilization; green pine needles gave way to crystalline leaves that shimmered and steamed gently in the morning light. Far enough out and the forests seemed to be made almost entirely out of glass. Roads disappeared as even the ancient, rigid magicks supposedly meant to lend them permanence gave way to the endless persistence of nature.

But if you go far enough, you'd find that civilization still stood on the tip of old Father Salvar's jagged finger. At a point called Solomon's Wheel, everything came undone. Crystal pine stopped and ordinary wood took its place. The ground was clear, save for patches of thick grass and a few inordinately stubborn weeds. At the center of it all was a perfectly maintained circle of interconnecting roads, all of which were in turn centered on a spoked wheel nailed to the ground with a spear now topped by a statue of the Saint herself. Ghost lights danced around it, whispering things in an archaic form of Salvic that few living spoke, and fewer still dared to listen to.

Just within earshot of those whispers, echoing dimly in the early night, two sets of hooves clattered to a stop. They were accompanied by the crush of snow beneath oversized paws.

"This," said an Orc wearing a hooded cloak fashioned from a red wolf's hide and lined with dead men's skin. He rode a creature like a white tiger the size of a horse, its stripes and mane thick and its horns ten inches long and pock-marked from years of frontier living. "This is as far as we go together."

"Yes," said the Centaur in the middle of the trio, a hairy brute whose eyes were covered by a sash that was just thin enough to see lights blazing beneath it. It sported antlers like those of a moose, and its equine body was thicker and sturdier than any ordinary horse while its human body was bruised blue and black beneath a sparse layer of white. He nodded, the gesture such that his antlers dipped seven inches forward and three back. "We all part ways here."

"Well then," said the plucky and downright unlikely human riding beside them. "I guess it's been a pleasure, gentlemen." He shifted a bit atop the thickly furred ram he rode, then stuck out a hand that neither the Shaman or the Seer deigned to shake. "...one-sided then, I take it."

"The road goes ever on," said the Centaur. "Winding and weaving, its paths predictably unpredictable and its twists and turns without pause or pity. Our meeting will go unchronicled, Wizard Blueraven," and he turned, and Caden couldn't look away when the Centaur stuck a finger under his blindfold and lifted it just so. Head cocked to one side, and there was the terrible expectation of the whole world changing from just a few words...

...and nothing profound happened. The Centaur blinked and lowered the sash, then spoke, "Good-bye and good luck."

You'd never think something that big could move so quickly, corner so tightly or vanish so abruptly, but the Centaur did. Snow puffed up in his wake and he was gone in seconds; maybe into the crystal forest, maybe into the pine, and maybe somewhere else all together. Neither Caden nor the Orc could keep an eye on him long enough to say one way or any other.

"Centaurs," muttered the Shaman, adjusting his wolf's head hood to keep a tooth from his eye. "I've met Spirits and trickster godlings who're more straightforward than that bunch."

"And I've crossed swords with zombies that were less creepy," Caden replied in kind, shuddering as he said it. "Would've been nice if he at least told us why he was tagging along."

"Old proverb of the Wyrmfolk," the Shaman began, "Ask no questions of Centaurs, for the answers you get will be three: All of them true, all of them terrible. I try to avoid them when I can."

"Smarter than me," Caden mumbled. "Been running into the things since I left the mountains."

The Orc nodded. "Suppose you've been running into my kind too, eh?"

The Wizard looked over to the Shaman, still remembering the unlikely circumstances of their meeting. "No, Mabek, I can't say that I have. You are one of a kind, after all."

They stared at one another for a full minute.

Then they began to chortle like schoolboys who'd just gotten away with something terrifically innocent and equally perverse.

"It was good seeing you again," Caden said, and meant it. "My regards to your tribe." He pounded a fist across his chest.

"I'd say the same, but..." Mabek shook his head, then slammed a fist across his own chest. Caden could hear the impact at least four feet away. Loudly. "Fortune smiled to set us on the same path, even so shortly as it did and-"

"Oh, don't talk like that. It makes you sound like an Elf."

Silence.

"Ew."

"Exactly," Caden muttered.

"Well, on that brutal note..."

"Yes," said the Wizard. "Good-bye, Shaman Redhide."

"Kaio, Wizard Blueraven."

The tiger growled, Charger bleated, and both riders made haste from the wheel. Caden followed the northernmost road where the woods stayed green; Mabek took a turn to the northwest and disappeared from the road when the woods turned back to crystal.

The Village of Evernorth that Caden remembered was a quaint little place. Wide in terms of geography, but the population barely topped a thousand by the time he hit puberty -- and most of those were seasonal migrants attending classes at the alchemic schools that provided for so much of Evernorth's economy. Isolated as it was and surrounded by so much barren wilderness, Evernorth really was the perfect place to field test alchemic inventions. It also made for an excellent place to stick an academy for Clerical Wizards -- Aeromancers, mainly; the people who in better times kept Salvar from being one colossal iceblock. That the village had a disproportionately high population of people with the taint of magic didn't hurt either.

The Evernorth that Caden grew up in was a sprawling expanse of small houses dominated by a town square that included the mayor's office, a proper chapel that was merged with both the Clerical academic facilities and the Evernorth Weather Tower, a single tavern that tripled as an inn and as the hub of the village's marketplace, and a bunker that was mostly underground; the place where all the alchemists, regardless of scholastic affiliation, were required to store and test their (less explosive) materials. It was all very quaint with plenty of room for children to wade through the snow chucking iceballs at each other. There had been a few trees in those days, and Caden still fondly remembered casting his first thermal spells to burn a few stupidly sweet nothings into the base of one.

The Evernorth that Blueraven called home was a place that was cozy and perhaps even charming, in a rustic sort of way. The people were descended from a core of barbaric frontiersmen and religious pioneers, and it showed in everything from the slogans etched into the huge drills and saws that fishermen used to get through the ice to the vaguely religious sport of axe throwing that took place after morning services at the church. Even the priests -- the truly local ones -- wore animal hides over their clothes. Everyone knew each other by family name at the least, and there were always smiles to be swapped and stories to be told and...

"You have got to be striking kidding me."

...and tonight, Caden Law returned to find that the Evernorth of his boyhood no longer existed. From a hilltop on the edge of the forests, he studied its replacement with a mixture of disbelief, wonder, and empty horror.

There was frosted cobblestone in lieu of the hard-packed snow-and-dirt roads that Caden grew up with. There were two- and three-floor houses instead of the cabins that he remembered, and there were just so many of them now that you could no longer see any expanses of snow at all. Of the old town square, only the Weather Tower remained close to what he remembered -- and even that was only because it had been elevated to stand out above the rest of the cathedral it was now linked to. The mayor's office was replaced by a bona fide town hall, and there were at least three taverns that Caden could see from his vantage point, and the old bunker was nowhere in sight. In place of the temporary wooden stockades that had once served more as a property line than as a defense against outsiders, there was now a red brick wall standing twice as tall and wide enough for men to comfortably pass each other by on patrols. The whole town (city?) was lit by street-lantern, and there was nothing magical or alchemical about that light.

"What in the seven hells," Caden muttered again, still not quite processing any of it. Charger bleated and started forward of his own accord. The Wizard did nothing to stop him.

Later on, he was going to regret that.

"HALT!" came the expected cry from behind a layered oak and steel door on hinges that must've weighed more than Caden did. "Who goes there at this hour?"

He hesitated before lowering his arm, and then answered with a half-truth instead of an outright lie. It came easier that way, "A wanderer seeking respite!"

"What have you to offer the Township of Evernorth?" the guard demanded, and Caden finally got a look at the guy through a slot in the door. He had beady little eyes like a goblin, but none of the honest spite that Caden had come to associate with them. He was unfamiliar, but there were too many years on his face to be a child. He was an immigrant. An honest to Sway immigrant to the most remote place in civilized Salvar.

"It's a town now?" Caden asked before he could stop himself.

"Whaddaya mean it's a town now?" the guard huffed, his breath steaming and his eyes narrow. "Evernorth passed from Village to Township four years ago, when the population hit-ah, why am I telling you?"

"Good question," Caden admitted. "You could always let me in and we could discuss it over a nice warm cup of tea and some biscuits-"

"Biscuits and tea with a pointy-hatted fruitloop like you?" the guard snapped. "What kinda fool d'ya take me for?"

The kind I'm going to turn into a sheep if you don't open the damn door, Caden wisely did not say. "Would gold get the door open faster?" he asked instead. "I've been riding for three days and-"

"BRIBIN' A SILVY!" the guard screamed, his voice cracking mad. "What kinda...!" and the door flew open, revealing not one guard but four. The other three outsized Wrinkles McMeaneye by a fair margin, and all of them wore gleaming silver armor to accompany their winter clothes. They had the look of overcompensated guardsmen everywhere.

Caden just stared at them as they brandished their swords, and he tried very hard not to laugh. The sad part being that it wouldn't have even been a nervous laugh. He had literally been through too much to be intimidated that easily nowadays, and actually felt sorry enough to have to cover his mouth so they wouldn't see him smiling. "Oh Lady," he sighed. "This just keeps getting better and better."

"Surrender at once!" the first guard demanded, pointing his sword like he didn't actually know how to use it. The other three didn't seem much better, aside from the layers of extra muscle they had to compensate for so many missing braincells. "And maybe we'll let you live."

Charger bleated. The ram snorted steam and its fur bristled from head to toe. Caden patted the thing on the head with his free hand and replied, "You guys are just too cute. Do they actually pay you to do this or are you just volunteering?"

The guards turned red.

It was actually mildly impressive to look at.

"Okay," said Wrinkles. "Gut the pasty-skinned son of a-"

Ting ting ting ting, went a metal truncheon against the men's helms, and each one stopped moving. They didn't even breathe, and Caden actually had to do a double take before realizing that he had been so occupied with the false threat that he didn't notice the real one creeping up behind it.

And Caden had enough experience to know the real deal when he saw it.

The deal in question was a living, breathing slab of everything that a Salvic man was supposed to be: Tall and muscular, broadshouldered and pale like fine porcelain rather than excess paste, with hair that was golden blond and eyes that were dazzlingly blue. He had a jawline you could drive nails with and wore armor that was one polish short of sparkling, with his sword safely sheathed at his hip and a steel truncheon in his hand. The cold didn't even phase this one, and upon reflection why should it?

He was a native of Evernorth, after all.

Caden knew as much.

Because a few seconds later, before his saviour could so much as begin to chide Wrinkles for his job performance, the two of them locked eyes and Caden spoke first. Just one word: A name.

"Ogden?"

After a few more seconds, his brother finally replied in kind: "What the seventh hell are you doing back here?"

"Well," Caden eventually got around to saying, "This isn't exactly what I imagined my homecoming to be like."

"What did you expect?" Ogden shot back from the other side of some very thick, very cold iron bars. Ones inscribed with enough runes to cage demons, among other things. "You go missing however many years and you're still wanted for attempted murder of a Senior Clerical Wizard. Nevermind that you come back with military-grade weapons and immediately provoke the damn gatekeepers. Honestly, Caden..."

"...well, a hug wouldn't be bad. Maybe a Oh, Mom's doing just fine and she still makes the best fish-pies this side of Berevar! or perhaps a Little Cadence is all grown up now! or even Dad's actually got a sense of humor or something." Pause. Caden rubbed at his chin. "Does he?"

"No," Ogden replied without so much as a smirk. "Kind of hard to have a sense of humor when you've been dead three years."

It took Caden almost thirty seconds to actually register this statement. Too long to stop him from admitting, "I don't know, Og. I've met some pretty humorous dead folks lately." Click. "Oh." Nevermind that most of the laughing dead had been sadistic monsters about it. Ogden stared at him for a few seconds, disgust slowly but inevitably creeping onto his face. "It's a long story. Could you at least tell me what I've missed?"

"No," Ogden replied. "No, I think not. I'll be back for you in the morning."

He left without another word or the decency of a backwards glance. All Caden could think to shout after him was, "Keep an eye on my goat! He doesn't like-" A heavy metal door slammed shut at the end of the hall. Caden winced, and was alone. "Well...that could've gone better," he mumbled.

All things considered though, it could have been worse. Evernorth's jailhouse was apparently a brand new addition to the town. It stood not too far from the town guard's headquarters, elevated by almost ten feet on solid stone pillars. The whole thing was made out of brick and metal, barely any wood involved in its construction, and there were enough runes and wards etched in that magic was nearly useless to get in or out. It was the kind of building you could leave unguarded in an emergency, then come back later and find it exactly as you left it.

And the cells were at least better than some of the cages Caden had been subjected to over the past few months. He actually had a bed in this one, even if it was one of those half-hang-on-the-wall-by-chains deals with flimsy sheets and a dirty pillow and an open window that meant the temperature was going to fall below zero by close to triple digits before sunrise. There were bars visibly inset into the floor, walls and ceiling, and a bucket for waste. They had taken his weapons, his rod, his goat, his amenities; but they left him with his Hat, coat and clothes, and that would do.

Caden took a seat on the bed, clasped his hands together and cast some thermal magic to stay warm. It was a hassle with all of the anti-magic in play, but he managed.

"Nothing to do now but wait."

It bears mention that the Wizard Blueraven was born to a very, very large family -- even by frontier standards. Brayden and Essa Law had been a prolific marriage, with seven sons and three daughters. Caden was the youngest of the boys, and the only one with magical talent. His brothers were Aiden, Brenden, Hayden, Ogden, Dresden and Camden; all six of whom were icons of strapping Salvic manliness, and most of whom were already settling down and starting families of their own when Caden went rogue. His sisters were Eden, Jaiden and Cadence; all three of whom were blatantly magical and equally brilliant right from the get-go. He had at least four nieces and/or nephews. Probably a lot more.

It should come as no surprise that Caden had basically been raised by one of his brothers and said brother's now-wife. It should also come as little or no surprise that they and Ogden were the very first people Caden saw the next morning. Perhaps it might come as a surprise that the two of them were trailed by a mob of restless little boys and girls that had quintuplets stamped all over them, herded along by a slightly older girl with a broomstick that was missing its head and covered in Church-approved runic script.

Dresden Law was a very tall man, even compared to Ogden and Caden's other brothers. He was also downright burly, and wore a brimmed hat instead of the hood on his coat. He had a hammer on one hip and an icepick on the other and a great big bowie knife on his thigh, and despite pale skin and blond hair, the man looked dark and grim on his best days. His wife, Crina, was short and visibly pregnant even in the thick winter clothes that defined Evernortherners to anyone visiting them; her hair sported more gray than Caden remembered, and her face had more than a few lines to go with it, but she was still pretty in a tired sort of way.

Caden spent a few moments studying the lot of them, and one by one they returned the favor. The kids took the longest, if only because their shepherd was distracted.

"So," Dresden finally said. "How's the Hat wearing these days?"

Caden thought about it and said, "Heavy."

And just like that, but for Ogden's general air of having a ship's keel lodged up his ass, the tension literally fell out of the room. Dresden began to snicker, and Caden couldn't help but join in, and then Crina picked up on whatever unspoken joke passed between them and the shepherd girl did too and then all the little ones started laughing just because and it went from there. It took four or five minutes before the giggles died down to a gaggle of sighs and shaking heads, and then Ogden cleared his throat to say, "Bail is set at 175."

The unspoken part of that was, Pay it and get the hell out already.

Caden began to reach for the coinpurse in his coat, but Dresden already had one out. With the speed and precision of a man used to making hard choices with too much precision for his own good, he counted off the bail and handed it to Ogden in full. The older brother pulled out a ring of keys, opened the cell door and ushered Caden out. He didn't speak again until they were all outside, where he turned to the Wizard and said, "Trial date is set for next week. We're keeping your things to ensure that you don't run off on us again. Try to do so and the men have a kill-on-sight order that will be supported by the Clergy. Is that clear, Blueraven?"

Caden stared at him.

Gave a terse little smile.

Said simply, "Clear, Sergeant."

"Captain," Ogden replied smartly, then walked off.

Caden waited a minute or so before looking at his other brother and asking, "What crawled up there and died?"

"A lot," Dresden answered. "But it can wait...you've obviously come a long way, and there's much to talk about..."

"...and I owe you for bail," Caden pointed out.

"That too."

He fell in-step with his brother's family, and together they left the jailhouse behind.

The walk through Evernorth was almost as much of a shock as being arrested by his own brother. Not only were the streets really cobbled, but there were honest-to-Denebriel sidewalks and traffic signs everywhere. Horse-drawn carts pounded by every so often, and there was a shop for something or other on every corner. Caden saw a few actual restaurants in his home town and it felt like being back in Knife's Edge for the very first time; a place where you could dine out of your home and probably had the money to do so.

"The Church got bigger," Caden noted as they passed it by.

"Among other things," Crina said. "Sway-botherers just keep getting louder and louder every week. Holy war this and For Saint, not Sovereign that. Even the local Aeromancers are sick of them."

"The local Aeromancers are them," said the girl with the broomstick.

"Exactly," Crina and Dresden both replied, utterly level as they said it.

"Festive," Caden mumbled. "So what happened with Ogden?"

"Well, you see how big the place's gotten since you left," Dresden said with a wave of one arm to indicate it. They passed a barber shop and a tavern and what appeared, more or less, to be a very high-end house of ill repute. "We actually have a crime rate now. And it can't be pawned off on outsiders since the wall went up. Except for the missionaries, merchants and freetraders, but nobody in their right minds will go after that bunch even when they should. Og started getting jaded pretty quickly. Then there was some...civil unrest a few months back," Dresden paused as they entered town square.

Even that was bigger than Caden remembered. The fountain at its center, showcasing Ethereal Solomon with his rapier held high and his Tome tucked under the other arm, was a new addition.

So were the gallows.

Which still had a few bodies in them.

"Og and his boys had to crack down hard to put a stop to it. There were reprisals. Og's house was set on fire. His wife and two of his kids didn't make it out, and the third was so wounded that Sway's Mercy had to be administered before he could even get there to say good-bye. They caught the perpetrators, of course. Heard the torture rack in the Church's basement broke getting confessions out of them. You can guess the rest."

Caden winced. None of the children or Crina said anything.

"But besides that, growth's been pretty good for all of us. Bren actually opened his own business in the early days. Now he supplies most of the meat to the restaurants on the southside. Hay teaches at an alchemy school not too far from here, Cam's part of a hunting company, and Aiden's actually gone into politics."

"Just the mayor's aide for now," Crina pointed out.

"It's a start," Dresden replied.

"How're the sisters?" Caden asked.

"Eden's off on Mission somewhere, Jaiden's joined the Witch-Hunters-" Caden rolled his eyes and Dresden nodded stiffly. "I know, right? And Cadence is actually handling the local Weather," he pointed to the tower as they passed, just in time to catch sight of a small violet cloud swirling around the lightning rod on top. "She's also handling some of the weekend schools, I believe."

"Auntie Weatheraxe taught me how to carve runes," said the girl with the broomstick, holding it for show. Caden examined them with a perplexed look.

"Weatheraxe?" he asked. "Nicely done, by the way." The girl beamed. "My sweet little sister's Sorcerous Name is Weatheraxe?" he asked again, blinked twice and then asked the little girl, "What's your name by the way?"

"I don't have one yet..."

"...no, no, your name," Caden said, trying to pronounce a lower-case letter in a whole sentence of them. "The one Mummy and Daddy gave you."

"Oh! Lucretia," she said, "Lucretia Lexia Lux Law!"

Caden straightened up and looked at his brother and Crina. Both of them shrugged. "Could be worse," he admitted. "Anybody ever tell you your oldest uncle's full name? Aiden Donal Orwell Rice Armand Lewis Law."

Lucretia stared at him. So did her little brothers and sisters.

"You forgot one," Dresden pointed out. "I think."

"Yes, well," Caden shrugged. That was the end of that conversation, and the walk across Evernorth resumed in earnest. Each of the children introduced themselves sooner or later -- most of the mob did it all at once -- and there were a few familiar and not-quite-hostile(-yet) faces to be seen about the place. One thing that stood out, and Caden had to comment on it sooner or later, was how cosmopolitan the town had become.

"Think I've spotted a few Elves, at least three or four Dwarves...and was that an actual Hobgoblin back there?" he asked, staring without shame. "I know we've always been too far out to be as militantly racist as the rest of the country -- that's why Greyspine was allowed to wander and keep the peace with all the locals -- but...wow. I didn't think I'd ever live to see that kind of progress."

Crina and Dresden shared a Significant Look; the kind that lets people converse in silence without any special powers whatsoever. It was one of those things developed through long years of marriage, including the parts where they had to discuss things as complex as alchemic physics while keeping the babies asleep.

"That's subjective at best," Dresden said.

"To...?"

Dresden shrugged. "The inhumans came in with the first few surges of growth, not long after you left. Tyr's Dwarves, as they call themselves, and then some others. Elves mostly, Dark and Drow and High. A Hobgoblin family that converted to the Sway just to get through the gates, and Og and the Church were both too perplexed to kill them anyway. Think we might even have a few Wyrmies running around..." Another shrug. "They mostly keep to themselves in a place called Inhuton."

Unspoken but still very audible: And we're all happier for it.

Caden said nothing.

"So," Crina said. "What've you been doing all this time?"

It is at this point that we take our leave of the Laws, if only for the time it takes Caden to come up with enough half-truths and flat-out lies to cover his involvement in the war, the price on his head, and the awful reality of his using Necromancy to survive the worst of it.

Rather than watch the Wizard squirm, we're going to leave Evernorth all together. Gather yourself up now, and don't forget to bring a good winter coat. An umbrella may or may not be advisable.

Out of the Laws' kitchen window, fashioned from the thickest glass you can see through. One last look would reveal the Wizard sitting at his brother's table, dining on a Salvic meat-pie concoction while being eavesdropped by his niece. Past that and you'll find yourself standing in the Laws' back yard, which is an actual yard and therefore a rarity among the relatively cramped confines of their neighborhood. No playground equipment or tree forts, but plenty of decapitated snowmen and battle lines for snowball warfare. There's a well trodden path between the Laws' house and their immediate neighbours, leading to the cobbled streets and from there it's a straight shot to town square.

Hang a left.

Straight for three blocks, then a right. Another left at the next turn and then keep going to the gates, where Ogden Law was overseeing the nightly closing of Evernorth's doors, an iron cage-lantern in one hand and his truncheon in the other. It takes three men to close each one, and all four of the night shift to slam the lock into place. Just past that and the cobbles continue for about seven or eight yards -- then it's just hard-packed snow until even that fades.

And it will fade, where we're going.

Back up the hill to the forests of pine, and deep enough in that they transition to forests of crystal. Needle by needle, branch by branch; until the jump from one to the other is too natural to even notice. Until finally, hoofprints in the snow. It's a short trail, blinking in and out at random, but it eventually leads to where we want to be -- to who we want to see.

The Centaur stood alone now, the uncontested master of all that he Saw with eyes granted by things beyond the Church's authority. Bowed low to the ground at the moment, his sash lowered all the way to his neck as he examined a sigil sunken into the snow. It resembled a pair of wavy blades to either side of a serpentine eye; the beginning of some new path that had shaded the Wizard's some miles and a day or so back. The impression and the color differentials were so faint that the Centaur almost missed them entirely.

Fairy lights danced and whispered about him as he reached out, power burning at the tip of a finger. The Centaur moved to undo whatever magic had been Worked here; to erase whatever path would be walked from this place...

...and he barely had enough time to register that something was wrong before he exploded.

There is no pretty, artistic way of putting it. The Centaur was there one second and then he was a cloud of blood and guts and gore the next. Fully intact chunks were raining down for the next minute or so, including broken antlers and a severed arm that broke backwards at the elbow. One of his ribs stabbed into a crystal tree and left cracks in from top to bottom, and that was before the bone caught fire and collapsed to black ash on the ground. The most intact segment was the hind end of the Centaur's equine body, standing almost comically upright until the smoke cleared and the whole thing collapsed in a half-cooked pile in the snow.

In the Centaur's place stood a draconic humanoid; thin and still holding the exact same sword that had been in his hands so many months earlier. He was frozen in place for a while as the memories flashed through his thoughts: Of a Wizard, scrawny and pale and blond, outwitting him in the basement-shop of an arcane merchant. He remembered reagents collapsing into a fire, and he remembered laughing in despair as the door -- the only way in or out -- was slammed shut before he could get to it.

He remembered, this Wyrmfolk did, the brutal feel of magic fires licking the scales from his bones and charring his fingers off in one exquisite instant that dragged on forever.

And then there had been blackness.

And then there was this.

Back in Dendrestok, Anton Wyrmtongue had laughed in terror.

Tonight in the forests near Evernorth, he just laughed with relief and said to himself, "It worked. It actually worked." A pause as he looked around, surveying the havoc caused by the Centaur's sudden departure. That wasn't part of the plan, but he wasn't complaining either. All the blood was already starting to turn silver, and the Centaur's corpse was beginning to rot from meat to ashen wood. Only the head remained unchanged, though the light was starting to fade from its eyes.

"I suppose I probably owe you my thanks," Anton admitted, picking the Centaur's head up by one tattered ear. "Well done, whoever you are. Rest in peace." He threw the head over one shoulder and left it at that. It only belatedly occurred to Anton that he had missed out on a perfectly viable chance to say rest in pieces, but it was a moot point by then anyway.

"...and finally, after all that, I made it here," Caden finished, tactfully omitting, glossing over, or outright lying about too many details to sleep easy at night. Not that he'd slept very well since his time in Raiaera anyway; if it wasn't catnaps on the road, it was being jarred awake by ambushes, being forced to sleep in cages, or having night terrors about everything from the unliving dead to a sultry grin and the pin-prick of initials being carved into his neck. The strain was starting to show by now. Bags under his eyes. Not very heavy yet, but give them time. "Figured I'd come home...take a break from all the fighting. Settle some of my old scores for the better, you know. It's true what they say, Dresden. Swaying Saints, it's true. Nothing focuses the mind quite like death."

At this point, Caden stopped and took a sip of tea. Real tea. Crina's home blend; the kind of stuff that was an acquired taste because lesser palettes would be overwhelmed by the number of herbs and spices that went into it, nevermind the preparation and serving and all the little tricks that turned into a sensory overload for the mouth. He hadn't realized how much he missed it.

"The things I've seen," he said, shook his head and left it at that.

The story had taken him around an hour, give or take all the interruptions and time spent improvising and the effort put into keeping everything consistent. He started his journey outside Salvar as part of an adventuring company (true; Caden was talked into joining Patton Ventures by a senior crewman), left when the company's ethics went sour (lie; Caden left when they went into an ancient Coronian warlord's tomb and half the company died). Jumped through a dozen more companies in the same way (half-true; he didn't join so much as he was alternately pressganged, held hostage and/or bribed for expertise, sometimes all at once; it never ended well). Travelled the world (half-true; Caden went all over the Known World but he didn't go to Kebiras until much later). Wound up in Scara Brae, then hopped a boat to Raiaera (stupid bird).

He was conscripted into the defense forces at Eluriand (true; Caden left out the bit about being chucked through a door and almost set on fire). He took part in the defense directly (true; Caden left out the parts about seeing 'friends' die, in part because they were Elves and because there were still children at the time). He was dragged off before the end (almost half-true; Caden was there until the end, and that was after being tortured near-death, among other things). He fought alongside retreating forces until being scattered near a coastal village (lie; Dresden and Crina didn't need to know the truth there, and Caden didn't dare speak of it anyway). He took a horse and made good his escape into the woodlands (half-truth), just in time to witness the Scourging of Tembrethnil (lie; Caden caused the Scourging himself).

He left out the events at Borse-Ahyarkham. Caden didn't want to talk about that. Not now, maybe not ever.

He still saw the bodies in the church sometimes, in dreams.

Why didn't they just leave when they thought I was dead?

Still heard the mothers crying.

There was nothing I could have done for them!

Still felt stones pelting off his back and couldn't answer the accusations levied against him.

...

Still tasted death's sweet, cold embrace, and could not let himself admit that he enjoyed it.

Ididn'tIdidn'tIdidn't...

He never mentioned the price on his head.

"More important than all my misadventures," Caden eventually said, once he'd put his Hat on the table and the children had been put to bed and Dresden and Crina listened intently in their night clothes: Plaid gowns. Matching. Caden wisely did not comment. "How'd sweet little Cadie get a Name like Weatheraxe?"

"To make a long story short," Dresden began, grinning in a less-than-thrilled sort of way, "She bested a Wyrmfolk Chieftain in open combat on the plains of Berevar. Came back wielding the pagan freak's axe and used it to stop a rampaging troll with a tornado of lightning and ice."

Caden took a moment to process this.

He couldn't. "Say again?" Dresden repeated the story, twice.

Cadence Law, for reference, had always been the runt of the litter. She was the shortest of the daughters, barely topping five foot five in heels, and even then you'd have to squint a little to be sure. She was a borderline waif, just that little bit too husky to make it all the way to anorexic. Long light blonde hair, deep blue eyes and skin that was just about as pale as snow. Her smile always glittered like diamonds and her magic, what little Caden had seen of it, was brilliantly benign. Clear skies and divination. Not much offense. And she wore dresses and she was just so girly...

"Brought the head back too, I might add. Threw it at the troll and everything."

The mental image cracked a little bit.

"Conjured up the tornado from a war-prayer," Crina said, "I was there. Her Voice bellows, Caden..."

Cracked a liiiiittle bit more.

"When it was all over with, she went back into the Church and kicked the head-priest aside. Lead one of the finest masses I've ever seen."

Shattered completely. The Cadence that he had known never really put much stock into all the clerical nonsense she as being forcefed. That had been an act to please Mother and Father. Now...

"Weatheraxe, they Named her. She's taken to it pretty well. Almost as cranky these days as old Greyspine."

"Swaying Saints," Caden muttered, then took another sip of his tea and rested his face in one hand. "Blink and the whole world changes."

Crina and Dresden shared another of those Significant Looks. She nodded harder. Dresden cleared his throat in surrender. "Yes. Well. Funny you should mention that..."

Caden stayed the night with his brother and sister-in-law, more because Dresden casually threatened to knife him in the spleen than because he actually wanted to. He was up early and expected as much; Caden was a Wizard who had been far and wide and knew much that dear ol' Auntie Weatheraxe either did not, would not, or could not share. Lucretia wanted to learn and that was that.

"Alright," he muttered from the living room floor as she plucked the Hat's brim up from his face for the third time in a row. "Alright, alright. I'll teach you something. Go away."

"No. Ask nicer." Because nyeh, bird-brain.

"Alright, Lucretia. I'll teach you something this morning. One hour in the field, hard practice, same way I was taught." He sat up. Tried to remember some of the extreme basics that had driven his early days as a Wizard's apprentice. "Which means you'll need to be in proper uniform. Pointy Hat included. Now get going," shove, shove.

Bubbly Okay!

Face into palm, grumbling. Bounce, bounce, away!

"I don't know how I keep getting myself into this crap," he mumbled once the little girl was safely out of earshot, then stood up and stretched away pains that shouldn't have come until his mid-sixties. War is brutal. He didn't bother waiting for her either. Caden went out into the back yard of the Law family household, found a decent enough stump and dusted the snow off before taking a seat.

Then he waited.

And waited.

And waited.

(It was actually only five or six minutes, but the Wizard Blueraven had never been known for his patience.)

Eventually, he reached up into his Hat, pulled out a heavy looking book and a cheap pencil to mismatch. Started writing. Didn't stop for a while. Among the more pertinent bits of thought that found their way onto paper was this.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Blueraven's Grimoire, Diary Section

Evernorth has changed. My father, Brayden Law, is dead. My little sister has apparently become an axe-crazed Sway-botherer. Of my older brothers, one has become even more jaded and bitter than I; the other is living a dream that I feel like I'm stomping all over just by being here.

I can't shake the feeling that something bad is going to happen. Or that it's already happened in part. Looking back on it now, I think I may have felt this way ever since I first set foot back in Salvar. It doesn't help that I've been hounded almost every step of the way by...

Gods.

Who haven't I made enemies with now?

The nightmares have stopped at least. Or perhaps they've just gotten less coherent. I didn't die in my sleep last night. Or come back from the dead to kill those I care for. All I remember is a white-covered street, her voice, and a name: Justina. Good to know I'm still at least a bit of a sap. I think at this point, I've seen too much real evil and coldbloodedness to think I'm a bad person anymore. Or to want to be one.

I guess I just want what Tancred showed me back when I visited Scara Brae...

---

The notes go on, of course, but the important bits end there. Just as well. Caden only managed to get another page before his writing broke down into magical theorem and then he was treated to a poke on the shoulder that almost triggered combat reflexes (standupstandupstandupJUMPAWAYwhere'saweaponCASTASP ELL), but thankfully stopped just short.

He looked up from the Grimoire and affected a smile that could've been real or not. Even Caden couldn't tell this time. Playing the role of Favorite Uncle was wholly new and unusual to him; all the nephews and nieces he knew before the past two days had only been toddlers at the time.

Now he was confronted with a proper Wizard Apprentice wearing clothes that were, for want of a better word, adorably similar to his own: A long threadbare coat with plaid patches scattered about at random, along with a suitably Pointed Hat (even if the tip sagged ridiculously). The difference came in the form of a thick red scarf and the rune-scribed broomstick. And everything was pink.

Pink.

Am I really having to fake this? Blueraven thought of his own smile, and then chuckled dimly. At what, even he couldn't say.

"Apprentice Law, reporting!" Lucretia declared with a clockwork salute.

Caden pointedly fought off the urge to groan. He had been like that too, once. (It had been an overdramatized act to piss off his tutors, but that was beside the point.)

"Okay," he said, and then tried to think of something nonlethal to teach her. (Tried not to be disturbed by how long it took.) "Have you been taught any Evocation yet?"

"...what's that?"

It goes without saying that what followed this question was one of the single longest hours of Caden Law's life. Pity it didn't last.

It's an ethnic ghetto, was the very first thing Caden thought upon arriving at Inhuton. And he was absolutely right, for a given value of right. Inhuton was a small-ish section of Evernorth that was as glitzy on the street side as it was shabby everywhere else. The people were different from the city's norm; they weren't variations of what passed for Salvic humanity. Almost none of them had the pale skin, the brown or blond hair, the blue or green eyes. Some of them didn't even have eyes for that matter. Hair was optional on a good number. Pale skin was an increasingly rare commodity the further Caden went past Inhuton's invisibly defined borders.

The only thing that really marked Inhuton was Inhuton. It was nothing like the city it occupied. It was as different from Evernorth proper as a determined anthill was from grass.

Shops lined the sidewalks, along with the occasional vending stand that somehow managed to stay in business despite the rancid conditions of the place. Most of the buildings were mixed brick and wood, and whatever side faced the street was always neatest. Some of the buildings sported signs of alchemically glowing lights and shapes, and a few of those could hardly be Church-approved. There was a strange uniformity to it all. The same couldn't be said of the people roaming the streets: They were as cosmopolitan as any crowd he had ever observed in Scara Brae or Corone, if not more so. Wyrmfolk stalked by in gangs, bearing Brood markers that would've had them at war anywhere else. Tyrant Dwarves conversed openly and equally with Drow, and a whole littler of Hobgoblins went streaking (literally) through the street at one point. Caden even passed a cafe where a High Elf, Dark Elf and Drow were all playing a certifiably human card game over a hookah and a pint of something steamy.

The only things binding these people together were unity in poverty and opposition.

And the further along he went, the more Caden noticed something strange. It wasn't that this motley coalition of abhumans and inhumans and outright freaks of nature regarded him with enough disinterest to imply that he was one of them.

It was that Inhuton was a lot bigger inside than it was outside.

No way in Hells they could cram this much into the few blocks it takes up outside, he thought, and almost immediately found out why.

There was a tower at the heart of Inhuton. A mile high and shaped like a spear or arrow orbited by emerald spheres and halos of iron chain links thicker than a human body. Sigils writ large in flowing spirals up and down the height of the building, and there was no obvious way in or out but for a circle painstakingly carved into the air between its base and the sidewalk. The whole thing smoked a faint eldritch green towards its zenith, and Caden could swear the clouds were shaped to resemble sigils of spatial distortion.

"Ah," Caden said, then carefully adjusted his glasses to make sure of what he was seeing.

Yep.

The tower was still there.

"Well," Caden said, then considered the situation carefully. It reminded him of the Evernorth he had seen in that twisted future of N'Thayn'sal, up to and including the cheap masonry and shacks that surrounded it. Which only made sense: Nobody would really want to live near this thing if they could help it. The buildings surrounding it were probably little more than urban stuffing, and most of them likely served some foul purpose of their own: Sacrificial altars the size of a Church hidden away in structures barely bigger than an outhouse; arcane armories ready and waiting and hating for the day when the ruse was finally over and their creators could unleash them at will.

"There's something you don't see every day," he said to himself. He was not, however, the only one listening.

"Only if you don't live here," said a voice that was younger than it had any right to be; thirty-something going on a thousand, and high enough to come straight from the back of the nose. "And you, Wizard, do not live here."

Blueraven's rod, sword and bowie were gone, but Ogden's people had left him his Hat and a Wizard who isn't a shifty bastard will not be a Wizard for long. Caden had stowed his wand in the Hat, and he called it out now with a flick of the wrist. The Hat jolted to one side of his head, he turned hard and his hands came up clasping the wand like a sword. Magic was already buzzing around his hands like a bee-hive made out of lightning -- but he didn't release it.

He just stared.

"Do I know you?"

Perfect, gleaming white teeth were bared to him in a smile that would've made any mortal painter weep. "Not here, not now," said their owner, whose very aura shone like gold andwhose eyes blazed like miniature teal stars. "But maybe somewhen and somewhere else. Do I look familiar, Wizard Blueraven?"

"Yes."

"As I should," spoke the High Elf, who dressed in robes of white and gold over a tight scarlet suit, and who bore a sword that was awfully familiar in the most literal sense. "My name is Raun Yenuial; Forefather of Aldinar, Eledier, and Vara; Forefather as well to the Diadem Fingolfin, though his line chafes to acknowledge it," he declared, and the resemblance was strong enough to back it up on all fronts. Aside from his glowing eyes, Aldinar's brow and Eledier's ears, the Elf could've passed himself off as Findelfin. And his surname even matched up to the alias that the lost General had used in the darkened future of N'Thayn'sal. The only thing that tainted the glamour was...

"You're a Warlock," Caden said, which was reason enough to keep the spell aimed squarely at Raun's face.

"The proper term is Warlocked Seer," Raun replied with a faintly amused smile. "I went too far on the Path, Wizard, and Saw the truth that my Starlit Gods did not want me to know. I broke my oaths to them and found new ones, and new bonds to go with them. I am the master of this Domain, for as long as I may cling to it. My disciples are many. You are not, and never will be, one of them. So tell me," he began to draw the sword, its blade colored icy blue with red sigils, just as Caden knew it would be. "Why should I let you live, knowing what you have seen and where your loyalties lie."

Because I have none, a smarter person would've said.

Caden was too afraid to be smart. So he just let fly with a bolt of lightning at what was effectively point blank. The spell arced tightly and reduced snow to boiling water with its passage, and then it hit a swinging dehlar blade and split in half. The leftovers veered wildly off any kind of course, torching lines into the street and setting fire to a nearby shack in the process. Blueraven immediately tried to step back -- gain distance, gain the high ground, gain anything he could...

...and there Raun was, holding Caden's wand-hand at the wrist and bracing his sword's edge just millimeters from the Wizard's throat.

It was the most sobering defeat Blueraven had experienced since his time in Raiaera. Simply because there was absolutely nothing he could do. His mind siezed up and his body wouldn't move and it was all he could do to keep breathing while his eyes locked onto a point six inches higher than one of the nearby buildings. The entire time, Raun stood calmly by. He still wore that same little smile, utterly unphased by anything as he answered his own question.

"You know what this is, don't you? A Magicide Blade. Enchanted dehlar, bane to any spellcaster no matter his preparedness." The edge came close enough to split one of the hairs on Caden's neck. He finally looked down to meet Raun's Seering eyes. "Why should I let you live, Wizard? Because there's only one path in all of destiny where I am allowed to kill you."

"And that is?" Caden finally asked. Just speaking felt like choking on bits of gravel.

"If you do not swear to keep silent what you've seen here, I will kill you. Simple, is it not?"

"I hate the way you people talk," Blueraven finally chortled. The alternative would've been to wet himself in abject terror and disgust.

"You're going to hate us a lot more when you get to the other side of Inhuton," Raun said, almost sadly. "But you will understand that soon enough. Now swear it."

For a moment, Caden closed his eyes and seriously considered not doing it. To give his word here and now meant that at least one aspect of N'Thayn'sal was probably guaranteed. Evernorth would someday collapse; Warlocked in the shadows of mile-high towers, its people living day-to-day by the whims of their arcane overlords.

...but if he didn't, Blueraven reasoned. If he didn't.

One apocalypse or a thousand?

The reaper queen smiled in his nightmares. There were bodies burning on the moons. The stars were going out. Nations had been reduced to bowls of blood and corpses, and the dead walked in agony against the living.

And a girl who might have been his daughter grew up to fight the war that he was never there for. And her mother, who might have been his wife, grew ragged and hopeless and fought to her grave.

Caden grit his teeth and Said...

"I swear by my own Name that I will not reveal this place to anyone who doesn't already know."

"Not enough," said the Elf.

"...and to never raise magic against you or your Disciples."

Raun smiled again. "That will do."

The blade pulled away from Caden's throat. Raun held his wrist a few seconds longer, then let go and sheathed his sword. The Elf turned and started to walk away.

Stopped at the corner of the nearest street. Looked back and regarded the petrified Wizard with a level gaze as children mobbed by; all Wyrm and Elves and a Dwarf or five.

"Suffer well, Wizard Blueraven," he Said, his Voice heavier and more electric than anything Caden had heard in his life. "Your journey awaits on the other side of my Domain. We will meet again."

Caden didn't wait for the Warlock to tell him anything else.

He ran away.

Inhuton blurred. Caden ran so hard and so fast that his legs felt empty and it burned just to breathe; until he tasted blood in his throat and there was a slow-freezing trail of snot on his upper lip. Nobody deigned to notice him as he passed. It was like they were used to seeing this sort of thing. He wasn't one of them. He never would be. They knew it and so did he.

The Wizard Blueraven was just passing through.

"How?" he raggedly asked himself at every other stride. When there was enough air in his lungs to form an actual sentence it became, "How is he hidden right there?"

The mechanics of it were simple enough: Just standard spatial distortion magic with some illusory spellcasting. But even with that, all it should've taken to have the local Clergy coming down on the place was a patrol through Inhuton by the police, or even just a Swaying Priest coming to look for converts, or even a Wizard looking to buy something barely legal for illegal prices. The Weather-Magi should've been able to smell the eldritch smoke coming off the tower on the wind.

Why didn't anyone know?

"I've got to find some way to circumvent the Word," Caden decided out loud, and almost immediately regretted it. Pain sparked off from the center of his skull to six inches past his eyes and ears; lightning blue wisps that burned and were gone so quickly they could only be seen in groups. He staggered. Couldn't quite bring himself to scream. Made it a few more steps and finally fell to his knees, feeling an emptiness in his stomach that reminded him of the chill that came with Necromancy.

A Wizard is only as good as his Word. Breaking a promise is tricky business, and it's hardly ever something you can consciously plan in advance.

Caden knelt there for a minute, then forced himself to stand against a street lamp. In the haze that followed, it finally registered that he was on the edge of Inhuton. He could tell because the urban sprawl was starting to give way to an oddly pleasant slice of tundra suburbia. The sign he leaned against marked an actual neighborhood, with houses and yards and fences and a clearly marked street that lead all the way back to Evernorth proper. Caden tucked his wand into a coat sleeve and stuffed his hands in his pockets. It didn't stop the shaking, but at least passers-by couldn't see it. He started walking again.

Stopped a few houses later at the sound of a voice that was as familiar as it wasn't. Older now than it had been, in spirit and in maturity if not in years. The sultry feel of it had been replaced by something gentle and sweet. The accent had changed a little; evolved with travel the way speech does.

A glance to the left turned into a blank stare. There were a million images dancing behind it, and not a damn one of them matched the reality of what the Wizard Blueraven saw.

Gone were the Akashiman-styled pants and the trimmed kimono shirt; none of the exposed midriff that caught his eye in the old days. No longer was her throat bare as if to challenge an attacker or seducer; there was a white scarf now. She actually wore a dress now, along with a heavy coat. Her hair wasn't stark white anymore either; just a black that actually matched her eyebrows. Her face was still all high cheekbones and perfect chin, bedroom eyes if you knew where to look, and her lips were as full as they'd ever been. Whatever weight she had gained in the past years, it looked good on her. Like it belonged there.

Stories practically hung in the air around her. Music thrummed in every laugh.

And a little girl with bright blonde hair ran circles around her.

Caden tried to say her name, but all he could get was a V that sounded more like a stuttering F. Listen closely though, and you might just hear the sound of a Wizard's wretched heart breaking into a million pieces.

Especially when the other shoe dropped as a rich, deep voice called from down the street, "Veshua! Justina!"

Caden looked to the source and saw an Elven man. If not for the pointed ears and the perfectly trimmed beard, he could've been Fingolfin. A few seconds later, the little girl ran up to him with shouts of Daddy! and Caden saw that her ears were pointed too. Everything didn't click into place so much as it all collapsed and the rubble just happened to fit together. A few seconds later, he heard Veshua identifying the man alternately as Nildinar and Husband and Love.

Something in the back of Caden's brain basically shut down at that point, and it's just as well. He looked away in time to miss it when his reason for living shared a kiss with what was very probably the son of a man who had just sworn him to inaction at swordpoint. He didn't run away this time.

He just walked, unnoticed by the happy little family that -- in some other time and place -- might have been his.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Greyspine's Laws of Wizardry

1. A Wizard must have a Hat.
2. All Wizards inevitably gain a staff.
3. A Wizard is only as good as his word.
   Addendum: Vendetta sworn is vendetta pursued at all costs.
4. A Wizard never stops thinking.
   Addendum: No, not even when he's doing that.
5. A Wizard can never truly go home.

---

Some hours later, Caden sat down on a bench outside of a tavern in what passed for uptown Evernorth. He took out his Grimoire, opened it to a random page and carefully rewrote Rule #5. When he was done, he stared at the page for a few minutes and then wrote one sentence.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Blueraven's Grimoire

I think I understand now.

---

Twenty years ago, a young apprentice watched a duel between magi; Wizard against Warlock, human against wyrm, man against man. He was more naive back then, if you could call it that. His initiate's robes were still clean enough to wear in public without arrousing suspicion. His dagger wasn't quite stinking at the hilt from dried-in bloodstains. He only wore one ring, and he hadn't quite gotten the hang of speaking with his true Voice.

He was a murderer even then, mind you. But he was a curious one, looking up to his master with a sense of envy at the scope of the man's knowledge. "Why are they fighting?" he asked.

It was a long time before the older Warlock deigned to look at him. Long enough for the duel to end when he finally said, "You'll know someday."

His name is Anton Wyrmtongue, actually Icetongue but there are reasons for that. Physically speaking, he's a thinly built Wyrmian man of a little more than six feet, not counting the extra inches granted by his draconic crest. Chest's a bit broad for someone of his physique, and so are the shoulders. His skin is scaly and mostly purple with pale blue for the soft bits like palms or the underside of the jaw. Four fingers on each hand, probably three toes on each foot. No tail. Orange eyes with slit-pupils that tint green in the proper lighting. Speaks with what you might label an Atlantic English accent and a very deep voice, to say nothing of the magic Voice he gained around puberty. Anton is generally a man of fashion when possible, but now he's been reduced to a red robe with a black mantle, tight black suit underneath and thick boots that were, notably, not made from human skin.

Still bears a sword in those robes, among other things.

He hails from a future called N'Thayn'sal; a place where everything that could possibly go wrong in the world of Althanas did. Usually in the worst way you can think of, and sometimes even worse than that. He was a heavy-hitter and a power-player back then, in that dark and dreary place. A Warlock Lord native to Evernorth and the broader regions of Berevar and Sulgore's Axe, specialized in all things Infernal and combative. Hit close to the top of the hierarchy by virtue of slitting plenty of throats and tearing out even more souls. Had a whole coven of minions to his name back then -- lots of expendable soldiers, just enough initiates and a few (completely untrusted) lesser Warlocks in his servitude. He was on the Council, on his way up and gutting anyone who got in the way.

And then he went to a reagent shop and everything went to hell in a handbasket. Anton met a Wizard, fought the Wizard, and was dragged back in time by the Wizard. He left a great deal of his power behind, ended up stranded two or three years in the past relative to where we are now, and was subsequently left to fend for himself in the wilds of Salvar. Skills as a liar, murderer, thug and humanoid puppetmaster allowed him to rebuild some of his power -- he had three or so of his five Bonds restored by now -- but he couldn't seem to pull together a decent collection of servants. It all fell apart, over and over again.

Most recently because he encountered the Wizard again and was killed by him.

Technically.

(It bears mention that Wizards are merely paranoid and well prepared for almost all contingencies. Warlocks are so far past paranoia and preparedness that the words lose meaning to most of them; it's like comparing first grade essays with a published thesis paper by Stephen Hawking.)

Anton came back. The specifics of how are confusing. All that matters is that he came back. And after he came back, Anton wandered through some distressingly familiar crystal woods, looked upon his old home city and whispered a hoarse, Not yet. He returned to the woods, searching by memory until he found an old and mostly illegal trade route used by the Wyrmfolk to deal with local tribes of Orcs and other barbaric humanoids. From there it was just a matter of walking until there was a spear at his throat.

A little smooth talking followed. "Of course I'm not an agent of the Church! I'm a Warlock for sky's sake!" he explained, relying on casual admission to keep the spear's blade from his throat.

It worked, just so you know. This is generally because the differences between Shamans, Wizards, Warlocks and so-on are usually more semantic than functional. Just because you protect your tribe, commune with spirits and hold a deep love of nature does not mean you are a Good Person. In the case of Shaman Redhide, who had associated with everyone from Warlocks to Centaurs to Wizards to Church Weather-Magi over the years, this admission was a good enough reason to draw his spear back and order his cohorts to stand down.

"What business do you have, Warlock?" one of the Orcs had asked, a big gray-skinned brute decked out in hunting leathers and holding an Alerian-made rifle like he knew exactly how to use it.

"I heard tell of a coven in Evernorth. I'm trying to find my way there, but I seem to be last right now..." Which worked mostly because it was true. "And you?"

Trading, as it turned out. Redhide and his merry band of marauders were actually serving as escorts to a convoy of Wyrm merchants visiting from Alerar and elsewhere. Anton managed to opt in from there, exploiting the inherent Warlock among the Broods to pass himself off as a wandering holy-man to his kin.

Which explains why, a little under a week later, you would find Anton leaned back against a wagon's wheel by a glittering blue fire, flanked on all sides by interested children and a fair maiden or three. Even a few of the Orcs had joined in to listen to him tell a story of his youth. The names were lies. The rest was true.

A Warlock and a Wizard fighting it out.

"And the funny part," Anton told them in the here and now as he stared up into the starry night sky. It was so different from the near-black one he had grown up seeing. There weren't even dead gods burning on the moon. "The funny part is that I still don't know what exactly compelled the to fight the way they did."

And I hope, he chose to leave unsaid, remembering the gleam of his mentor's eyes, I never have to find out.

Warlocks aren't supposed to feel nostalgic. It's one of the very first lessons taught to initiates, between getting a dagger and actually using it; but you never really learn it until after the blade cuts out your best friend's heart. Or after his cuts out your own. Nostalgia leads to hesitation leads to dying, in shortest terms. But for all of his intimate knowledge of the Warlock's unwritten code -- the Darwinistic set of rules and tricks that kept you alive when even your reflection in the mirror couldn't be trusted -- Anton could't help but feel a little pang in his stomach when he finally set foot upon the frosted cobbles of Evernorth.

It wasn't like he remembered. That just made it worse.

When Anton was a boy, Evernorth had already been Warlocked into submission. There was an Orc invasion in the months before today, back in N'Thayn'sal. They struck from the sky with ships and guns that were a rival to anything the Alerian Elves had ever brought to bear, in numbers that rendered any conventional opposition futile at best. The Weather-Magi tried, and so did their Church backers. They failed. They all failed, and most of them died, until at last Anton's old master gave the order to move. The coven declared itself openly, demons swept the streets and Evernorth was burning out of Orcish bondage within a day. Anton still remembered the savage smiles of his cohorts as the last few Aeromancers collapsed to their knees, bitterly weeping as they declared allegiance to the Warlocks.

Then came the towers, the expansions, the defenses...

There was no invasion here. In and of itself, this wasn't so bad.

"Looking a bit wistful there, Brother Wyrmtongue," one of the merchants said as the wagon Anton rode in turned a corner. They passed by a building that should've been an Arcanery, and then another that had been Anton's favorite whore house -- the one where he sent troublesome initiates to die. Just a book shop and a bakery now. There was even a silver-clad guardsman idling by, twirling a club and tipping his hat to a sweet little old lady.

Anton felt his stomach turn as he said, "It's not what I was expecting," though he didn't actually open his mouth to do it.

"You've never been here, have you?" the merchant asked.

"No," Anton lied. "I just expected the coven to have more of a say in things." This was true.

They passed a statue of the city's founder, Ethereal Jeremiah, holding a spear aloft in one hand and his Book in the other. Anton remembered a sacrificial altar in its place; remembered using it a few times. "Give it time," the merchant said as the wagon passed it by. "Have you ever seen Inhuton?"

Anton lied, "No," and tried not to think about sleeping in a back alley as a child before his talents manifested, and before the coven declared itself. They passed by a similar alley in what passed for normal Evernorth, full of trash and a stray cat or two, but he remained silent.

This was the part that made it all hurt; that reminded him in an ironic way of how nostalgia was supposed to be avoided. Anton was an alien here in his own home town. He could feel and remember all he wanted, but his cover-story and the necessities that built it meant he couldn't actually show or speak about anything to anyone.

He sighed.

And as the wagon came to a crossroads, Anton stood up and said, "I think I'll make the rest of the journey alone."

The merchant looked him over. So did the orc riflemen riding beside them. "In that?"

Anton regarded his robe. It was one of the only things left that still marked him as a Warlock, at least to anyone familiar with the rituals and fashions. He shrugged out of it without any expression at all, folded it neatly and set it down in back of the wagon. "Consider it payment for carrying me this far," he said. "Good-bye."

Wyrmian culture is diverse. There are literally a million customs spread across the myriad Broods that occupy the known world of Althanas, and probably more for those Broods that've made it as far as Kelbiras. One of the only significant traditions that can be found in all of them is this: Warlocks are considered holy-men, to be respected and revered. When one gives you something, it's generally going to become a keepsake that you tell your grandchildren about. It was for this reason that the merchant said and did nothing to stop Anton, merely bowing his head low and clasping his hands as if in prayer.

Anton ignored the gesture. He made his way through the lead wagon and came out the back with a plain winter coat and a strap for his sword, disembarked in front of another wagon, turned sharply to the left and vanished down the nearest alley.

Caden woke early on the sixth day, well before his neice could come and poke him with her broomstick-turned-staff. He spent a few minutes staring up at the ceiling, then stood and got dressed. Dresden and Crina had been too hospitable to allow him to stay at an inn, even though he probably had more money in his coin purse than their entire family did in any bank or safety spot under the cupboard. The only payment they would accept was training for Lucretia and an honest assessment of her talents.

The kid had potential. Once Caden taught her the basics of Evocation she knew how to cast fire magicks almost instinctively, to the point that she didn't even need the invocations by the third day. Trying to steer her from there was difficult though, and what little training she had beforehand was practically a handicap.

And Caden kept running into another problem: He wasn't a teacher. Not a bad teacher, not a good teacher -- just not a teacher. He could jot down formulae and articulate all kinds of lunatic concepts, pass on experiences and all that, but he didn't have the patience or the know-how to make it stick. His training had almost always been variations on the theme of Try not to get yourself killed. That didn't translate too easily when trying to teach a little girl how to safely cast a fireball spell.

So he didn't feel bad about skipping out on her daily lesson for once. He'd probably be dead by tomorrow afternoon anyway, once the trial was over and the Sway's Judgement had been carried out. Ogden had stopped by once to inform him that the penalty wouldn't be that severe, but Caden was a magic user in a country known especially for its hatred and fear of them. The penalty was always that severe. The only thing keeping him from panic was a state of apathetic numbness.

Today was just a little bit more so: I'm going to die tomorrow, so why bother?

He still had the courtesy to leave a note on his way out; promises to come back and give a lesson later in the day or something like that. Caden wasn't even really thinking when he wrote it. He put on his coat, his Hat and his glasses, wandered out into the street and didn't look back.

Three days after he arrived in Evernorth, Anton woke up in the pre-dawn hour and snapped his fingers. Green flames lit up on every candlestick in the room, not a single one of which actually touched the wick or melted the wax. He sat up without having to go through any of the motions that most people do when they wake up: There was no scratching because his scales never itched. No stretching because he didn't get cramps. No open-mouthed yawning because the Wyrm respiratory system worked differently from that of a human or most other mammals and reptiles. He didn't even move any sheets or pillows around to get out of bed -- but this was more because he was a Warlock and therefore paranoid. Which explains why the sheets were rolled up neatly on the floor at the foot the foot of the bed and the pillow was propped against the window, holding the curtains shut and providing a convenient block to anyone trying to spy his sleeping form from the next floor up in the building across the street.

Anton stood up, already fully dressed with sheathed sword in hand and ready for the draw. He eased the holster into its spot, hidden on his belt by the overcoat, and then carefully checked each of his four rings to make sure they were all working properly: A nudge of willpower to each one, and sigils burnt orange or blue or green in response. He growled just above his breath, the Wyrm equivelent to a human Hmmm. Checked underneath the bed which was a lot harder than it sounds because Anton had never actually gotten down to the floor. Warlocks assassinate each other so regularly that it's considered business as usual in most circles, hardly worth batting an eye. And even when other Warlocks aren't trying to kill you, there's always the possibility of everything from magical law enforcement to demons to fairy tales with a bone to pick. Preferably yours.

Nothing lunged out at him from the shadows under the bed.

Anton still checked twice. Just to be sure. Then he flipped down to the floor and straightened up, snapping his fingers again to dispell the eldritch candles and bathe the room in total darkness once more. He exhaled a cool fog, relaxing ever so slightly in the still air of the Gargoyle's Hour. Breathed once, twice, three times. Closed his eyes. Calm.

Anton drew his sword and stabbed it straight through the door of the inn's rest room. He only stopped after the wood was splintering around the guard. He drew it out once, stabbed lower and then repeated the process all the way to the floor. Each attack was spaced out by three inches, and the whole trail took about twelve seconds to gouge out. He finally draw the sword out and stood up and away from the door, power gathering in a greenish-yellow blaze at the palm of his free hand. It did not cast enough light to even show the palm holding it. "Sloppy technique," he said without actually opening his mouth. "I've had Initiates try me better than that."

"And I've known Initiates to do a better job staying alive."

The door blew open. Anton scarcely had time to throw his fireball, only to watch something pale and red devour it wholesale from the inside out. He jumped back beneath a whistle of metal, struck blind and hit nothing but the flimsy wooden chair offered to the inn's guests. It jerked harshly on the impact, as if kicked up into it, and Anton instinctively ducked down and to the left. The whistle came within a tenth of an inch of taking one of his crests and he roared hurricane winds and blizzard chills in response: The nearest wall was covered in ice and almost collapsed in less time than it takes to blink.

And then one of his wards flared hard red and green as something the shape of a stylized ram's head crashed into it. Anton felt his feet leaving the floor and he turned with eldritch fire already built upon his left fingertips. A quick swing as he hit the pillow and the glass behind it; green-yellow fires whipped out and flayed the entire room, burning hot scars into everything they touched. But something was wrong, and Anton noticed it well before gravity kicked in: The only things the scars outlined were furniture and walls. Nothing out of place but the chair. Surrounded by broken glass and fluff from the shredding pillow, Anton backflipped and managed to sink the landing on his feet without slipping or sliding. He jolted upright and screamed, "VÉTER!" and the wind came. Except it wasn't quite wind so much as it was a violet tide of energy too transparent and inconsistent to resemble anything else. Anton swept his hand up and lowered his sword; the magic flowed upwards and came down with his swing, its path a rough mirror of his arm's motions. It slammed into the Inn where Anton had been staying and completely obliterated it: Raw force imploded the front and ice covered everything and everyone inside.

"Ogón."

And from the violet ice and wind came a blaze of green and yellow, so bright it hurt to look at and yet it cast no light beyond its own edges. What was left of the Inn vanished in less than a minute, consumed from the outside in and the inside out. All that remained was a pitch black silhouette, slender in most ways and pointed where ears should've been visible. Anton sneered and switched his sword from hand to hand, the sigils of his right rings now burning green as he Spoke the Names and Worked his magic, "Zieg! Sadoh!"

Purple smoke vomited up out of the ground to either side of him, splitting open to reveal burning green holes in the cobblestones. They gaped and bled, and within them formed the likenesses of things that could've been dogs in some other nightmare and place. They were twice the size of any mere wolf, hunched brutishly at the shoulders and smooth-skinned like seaserpents should've been. Their eyes were vacant yellow and cruel, their mouths dsturbingly humanoid and full of sharp teeth, and they had fin-like protrusions instead of ears. Their drool was like ultraviolet napalm, and their growls were like death metal guitar riffs on a bad acid trip.

They were demons.

And when the silhouette finally opened its eyes to regard them, they were gone. The fires were gone. The street was gone. In everything's place was the hotel room, still positively soaking in darkness. Anton was still standing exactly where he had been before stabbing into the bathroom door. Before him was the silhouette, distance of less than three feet.

Its eyes burned like miniature suns, each one colored teal.

"I expected better, Banebram," Spoke the eyes' owner with intent, and the effect was instant. Anton crashed to his knees as surely as if someone had slammed a cinder block through his shoulders and down into his stomach, blood bubbling out between his teeth as he collapsed. He sword stabbed into the floor as he struggled to hold himself up, even while his arms and legs began to spasm as if from electric shock. His eyes began to bleed a few seconds later and, one by one, his wards and protective spellwork simply shut down. What remained was a desolate, fiery emptiness burning itself out in his gut, just a few inches behind the belly button. "Stand," and he did. "Disarm," and he was. Sword first, then the rings, then a small assortment of throwing knives from his sleeves and belt. "Sit."

Warlocks tend to guard their Sorcerous Names with a jealousy you simply don't find in other magical circles. It's one of the few hard, real differences between they and their magical kin. A Warlock invests his power, his security, his very soul into his Name. If you know it, and if you know how to use it, then there is literally no limit to the damage you can do or the options you have for inflicting it -- and there's almost nothing they can do to stop you.

"Master," Anton rasped, blood dribbling up from his throat as he said it. "How...?"

"Blindsighter's Cage Psicana," Raun Yenuial explained, "triggered the moment you set foot on the third floorboard," he pointed down, and Anton's eyes followed to the exact point where the spell had been waiting. Only now, in the dark and with Raun allowing him to see it, could he make out the sigil's pattern hidden in the grain of the wood. "Did you really think I wouldn't notice your arrival, Anton?"

"The thought had crossed my mind," he spat, finally having enough control to wipe his mouth afterward. "I didn't..."

"Expect me to contact you because you're a time-displaced abomination put here by your own incompetence and the ineffable whims of a mad god dead by your own era," Raun finished, coldly. Then he laughed and there was nothing glamourous about it. It wasn't light or musical like the laughter of Elves is supposed to be. It was hard and arrogant, like a tyrant king. "I knew two years ago, when you dropped into Berevar. I Saw the flow of Time ripple and bleed, and it was a beauty that no mortal language can explain. One thing I am curious about is whether or not you still have the Gifts such a passage would have left you."

"No," Anton answered reflexively. "My ability to tell time faded months ago. My ability to tell location gave out long before that." Raun nodded and Anton continued, "Every now and then they flicker back...but it's unprictable."

"The Gift of Awareness often is," Raun said. "Which reason are you here for?"

"...I don't know," Anton answered. It frightened him. More so than the power that his old master held over his life, his body, mind and soul, it terrified him.

Because it was the truth.

Anton had been struggling for two years to build a power base and establish himself here in Salvar, and he still didn't know why. The motive of it didn't seem to matter so he never even considered it.

"Therein lies the problem," Raun mumbled, though not at all kindly. "You always were a thoughtless brute. An excellent planner but lousy in the short-term and in the overall execution. What you have right now is an opportunity," and there was a feeling of hands on his shoulders and chin, and even fingers prying into his eyes. It all pulled his vision up, until he locked gazes with the Seering eyes of his old master. "You are the only man in all the world who has, with true certainty, lived tomorrow. Do you know what that means?"

"...I want to go home," Anton whimpered.

"You'll never be able to do that." His heart sank. "The world of N'Thayn'sal has already been destroyed, its possibilities unraveled and its track removed from our own. There may yet be commonalities between our Tomorrow and your Yesterday, but it will never be the same. Do you understand?"

"Yes," and it hurt to say. Even if the stars were dead, the world was collapsing in slow motion, and the carrion armies of the Reaper Queen and the Forgotten Ones all struck daily into the borders of Warlocked Salvar, it was still Anton's home. And he would never, ever return to it.

"Do you know why?"

"No."

"The Wizard Blueraven," Raun said with a smile. "The very same man that brought you here."

Anton's blood began to chill.

"He came back with knowledge of tomorrow too: A guidebook to the creation of N'Thayn'sal, apocalypse by apocalypse. And he's been working to undo its birth since the moment he returned to this era, and he's succeeding at it."

"Why are you telling me this?" Anton asked, baring his teeth without moving his jaw. Frost clouded around his nostrils and Raun smiled in kind.

"To motivate you," he said. "I said it before, Anton: You have a unique opportunity in all the world. Blueraven goes by a book. You actually lived it. He seeks to prevent the end of the world, but you...you can profit from it. Grow in power, in knowledge, in strength. Just think of what you could do."

And he did.

And the Warlock Banebram liked it.

"So," he asked, looking to his old master. "What's in it for you?"

The answer was a sickly smile that spoke of screaming women, crying children and dead men who could not rest. It was more demonic than anything Anton could summon up on his best day. It was the kind of smile you can give only when you have absolute control over someone and don't care whether they know it or not. "Power of a sort," Raun finally said. "A throne behind curtains, secure. The loathesome tyrant's beloved right hand, ruling with a velvet touch and an iron grip."

Anton couldn't bring himself to sneer. But he sure as hell tried.

"I know," Raun sighed. "But what can you do, Anton?"

"Nothing," he answered, and this too was truth.

"Exactly. Now walk the streets until you find the cafe. You will know the one. You are free to act on your own from there." Raun nodded.

And Anton was back in bed. The pillow, the sheets, the chair; he could see everything and none of it had changed. He never actually moved, and now it was dawn.

And the closer he looked at the ceiling, the more he could see Salvic ants jostling along a path that looked awfully similar to the sigil used for Blindsighter's Cage Psicana.

"Son of a bitch..."

Anton left not too long after his encounter (if you could call it that) with Raun. He tipped the inn's morning shift with a few gold on his way to the door, then stepped out into the brisk morning air with his hands secure in his pockets and his rings hidden accordingly. Evernorth was a place run by Wizards of a Clerical sort, and they didn't take too kindly to artifacts of black magic being displayed openly. He did what he could to blend in, which wasn't a lot. Like most cities proper in Salvar, Evernorth was predominantly human and the non-human populations were pigeonholed by how close society considered them to humanity: Elves were closest for obvious reasons, followed by Dwarves, and then everyone else was effectively cordoned off in a little rat-trap ghetto called Inhuton.

Anton chanced through the place once in the walkabout of his old stomping grounds. The distortion magicks were in effect, but even if everything went exactly as planned there wouldn't be so much as an arcane shack for the next two years, nevermind the council's mile high towers. He saw plenty of faces he recognized though. His thirty-second kill, for instance, which was memorable simply because it had been the first time anyone was actually able to fight back. His first lay, who was nowhere near as attractive as the nostalgia goggles made her. An Orc fish-vendor that Anton fondly remembered gutting in the middle of the street for trying to protest the Warlocks' authority. He even saw himself, running along with blood on his hands and a fevered grin on his face; fresh off some kill that Anton couldn't quite remember and trailed by another initiate that he was probably going to murder before the end of the week.

He smiled to Inhuton, fond and somber and stone sober at the same time.

Then he moved on.

So it is that we come now to a little cafe on the edge of Evernorth, not too far removed from Her Swayed Grace's Sanctioned Scholast Arcana. The details of the place are utterly irrelevant. Just know that it's a rarity aong Salvic coffee houses: It has an outdoor area, usually reserved for the times when the weather is more cooperative in Spring and Summer. Within that outdoor area, you'll find tables and chairs. Sitting at one of those tables and in one of those chairs, you'll find a Wizard hunched over a book, his Hat standing on the table and a pencil being worn to the nub. He was writing down what could very well become his last will and testament. Nothing focuses the mind quite like the imminent prospect of death.

Except maybe for what he heard next.

"I'm beginning to think that the saying is true, Wizard Blueraven." He stopped writing. It was so sudden you could actually hear lead scraping to a halt. "There's no-one who can understand you quite like your worst enemy."

Caden looked up from his grimoire.

Anton regarded him impassively.

Snow melted in a thin line between them. Not too far away, birds squawked and tried to break free of their cages. A stray cat scampered across the street and ran like hell, and a more disciplined horse still threatened to break its reins and follow suit.

"I thought you were dead," Caden noted, his voice still and calm and thoughtful. He'd been careless to take his Hat off, or have a weapon undrawn or a spell unprepared. He didn't even have any spare power summoned up in advance.

"Suojella's Flashfire Ward," Anton replied. "Probably." And then he very calmly, deliberately, and unapologetically pulled up a chair and put his feet on the table. "Truth is, I wear so many protective magicks that I've lost track of which one might have allowed me to return. All I know is that my strategy of putting...resurrection points all over the countryside, actually paid off. At least something went well these past two years."

"I'll do better next time," Caden said, outwardly in control and inwardly cringing in abject terror. "So help me, I'll do beter next time."

Anton actually smiled. He looked tired. "Maybe you will. But...have you ever actually thought about it?"

"About what?" Caden asked.

"This," Anton motioned, and then shrugged. "Us, even. You and I are, to my knowledge, the only people in this world who have ever travelled through time."

"And I don't care to repeat the experience."

"Neither do I."

They both nodded. It was one gesture short of attempted murder.

"But have you ever wondered...why are we at each other's throats, when we could do so much more at each other's side?"

Caden stared at him.

"Why would we work together?" he asked. "You're a monster."

"And you're worse," Anton replied. "I can smell the Taint on you, Wizard. I can see the blood on your hands. You've washed it off, oh yes. Plenty of times. You've scrubbed them raw in rivers and spent hours trying to find enlightenment beneath waterfalls. You've written a thousand pages of reasons, and not a damn one of them is real."

"You're wrong."

"Am I?" Anton asked. "Am I really?"

He pulled his feet from the table and leaned forward. Caden closed his grimoire and traced runes onto its cover, just out of Anton's sight.

"Look me in the eye, Blueraven. Look me in the eye and tell me you have a reason for anything you've done."

Caden did.

Caden did.

Caden...

"...did..."

"Eh?"

"I did have a reason," he said without blinking.

"...ah," Anton replied, comprehension dawning. Caden was a Wizard, after all. By definition, morality was right out the window. That left only one option for a motive strong enough to do the things that Anton knew him capable of. And now it was gone.

They were the same.

For this one instant, Anton knew, they were exactly the same.

"Yeah," Caden said. "Ah."

Anton leaned back, growling his approximation of hmm. Caden looked at him, waiting for the right instant to trigger his spell. "Maybe we can help each other..."

This is how conspiracies are born.

"The sentence is as follows!"

The trial took about five minutes. Caden went as himself, leaving his Hat and coat and remaining gear in his brother's hands. Dresden and Ogden were the only members of the family who even showed up -- and Ogden hardly counted since he was there by mandate.

"The vagrant rogue Wizard Blueraven is to be beheaded for the crimes of attempted murder, attempted assassination, Clerical desertion and the wholesale use of Unsanctioned magicks! His body is to be burned for purity's sake due to suspection consortion with Unholy influences!"

Caden said nothing in his own defense. No-one raised a voice in his favor either. He spent the whole trial, if you could even call it that, with swords at his throat in a triangle pattern and crossbow bolts aimed at every major organ. There were three Wizards on hand just to subdue him if that failed. He was only barely relieved to see that Cadence wasn't one of them.

"Sentence is to be executed immediately!"

And that was that.

Within two minutes, they'd slapped the chains on him and frogmarched him all the way out of the courthouse, across the square and onto the chopping block -- because magical criminals weren't just hanged. You could never trust something simple and easy to do the trick with them. You head to behead them, and that was just step one.

"Good-bye," Dresden said to him as they passed. He wasn't going to stick around for the execution, which was just as well. He tossed Caden's wares onto the ground in front of the execution stand.

"Tell Lucretia I'm sorry," Caden asked, and found himself surprised to actually mean it. "I left you a coin purse in one of the drawers. Good-bye."

Dresden nodded and left. Only Ogden remained, and only because he was the man to give the final order. They lead Caden up the stairs and brought him to a kneel, forcing his head down until the block was thrust up into his neck. It was all he could do to stop short of a quip about being choked to death instead of beheaded, but Caden managed. He didn't want to anger the executioner. Chiefly because the guy was big an mean and his axe looked suspiciously blunt and there were so many things that could go wrong with all of this.

They waited until a crowd was present.

They waited until there was a crowd for this.

Caden grinned to himself in disbelief. He muttered, "Nobody ever said Salvic justice was perfect. Or good. Or effective."

"I heard that," said the executioner.

"Damn."

Ogden cleared his throat. Silence took hold, and Caden dared to raise his head -- just enough to look at them. All of them.

"Have you any last words, Wizard Blueraven?"

Veshua was there.

"Yes."

She had brought her entire family.

"Then hurry up and say them."

Her daughter, her husband...

"...it's just one thing..."

...her father-in-law and his coven...

"Run."

Nothing happened. Very pointedly, nothing happened. Ogden sneered.

"Be done with it then!"

The axe came up.

Caden smiled.

The axe came down.

Light shined off the axe's blade. It thumped once. There was a collective intake of breath, and then someone screamed.

The executioner dropped dead with a hole straight through his chest, as neatly made as if someone had rammed an oversized cookie cutter through his left breast and shoulderblade, taking the internal organs, sections of bone and muscle and a pint or so of blood in the process. The man didn't even have time to scream, and it didn't take long before blood was soaking into the wood of the gallows. Almost at the same instant, the chains fell off of Caden's wrists and ankles. The crowd was already snapping out of shock and into panic, and there were three Wizards all readying spells, and Caden counted no less than ten crossbows aiming for his head and--

And he ducked.

Ogden's truncheon passed just a few inches short of his scalp, and Caden blindly reached out. He drew his brother's sword backhanded, came up with a twist and broke Ogden's nose and cheekbone with a good hard smack of the pommel. Then he sidestepped, smacking Ogden again as he went, and a flurry of crossbow bolts missed both of them. The guardsman dropped with a grunt, Caden jumped off the platform with a shout, and people started scattering. Civilians, that is. The Watch, the Wizards, and most importantly the Warlocks...

They all stayed put as best they could. Some were shoved around, some weren't. The only reason Caden wasn't killed three times in a row was because the Wizards were all too busy trying not to be trampled, while the Watch struggled to multitask crowd control and then some.

"Kaganis!" Anton's Voice bellowed. "The Wizards!"

This was followed by a shrill cackle of acknowledgement, and then people started getting thrown out the way like rag dolls in a tornado. Caden tensed, and the Warlocks all looked to their master, and Raun finally deigned to draw his sword. All of them followed suit accordingly.

"Not as planned," he phlegmatically declared. Caden caught sight of Veshua scooping her daughter up and backhanding someone out of the way; Nildinar was just a few steps ahead of her, clearing a path with a pair of blurs that were probably his arms in action. Caden looked back to the head Warlock and readied his sword. "But I will make the most of it."

Caden smiled. "Didn't see this one coming, did you?"

A second later, Anton burst through everything atop a great big violet-skinned thing that was equal parts bull, elephant and demon; four-limbed with a long serpentine trunk ending in a four-digited claw, bearing colossal spikes that arced forward from its shoulders, a set of tusks around its mouth and elkish horns from the top and back of its head. It had four eyes, each one red on blue or blue on red. Anton steered the monster from atop its shoulderblades, one hand on its horns and the other bearing his Magicide Blade high. Jumping about behind him was an obsidian-skinned gremlin with an oversized head, feet and hands, and a halo of gray fire around his head. Green ones burned like tiny suns where his eyes should've been.

"For Warlock Lord Raun Yenuial!" Anton laughed. "The Wizard Blueraven must die!"

Which framed it all like so: There were now three Wizards, an unknown number of Watchmen, and plenty of civilians to attest to Raun's Warlock status. He might've been able to get by as a Seer, but a Warlock is just a death sentence that hasn't been carried out yet as far as Salvic laws are concened. To top it off, Caden himself was now named as an enemy of the Warlocks in question, which might just weigh against his own death sentence if he could just survive the next five or six minutes before the rest of Evernorth's Clerical Wizards came to bat.

Here goes, Caden thought, just before the battle was joined.

In the months that Caden spent running and fighting for his life from battlefield to battlefield, being pawned around by one higher power or another, virtually all of his battles had been uncomplicated things. Magic missile this evil overlord here, fireball that necromancer there, stab that one to death and so on and so forth. He had almost forgotten what it was like to wage war as Wizards and Warlocks do, in the shadows and spotlights of politics and perception; where truth was a dagger best hidden in a cloak of lies, and the only people you can truly rely on are your enemies. This is the environment that breeds paranoia among Wizards and their ilk, not to mention the reason that murder by shady means is considered a perfectly natural way for them to die.

Older magi, the ones like Greyspine or even Warlock Raun himself, called this the Game. The rules are, quite literally, ineffable: You can't speak them or write them, and if you have to ask then you've already lost but don't worry -- nobody ever wins the Game anyway. Not for long. To a Wizard, playing the Game is like a combination of breakdancing on a tight rope over a pit full of flaming metal spikes and having mindblowing tantric sex with Raiaeran twins who wouldn't know what the word inhibiton means if you beat them over the head with it. It is what you fear and what you crave.

And Caden Law -- the Wizard Blueraven -- had been absent the Game for far too long.

He charged into the frey with the nearest Warlock, a Drow initiate by the look of things. The boy looked thirteen, but he met Caden with a series of lightning quick dagger thrusts that were entirely too professional for his age. Caden sidestepped most of them, parried the last with the back of his hand on the boy's wrist and swiped the dagger from his grasp in the same motion. The kid jumped back and tried to duck, but a Wizard's bolt frost-glassed his entire upper body. He toppled over and was shattered from the waist up by trampling feet. Caden didn't spare him a second's notice. He was already onto the next opponent, another initiate, and this one was a slightly older Elven girl with red eyes. She had a dagger in one hand and a fireball already clutched in the other, but Caden killed her before she could make good use of either. The third initiate, a burlier Wyrmian Warlock-to-be, shoulderchecked him as he made the kill. Caden lost his sword in the girl's throat, twisted awkwardly with the impact and sank his stolen dagger into the initiate's neck. This one screamed and staggered away, but did not go down.

"Die, Wizard!" Anton howled, which was actually a pretty nice warning. Caden turned and jumped out of the way just in time to avoid being flattened to pulp by the Warlock's demonic steed, which was conveniently bad at slowing down or cornering. The third initiate -- the one with Caden's stolen dagger in his neck -- went from being six and a half feet tall to an inch or two thick, give or take. Most of his guts splattered out into the snow. Caden watched Anton's mount demolish the executioner's stand, and Ogden was sent flying by the impact but Caden didn't see where he landed.

Show or no show, that deserved some kind of retaliation.

Caden thrust his hands out to either side, brought them back in and shifted his feet abruptly, the whole act looking more like a dance or martial arts display than anything else. Rock shot up from underneath the snow, big and heavy and nowhere near as cooperative as the ground had been in Raiaera, especially not without a wand or rod to focus through. He was just quick enough with it too: Anton's ugly little gremlin cackled as it threw a spell at him, and green flame burst all around the boulder's sides. Caden grimaced and shoved forward, putting his entire body into the effort. The rock went from zero to sixty in the time it takes to blink, and the gremlin let out a shrill scream and POP -- it was gone.

Anton laughed and his demon ground to a halt before turning around, its trunk lashing a six foot long hole into the city hall's front wall as it went. The thing reared up on its hind legs and came down hard enough to shake the entire square, and Caden gulped hard.

He turned, started to run, and immediately stopped and jumped out of the way as a Warlock tried to blast him with a green fireball. Caden hit the snow rolling, then kicked as much of it as he could up into the Warlock's face. This was met with indifference and the drawing of a Magicide Blade. He threw lightning at Caden and missed, then charged in for the follow-up. Caden dodged his swing, tripped him with one foot and grabbed him by the shoulder. The Warlock was bigger, stronger, meaner, but Caden was just that much more of a clever bastard.

He dragged the Warlock further off balance, leading him in a wide circle and then throwing him away at just the right moment for one of Anton's spells to hit him. Caden didn't actually see the magic's approach. All he saw was the effect: Heatless purple fire that burst out of the Warlock's chest, shoulder and waist in lopsided ring-patterns, each one expanding out from the surface by three or four inches before fading away. The Warlock vomited smoke and collapsed in a dead heap.

Anton was charging him again.

Caden dove for the Warlock's Magicide Blade and grabbed it, reached down into Father Salvar and pulled the ground up beneath his own feet. He was standing atop a cresting wave of stone within seconds, and Anton was laughing like a maniac as his demon barreled into it at full speed. Enchanted dehlar came perilously close to chopping Caden's pelvis in half between the legs, even as the pillar of rock collapsed beneath his feet. He jumped backwards, screaming until his voice cracked, grabbed hold of the demon's hide and held on for dear life.

Conveniently enough, Anton apparently took a hit across the head from debris right as this happened. He fell over and slid back along the demon's spine, until he and Caden were close enough to exchange death threats without being heard. Among other things.

"I'd say this is going about as well as it could have, all things considered," Caden said.

"Agreed," Anton said with a smile. "It's been far too long since I merely played the brute rather than acted like one. But it's only a matter of time before the Coven begins summoning up its demons, and then the Wizards will arrive in force." He began to sit up, and Caden was able to scrape and pull himself onto the demon's hind quarters by then. They'd left Town Square and were now riding hard down the streets of Evernorth, with traffic clearing from their path or being crushed underfoot. Anton grimaced. "I don't think he'll risk the use of my Name as long as I'm fighting 'beside' him," he added, complete with spoken quotation marks.

He was Sideways illiterate, but Warlocks are still perfectly capable of speaking the way Wizards do.

"Get us back to the fight," Caden said.

And then he attacked. Anton met him in kind, holding tight to one of the demon's elk horns to stay upright while Caden fought to keep his balance with every other turn, bump or hard stride. Dehlar whistled past dehlar, the swords missing each other almost as often as they clashed. This was intentional, mostly because real swordsmen don't go edge-to-edge if they can help it. Anton nicked Caden's face, Caden came to within an inch of slitting Anton's throat. It was enough for the Warlock to admit, "You've gotten better."

To which Caden replied, "Told you I'd kill you next time."

The Wyrm grinned at him.

"My brethren!" Raun's Voice suddenly interrupted them as they neared the square. There were bodies strewn about all over the place, plenty of them Watch but a disquieting number of civilians as well. "CALL UP YOUR FAMILIARS!"

A Warlock summoning a demon can be a subtle thing. Most of the professionals simply phase one in as simply and silently as they can. It takes more energy to do it this way, but it's a lot quicker and the demon in question can arrive in the middle of an attack or spellcasting of its own, fresh to the field of battle with murder and mayhem in its eyes and a song of war blaring like death metal in its heart. Even if said heart happens to be in a jar under the Warlock's desk, and even if its only the demon's heart from a strictly technical standpoint. Rookies do things more spectacularly. So do the big leaguers when they want to scare or impress someone. There's a lot of fire, brimstone, maybe a bolt of lightning or a small tremor.

When an entire Coven does it, you get mixed results that are like the Fourth of July in Hell.

Literally.

The sky above Evernorth turned a putrid mix of radioactive green and pitch black, the dividing lines between them all purple and red. Lightning rained down into the town square and corpses exploded left and right, some burning first but most simply turning to showers of bone shrapnel and bloody vapor. Snow turned to crimson fog as the temperature in the square skyrocketed, and it felt like the whole earth shook in that city. Smoke billowed and rippled and violently twisted into tornadoes, each of which collapsed into shapes that were nightmarish almost as often as they were humanoid. Two by three by five and then some, every single one of them erupted into a demonic familiar. There were things that looked like alligator-dogs without skin, hovering gargoyles with seraphic patterns ofbat-wings, succubi and incubi, Haidian gladiators and body-horrors that looked as if someone had welded them together from the dead. And maybe someone had. They came to the Warlocks two and three to each, and even the lowliest of initiates were at least flanked by demon-dogs and molten gremlins.

The remaining Watchmen fled in terror. No exceptions. Only a few clerical lunatics and the stubborn, bloodied and blooded Wizards of the Church of Ethereal Sway held their ground, meeting the new arrivals with a combination of furious determination and spell after ruinous spell. Voices called out and power came to bear. One Warlock turned to order her gremlin squad to begin fire-support of another's brutes and her head flew off in layers, as if swiped away by something unseen from a higher dimension. A demonic oliphaunt, like Anton's own, charged one of the clergymen and had its legs blown off by a nearby Wizard.

Caden and Anton re-entered the square just as the demonic hordes started to rally against the Wizards. Anton kicked Caden off of his steed with a maniacal laugh, and Caden hit hard-packed dirt rolling. He came up to his feet unsteadily and screaming obscenities.

A fireball missed his head by about three inches. Caden screamed again and took a blind swing at the source, and the Magicide Blade didn't block the next spell so much as it ate hellfire and vibrated a little bit for the effort. In any other situation, Caden would've probably stopped to marvel at his new toy. Right now, he just used it to block another spell, and then another and another one after that. All the while, he was working his way closer and closer to where the Coven was thickest.

He didn't know how many of them there were. Only that they had an army of those fireball-hurling gremlins and most of the initiates seemed to be casting long-ranged spells with them. The target was one of the Wizards, a tall young man who was protecting a pair of clergymen. They either didn't notice Caden or Raun had assigned someone specific to take him out.

Caden assumed the latter and ducked on the general principle of the thing. This was the only reason he didn't die horribly as a bolt of silver flame zigzagged through the space he had been standing in. Frantic on reflex, Caden broke into a run towards the Warlocks and reached out with his senses...

...but there was hardly any power left in the area to call upon. Salvar didn't have the kind of background magic that made spellcasting as easy as breathing in Raiaera. The coven and the other Wizards had already used most of it and almost all of them were running on fumes, while the demons had their own reserves to draw upon.

Dammit, Caden thought, I don't want to use Necromancy!

Thankfully, he didn't have time to debate it with himself. Caden stopped in mid-run, juked to the left twice and then the right once. Thin strings of violet lightning ripped past him at every step, all of them arcing back to the fingertips of a High Elven Warlock whose face was all business. Said Warlock was standing behind demonic lines, attended by a nine foot tall humanoid thing that looked like some kind of gladiator. It had violently pink skin, wore black platemail leggings and the sleeves to match, its chest left bare but for a plate of metal nailed over one side. The thing had a sword with a blade longer than its own body, and wider than Caden's arms stretched and measured fingertip to fingertip. The Warlock said something, and it looked at him with eyes that quite literally burned.

"Shit," Caden said.

It was like being back in Tembrethnil with a demonic hound-steed coming down on him, except no Circle of Power or friendly Ranger to use to his advantage.

"Nash malal!" the Elf yelled, and the gladiator lurched to one side...

Caden felt the air ripple in a curve that lead from his left side around his back to the right, and all he could think to do was lunge blindly in that direction. An instant later, the gladiator's sword gouged down into the ground and ripped a twelve foot long trench into it. The thing slowed to a stop at the end of its swing, stood upright with arm and blade held high, then craned its head back to look at him.

"Dolomen sorai!" the Warlock cried.

Which was followed by, "WIZARD!"

Which was in turn followed by the gladiator twisting in a blur and cleaving through the head, neck, shoulders, chest, stomach and hips of Anton's demonic elephant, all so quickly that Caden didn't even notice what happened until it was over with. At least a ton of dead monster went bleeding sidelong through the air, hit the ground near the edge of the square, ripped apart and finally splattered into an ectoplasmic goop all over a fishing shop. A lesser man would've thrown up just looking at it. Caden was too busy looking back to the gladiator to care. Which is why he saw Anton go careening into the thing's chest, not quite accidentally stabbing it in the exposed flesh with his Magicide Blade. The gladiator didn't move and Anton looked like a man crashing into a brick wall for all the good it did him, but he didn't let go of the sword either. His weight dragged it down a few inches.

The demon screamed and collapsed into a messy of greenish-pink blood and gore, most of which immediately caught fire.

"Ah," Caden said, then blocked what looked like, for lack of a better description, a soccer ball-sized mass of purple strings. "Thanks," he said.

"Don't mention it," Anton replied.

Caden smashed him in the face with the butt of his sword, then took Anton's own Magicide Blade and managed a very, very deep breath. "Wasn't planning to."

If Anton had a reply to that -- if he was even conscious at this point -- he didn't say. Just as well, since that was when the Wizards of Evernorth arrived in force.

There is a saying, very well known, that goes Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

It's good advice.

And if you've ever actually seen a Wizard in action -- let alone twenty of them on the warpath -- you'll know that the original speaker never knew what in the hell he was talking about.

"FOR THE SWAY!" was the battlecry as the Clerical Wizards of Evernorth charged into battle. The Wizard's Voice quite literally boomed, shaking the ground and breaking glass all on its lonesome. It really was spoken in all-caps, the size overblown and the letters bolded for emphasis -- the kind of speech that only a skilled arcanist is capable of, with the kind of power that only zealous faith and blinding rage can bring. Several of the lesser demons exploded the instant they heard those words, and all the rest shifted attention whether their masters wanted it or not.

Caden dropped off the radar, and he knew it. The Wizards came calling and he simply did not matter anymore.

"Rally, Coven!" Raun ordered, and the Warlocks did. One by one they turned with their demons and charged to meet the Wizards head-on -- and it was ugly.

The first Wizard rode in on a pale horse, a holy tome in one hand and a tangle of fire and lightning in the other. He unleashed it in a wide cone, and one of the larger demons plowed right through with a roaring scream of pain. A Warlock clung to its back, swung up onto one of the shoulders and blew the Wizard's head off with an eldritch shot, just before a blinding ring of letters ripped out from his chest and cleaved him in half. He fell, and the demon followed, and they weren't the last.

Another Wizard met two Warlocks head-on, spells blazing between them as they closed to melee range. He smashed one down with a mace-headed staff and the other took his throat with one good dagger's thrust, and then the Warlock hid under his body amidst a barrage of magic missiles. Two demonic gremlins standing nearby didn't have the advantage of cover, and the spell blew them both back to Haidia even as it took chunks out of the dead Wizard.

Caden was, if only for a few seconds, stunned to inaction by the sight of it. A gladiator demon fell dead just a few yards away from him, and a Wizard's litanies caused a flier overhead to simply explode into a shower of burning gore not too much further from that. For the first time since he stood in the Deathlands of Raiaera, his jaw went slack.

...and then, as is often the case, someone remembered that he existed and posed a threat. He heard a buzzing whistle, stepped backwards and closed his eyes. Something hot and bright and green shot by his face, its shape visible through his eyelids, and Caden bit back a scream of fear. He ducked and turned, just in time to both the follow-up and see his attacker. It was the same Warlock as before. The Elf had his hands drawn back to one side, and he was calling up heavy artillery magicks from the look of it.

Caden felt the ground shake and decided not to be a sitting target any longer. He charged. The Warlock screamed again, "Niai!" and Caden drew up his swords -- and when the eldritch cannonball came, it split and shattered on their blades. The Warlock tried it again but got the same result, and by then Caden was point blank.

Man to Elf, he struck.

The Warlock parried it with his elbow. Caden had no idea how, even though he watched it happen in what felt like slow motion. He followed up with a thrust and the Elf sidestepped it, pirouetted around him like a dancer and kicked one of his legs out from behind. Caden fell, blindly thrust one of his swords back, and missed again as the Warlock jumped out of the way. He landed in an artistic crouch on one foot, hands cupped forward and power already built. Not for the first time, Caden watched his life flash before his eyes.

"Ni-"

Caden took the Elf's right pinky off, along with a chunk of his hand. It wasn't much in the grand scheme of bodily injuries, but it was enough to break the Warlock's concentration and send him screaming to the ground in pain. In another time and place, Caden might have hesitated. Here, he did not.

Enchanted dehlar broke through the Elf's skull twice, lodged three inches into the dirt and slit through gray matter somewhere between. The Warlock gasped and the sound trailed off into a pathetic squeak that was lost to the din of battle. Caden stood, yanked the sword loose, looked for another target and got a running start.

"Doyle, Kresch! To me!" someone Said, and as Caden slammed into an initiate with both swords through the back, he looked up to see something he probably wouldn't live long enough to forget.

She was a short girl. Couldn't have been older than twenty -- hardly looked older than seventeen. Light blonde hair and pale blue eyes, the former butchered tomboyishly short and the latter cold like a winter sky. She had a band of freckles across her cheeks and nose, and she dressed in a Wizardly cassock colored white and gray: the colors of a storm. She wore a stovepiped hat with a wide brim, something puritanical and distinctly masculine, and boots that had metal plates bolted to the toes. There was a battle-axe in one of her hands, its blade shaped like a pinwheel and its handle bearing a chain fixed to an iron band on her wrist. Lightning and ice danced around it -- around her -- and she was wreathed in power and glory the likes of which Caden couldn't compete with on his best day. The air didn't burn around her so much as it froze in the opposite direction.

She stood her ground with cold fires burning all around her, and a great beast circled her with something like fear in its every step. The thing was taller than most buildings in Evernorth, moving on two thickly muscled legs and huge feet that looked well suited for the terrain. It had stubby little arms -- human-sized arms -- tipped with four-clawed hands. A row of plate-like spines rose from its shoulders to its hips, then sank to a set of vicious spikes on its tail. Its head was topped by a massive bony crest, and its teeth were bigger than the swords in Caden's hands. It had four eyes on either side of its head and smoke rose in green streamers from two rows of nostrils beneath them.

It circled her and it was afraid. Even though Raun himself rode the thing like a mad surfer. He called up a blast of violet wind, turbocharging a flame spell that struck down one of the original Wizards from the start of the battle, but he never once looked away from her.

"Cadence?" Caden asked, staring at the Wizard Weatheraxe and realizing for the first time that he no longer knew his own sister.

"Steelheart! Whitesnake! To me!" she called again, more from impatience than fright.

Caden looked around and saw a burly Wizard on a white horse turn around and come charging for her. One of the gladiators appeared in front of him and that was the end of the cavalry. The other was nowhere in sight.

"Dammit all," Caden said.

He charged the Tyrant Wyrm and its Seering rider without anoher word. It never actually occurred to him to run away.

Raun saw him coming. He didn't actually waste the effort of looking, but he still saw Caden's approach. The hand without a sword came up and violet winds danced around it, arcing high -- and then igniting as they supercharged a fire spell that raced through their original path. Caden barely had time to slow and swing one of his own swords up, and even then it was a near thing.

For all the power he had seen Magicide Blades absorb and outright negate, the Warlock Raun's magicks still hit hard enough to knock the weapon right out of Caden's hand and embed it hilt-deep into the ground behind him. Caden screamed and drew his hand back in, ducked low under the remainder of the blast and kept running. Raun cursed and Cadence took a swing with her axe. Arctic lightning shot up from its blade like a maniac aurora, and Raun was too busy countering it to get another shot off.

The Tyrant still hadn't noticed Caden's approach. He sucked in a breath, took sword in hand and came in swinging. Enchanted dehlar smacked into the huge demon's shin, sank about an inch through scale and hit bone -- and it didn't do a damn thing. The foot came up, Caden took a hit that was like being smacked by a brick wall, and he landed several yards later on his side. He was bleeding from a broken nose and the teeth in the front of his mouth felt loose, but it could've been worse. The Tyrant could have noticed the mosquito's sting. It could've turned around. It could've even decided that it wanted a snack.

Incidentally, things got worse.

Caden came up to his feet on wobbling knees, just in time to see the demon lizard's jaws bearing down on him. And it probably says something that this actually was the most terrifying experience of the day thus far. Caden jumped to the side and took another swig, nicking the monster's cheek with a cut that smoked and bled green ichor. It reared up and roared loud enough to shake the whole battlefield even as Raun jogged down its back, trading spells and litanies with Weatheraxe the whole way.

"Strike me," Caden mumbled. He couldn't hear the sound of his own voice, but he could feel the roar vibrating its way up through his feet and down through his scalp, the echoes meeting somewhere in his bowels. It was about as pleasant as Orc cooking. "Strike me..."

The Tyrant looked down at him again, emerald fog seeping from between its teeth. Caden gulped.

And an idea struck, awful in its simplicity and vile the whole way through. Caden grinned.

The Tyrant opened its mouth again and the world turned acid green.

...and what began as the arcane equivalent of pressurized radioactive gas hit the ground in a spray of what looked like cheap dry ice, its path warped beyond all belief around a clear, empty space where the light itself seemed to be warping. Just a few inches behind the distortion, the Wizard Blueraven stood with his empty hand outstretched, his entire right arm a bloody mess and his face a mask of determined glee. He had taken the energy of the Tyrant Wyrm's eldritch breath, negating the worst of its damage with a combination of his own Gravity Gambit and the enchanted dehlar sword.

"Blindsighter's Cage Arcana!" Blueraven shouted, and Raun actually paused in his duel with Weatheraxe. "HALLUCINATORY BINDINGS DON'T COUNT, PRICK!"

The first Gravity Gambit faded and the Tyrant lunged in without pause. Blueraven willed up another one and met the monster head-on with it. The spell was designed to deflect physical attacks; anything with mass to it. It was unpredictable though. The angle and direction of deflection were random, and the spell wasn't meant to handle anything bigger than a person. It had trouble with horses. The Tyrant was bigger than your average inn. The only thing that kept the Wizard from being splattered was Caden's skittish reflexes. He jumped to one side even as the Tyrant's nose hit a bubble of clashing gravity and anti-gravity.

Gambit popped.

Tyrant's nose and the front of its upper jaw were ripped apart, sending shards of bone and whole-sized teeth in every direction. Caden felt his shoulder and the side of his chest both open from cuts too fast for his nerves to notice until after the blood was already leaking, but he didn't let that stop him.

Blueraven ran up to the Tyrant Wyrm and sank his Magicide Blade straight into one of its eyes, pushing until the sword was completely embedded in the monster's skull. Then he pushed some more. Something popped once he was wrist deep, and then Caden twisted and tried to pull out. He had to leave the sword behind just to get his own arm free. The Wizard fell down and the Tyrant never got up -- it made a slow growling sound and simply...broke down.

The result looked like a small mountain of toxic green slime, most of which started steaming away as soon as it formed. Within a minute, only the Magicide Blade remained. Caden sat up, wheezing and trying not to pay attention to the pain in his arm or the taste of blood in his mouth or the blur of his vision. He didn't even remember where he'd lost hi glasses, or if he was even wearing them when the fighting started.

Incidentally...

Twenty Wizards had started the battle against at least as many Warlocks and probably as many initiates, and certainly two or three times as many demonic familiars. The number jumped to twenty-four if you counted the three Wizards from the execution and Caden himself.

By the time Caden sat up and realized that there was still a fight going on, it was practically over. And the only ones left standing were Raun, Cadence, and four or five bloody, bruised, angry looking academics who looked like they knew how to carry axes, maces, polearms, daggers, swords and staves of power very, very well. And even deprived of his dread steed and his army of minions both mortal and abyssal, even after slinging spells for Sway only knew how long...

Raun was holding his own against the best Evernorth could throw at him.

He had picked up a steel dagger from somewhere while Caden was out, and now he wielded that and his Magicide Blade against the Wizards -- and they couldn't touch him. Spells were cut to ribbons, and anyone foolish enough to try melee was made into a fool at best. Assuming they got back out of it alive. Raun moved with all the grace and finesse of a High Elf, and he fought with the benefit of Seering Eyes. The Warlock would've probably been at home in the halls of Istien University, both before and after its ruin. As Caden watched, he parried an axe with nothing but the tip of his dagger, stepped up shoulder to shoulder with the Wizard carrying it, then took the man's nose, eyes, forehead and Hat in a swipe that looked too artistic to be murder. He had already moved away from the body before it could collapse, batting away a fireball as he went. Dagger twirling, he summoned up an arcane cyclone and set fire to it, but two of the Wizards shut the spell down just as quickly.

Caden smiled that nasty Wizard smile, reaching out with one hand...

...and his Hat came, easy as that. Blueraven put it on, then daubed blood from his arm and mouth and started tracing runes into the ground. When he was done, Blueraven planted his red-dripping hands onto the words and twisted them out from each other. The letters smeared.

The ground beneath Raun's feet moved. It was so quick that the Warlock fell to his knees before he even knew what was happening.

Blueraven pushed down and swept his hands to the right.

The ground collapsed as Raun tried to get back up. It enveloped him like quicksand, and he sank straight to the neck. The last few inches came slowly as he fought to keep his head above the dirt, even as the ground twisted until he and the Wizard faced each other.

"I'm suffering just fine, Pointy-ears," Caden spat.

One of the Wizards came in swinging his staff, and the last thing Caden saw was the Warlocked Seer's head exploding. It really does say something of his lifestyle that this was one of the least disturbing things he saw that day.

Anton fled and as a result he became the only survivor from the losing side of what would be known as the Battle of Evernorth. He ran as fast as his legs could carry him, laughing mad with tears in his eyes. Through streets that were long abandoned, past houses and shops where people were huddled in prayer beneath tables and behind counters, clutching holy books and arming themselves with feeble knives, cleavers, hooks and the occasional and inevitable pitchfork. He ran all the way to Inhuton, past the makeshift encampment of the Orc traders, where Redhide greeted him with a risen spear and a shouted warning. He ran and he ran and he ran.

And he was free.

"Free at last," from his obligations, "From the coven," from his Brood, "From Raun!"

From living.

He made it half-way past an alley near the edge of town before a spear thrust out from the darkness and caught him in the side of the head. The shaft snapped against the corner wall of one of the buildings and Anton crashed in mid-stride, his body tumbling through a stack of fish-filled crates and coming to an inglorious stop in the snow. His last action, last thought, last anything was to reach out just that little bit further -- until his fingertips at least, would meet the sun's rays. If and when the clouds ever cleared before the Wizards found him.

"And thus ends the story of the Warlock Banebram," his murderer declared as he stepped out from the shadow.

Anton stared at his own corpse -- at the thirteen-year old initiate who, in another Time and place, would have become him. He watched the blood leaking and congealing around where the spear passed through scale and bone, and he thoughtfully considered what to say next.

Eventually, the battered Warlock just smiled to himself.

"You were right, little one. I am free."

He put a hand to the Magicide Blade tucked in his belt, a new one swiped from a corpse on the edge of the battlefield. Kissed one of the rings on his free hand, and the sigils burned pale blue for just a second. He made a gesture to the Trinity of Gods that had been his guidance back in N'Thayn'sal; to Draconus, the Drowned Justice; to N'Jal, the Whispering Queen; to Jomil, the Dancer in Chaos. And then he headed for the gate, and whatever lay in the world of Althanas.

Anton's uncharted yesterday, and now...the Nameless Warlock's unforeSeen future.

Caden awoke to the view of a wooden ceiling and the sound of a woman humming quietly, beautifully. His heart ached on reflex and he closed his eyes, but it was a moot point and he already knew it. The humming stopped and patient silence took its place. Caden shuddered and tried to ignore it, focusing instead on what he could feel of himself and his surroundings.

Someone had cleaned him. His clothes had been changed. And he was lying in a bed beneath two layers of blankets with his arm completely bandaged. Someone had healed his nose, if only because he could smell whatever reagent they had used. There was a bandage fixed to each of the cuts on his shoulder, chest and face.

"Half-ass," he finally muttered before opening his eyes to the inevitable. First the ceiling.

And then Veshua, who sat on the side of the bed. She was knitting something. The woman that Caden had known to knock out Trolls in bar-fights was knitting something.

"You were asleep for three days," she said, then started in on her knitting again. "Dresden and his family stopped by for each one. The little girl with the broom, Lucretia? She's very fond of you, Caden. She and Justina became friends easily." Here a smile, not wistful or sad, just...knowing. "They've promised to write each other often, once they know how."

"...that's nice," Caden said uncomfortably. He sat up. Something in his stomach felt like an overstretched rubber band, but that didn't stop him. "Maybe when her own journey begins, she'll have a friend to visit on her way out."

Veshua smiled. "Yeah." A long pause. "I'm...I don't know what to say, Caden," she put the knitting needles down and straightened up, though she did't turn to face him and the battered Wizard was thankful for it. "It's been so long..."

"Five years, sixty-two days, twenty-three hours, forty-three minutes and twelve seconds. Unless you want to count extenuating circumstances," Caden answered. Veshua almost looked at him, but he could still see the raised brow. That expression used to make him blush. Now it just made him lamely admit, "I picked up a few tricks abroad. And I guess I counted," which was about as close as he would ever come to telling someone uninvolved about his trip to N'Thayn'sal, or the strange sense of timetelling it had left him with.

"...Nildinar is a good man," Veshua said. Caden waited. "Even though his father was...was that Warlock, Raun...Nildinar never joined the Coven." She smiled uneasily. "They went over him with everything the Church could spare, but...they couldn't find a trace of magic."

Caden remembered Nildinar's crowd clearing exit from the riots preceeding the battle. He didn't buy Veshua's explanation for a second, but he didn't push either. "That's good," he said. And then he lied straight through his teeth. "I'm happy for you, Vess."

She tensed.

And finally, the lost love of Caden's life turned to face him. She was as beautiful as ever, and just as far out of his reach. And when she smiled, it still lit up the room and made his heart do backflips, but Caden showed nothing. Deception is, to a Wizard, a lot like breathing. You can hold off on it for a while and you can learn how to perfectly control it, but sooner or later everyone has to.

He didn't ask about whether or not she remembered their promise to wait for each other. He didn't ask her how she and her husband had met, how they'd fallen in love, or why they named their daughter what she and Caden had picked out if and when they married. He didn't even ask her if she still thought about him during all those nights. He boxed it up, the way scholars box up outdated records and athletes put away old trophies. He cut himself off from it the way that men do, until all that remained was a numb ache that never once glistened in his eyes, dried on his tongue, or wavered in his voice.

All he did was to ask, "What happened, who's pissed off, and how long do I have to run like Hell?"

Veshua stared at him for a few seconds, then chortled, and then burst into laughter. Caden joined her not long after that, and for a while it was like old times.

Even though it wasn't and it never would be again.

As it turned out, the Battle of Evernorth had implications at every level. Caden was unsurprised to learn that. But he was pleasantly surprised to find that his actions had earned him a (more-or-less) unconditional pardon from the local Church, left to him in a very heavy scroll in Veshua's living room. Accompanying it was a formal declaration of banishment, which was also not a surprise. His weapons, Hat, coat, grimoire et all were piled neatly underneath it. Charger was vandalizing Nildinar's garden in the back yard, scaring neighbor children and generally being a menace to society. Caden approved. Dresden stopped by with his entire family to say good-bye, and Caden gave a few parting lessons to Lucretia as his past partied with itself. Veshua taught Dresden's children how to dance, Dresden and Nildinar had an arm-wrestling contest, Crina baked a cake and Cadence -- bitter, frosty, irritable Cadence the Weatheraxe -- showed up just in time to bless it, give Caden a hug, and leave.

For all the reputation she had as a hard-liner, her eyes still had a mischievous little gleam in them when she learned that Lucretia now knew the basics of thermal evocation. There was something about a formal apprenticeship in her future and the little Wizardess spent the rest of the day rambling about it with Justina.

Caden sat on the sidelines for the most part. He was still sore and Evernorth had left him with a couple of new scars to show for it.

The next few days saw the entire city undergo a huge demographics shift. The mayor and the Church issued a joint declaration banishing every inhuman from the city and giving them a week to clear out -- because all the Warlocks, bar a few corrupted souls, inhuman. The week's grace period was because the Church's surviving Wizards were still licking their wounds and nobody wanted to chance a full-blown civil war so soon after the Battle they were all busy writing songs about. When Veshua told him, with Nildinar and Justina in the room, all he said was, "I know a guy."

Redhide asked him later that day, "Why are you accompanying us? It's not like you're under any obligation to-"

"These are my people," Caden answered, putting on a new pair of glasses as he did it. "Give or take. I'm only riding with you for a while though."

Redhide gave him a slow nod. "You're going through with it, then?"

Here, and only here, did the Wizard Blueraven's cheerful facade crack. He smiled through it, tilting his head such that the lenses of his glasses were rendered opaque, and said, "I have no reason not to."

Word of coming Witchhunters and the violence spreading throughout the country hastened the inhuman exodus. More than a few sympathizers went with them. The old ghetto burned down the night they left, and Caden watched the smoke rise as he gave his newly adopted goddaughter a ride on Charger. "What's that?" Justina asked.

"The Fifth Law of Wizardry," he answered, looking forward to the caravan. "You can never go back."

She was too young to understand now, but she would in time. Caden chose not to spoil it for her.

He left the caravan a few days later, when their path took them away from the frozen coastline of Berevar and the wildlands that lay beyond its reaches. He did so with minimal good-byes; a handshake for Nildinar, a hug and kiss on the cheek from Veshua and Justina, and a crossing of sword and spear with the Shaman Redhide. "Good luck," was the last thing the Orc said to him, and Caden just smiled.

A few days after that, he rode to a stop on the opposite coast from Evernorth, in the officially designated Wildlands of Berevar. He set up a small camp, using wilderness skills honed in his apprenticeship to Wizard Greyspine, and stayed warm with the help of some blankets and magic. Charger wasn't bothered by the cold, but he still bleated something troublesome in the witching hour that night. Caden had his wand out before he even opened his eyes.

"Stop," said a voice, and he hesitated to do so. "It's me."

"Exactly."

A deep, draconic laugh lit across planes of snow and ice, and in the dull moonlight stood Anton Wyrmtongue. He wore a new robe, something different from the one he'd won during their last fight, and he was accompanied by a new gremlin that puffed fire and giggled smoke. "I've come to say...thanks."

"For?"

"Cooperating with me."

"I'm wondering if I shouldn't have," Caden admitted.

Anton rolled his eyes and spoke without moving his mouth. It was one of those disquieting habits that reminded Caden his enemy would never be anyting close to human -- not in mannerisms, not in compassion, not in morals. And that was fine. Caden was feeling a little inhuman himself these days.

"You said it yourself when we went over the plan, Wizard: One Apocalypse or a thousand. While I was powerless to directly harm Raun, you...you were only bound by a figment of your own imagination. He probably locked you in when you first walked into Inhuton. Blindsighter's Cage can be difficult to detect, after all."

"They never did find any towers there," Caden said. "At least not while I was around."

Anton shrugged. "Your timing was perfect, I might add."

"It could've been better. Innocent people died because I didn't want to."

"You said it yourself: It was for the greater good."

"I don't like what I'm turning into," Caden replied, "For the greater good or not." He waited a few seconds before adding, "And one thing still bugs me. If Raun was so...prophetic, if he could See everything the way he did...why wasn't he able to See our plan? Nevermind everything that he could've done to disrupt it. Like just not showing up."

Anton chuckled. Sighed. Took a few seconds to say, "I honestly don't know, Wizard. And you can bank on that. Maybe Seering Folk aren't as omniscient as they claim. Maybe they can See all options, all possibilities and paths, but they can only focus in on so many of them at a time. And there's always the off chance that our unique natures as timetravellers could also do something to the Sight. Perhaps it's one of those things we're just better off not knowing..."

Silence.

Dead silence, with not even the howl of wind.

Followed by lunatic cackles that'd make you wonder about which of these two is the evil one.

Anton actually wiped a tear from his eye before adding, "And I will say this of Time, Wizard, before I leave...

"It goes on. And the past is not what we remember it to be. In my youth, I actually watched myself...I watched myself duel you to the death in that town square. I watched you kill me in cold blood. And now, everything has changed. Because now, I have killed myself in cold blood. Do you know what my old Name was? Banebram."

Caden stared at him.

"Something to think about, eh, Wizard?" Anton asked.

He left not long after that. All things considered, it was the most peaceful meeting Caden ever had with him. He saddled back up the next morning, and like reluctant heroes nowhere, rode off into a false dawn.

End

Out of Character:

...oddly enough, I don't think I have any actual spoils to request here. Perhaps I could make a claim to a modified Disenchant Skill or something (what he did with draining magical energy from the Tyrant Wyrm's acid breath), but feggit. D: I'm overdue for a character update anyway. Incidentally, if anyone wants to have Church agents use them in the FQ... Magicide Blade: A three to four foot long sword with a curving blade, somewhat similar to an Elven cavalry saber. The blade is mainly colored sky blade with an orange or red shine, while the handle looks like solid gold and the guard is minimal -- just enough to keep th hand from slipping, but virtually useless to catch an enemy blade. These swords were made for the express purpose of breaking spells, barriers and enchantments and killing magic users. The blade is fashioned from a uniquely enchanted form of dehlar that not only resists magic but completely negates it on contact. The effect only applies to the blade, however, and the weapon does not generate a protective field, nor can it be made to channel or absorb magic for the wielder's use. The Church of Ethereal Sway possesses around fifteen to twenty of these weapons, and may use, destroy, or issue them to field agents as it pleases. Despite their origins as Warlock weapons, their use against magic is obvious. The Church lacks the arcane knowledge or materials to make more of them.

EDIT: Would the new glasses count as spoils? If so, those. :D

The Laws of Wizardry :: Hey, I’ll be taking this for judgment. It’s quite a big thread, so I’m sorry for the delay. Minimal commentary except where necessary, and I’ll get this done with the regular rubric since I wasn’t really given any specifics.

Continuity 8

Setting 8

The only reason I dropped the score was that there was a good bit of setting, and it was used well at times, but some of the times that you started to describe things I was still not truly able to visualize certain aspects of what was going on.

Pacing 7

Lots of one line paragraphs, and short posts interspersed throughout the thread cut the pacing at times, but they were for good reason. However, it still made the flow slow suddenly, and then pick back up immediately.

Dialogue 9.5

Brilliant. That’s all I can say. There was a lot of it, it stayed true to character, and it was magnificently done.

Action 8.5

Persona 9.5

Just like dialogue, this was done nearly flawlessly.

Technique 8.5

It’s more of a technique than an actual mistake, I believe, but it’s one that makes me cringe… probably mostly a pet-peeve. However, when you use “you” or any other second person writing in a third person narrative, it’s a bad mojo. You don’t write the second person words in a form of “You took a step” which would be true second person, but there are a lot of “you’d” see and such. I’d avoid that in the future, since it makes me really just take a second glance at it multiple times.

You also happened to go into present tense a couple of times.

Mechanics 9.5

Clarity 8.5

Wild Card 9

I must say, this is not just one of the best things I’ve ever read that you’ve written… This is one of the best things I’ve ever read on the entire site.

Score:

86! The highest score I’ve ever given for a thread.

Rewards:

Caden Law: Base Experience 5058 times two for completing in the FQ = 10116

533 base gold, time 2 for the FQ, 1066 gold!

The “spoil” that you request is approved, you get new glasses. Also, the weapons are going to be taken into consideration for use for Salvar, and you will be given credit for it.

Exp and GP added!

The JC choice will be made and if it is approved it will be moved to the proper resting place for all amazing threads. :p

Oh, side note, you also leveled up btw. Haha. Congrats!