The Wizard That Did It

My name is Caden Law.
My Name is Blueraven.
I am a vagrant scholar and war veteran.
I am a murderer, a liar, and a coward.
Months ago, I took up arms with the people of Raiaera.
Months ago, I was pressed to war and sent to die.
I stood with free Men, with Elves, and with Nature herself.
I hid behind the lines, letting others fall in my place.
I have wielded the arcane for any cause that counts.
I have desecrated lands for my own miserable skin.
I have seen a future that cannot come to pass.
I have seen the future that I cannot undo.
I am a tapestry of scars.
I am living proof of sin.
I was born in Salvar, and I returned seeking to mend my wounds.
I was born in Salvar, and I ran seeking solace for my crimes.
I am a Wizard, alone and unsanctioned.
I am a tool, filthy and broken.

A mountain pass somewhere in northeastern Salvar. There was a blizzard raging, but there always is this far out. Even in times of peace, this was a part of the world too far removed from any seat of power to warrant the efforts of Salvar's weather magi. That the roads remained worthy of travel was nothing short of a miracle, even if you had to trudge through six inches of snow to get to it.

The pass was a nexus of roads, of powers, of intentions. It was one of those unseen henges upon which the fate of the entire nation could pivot from at any moment. Four roads connected here: One that followed an ancient tunnel from the side of a stream, one connecting directly to the capital city of Knife's Edge, one that segued to one of the dozens of villages that called this mountainous region home, and another that lead right through to the untamed wilderness of the Far North. It was kept clearer than most parts of the pass, enough that you could see the rough old stones of an ancient road beneath a thin layer of snow and ice. The anchor for what little weather magic kept snowfall from piling up was a sign standing between the road to the Far North and one of the villages.

It was nothing impressive.

The man standing in front of it was another matter. He wasn't especially tall or broad and in any urban setting or even an ordinary tavern, he would've been easy to write off as Silly Miscreant #3552. Out here, however, was another matter. Out here, where everything was black and white, he stood out and demanded attention whether you wanted to give it or not. Out here, he looked like a true demon: His skin pale as porcelain, his hair one great shock of backswept blond, his ears pointed and his face mostly hidden from the eyes down by a sleekly angled iron mask. He wore a silk scarf, thickly woven and very, very red. He wore a knee-length tabard bearing a red fist upon a very white background. He wore plate armor on his shoulders, his elbows, knees and hands. He wore chainmail and thick cloth beneath. Strapped to each thigh were daggers, fit for throwing or not. Held in his left hand was a strangely curved stick, solid brown with a bronze cap at each end.

He was absolutely motionless, his eyes closed and his expression -- what little of it could be seen above his mask -- serene and restful.

I have done noble deeds.
I have done awful things.
Because I did not have the choice to do anything else.
Because I did not have the courage to do anything else.

Listen closely and you might hear as he hears. Feel as he feels. Know what the Rogue knows.

The sound of hoofbeats crunching through snow, of labored breathing and weary bones. The echo of each impact through hundreds, dozens, and finally just a few feet of dirt and rock. The knowledge that now is the time for him to open his eyes.

Shy away from those cold blue things. They'll be the death of someone.

My crimes are many.
And today, they come for me.

See what he sees now.

A man of twenty-odd years age, wearing both a heavy cape of fur and hide, and a thick blue longcoat. Pale in the sense of being pasty, unattractive, too busy hiding in dark basements and lurking in dank dungeons to ever get more than sunburn from the time spent in transition. A man wearing a tall blue hat with a wide brim and a thick black belt at its base, and yellow-lensed goggles like those of a skyship pilot or a steam racer. A man with a sword on one hip and a red rod dangling from the other, with light blond hair and a thin case of stubble, riding upon a burly Salvic workhorse.

He was a Wizard, and his greeting was a disconcertingly naive, "Hello!" shouted over the roar of nearby winds that somehow failed to bring more than light snowfall to this place. "What are you doing out here?"

The Rogue stared. Comprehension dawned, and the faux naivete bled away like the color from the Wizard's skin. "I am what you think I am," the Rogue declared, with a Voice the Wizard found all too familiar. It defined itself with a spectral echo on the mind and elsewhere, one that always lead to thoughts of the color red, and of the taste of blood, and the scent of decay. A Voice that came bearing gifts of despair, of grief, and of impotent fury.

The Voice of a Death Lord come to Salvar.

The Voice of the Wizard's crimes catching up to him.

My Name is Blueraven.
And today is the day I die.

The horse died first. It always did. Blueraven had never been much good at tending to them in his youth and he was no good at keeping them from being slaughtered in his adulthood. The Rogue's opening strike was pure speed and control backed by power that shook him to the core even when he wasn't the victim: Ten, maybe fifteen feet gone by so quickly that Blueraven had no time to blink, and then there was a short-bladed sword with a long handle and the Rogue was airborn beside him and there was a spray of blood all over his face and front.

The horse's head flew off. It had been severed with enough force that it actually struck Blueraven and sent him flying six or seven feet before he finally hit the ground. Not on forgiving snow, but on hard-packed dirt and ice. The Rogue spun twice in mid-air and landed with a crouch and a fluid rise to his feet. He had the sword in one hand, clutched nearer its pommel, and the empty scabbard in the other.

The dead horse collapsed. Its head tumbled to the edge of the road, leaving a quick freezing slick of blood in its wake.

"Ow," Blueraven said as he sat up, experienced enough with the pains of battle to know that he did not have the time to indulge in them. "That hurt," he still made the apparent mistake of saying.

"Stop talking," the Rogue told him with clinical detachment, even as he reduced the distance between them from eight feet to point blank. One foot thrust forward, and the soles of his boots were covered in the medieval version of tread spikes.

"Piss off," the Wizard said back, just as the Rogue ground to a halt in front of him. The air glowed a pale blue, snow fell against the outline of a weak barrier, and the Rogue was undeterred. He took a swing with his sword and Blueraven was ready for it: Wand already in hand, driving one of its metal caps into the sword's blade. Magical alloys clashed, and the result was a spray of red and blue sparks. "I said piss off!"

The Rogue backflipped away. Whether it was the force of Blueraven's spell or the Rogue backflipping off of thin air, the Wizard could not tell. He had no time to worry about it. The Rogue landed on one foot, rose to a queer little stance, and then he as gone.

Footsteps in the snow. Hard to track, but Blueraven saw them and took a wild guess. He pointed his wand, flicked his wrist, and heat lit the air with enough intensity to vaporize snow on contact and boil orange where it struck dirt.

He missed.

The Rogue did not.

The Wizard screamed as a blade pierced his cape and coat, his shirt and his skin all in one go. The Rogue was behind him, scabbard thrusting forward and its metallic tip driving into the small of Blueraven's back. He turned away from the impact but his bones still made an assortment of sounds and sensations that were anything but healthy. His feet slipped on the icy ground, and the Rogue took another swing with his sword. Blueraven parried it off of his wand with another shower of sparks, then threw up his free hand and made a fist of it.

The ground swallowed the Rogue to his chest in an instant. He did not even blink as he took a stab with his sword and pierced Blueraven's thigh. The Wizard shrieked and staggered back, staying upright only through sheer force of will. He hobbled away from the Rogue, spitting obscenities in five or six different languages as he went. If not for the surging pain and the fact that his blood was already freezing all over his leg, Blueraven would have tried to finish it then and there. He could not ignore it this time.

...and it cost him dearly.

"To me."

No flashy effects marked their appearance. There were simply three of them there where there had not been before: All bearing the same clothes and armor and masks as the Rogue, each one armed differently. Two of them bore enormous double-ended swords; thick curving blades joined by a single hilt, covered from without by a buckler shield marked with the same red fist, and the third carried a polearm ending with an enormous axeblade to one side and a rounded hammer's head to the other.

Blueraven ducked by the first as she landed, and the speed of his Wizard's mind was the only reason he recognized her for a Drow. He pushed upright with a scream and threw up another gravity cushion to slow the blade of the third, and for the same reason he was able to conclude that this one was an Elf like the first. The cushion was the only reason that this thought was not his last.

The hammer plowed through it in slow motion, but the force was still there. It slammed into Blueraven's back hard enough that he did not scream. The pain was such that it sent a shock of ice through his veins, and the impact was enough to throw him into his own barrier. Antigravity was an accelerator.

The first Rogue chose that moment to release himself. The earthtrap had never truly held him in the first place. He sprang up out of it with a spin, and the next thing Blueraven was that spiked boot rising up into his chest. The hit came with the same effect of a stone skipping along the surface of a pond: Blueraven bounced, his coat tearing at the right chest, and he kept going with even more speed and less control than before.

The fourth Rogue appeared then. Blueraven tried to stop him (her?). He really did.

He could not even stop himself.

Neither could she (he?).

The Rogue tried to run him through and what remained of his gravity spells slowed her strike just enough for him to unintentionally parry it. The blade still raked him from stomach to shoulder, ripping open his clothes and slitting the brim of his Hat along the way. That was where the fighting ended.

Blueraven tumbled right over the edge of the Pass, and it was a long way down...

Caden Law had lived in interesting times, even by the standards of Wizardry. A year or two ago, he had taken that description a step further and made it both plural and literal: Something or someone had plucked him out of his Time and Place during a teleport spell gone awry. Twenty years to the future and back again; he returned with new trauma, new reason, new enemies that he had and had not met, and more besides. He came back both changed and unchanged, and he came back repeatedly at that.

Caden was a living, breathing temporal anomaly. As a consequence of this, he occasionally gained an inch and ten or twenty pounds and a few months of life experience and magical talent that weren't there before. This was usually accompanied by a surge of golden light and a feeling of perfect health and equilibrium, along with an occasionally euphoric high that didn't last nearly long enough. More importantly, at least for now, Caden's mishaps with time travel had left him wth a built-in timekeeping and global tracking instinct that was, usually, accurate. Of late, the location instinct was starting to fade, but the timekeeping was as accurate as ever. It was always there, in the back of his thoughts. A steady little clock beat on the brain; the kind of thing that cost him sleep if he thought about it too much. It was a reminder of the shattered tomorrow he was trying to prevent.

And right now, it was telling him that he had been unconscious for exactly one hour, twenty-seven minutes and thirty-two seconds. As he came to, Caden immediately took stock of the situation. He was a trained Wizard after all, clerically sanctioned or not, and a Wizard's mind is always working.

He lay in the narrow, snow-packed crevice between the pass and the side of a neighboring mountain. Or maybe it was just a deep trench lining a single mountain; Caden had never been very good at actually keeping track of geographical standards. He wasn't bleeding anymore, which was good. But that was mostly because the blood had literally frozen on each of his wounds, along part of his face, and all over his clothes, which was bad. Very, very bad. Experience told him that he had an arm and a leg broken, and maybe there was something ruptured in or around his lower spine too. The cold left him numb, and the fall had broken one of his goggle lenses and cracked the other, but he still had his Hat and his broken hand was still clenched in a death grip around his wand.

Caden shuddered and tried to sit up. His body hurt too much. He tried to reach for his magic, but there wasn't much left there either. Not enough to miraculously heal himself, even if he actually knew how. Certainly not enough to fight the good fight all the way back to civilization. There was nothing he could do.

Maybe in a few years, someone would find his body. They'd pick it apart for one reason or another. Someone would, inevitably, find his tomes and open them. Someone older and wiser, or perhaps younger and more foolhardy; a person who could fight the future and in. A hero of time, or maybe just a peasant warrior in the right place at the right time to trigger one of those epic, legendary journeys of...everything. Another Devon dan Sabriel, ready to do what needed to be done, because Caden Law could not.

All he could do was lie there and let the cold seep into his veins, let the weight tug at his eyelids, let inevitability rest on his weary conscience. He had played his part. There was nothing left for him to do.

Caden closed his eyes and tried to smile. He was too tired and his cheeks too numb, but he still tried. Slowly but surely, spots faded from his vision and the world cooled to black...

This won't do, said the Sage.

For one so intelligent, you're awfully shortsighted, said the Hermit.

...what would you recommend?

There are those who thinks the Hermitess only cries. They are wrong. She likes that they're wrong. It makes it that much more dazzling when she smiles. Weave a little web with me, and introduce a little anarchy. All it takes is a little reminder...

*****

Your work is not finished, Wizard, said a warmth that began at his belly and spread out from there, bringing with it pain. The pain of life, at first, and then just the pain of suffering. Caden had never been enough of a philosopher to consider the two one and the same, but they were. Right now, they surely were. Have you forgotten your reason so easily?

He wanted to scream, to cry, to kick and flail and throw a tantrum just for the release of it. But he couldn't. Caden was too tired. Too broken.

Open your eyes, Wizard, that you may remember your Why.

"...striking...hate...you," Caden rasped, shaking his head from side to side and feeling pins and needles sew a tapestry of fresh aches and pains from his shoulders to his knees because of it. "Hate you so much," he said.

Why turns to Who turns to What turns to How turns to When turns to Where turns to Why anew, infinitely looping in on itself for as long as the reason holds. A man with a reason can do great things, and a Wizard with a reason can do awful things, and both of them can sleep still in the night without care or sorrow, said the Voice, singsong straight to his brain. It brought a spark to his senses, putting spots of light on the insides of his eyelids. Open your eyes, Wizard Blueraven. Open your eyes, Caden Law. Open your eyes, and see the Reason that has driven you this far, and will drive you further yet.

He wanted to obey.

And so he did.

For the rest of his days, whether they were many or none, Caden honestly wished he hadn't. Not because she was beautiful -- and she was, more so than any woman he had ever met -- but because...

...because of reasons he lacked the courage to say. Because of long nights and young, heartfelt promises. Because of sparse encounters and separate ways; longing looks and tender whispers; sweet nothings, bitter somethings, bittersweet everythings. He regretted it because he knew, right then and there, that his life could not end like this. He could not go peacefully.

There, there, the woman said, caressing his cheek with the tenderness of a lover. Did you honestly think that any Wizard could ever go beyond the veil that easily?

"I hate you," he said, and meant it. "Gods and Saints, whoever you are, I striking hate you."

I know, she said, soft and understanding. It wasn't her likeness that he hated. Caden could never hate the woman she appeared to be; the reason that really had driven him so far, through so much. Do you remember now? she asked.

"Yes," Caden admitted, and he began to cry. Or at least, he would have, if the tears didn't start to freeze as quickly as they'd left his eyes. "Now go away."

She inclined her head, smiling in the way that likeness always did in his dreams, and then she left him there. No flashes of light. No steps away. He had nothing to chase, nothing to reach for, nothing to focus on. Just the memories.

Just the motive.

Just the fury, boiling like hellfire beneath his frostbitten exterior.

Caden lay in the snow for a while longer, staring resolutely at the sky and trying to think of a way out of this. A Wizard's mind cannot rest. His body may break into a million pieces in the rigors of battle, grow weary and weak with the pressures of age, but the mind stays sharp. Wizards don't go senile. Evolution has weeded out the absent minded ones, and only survivors make it long enough to put on the Pointed Hat. Caden was not going to die here. He didn't know how, but he was not going to die here.

"Her name," he said to himself, more to work the blood back into his jaw then anything else. That was his excuse. "Her name was Veshua. Veshua Yakova. She was my first love. My only love..."

Snow crushed. Caden would never be able to explain how he heard it over the roar of winds through the chasm he lay in.

"...and for her sake..."

Snow crushed again, and it was coming closer.

"...I would do anything..."

Caden waited, his eyes closed, his mind racing and his heart pounding, as the steps came closer and closer. He had a plan. It wasn't a pretty one. It wasn't something he wanted to do. In better times, it was something he would've found absolutely disgusting. He would've tried to find an alternative to it at any cost. He might even have let himself die anyway. But it was the only choice he had left. He couldn't afford to take a third option. She was counting on him.

The footsteps stopped.

Caden inhaled, opened his eyes, and exhaled. He wiggled one foot, and then he almost grinned. It was the hammer-wielding Rogue, come to finish the job alone. He stopped for a moment, just a single moment, and even though his face was half-covered Caden could still see the surprise written in his pale blue eyes. He committed them to memory. Not because he wanted to, but because he couldn't afford not to. Once upon a time, this was some mother's son. An Elf, yes, but he had been a child once. He had grown. He had lived and maybe, if he was lucky, he had loved. Perhaps he had a motive noble enough to do horrible things for as well, and maybe it wasn't just greed that had compelled and seduced him into Xem'zund's service.

Caden wanted to think that. Because it made what he did next that much more difficult. He would've had trouble living with himself if it was too easy.

"I'm sorry," he said, and meant it. "I'm so sorry."

The Rogue's head cocked to one side. Maybe he was about to speak, maybe he wasn't. Caden did not give him the chance either way. With his broken hand and his numb wrist, he wiggled the wand and summoned up his reserves and performed the subtle, lethal Geomancy that had saved him so many times before: Spikes shot out of the crevice's walls by the dozen, thin things that went right through armor as easily as they pierced flesh, ripped muscle and broke bone. Shoulders and knees first, and then the elbows and hands, sides of the body and the rest of the legs. Caden shifted the wand again and the spikes moved with his intent, if not with his directions. The Rogue jolted forward, until held aloft just a few feet over Caden's deathbed. He wasn't bleeding. Caden tried not to let that make him feel any better.

A flick of his good wrist, and out it came. His absolute last resort, because it was simply inadequate for any reason but the worst one. It was a scalpel he had purchased all the way back in Scara Brae; an improvised pen that he ordinarily used to write in his own blood when conducting certain spells and alchemy. Caden tried not to hesitate as he took the knife and held it the way he had practiced: Flat across the palm of his index finger, edge down, like some kind of stubby little claw.

He tried not to blink as he took the scalpel and jammed it into the Rogue's eye.

...and above all else, Caden did not look away from what he did next.

All magic eventually boils down to the same concept, no matter how holy or corrupt or amoral it claims to me. It's just energy being moved through force of will and intellect and belief. It's power, to be molded and exploited and moved from place to place as necessary. That was the core principle of both thermal magicks and Geomancy and, as Caden had found out when he used it to kill a huge section of Tembrethnil Forest in Raiaera, Necromancy.

With his scalpel as the medium, Caden reached into the Death Lord Rogue and found the powers that kept him animate and strong. He found them, and it was all too easy to rip them right out and funnel every little bit into his own system. Blackest magic swam through his veins like boiling peppermint tar, registering to each of his senses in turn: His vision abruptly cleared, but for the world taking on a putrid green tint; his pain was overwhelmed by the shock of hot and cold power racing through his skin; his taste and smell were overloaded with peppermint; and he could hear the Rogue's soul -- what little remained of that wretched, tainted, corrupt swirl of identity and energy and life and unlife that made him...

Caden could hear it draining away into nothing.

It took the Rogue twenty minutes to die. He didn't blink from start to finish, and neither did Caden.

When it was over, the rock crumbled, and the Rogue's body was a withered husk wrapped taut around fragile bones within rusted and stained armor. It weighed, maybe, ten pounds when it landed on Caden. For all the blood still frozen and caked to him, he had no trouble pushing the corpse off and standing up. The Wizard dusted snow off. He looked at his scalpel impassively for a moment, then threw it away in quiet disgust.

He left the body there, and hoped the snow would give it the good burial that his reminder had denied him.

Salvar is a stranger land than people give it credit for. Look far enough into its mountains, and you will find miracles. Maybe they won't be pretty miracles, or maybe they'll simply be mindblowing, but they'll still be miracles all the same.

The first miracle that Caden encountered that day came almost four hours after he had staggered away from the Rogue's body. The black magic high had worn off by then and although the worst of the damage had been undone, the Wizard was still in awful shape. His clothes were wrecked, there was still blood caked all over, and his vision had returned to its usual blurred state. He was thankful for that last part, of course. It meant that he didn't have to see everything the way Necromancers do. At least the snow had done a good job covering his tracks, even if it was taking all of his remaining energy to keep his temperature above hypothermia. this was actually why he considered the first miracle to be a hallucination.

Because orange orchards simply don't grow in Salvar. And even if they did, the oranges they produce wouldn't be lightly frosted things that still look big and juicy and delicious, as opposed to the withered little chewtoys they should have been. The wood at least looked right; stark gray from decades of frost build-up in its bark, but the leaves were still crisp green and...

Beyond that, civilization. If only in trace amounts. Three small houses, spread out at one side of the orchard around the end point of a mountain road. The biggest was obviously a smithy of some kind, evidenced by the red brick smokestacks coming out of it and the veritable blast furnace of arcane energies that Caden could feel even at this distance. Next to that was a slightly smaller house, probably an actual dwelling. It had no windows, and only one door in or out. There was another red brick smokestack, but this one was smaller; presumably for cooking or warmth. Last, and smallest, was something that looked like a brick igloo with a round wooden door.

Caden stumbled into the orchard and leaned against the first tree he could reach. His breathing was ragged. His vision was starting to get spotty again, and it was all he could do to keep his thoughts in a nice, orderly state of panic and wonder as the cold started to truly overwhelm his remaining magicks.

He looked up in time to see the presumable owner of the homestead exiting the smithy. A short fellow, maybe a little under five feet, with skin that looked like a bruised grape. Stocky in every sense with a thick, coarse black beard and backswept hair to match. He wore nothing but heavy industrial leathers and an apron even in this weather, and carried with him a sheathed sword that looked vaguely Akashiman in its shape. A few seconds later, he walked over to a mangled looking tree stump in the middle of the clearing between what Caden assumed to be his houses.

He took a stance, and this too looked vaguely Akashiman.

He drew the sword, struck with it, and then held it up for a few seconds as a piece of the stump slipped away and fell to the ground. He nodded a bit and took another swing. Another piece fell off, and the man actually laughed. He sheathed the weapon and started back towards the smithy.

Stopped abruptly. He must've seen Caden.

So the Wizard did his best to fake a smile, and then he passed out somewhere between saying, "Hello there," and faceplanting into the snow.

It took him three days to wake up. When he did, Caden found himself literally strapped to the floor of what he presumed to be the actual home of the stead. Mostly because there was furniture clustered about at his head and feet, and a bed laying next to him. Admittedly, the walls of most homes aren't lined from corner to corner with axes, swords, daggers and spears. Likewise, most people consider waking up strapped to the floor on top of a bearskin rug in a room lit only by the fireplace to be a bad thing.

For Caden, it was enough of an improvement that he didn't actually mind it when he noticed that someone had stripped him down to his pants and, apparently, spongebathed his leftover wounds. His captor had even been nice enough to leave his head propped up on a relatively soft pillow. Compared to his last jaunt being imprisoned -- when a bunch of lunatic fringe cultist Elves had captured him, seduced him, tried to kill him, seduced him again, and then tried to kill him some more before sending him off to die -- this was downright relaxing.

Caden managed to tilt his head upright enough to get a better look around him. The only new detail was a closed closet or maybe restroom built into two of the walls, sticking out at just the right angle to throw off everything else. He flopped back and sighed. Tried to sleep. Couldn't. Tried not to think about what he had done to survive, and he would've failed at that too if the door leading in and out hadn't swung open with a blast of frigid air and a quick, numbing flurry of snow. Caden shuddered all over where it touched him, and it was all he could do to resist struggling free from his binds.

The door slammed shut. A few seconds later, he heard a simple, "Ah. Good. You're awake now." A few seconds after that, Caden looked over at his savior and captor. "You banged the shit outta this thing," he said, brandishing Caden's sword. It was back in its scabbard now, but even without seeing the blade, Caden could tell that the thing was probably in better condition now than when he had first gotten it.

"What's your Name?" the blacksmith asked.

"Blueraven," Caden answered. "And you?"

"Dueril."

"Blackface?" Caden asked, recognizing it as a Dwarven epithet for Drow...in the Drow's own tongue.

"Family name, birdboy," Dueril answered while politely stepping over the Wizard. He sat down on the bed, reached around under one of the pillows and took out a small leather pouch. From it he drew a notched, oily looking stone that shimmered green in the firelight. "Plynt sharpening stone," he said as an aside.

"Ah." Caden nodded, and then asked, "Is there a specific reason why I'm half-naked and strapped to the floor?"

"Several. Take your pick," Dueril said, though not unkindly. "There's the blood, the fact that you're carryin' enough magic tools to knock out a small platoon, or maybe that hellish look in your eyes. Could just be the stink o' death all over you."

"...I'm a Wizard?" Caden suggested.

"That's an even better reason than the other ones."

Caden considered this, juxtaposed with the reputation of Wizards in Salvar. They were generally weather magi like some of his sisters, arcane hitmen for the Church, or merely sanctioned magical badasses like his own mentor, Greyspine. He had met a few proper enchanters and one of his sisters did double-duty as both Wizard and Cleric, but for the most part that summed them up. And none of those job descriptions included words like pleasant or generous. Most Wizards really were subtle and quick to anger, and almost all of them knew at least a dozen ways to commit murder and get away with it. In his time abroad, Caden had found another ten or eleven to add to the dozen he'd known when fleeing the country some years ago.

"Fair enough," he said. "Can't really argue with that. I wouldn't trust me either, so..."

"Give me your Word and I'll let you up," Dueril told him. "Swear that you'll do nothing to harm or endanger me, nor will you allow harm to come to me under any circumstances."

Caden thought about it. He remembered his comrades in arms, the Bladesinger who stood with him during the Siege of Eluriand, and the Wanderers ho fought alongside him in Tembrethnil. Five hundred people had called themselves his allies, had been under his protection in one way or another. Maybe ten of them were still alive. If he was being optimistic about it.

"I can swear not to hurt you, but protecting you...that's..."

"Then tell me why."

"...I don't think I can."

Dueril stopped sharpening and polishing the sword long enough to give Caden a frank look. "This was one of the worst kept swords I've ever worked on. It had battlescars that took six hours to hammer out. I was one step short of reforging it all together. This is a Raiaeran Conscript's Blade, boy. Its shine was tarnished by run-ins with awful things. You're almost as scarred as this thing, and nothin' I can do would quench the taint outta ya." He looked back to the sword and resumed polishing it. "Been in a war, Wizard. And it don't take a genius to know which one. You don't have to say anything more."

Quiet followed, but for the scraping and the sizzle of the fireplace. After a while spent staring at the ceiling, Caden finally said, "Thanks."

"No worries."

"Offer still open?"

"Best as you can fullfill it."

He nodded. "I swear upon the Name of Blueraven that I will not harm you."

Dueril kept sharpening.

"...so, can you let me out now?"

"Can't rush perfection, Wizard," Dueril told him. Which seemed like a perfectly excuse to leave Caden strapped to the floor for another seven hours. In Dueril's defense, it only ended up being three.

Caden spent two days in recovery. For the most part, he spent that time making repairs to his clothes and getting to know Dueril -- who, understandably, refused to tell Caden his full name. Considering what a Wizard can do with names, Caden didn't blame him. Once you got him started, Dueril transformed from mountain man to storyteller, and he was a fine cook too. It was the first time in years that Caden sat down to a homecooked meal without war or death putting a blade at his throat.

"I'm a hundred-and-eleven," Dueril told him one day, all while hauling up a barrel from what Caden now knew to be a basement-level cellar that doubled as a freezer. "Just one of many sons of the Lines of Dueril..."

As it turned out, and Dueril spent the better part of the day explaining this in detail, the Dueril were a clan of half-breeds descending from a mixed population of Dwarves and Drow. Their history dated back to a Dwarf-sided resistance fighter named Dueril Delgadril khesh-Klevak. Delgadril was one of the few successful military leaders on the Dwarf side of the War of Inference; a real diamond mind, as Kachukian scholars would put it. He was the bastard son of an Alerian noblewoman and a Dwarven prisoner of war, spirited away by his uncles and raised to the blade from an early age.

As the War of Inference dragged on, Delgadril established himself as one of the few successful generals on the Dwarves' side, even if his own people distrusted him because of his dark purple skin, white hair and pointed ears. When the war ended, Delgadril was among the final signers of the Treaty of Congruity, joining on only with the condition that he and his men -- pureblooded Dwarves, mostly -- would be allowed to start their own Clan. Dueril: The Blackfaces. While the clan was initially almost as pure as any other, Dueril made it a policy of accepting the unwanted children of Drow and Dwarf unions as its own. Over time, Dueril even began to accept true Drow into its ranks, provided they were outcast by their own people or sincerely in love with a Dwarf.

"Near as I know, Dueril's still going strong back in Kachuk. They're a broker for what happens when magic meets metallurgy; run one of the finest factories arcane in that whole region."

"Why did you leave?" Caden asked just before dinner.

"I was never much for minin', and I only grew to like smithing in my seventies. I left 'cos I wanted to be a soldier." Dueril took a few minutes of eating before picking up right where he left off, "I was a damn good one too. Best axe in my unit, best sword in my platoon, best rifleman in my company."

It took a few hours before Caden finally worked up the nerve to ask the obvious. By then, he was sprawled on the floor and Dueril was laying in bed. "Dueril?"

"What."

"D'you still know how to fight with a sword?"

"Swords, axes, daggers, hammers, spears, guns..."

Caden nodded. "D'you think you could teach me?"

"Was wonderin' when you'd ask that."

"There are exactly three rules to usin' a sword, Blueraven. Pointy end goes in the other guy, try not to die, and never let 'em see ya sweat," Dueril explained on the first day of their training. "And we're obviously gonna have a bit of a problem with that first one 'cos o' your promise, but the other two should go just fine."

"I think I've got #3 down pretty well," Caden said, which was technically true. He was literally too cold to sweat.

Dueril grunted something incomprehensibly neutral. Then he wandered back to the smithy and stayed there for a few minutes too long. Caden was left out in the cold, shuddering as feebly as any foreigner despite being back in his Wizarding wares. The cape he'd purchased back in Dendrestok had been beyond repair; too many bits ripped off during the fight or the fall that followed, such that not even alchemy could fix it. Caden's goggles were back to normal, at least. Dueril hadn't begrudged him anything for the old liquor bottle Caden transmuted to repair them. By the Drowf's (Dwow? Drawf?) order, he had to leave his rod and wand in the house. The bowie was fine. The sword was better.

Caden had never actually noticed how lightweight and well balanced it was. Maybe that was a consequence of Dueril's repairs, maybe not. Either way, Caden drew it today and for the first time, he made a convincing job of flourishing it. Didn't even give himself a papercut whn he drew the weapon from its scabbard.

"Ready?" Dueril asked, and Caden looked back to see the Dwarf (Drow?) emerging from his workplace with an oversized quiver filled with axes and swords and a few short spears. He had traded in the apron for a vest covered in dagger sheaths, and even wore what looked like a fisher's cap loaded with throwing knives.

All of which looked very, very sharp.

Caden briefly wondered whether or not this was such a good idea after all, but Dueril cut him off (verbally, which was much better than the two and a half billion pointy things he could've used otherwise) with a raised hand and a simple, "Too late to back out now, birdy."

Caden actually whimpered. Dueril rolled his eyes and went about scattering weapons all over the ground. He threw them everywhere without actually looking, drawing swords and axes at random from the quiver and then chucking them over his shoulder. Even without trying, he still put every single one of them blade-first into the ground. Ten minutes later, he upended the quiver just to be sure, then threw it away as well.

Then he went back into the smithy and did it again. With hammers and maces and morningstars and guns this time.

"Strike me," Caden muttered.

"Zeroeth rule of swordsmanship," Dueril suddenly declared as he threw away the second quiver and drew a true Dwarven blockhammer from the ground at his feet. "Don't ever rely on your sword," he shouted. Caden almost jumped out of his boots. And his sword did jump out of his hands, helped along by a good smack from the Blacksmith's hammer. It landed almost twenty feet away, point down and wobbling with an almost musical sound to it.

"But you said there were only three rules!" Caden shouted.

"Rule negative one!" Dueril replied, then drew a handful of throwing knives from his hat. "There are no rules!"

Caden had always been very good at the theory of things. You have to be good at theory in order to qualify for the Pointy Hat of a Wizard, nevermind the fancy name or the badass longcoat (or robes, for the traditionalists). In magic, applying theory is usually about as easy as coming up with it in the first place: You do X, you've got a 99.9% chance of getting Y, which leads you to Z, which is often very flashy and explosive. In swordsmanship, along with armed combat in general, things got messier. Apply theory too stringently and Z comes before Y or X stumbles along after Z or W decides it's had enough of being left out of the metaphor chain and throws V at you like a boomerang.

But not applying theory is equally bad, because then the entire alphabet decides to run a train on you and nobody's gonna give you a towel or the courtesy of a reacharound, and you can bloody well forget a call back the next day.

To start with, Caden had to learn how to fight. And that meant shedding the things that got in his way the most: His Hat and longcoat, because the one was too much of a drag and the other kept tripping him up. But going without those also meant going without the lion's share of his protection from the cold, which meant trying to establish and maintain a heating ward without losing concentration and getting burnt alive or frozen to death or gods-know-what. Caden gave up on the ward by the end of the first hour, and that just meant getting adjusted to Salvar's brutal cold -- something he didn't need to do for almost five years.

He was hypothermic by the end of the first four hours.

"Good," Dueril told him at the end of the day, when Caden almost sent himself into shock trying to use magic to restore his temperature. "You can always work on a cold ward later. This'll teach you to survive without prep time."

By day two, Caden was getting better at ignoring the cold. He was Salvic-born and raised, after all; even if he had been gone for years and come back under too many layers for comfort, the ice was in his blood as much as it had ever been. His swordsmanship was still lousy, but at least he could keep a grip on it this time. He was also getting better at his situational awareness; no longer tripping over the weapons scattered all over the ground, no longer having trouble backpedaling to avoid getting his head chopped off. Half-way through, and he had even gotten the hang of parrying with a Coronian-patterned sword: The trick wasn't to hold it in close like a baseball bat, but to hold it at full extension and flick it like an overlong wand. Don't bash the other guy's weapon, just trip and nudge it. Quickly. To avoid getting your wrist slit or your arm cut off or worse.

By the second day's end, Caden's defenses almost looked like those of an amateur fencer. His attacks were nonexistent: A Wizard's Oath is a binding thing, and Caden had no way to learn how to exploit the openings his defenses made. The closest he could do were a few pretend attacks that did more to make Dueril back off than anything else.

By the thrd day, he worked up the nerve to ask, "This is supposed to be real world training, right?"

"Tomorrow," Dueril told him, and then threw Caden the bowie knife he'd bought back in Scara Brae. Its balance had changed, just a little bit. The weapon was heavier, but its center of weight had been stretched out until it felt the same from handle to tip. Caden had no idea how the Dwarf did it, and he didn't ask. "Today, twins."

"Salvic or Akashiman?" Caden asked.

"Alerian," Dueril said, wiggling his eyebrows.

"Sweet," Caden said with a grin.

Which somehow made for the ideal lead-in to Dueril trying to skewer him. (Again.)

By the end of the first week, Caden was back in his longcoat and Hat, able to defend himself competently with a sword and dagger (bowie knife) combination. He was still lousy on the attack, always striking a fraction of a second too late for any given opportunity, but at least Dueril wasn't letting him survive now. The half-blood was all the worst things you'd want to run into in a fight: Fast and agile like a Drow, strong and sturdy like a Dwarf, and experienced in virtually anything he could pick up. He didn't have magic, at least Caden didn't think he had any magic, but he didn't need it either.

The little bastard was just that good. When he stopped using swords, he switched to daggers. When he couldn't use daggers, he took up maces. When maces didn't work, he whipped up an axe or two -- or three, four, or as many as he could juggle. When all else failed, Dueril took to using thrown weapons. That was when Caden resorted to magic.

As Wizards go, Blueraven was something of a plexiglass cannon. Easily cracked, fractured, and generally ruined, but not very easy to break. Almost every spell he knew was geared towards destroying things: Fireballs, magic missiles, lightning bolts, and all the rest. Other Wizards had barriers, wards of preservation and endurance, and even just cryptic Preventative Measures to stave off injury and death. The closest thing Caden had to a barrier spell was being able to pull up a wall of rock.

"There is this one trick I've been wanting to try," Caden said. "Something to do with gravity."

"Do it quick then," the Dwarf told him while drawing another handful of throwing knives. He sent them flying with nothing but the flick of a wrist.

Caden answered by waving a hand at the things.

Five or six sharpened slabs of metal, and Caden responded with a handwave.

...somehow, it made perfect sense that it would work. The knives came to within six inches of Blueraven's hand and then stopped cold and fell to the ground as if bouncing off an immaterial wall. Dueril quirked a brow and Caden grinned. The Drow tried it again and the Wizard responded in kind with the same results. On the third go round, Caden was adding a fluid, circular motion to his wrist and the knives not only stopped, but went off course. By the fifth, the Wizard was down to doing it with just one finger, and on the sixth, he used his whole arm and generated an unseen something that managed to simultaneously flatten and scatter the snow at his feet, generate a small gust of wind and an empty pocket of nothing at its center.

The fifth time around, Blueraven had deflected the last of Dueril's knives. For the sixth, he deflected two spears and battle-axe -- all of which scattered in different directions.

"Dangerous," Dueril noted.

"Unpredictable," Caden agreed as he dropped the barrier. "What should I name it?"

"Dunno," Dueril shrugged.

Then the Drow whipped out a rifle and shot him.

(Or he would have, if Caden had been a fraction of a second slower in throwing up the barrier spell. Sixteen lead pellets sprayed all around him, pelting trees in the orchard and kicking up bits of snow along the ground. An orange exploded somewhere at the far end of the homestead, and one piece of shot actually came within a tenth of an inch of Dueril's foot.)

"Whatever it is," Dueril said, absolutely calm and unphased by the fact that he'd come within a hair's breadth of losing a toe. "I wouldn't rely on it."

Caden answered with one of those jittery little grins that only Wizards can manage. The kind that have I am unhinged and carrying enough dynamite to take out a whole city block written all over it.

"Blueraven's Gravity Gambit," he declared.

"Sad to say it, Blueraven," Dueril told him at the start of what would have been the second week. "But there ain't nothin' I can teach you that you haven't already learned. You've got the basics down; too much more from me and you'll end up forgetting what you already know-"

"Then what do you recommend I do now?" Caden asked, emotionally conflicted between Awwww... and YAY! No more prospective knife wounds!

"Same thing a wise teacher tells any of his students: Whatever ya do, just try not to die," Dueril said. "An' it pays to remember the rules."

"But there are no rules!"

"That or there's actually five," Dueril pointed out. "Committee never did figure that one out."

Breakfast came and went. When it was over, Dueril went to take a bath and Caden put on his Wizardly wares for the day. The longcoat felt a little heavier than usual. The goggles were a it more snug, so were the gloves. The boots felt about like they always did, and the weapons were a bit disconcerting since he actually noticed them for once -- and not in the sense that they were awkward. It was disconcerting because they weren't awkward. The sword felt like it belonged in the scabbard on his hip. The bowie knife felt as if it needed to go in the sheath next to where the rod hung on his other side, and he noticed for the first time that he actually missed having the scalpel in his coat's sleeve. It had been reassuring, even if it carried the perpetual risk of slitting his wrist.

Without ever actually noticing it, the Wizard had become a warrior.

A squishy, unarmored, barely functional warrior, but a warrior nonetheless. If he'd had a mirror handy, Caden would have probably straightened up with a bit of pride in his eyes. He made do with the reflection off an iceblock in the cellar. A few minutes later, he left the house with a small spring in his step.

Dueril was waiting for him, wearing a backpack with a huge quiver fixed to either side. Spears and axes and swords were sticking out from both, and it was a safe bet that the pack had more of the same. Every single one of them had its blade covered, with everything from a sheath to a scabbard to a silk or leather wrapping and, for one noteworthy case, an old plaid shirt. There were two duffels at his feet and an expectant look on his face. The presence of a pair of shotguns hanging by straps around his shoulders and a pair of suitably Dwarven axes at his belt didn't hurt either.

Even without the implied threat of Backwoods Quid Pro Quo, Caden would've done what had (not) been asked of him. A thought which he found both pleasing and repugnant: Pleasing because it meant that he had at least some shred of decency left in him, and repugnant because he was still a Wizard and shreds of decency are like stab wounds that happen to other people. He took up the duffels without a word, Dueril grunted a thanks, and they set off with the Drawf leading the way.

Only when they were far enough down the road that the orchard faded from sight did Caden think to ask, "Dueril? Why did you take me in anyway?"

"'Cos I'm up in the mountains an' I get bored a lot," the Dwarf answered. "Can only make so many pointy-smashy bits before ya have to go get some kinda interaction with your fellow say-pyent," he added as an afterthought.

"That the only reason?" Caden asked, searching. For what, he didn't even want to know.

"Gave me more time to make pointy-smashy bits?" Dueril asked, and this was somehow good enough.

For those who don't speak Pigheaded Male, it boiled down to comradery and friendship. Both of them needed it, more or less. In times of trouble, that's all it takes to find a mentor. Or, at the least, a good drinking buddy.

"So where are we headed?" Caden asked, shouldering both duffels when they became too heavy to just carry. The snow was knee deep already. Dueril trudged on even though it was almost waist deep for him.

"Li'l minin' town called Borse-Ahyarkham," the blacksmith answered. "Gonna pick up my ram-wagon 'n' head out. Headed anywhere south?"

"No," Caden answered. "Going as far north as I can manage."

"Dodgin' one war just so you can dodge another?" Dueril asked, sounding only vaguely disappointed.

"Not exactly," Caden said, and this too would have to suffice.

It took a few minutes before Dueril asked, "Y'wouldn't happen to be headed to Evernorth, would you?"

And it took Caden almost a minute to get over the shock of hearing his home town's name and admit, "Yes. Why?"

"Had a couple others come through here once, headin' that way. Mercs, it looked, lead by this girl named...named..." Dueril stopped. Stroked his beard a few times and snapped his fingers once or twice. "V-somethingorother. One o' those fruity North names..."

"Veshua?" Caden asked.

"Yeah. That."

It wasn't the cold that turned his blood to ice this time, nor was it anger or magic that warmed him back up. His knees were starting to shake, but Caden soldiered on and actually pushed Dueril a few paces for the Drow started bickering and took up the lead again. Dueril didn't ask what the rush was, and Caden didn't feel like telling him either. It didn't take a genius to know what war the Wizard ran from, and certainly didn't take one to know what reason drove him on.

"To Borse-Aryakham!" Caden bellowed, and it wasn't long before the Wizard started laughing. It wasn't a proper Wizardly cackle or even a Sorcerous chortle. It was almost normal, and damnably infectious at that. Dueril eventually started laughing just because Caden wouldn't stop, and then Caden kept laughing because Dueril was laughing and...

...and it was all much too good to last.

The first sign that anything was wrong came when Dueril reached what was, for him, a familiar fork in the road. It wasn't the pass where Caden had fallen, but another smaller intersection with a road leading to Borse-Aryakham and another leading out of the mountains all together. The post with directions to one or the other, along with a third arrow pointing to Dueril's homestead, had been knocked down. In and of itself, this wouldn't be worth much notice.

There was blood frozen on it though. Frosty red and shaped like a handprint.

Further down the road and there were footprints. Rough and oversized, and fresh enough that the snow hadn't filled them in just yet. Multiple trails of them at that. It was Caden who noticed the pattern to them, "Someone's...searching or patrolling for something. D'you see how each trail stops shorter than the other?"

"Further out from the other," Dueril noted. "Might be someone's lost a child out here. We should hurry up, get to the village 'n' see if they need any help."

"Yeah," Caden agreed, a little too easily for his own comfort.

It wasn't long after that before they found the first body. It was buried so deep in the snow that Caden ended up tripping over it, and he had to use magic to melt the ice and get it free without wasting too much time. True to Dueril's guess, it was a child. But this was when they knew that something really was wrong. Freezing to death doesn't leave gashes in the skin, and no animal spaces out its attacks like that -- nevermind that the only bite marks were on the hand the kid had stuck into his own mouth to keep his jaw from shaking.

Dueril and Caden knew knife wounds when they saw them. Dueril had handed enough of them out, and Caden had taken enough of them in turn. The boy had frozen to death, but someone had tortured him beforehand.

The Wizard and the blacksmith exchanged stern looks. They propped the body up by the road and Caden summoned up a tall enough slab of rock that the snow wouldn't bury it. "We'll come back later," he said, as if the corpse could hear him.

After his dabblings with Necromancy, maybe it could.

"Let's go," Dueril told him, and Caden didn't argue. He shouldered the duffels again and dutifully followed the blacksmith.

Within a few minutes, the trails had grown more recent. Some of them were recent enough to see drops of blood here and there. It wasn't long after that before they heard a woman crying, and neither the Wizard or the Drow was very surprised by this. They carried on until they found her, not too far up the road from where her son(?) had died.

Caden had seen people cry. He'd seen Elves cry, he'd seen Orcs cry, he'd seen demonic things cry, and once or twice he had seen himself crying in the reflection of his discarded glasses or along the unpolished surfaces of his sword. He had seen the tears of men, women, children and things that weren't any of the above. Of all the people he'd seen cry, human women were generally the worst, because contrary to what stories tell you, solitary tears don't happen. Emotions are all or nothing or just plain frakked. There's snot, there's choking, there's swelling and redness and worse yet. Crying is not beautiful. Crying is ugly. It pulls at heartstrings, if you've got them, and any romantic portrayal of it is a lie.

It's even worse when that person is a mother crying to death in the snow.

She was half-naked when Dueril and Caden found her. Looked to be in her thirties, give or take some entirely too recent wear and tear. Red-haired, but it was going gray quick and the snow made it worse. The only thing she was wearing were rags, and the only thing that'd kept her going this long was probably sheer maternal willpower -- and that had finally broken and she was shivering and bleeding from knife wounds and gods-only-know what else.

Dueril dropped his weapons and hugged her. Caden cast a thermal spell and tried to warm the whole area up, slow and steady instead of quick and hard. Too fast and hypothermia would've just transitioned to hyperthermia or plain old shock. It wasn't much. It wasn't nearly enough. But it was all Caden could do.

"There, there," Dueril told her, trying to sound comforting. He did a reasonable job of it, but she was crying too hard to make much of a difference. "What happened, dear?"

"D-Dueril? Dueril Dwight? Is that you?"

"It is. Ya gotta tell me, dear, what happened?"

"Oh, Sway..."

The Wizard Blueraven thought he could run away from Raiaera. Thought he could hide from his past in the place where his crimes had begun, and that maybe he could find redemption and healing here. Perhaps if nothing else, he could find the inner peace to return to the front on his own terms.

He was wrong.

He should have learned this when the Rogues ambushed him at the pass, but he didn't.

The war had followed him home.

She was a gibbering wreck for more than half an hour. While she told Dueril her story, Caden improvised shelter from the earth beneath the snow. Salvar didn't have as much magic to work with as Raiaera, and the mountains were especially difficult since this was land that had risen in spite of everything trying to keep iflat, but Caden made do. Three slabs, crushing together until they formed something kin to a teepee, and then Caden raised it up on thick pillars of rock until he was barely eyelevel with the small crawlhole in and out. More geomancy and he put a narrow ladder in and out, and then dragged his wand across the underside in the shape of runes. Warmth.

If he hadn't been so brutalized the week before, he probably would have stopped to make such a shelter for himself.

He helped the woman up the ladder, even though she looked almost as terrified of him as she had been of the story she told. Dueril promised to come back later, and she watched them go without a word. There wasn't any hope in her eyes. She was practically a dead woman walking, and her story lodged in Caden's mind the rest of the way to Borse-Aryakham.

"They came in the night," the woman told them. Dueril had identified her as Lasya, a miner's wife. "They waited until the mining shift was changing and then they came and there was nothing we could do to stop them. We tried. We tried we tried we tried but there was nothing any of us could do! They killed anyone who fought back. The miners tried to outnumber them and it didn't do any good at all! Just three of them and the village was almost brought to its knees in minutes! And then the leader came...

"He took our dead, Dwight. He took my husband and raised him from a corpse! But it wasn't him anymore. His eyes were so empty, so lifeless. But he moved. He moved and he moved and he kept telling stories and he took a knife to our boy. He took a knife to me too. And when he was done he sang a song and nailed his own brother to a wall, right at the elbows. Oh Saint...

"When they'd proven that we couldn't do anything to stop them, they gathered us all in one of the barns and started letting children out. Saint, I could hear my boy screaming for hours...and then they sent him and some others out into the cold to find a...to find..." She had looked at Caden then, and he understood why she was afraid of him. "To find a Wizard...

"After the first few, they started letting the mothers go. They stripped us, to make us go faster. Keep us from going too far if we found our babies. Keep us coming back to see what they'd do to our husbands. Mothers only; any mere 'maiden' was just chained up around the neck by their leader and...

"I had a daughter too, Dwight.

"She's not even fourteen years old."

"You've fought them before," Dueril eventually said. It didn't sound accusing.

"Maybe," Caden said, and Dueril shot him a look like nothing the Wizard had seen from him since they'd first met. "I'm not being vague. I don't know if these are the same ones that almost killed me before I met you."

"How many godsdamned Necromancers're runnin' 'round these parts, Blueraven?" Dueril asked, and Caden shuddered for a moment. The cold had nothing to do with that either.

"That's just it," he said. "I fought a bunch of assassins. Rogue-types. The only magic I saw from any of them was the Voice of their leader and his ability to summon up the other tree. And the magic that's keeping them animate." He considered it for a moment. "She said there were three to start with, then their leader came. These might be the same Rogues from before, plus a Necromancer I didn't get to run into last time around. And they've got at least some undead with them."

"If we go into this without a plan, we're gonna die," Dueril concluded. "So come up with a plan, birdbrain."

"Well, they want me but they're expecting you," Caden started. "They probably know you're in the area," he said, leaving unspoken how they would've found out. People were being tortured. Lasya had said as much. Sooner or later, someone's tongue slips -- and then it gets cut out, but it still slips first.

"Then we give 'em what they're expecting an' then we give 'em what they want," Dueril decided. "Ever take down a Necromancer before?"

Caden hesitated. He still had occasional nightmares about stabbing Kholia Horren to death with the very same bowie knife he was carrying today. Once in a while, the nightmares ended with the withered old Blightcrow's mask falling away to reveal Blueraven's own grinning face. He pushed them aside for now, saying only, "Yes." A few seconds later, he added, "It wasn't easy. I had more power to draw from back then."

"Why can't you do that now?" Dueril asked.

"Because Salvar's just not as magical as Raiaera. It's difficult to explain but-"

"Blueraven," Dueril turned and said to him, "Stop bein' a dumbass. You're a Wizard, right? Wizards are prepared for everything, aren't they?" he asked. Caden stared at him. "Aren't they?"

After a while, impossible as it was, the air actually began to grow colder. Every drop in temperature corresponded to Caden's breathing: He inhaled and the snow actually turned blue. He exhaled and the temperature stayed the same. After a few seconds of this, he started forward again, saying only, "I never thought of doing it that far in advance."

"Doing what?" Dueril asked as he took the lead again.

"Drawing in power. Usually I don't get the chance," which wasn't entirely true, but Caden wasn't one to admit his shortcomings. It really never did occur to him to prepare so long before a battle.

He tried not to think of the Wizard's Hat as a glorified dunce cap, but it was something of a moot point now.

"D'you think you can take their Necromancer by the time we get there?" Dueril asked.

"...probably not in a fair fight," Caden said. "Xem'zund's Necromancers are...a little out of my league, to put it one way."

"He'd slaughter the shit outta ya," Dueril translated.

"Not necessarily. Even if I couldn't beat him outright, I could drag it out. I know some tricks too."

The village was starting to come into view. Barely visible with snowfall and distance, it still looked like an industrious place. The smokestacks were still going, even now. Dueril reached around and drew a pair of shortswords, casting their scabbards aside with a wave of each arm. Caden took that as his cue to lower the rod and draw his wand. It felt a little awkward, after so long practicing with a sword and knife. It also felt deeply, profoundly right.

Blueraven was a Wizard. Warrior or no, the pointy Hat always came first.

They came to a stop just outside the heavy stone wall that encircled the village, ending only where the mountain was too steep to build on. There was blood all over the ground, and where a guard house once stood there was only broken wood. The gate had been flattened, already long since buried in the snow. From what Caden could see beyond it, the road continued a few hundred yards downhill into a relatively small village, with the mines located on the far side from where he and Dueril stood. There were houses and barns everywhere, a few shops and a tavern too. There was actually an orchard here, just like the one at Dueril's homestead.

"Hang back," Dueril told him. "Stay out of sight, if you can."

"They've got Rogues," Caden said. "Like Akashiman ninja, except with better armor and tactics. I can't hide if they want to hide me. Once I cross this threshold, they'll know it."

"Wizard thing?" Dueril asked.

"Sort of."

"Then don't come as a Wizard," Dueril told him. "Come as...come as whoever you are."

"Caden," he said at last, trusting Dueril more than he trusted his own paranoia. He would probably regret it, but he didn't care right now. "Caden Law."

He reached up then, and took off the Hat that marked him as Blueraven. Without it, he was just another mage. He had never been sanctioned by the Church, and the Hat was actually apprentice issue gear from the days when he was Greyspine's problematic protege. But it was still a Wizard's Hat, and Caden had earned it. A Wizard is made by just three things: His staff, his robes, and his Hat.

Caden didn't have a staff. He didn't wear robes.

In a lot of ways, the Hat was Blueraven. Anyone can write a grimoire, anyone can have a Name, but only a Wizard wears the Hat.

He shuddered a bit. Put down the duffels, carefully, and started to fold the Hat up.

"Wait," Dueril said. Caden looked at him. "Just save it."

"Save it for what?" Caden asked, no longer a Wizard so much as he was a rogue mage with too much power and knowledge for his own good.

"For when you want them to notice ya," Dueril said, and Caden understood.

Silence for a few seconds. Dueril started towards the village and Caden followed. Eventually, the Drow spoke again. "Whatever happens, Caden, not one of them leaves this place alive."

A Wizard would have nitpicked over whether or not the Death Lords were technically alive or not.

Caden merely said, "Damn straight they don't."

There was no resistance. Caden knew why, and so did Dueril. The ghost town approach doesn't work when you fortify it. Put guards by the doors and people just run screaming to the nearest armed encampment. You have to lure people to the point of no return using mystery as a bait.

The mystery was abandonment, and the distant sound of wailing mothers and fathers; people who had lost too much to feel shame, and who were too impotent to feel rage. The alarms were corpses, placed strategically where they would be best seen from all the worst angles: Right when you turn down a long street, or when you turn to leave the town square. Only a dozen or so were scattered along the ground, pale and stiff with death. The others were all nailed to the walls outside. Mining spikes and even whole picks had been converted into makeshift nails for crucifixion, but the actual damage hadn't been enough to do the deed.

Men died all over the village because they had been nailed to the walls by their elbows and knees, left to bleed and freeze in the cold. None of them wentwith any dignity. You don't die angellically when someone puts six inches of wood or steel through your bones. You die hard, screaming, begging for mercy even when what's left of your civilized brain is pointing out that there won't be any. A lot of Borse-Aryakham's men died that way. Dragged to the wall by their own brothers and sisters, then murdered in frozen blood.

There are a lot of people who like to say the world is divided by shades of gray, and they're wrong. To have shades of gray, you have to have stark black and white to contrast them against: Good and evil exist, pure and unfathomed. What happened in Borse-Aryakham was pure evil, and Dueril would've killed anyone who said otherwise. He walked through that village with his swords gripped so tight that his knuckles -- his purple-blue knuckles -- actually turned white.

He went in looking for trouble, and he found it in the town square.

Three Rogues, just as Caden had described them. White tabards, black armor, red details and heraldry in the form of a crimson fist. One had a strangely curved stick, two carried double-swords in the likeness of war-bows. Two were Elves, including the stick-carrier, and the third was a Drow. Two females and a male; it felt wrong to think of them as women and a man. Behind them, standing in the center of a violet circle of fel script, was their leader. A Necromancer, calmly and reverently chanting the same vile mantra over and over again. His Voice sounded red on the brain, like the frozen blood of his victims, and it stank just to listen to it, like the corpses in his wake.

He was a young man, of course. An Elf, with stark white air and pale blue skin. He wore the dark purple robes of an Archivist, with the same white-and-red tabard as his cohorts. He carried diamond-shaped shield bearing the Necromancer's Eye on one arm, and his other hand held something that looked like a black and green kris knife.

Clustered around his circle were the risen dead. Thirteen of them, all strapping Salvic men clad in the overalls and t-shirts of miners caught unprepared. Most were still clutching their pick-axes, and all of them sang hymns to Xem'zund with voices that were very much alive and just as hollow on the ear.

Dueril looked at all of this in disgust. The Rogues, who were clustered around the Necromancer and his minions, had already noticed him. They were already approaching. He had only a few seconds before going into the fight of his life, and Dueril chose to spend them on the only thing that made sense: A roar of challenge.

"LET'S DANCE, YOU BASTARDS!"

Swords sang. There was no other way to explain it. Curveblade, the lead Rogue, was the first to attack and Dueril was waiting for him. Blade to blade and the Dwarf parried the Rogue's weapon aside like a master schooling a rank amateur. Curveblade leapt over him and Dueril threw his left sword up without bothering to look. He lunged forward in the same breath, thrusting his remaining sword into the buckler-shield of the Drow with enough force to stop her cold. The remaining Elf circled around and came at Dueril with a spin. He ducked underneath it, spun around and somehow had the backpack off of his shoulders and slinging by one strap in his free hand.

There were more than seventy pounds of steel weapons in that pack. Dueril smacked the Drow with it and sent her facefirst to the snow some ten or eleven feet away. The impact broke buckles and straps and sent weapons flying everywhere, and Dueril took advantage of it: He slung the pack overhead and scattered a field of sheathed axes and swords, spears and daggers all over the place. It had the net gain of keeping the Bowblade Elf away from him for a few seconds more, not to mention putting all three Rogues where he could see them.

Snow crushed behind. The risen dead were coming, still singing, and their voices were coming closer too. Dueril threw the empty pack away, drew a shotgun and blindfired it behind him, all while slinging his remaining sword up and parrying Curveblade once again. He followed up this time by clubbing the Elf across the shoulder with the barrel of his gun, hooking its bayonet mound on the Rogue's armor and dragging him down in something that looked like back alley judo.

No time wasted, Dueril stabbed the Rogue straight through the chest and leapt away before he could suffer from a counterattack. He spun twice in mid-air, landed with a stagger in the snow and had his remaining shotgun raised and readied before most people would've finishd blinking. The Glaive Elf made the mistake of being right in front of him, less than six feet away.

Dueril pilled the trigger and blew the whole top half of the Rogue's head off, eyes and everything. The Elf staggered on a few paces and abruptly collapsed, twitching all over the place. He wasn't going to get the chance to celebrate the victory. The Drow followed up, looting her fallen comrade of his weapon without even pausing in the middle of a handspring jump. She landed on the stairs of a Church behind Dueril and launched herself at him, spinning like a buzzsaw as she went. He blocked the first slash with his gun, but the weapon was knocked out of his hands on the second and by the third it was all Dueril could do to duck under her. She stabbed one bowblade into the ground and swung around on the handle, then caught him square in the back with both feet.

Dueril plowed through the doors of Borse-Aryakham's Church, only to find himself in a room so desecrated he could not recognize it. The pew had been replaced by an altar formed from dead girls sewn together, their skin pulled back to show bare skulls. More girls had been murdered on the benches, their insides torn out and used to decorate the walls. A few, just a few, were actually still alive.

Dueril had seen horrors. He was a hundred-and-eleven years old, and a veteran of war and of dungeons and raiding and gods-know-what, and he had seen some horrible things in his life. What was done to the girls who still lived was going to give him sleepless nights even if he lived another hundred-and-eleven years. It was all he could do not to vomit when the Drow came running in after him, spinning like a ballerina with each step and whipping her bowblades in lunatic orbits that were as distracting as they were deadly. Bits of wood splintered off the benches where they hit. Blood flecked everywhere.

Dueril took out his axes, and he screamed.

The Rogue flew back out of the Church as quickly as she had entered it, taking with her a chunk of the doorframe and a huge dent in her chestplate. Dueril had actually struck her hard enough that the tabard more or less exploded at the point of impact. She hit the snow and tumbled thirty feet before sitting upright on both knees, her head lolled to one side and her eyes even more blank than was normal for the Rogues.

Curveblade took up the slack, appearing on the wall above Dueril's head as he stormed out of the Church. The Rogue went for a cleaving blow to the Dwarf's had, but Dueril twisted out of the way and slammed his axes into the side of the Elf's chest. Steel crumpled but did not break, and the Rogue spun out of control into the snow nearby.

That's when the dead came, trying to buy time for the remaining Rogues to recover. All thirteen of them charged at Dueril with more life than they should've ever had, and he walked right through them like they weren't even there. Limbs fell off, heads collapsed, bodies ripped apart and there wasn't a drop of blood for any of it. When he was done, Dueril stalked towards the Bowblade Rogue with murder in his eyes...

...and that was when the Necromancer finally deigned to get involved directly.

"Gravesake Earthbinder," he declared in the calmest of voices, just as the severed hands and heads of the miners vanished into the snow. They reappeared an instant later, grappling Dueril's feet and legs, his axes and finally his hands. Teeth sank into leather and the Dwarf screamed, more from rage than anything else. "Kill him," the Necromancer ordered.

And then he paused, as the whole game changed.

"No," said the Wizard Blueraven, standing right behind the Necromancer with his Hat on his head and his rod in hand. The Necromancer had just enough time to turn around when the Wizard said, "Magic Missile Barrage."

It started near the very base of the rod, just past its handle, and moved all the way to the tip. Sparks of violet, blue and white light, all surging out and coalescing into fist-sized clumps of energy. The launch pattern spiraled up from the base; three to start with, then three again, four after that, five, six, seven, and finally just one big burst from the tip. The Necromancer's tabard ripped like cheap paper from the first few hits, and everything after that sent him staggering further and further from the center of his Circle of Power. He hadn't been prepared to actually get involved, so focused on the much more important task of praying to his demigod. When he actually did get involved, he had shifted all that focus to Dueril.

Caden made him pay for it.

Blueraven made him bleed for it.

"Stone Maiden Mausoleum."

Swish and flick of the rod. Four pillars of rock shot up out of the ground, scattering snow everywhere. From them came spikes, each one linking to the next so thoroughly that there wasn't a single gap anywhere in them. The ceiling followed, and then came the spikes inside. Metal crunched and broke. The Necromancer's Shield actually screamed, and something like blood eventually leaked out of the Mausoleum's base. Blueraven tipped the rod up and the Mausoleum raised several feet up from ground level on a mound of risen dirt. He turned the rod down, and the Mausoleum vanished into the ground, leaving only a oversized pothole in its wake.

"That," said Caden, "Was way too easy and went according to plan entirely too well."

"That's mostly 'cos you're not the one gettin' gnawed on, shit-for-brains!" Dueril shouted at him while struggling with leftover miner-parts. At the same time, the Drow had finally gotten her wits about her, she had her target picked out, and there was nothing Dueril could do to stop her.

Caden brought the rod to bear.

Curveblade almost took his hand off for the effort. The rod flew from his hand in an instant and Caden snapped his arm back and jumped away in the same breath. The Rogue almost slit his throat. Caden planted both feet then, thrust his arm forward and focused willpower into his hand. The Rogue went for the kill. Gravity and antigravity swirled into existence around him, and the Rogue ground to a halt at its center, the conflicting forces shredding his tabard and tearing away whole chunks of hair and loose bits of chainmail.

"Gravity Gambit," Caden said, which had roughly the same net effect as piss off. The Rogue actually made a little gasping sound as his feet tore from the snow and the spell's power increased. He spun wildly in place for just a few seconds, and armor crunching here and there, before gravity or anti-gravity won out and sent him flying to Caden's left at close to fifty miles per hour.

The way was clear. Dueril was ten feet from getting his head cut off. Caden flicked his wrist and the Wand of Nevermorrow flipped out of his coat and landed securely in hand. Lightning shot out of it streaking through the air and-

The Drow took it square in the side of the head.

She tumbled to the ground and flipped a few times before grinding to a halt behind Dueril, her warblades scattering as she went.

"It's not over yet!" Dueril shouted as Caden started towards him. The miner's limbs still had him pinned, which meant...

Caden turned around and drew his sword with one had. It was the single most perfect draw of his life. Underhanded, blade down, timing was beautiful and the Rogue's sword clanged against it like a sledgehammer -- but Caden held on. He backpedaled and went for an Arcane Blast; the Rogue met him half-way with his empty scabbard, knocking the wand out of Caden's hand. The Wizard flipped his sword upright and parried another strike, then another, and another, and five more after that, and six after that, until he finally lost count.

Battered to low Hell and back, the Rogue was still faster, stronger, and just plain better than Caden. His chest was practically caved in at two places, his body had been twisted like a wet towel and he'd been run through at least once, but he kept going as if nothing could stop him -- and maybe that was true. Nothing Blueraven did could stop him.

The Wizard ducked, and a swing of the Rogue's scabbard took his Hat right off. The Rogue spun.

The Rogue spun.

The Rogue spun. There was an opening when his back was turned, and Caden Law took it. A straight thrust as the Rogue finished his turn, and Caden's sword drove through chainmail and silk, meat and bone and organs alike; from the Rogue' armpit to the inside of his opposite shoulder pauldron, ending only when metal clanged against metal. Magic took hold then, bitter freezing cold that crystallized the Rogue's bones and left sheets of ice all over his body, thickening towards the feet. A pure Thermal Strike, dropping the Rogue's temperature until it edged close to absolute zero.

He pulled the sword out. Indulged himself in a spin to the Rogue's front. Planted the sword's pommel right into the Rogue's forehead. It didn't shatter him instantly so much as it left a spiderweb of cracks through every part of the Rogue's body, even his still attentive eyes. Caden stepped back and waited while the last Death Lord crumbled, bit by bit, into a pile of frozen meat and abandoned armor.

Only then did the miner's limbs let go of Dueril.

And only then did Caden finally sheath his sword. He put the Hat back on a few seconds later.

My Name is Blueraven.
My name is Caden Law.
I am a murderer, a liar, and a coward.
I am a vagrant scholar and war veteran.
Months ago, I was pressed to war and sent to die.
Months ago, I took up arms with the people of Raiaera.
I hid behind the lines, letting others fall in my place.
I stood with free Men, with Elves, and with Nature herself.
I have desecrated lands for my own miserable skin.
I have wielded the arcane for any cause that counts.
I have seen the future that I cannot undo.
I have seen a future that cannot come to pass.
I am living proof of sin.
I am a tapestry of scars.
I was born in Salvar, and I ran seeking solace for my crimes.
I was born in Salvar, and I returned seeking to mend my wounds.
I am a tool, filthy and broken.
I am a Wizard, alone and unsanctioned.

A mountain pass somewhere in northeastern Salvar. There was a blizzard raging, but there always is when you're this far out. Even in times where people can lie and say their seclusion will give them peace. Once upon a time, the people near and around this pass thought its remoteness was enough to protect it, and that the blizzards were just a small price to pay for their safety. For their hubris, they would spend the next years trying to find their lost children; trying to rebuild their broken families; trying to wash the blood out of their desecrated Church. They had chosen to live in a part of the world too far removed from any seat of power to warrant the aid of Salvar's weather magi. That the roads remained worthy of travel was irrelevant.

The pass was a nexus, not just of roads, powers, and intentions, but of lives and stories. It was one of those unseen henges upon which the fate of the world pivots. Only four actual roads connected here, but a million stories had passed the sign at its end, and maybe there would be a million more to come in the years ahead. Stories of adventurers in dark tunnels by ancient streams; of shadowy spies in torchlit streets; grand heroes from unassuming places; and stranger tales from the wilderness. The ground was kept clearer than most parts of the region, if only because someone so many years ago had happened upon this place and thought to put a weatherpost where the roads forked. It wasn't impressive.

Until you realized that it was the only reason why an attentive eye would see all the tracks worn into the stones beneath the snow.

It was also the only reason that Caden was able to find what remained of his horse, along with all the packs still fastened to it. It was where he parted ways with Dueril; not on the high note their friendship deserved, but on a somber one that included crossed blades and military salutes. They exchanged a gift each, not that Caden had much to give. Just money, and that wasn't enough to pay for what the blacksmith had given him -- which included, among other things, a riding ram.

I have done awful things.
I have done noble deeds.
Because I did not have the courage to do anything else.
Because I did not have the choice to do anything else.

"You did what you could," Dueril told him as he handed Caden the ram's reins. The animal had been too fidgety, and people had been too cooped up with it during their internment in the barns. It needed freedom as much as anyone else did. "But they needed someone to blame, boy. And those monsters, gods damn 'em, they did come lookin' for you."

"I know," Caden said, trying and failing not to sound bitter. They had run him out of the village, stones thrown and everything. Dueril followed a few hours later, bringing with him all of his weapons, his packs, his wagon, and three rams: Two fixed to the wagon, and a third with a saddle and jittery nerves. It looked at Caden, Caden looked to it, and both of them snorted in turn. "I just wish they hadn't been screaming all those names when they threw the rocks."

"Can't be helped," Dueril sighed. "You're the Wizard that did it, Blueraven. And as long as you wear that Hat, and cast those spells, that's what you'll be." He said the words with sympathy, but logic had a way of ruining that and both of them knew it. "Take this ram," he ordered.

"I don't exactly have a good history with animals," Caden admitted, thumbing at the dead workhorse.

"'Sokay. I'm not askin' you to bring it back. Charger can take care of himself when he has to...and now, my boy, I'd say that you can too."

Caden loaded the ram up, bag by bag, and then eased himself into the saddle. Charger was smaller than the horses Caden had ridden before, but not by much. Almost as tall and long as a Raiaeran steed, and certainly wider. His hair was thicker and longer, colored stark white with black horns and hooves. The ram grunted, and it sounded more like a bull than a mountain goat. Caden waved good-bye to Dueril, and the Dwarf finally saluted him in turn. His eyes were a bit misty, not that he'd ever admit it.

I am the Wizard that did it.
And today, I ran from my failures.

Look through those eyes, and see now what Dueril Dwight sees.

A man of twenty-odd years of age, wearing a pointed blue Hat and a longcoat to match. Pale in the sense of being pasty, unassuming, and too busy exploring dark chambers and dank dungeons to ever get enough sunlight. A man with a sword on one hip, a rod on the other, and the skills and knowledge to use both. A man who, in many ways, reminded Dueril of a certain young half-breed with too many axes to grind and too many scars to carry.

The Dwarf stayed a while longer, but Caden took off without another word. Charger didn't break into a stride so much as it leapt forward, and then leapt again, and then turned that chain of crazed leaps into some kind of long-distance sprint where its hooves only ever had strained diplomatic relations with the ground at best. Down the road, up onto the side of a near-vertical incline, and right over the tip of a mountain wall, never to be seen around these parts again.

My name is Caden Law.
I endure.

Out of Character:

OOC Post o' Doom: Now with 50% MOAR spoils! Anyway, I'm kinda playing fast and loose on the liquid time thing. The Arcanist's Rod was a reward for the Raiaera FQ, and was obtained in-RP in my (as yet incompleted) thread with Schroedinger's Nirvana. The horse and bags will also be acquired in that thread. As to my actual spoils... Swordsmanship: Caden is now considered an Above Average swordsman when on the defensive, but is still somewhat Below Average when attacking. This skill holds true for use of a bowie knife as well, and for when Caden is using both at once. Gravity Magic: Caden is now an adept with Gravity Magic, no longer reliant on leylines in order to make use of it. He still requires an excessive charge-up time to perform Siege Arcana, but he no trouble slowing his falls or creating short-lived barriers, among other things. He currently has two named spells, Siege Arcana and Gravity Gambit, and several more in the conceptual stage. Blueraven's Gravity Gambit: A purely physical sort-of-barrier spell. Gravity Gambit basically creates a whirling sphere of gravity and anti-gravity in front of Caden's outstretched hand, its size dependent upon whether or not he uses one or more fingers, his entire hand, or a casting focus (eg. wand, rod). It works by first slowing or stopping an incoming attack, then redirecting and repelling it in the new direction -- something that happens at random and leaves a certain chance for the attack to get through for better or worse. The Gambit is short-lived, fairly quick to activate, and only affects physical attacks; anything magical or without mass would pass right through it with minimal interference. The Gambit is also limited to wherever Caden is aiming at the time, can only be cast at point blank ranges, and can only be performed one Gambit at a time. Thermal Strike: A last-ditch melee attack with a bladed weapon, its power varying by the size of the blade in question. Whenever a Thermal Strike connects with a slash or glancing blow, the point of impact either cools down or heats up over the course of several seconds, until the target either suffers hypo- or hyperthermia and localized shock at the point of impact. Repeated Strikes quicken and lengthen these effects. If the Strike connects with a stab or thrust, embedding a blade into a target for the long haul, Caden can freeze or combust his target around the point of impact. This takes almost ten seconds on average, and can be countered through elemental immunities or just bashing him away. Magic Missile Barrage: A rapid and sustained-fire version of the good ol' Magic Missile, performed through the use of the Arcanist's Rod or the Wand of Nevermorrow. Caden must remain stationary to use this spell. Charger: Riding ram, a little smaller than your average Raiaeran horse. Colored stark white with black hooves and thick, curled horns. Charger is basically a mountain goat on steroids, able to maintain good speed, traction and balance on just about any surface. He's a bit jittery from when Caden got him and eats just about anything. Improvements to Existing Equipment: Caden's Raiaeran Conscript Sword and Bowie Knife are now Masterwork weapons. Feel free to deduct my GP rewards and an additional 200 GP each from my total gold if need-be.

I'll keep this as short and helpful as I can, and I hope my advice assists you in the eternal pursuit of prose perfection.

Story: 18.5/30

Continuity: 6.75/10

I felt like I managed to get one foot into your characters shoes, but couldn't find the other one anywhere. You mention someone named Xem'Zund as a controller of these Rogues, but do not mention anything other than his name, or really go into any depth about Caden's dealings with him. You did kind of round this out in other areas. For instance, the general reaction to Wizards in Salvar was fitting, as was Caden's thoughts back on other wizards, and for the most part any his reminiscing added more depth to the story. The explainations of Dueril's lineage also added some depth and a bit of realism to both his character, and Salvar itself for housing such people.

Setting: 6.25/10

In general you seemed to focus on a few details of any one place while leaving the majority of it vague, and though you certainly maintain a level of imagery and flow, I find myself wanting more when I read your descriptive segments, or occasionally wanting it presented in a different fashion. For the most part you were rather frank and utilitarian with your physical descriptions, though you did quite well in setting the mood in a number of cases. There were a few points in which you seemed to try out some different descriptive styles, and these really smoothed out the flow of your prose. while adding a certain depth and immersion to the writing as well. Your use of the little things to describe works, but you should try to add it with some broader physical descriptions, like colors, smells, textures, etc.

Pacing: 5.5/10

The pacing of this thread wasn't exactly all over the place, but it varied a little much. You started four sentences is succession with 'he wore,' and that descriptive paragraph brought the flow and pace down. You've also shown a tendency to always describe things from Caden's perspective, such as 'he saw/noticed,' mostly simply stating they're there. It would improve the flow of your writing a great deal to branch out and give action to these objects, letting the actions they take describe the things themselves and keep your narrative flowing. I believe you actually did this a few times, but it was rarely. Your little rant about applying theory to swordsmanship was amusing, but broke the suspension of disbelief a little, and I almost felt more like I was listening to someone than engrossed in a story. Your monologue about the people he's seen cry almost turned into a list, and kind of dragged on too much as well.

Character: 22.5/30

Dialogue: 7.75/10

Caden's dialogue with himself after the disappearance of the woman who healed him really felt like someone in disbelief. I also enjoyed Dueril's banter with Caden as they began their training spar. In fact, almost all of Caden's interaction with Dueril was enjoyable, and your use of appostrophes and other changes in spellings brought out his accent rather well. For the most part, I felt the emotion I would expect in Caden's words, and there were plenty of them. You do lump dialogue together often, however, and while it usually isn't many lines, the flow tends to grind back down once you get back into description and narration. You could consider adding some small reactions or interactions by either speaking party occasionally so your dialogue doesn't outpace your narration.

Action: 7.25/10

You are fairly good at creating engaging action sequences, and aside from the occasional confusing sentence structure or word choices, I enjoyed all the action in this. The decision of Dueril to immediately shoot Caden after calmly discussing the name of the spell was amusing, and added to the realism of the character and his role. The final fight scene was exciting, if somewhat confusing at times, but I understood almost all of it first time through for the most part. Caden used a wide array of techniques in the final battle, but regarding his thermal strike, I find it a little hard to believe he could actually drop the rogue's temperature to even close to absolute zero.

Persona: 7.5/10

I came into this thread expecting some kind of split-personality due to your introduction, but I never noticed one. Conversely, the strangely calm description of Caden assessing his wounds after falling felt almost surreal, and very befitting considering the numbing cold he was in. His 'death scene' didn't quite feel like he took it seriously, though, which may have been just his personality, but all the same it still felt rather rushed or half-written. Caden's feelings about how at home his weapons felt after his training, and his longing for the comfort of his scalpel were well executed and appropriate. The subtle shift in Caden's walking upon the mention of Veshua was also a nice touch. Caden's assesment of the footprint patterns seemed appropriate, but again he seemed a little too unmoved, this time by the dead child. Despite these things, I feel I got an acceptable look into your character's head in this thread.

Writing Style: 20/30

Technique: 6.75/10

Your creative introductory 'poem' set the stage nicely for a split-personality character, but I never really saw any distinctive change. In a few instances, you addressed the reader directly as 'you,' which technically changes your writing to second person perspective, and you also occasionally forgot to add an 'ed' to a verb, changing it to present tense. Your description of the entrance of the three 'newcomers' in your first fight was slightly confusing, but more it felt too shallow, and while the effect I believe you intended was achieved, it was at the cost of a bit of realism. There was no mention of their skin color, body type, only their equipment and the fact that they were there. You rely on stand-alone sentences for emphasis too much, and they are a little overused. The descriptions of the necromancer and the undead surrounding him conveyed the feeling well, but remained themselves almost hollow, and not quite finished. As for your finishing post, at first I thought you must've accidentally reposted your intro at the end, but in reading through it I think that you did very well in bringing the story back around and creating some continuity. Your style and sense of humor are indeed unique, and though not quite what I would do, I believe you can run with this style if you include a few more traditional elements and save your humor for the points where it'll have the most effect.

Mechanics: 6/10

You tend to use incomplete sentences to describe things or situations very often (your very first sentence of description, actually), and in most cases have a verb, but one which does not involve the actual subject of the sentence. Your decision to split the line about orange orchards into another paragraph after the mention of the miracle definitely accomplished what I view to be as your intent to suprise, but the same thing could've been accomplished without beginning a sentence with 'because' by ending the previous paragraph with him thinking it was a hallucination 'because of one simple fact.' Then. simply omit the beginning because in the next paragraph. Also, try to refrain from beginning sentences with 'and' as well; semi-colons are useful in this capacity, as I just demonstrated. There weren't many spelling errors, just a number of repeated grammatical errors, and the occasional typo.

Clarity: 7.25/10

In general terms you remain quite clear through most of your narration, but tend to get a little unweildy in your descriptions, and occasionally your action scenes. Your description of your 'wizard' after the interesting transition about hearing as he hears and seeing what he sees in your intro was so blocky I actually thought you were describing several different people, for instance. Your writing has a modern feel to it, and thus an 'informal clarity,' but I seem to read through it seamlessly when you take the more traditional approach. There's no need to choose one over the other, of course; pieces of each could mesh together well enough considering your style.

Wildcard: 6



Total: 67/100

You recieve 2,756 EXP.

You also would have recieved 250 GP. However, considering your request for the upgrade of your weapons, I have deducted 200GP for one weapon, and 150GP for the second, since Dueril became such a good friend with Caden.

You lose 100GP.

All spoils approved.