William had once met an alchemist who’d showed him a special metal that the alchemist claimed would burn like wood. He’d scoffed at the notion, thinking only of the way metal heated to a glowing red when thrust into a forge’s coals. But true to the alchemist’s word, the metal had lit up brilliantly when the alchemist had cut away a small piece and held it over an open flame. William couldn’t remember what the metal was called, but he would never forget the brilliant white light that the metal gave off as the flames consumed it. It was one of the most powerfully intense things that the revenant had ever seen and the afterimage of the burning metal had left spots in William’s vision for a half a day after he’d stopped watching it. The terror that welled up in William’s chest as he ran from the flesh-crafted acid beast felt just as bright as the burning metal had been.
A circle of runes blazed around Atzar, casting the hollow remains of Arztschlange’s chest in eldritch light. William didn’t really know anything about magic but it looked incredibly complex. To have conducted such an elaborate ritual while dead on his feet was an impressive feat. It was too bad that he wouldn’t make it out of the plague valley, William thought. He had had potential.
Atzar glanced up as William ran back to him. The mage’s sunken, red-rimmed eyes widened as the mutated fungal zombie mass swelled to fill the dragon’s throat behind William. His shaking hand moved down to continue the ritual and William noticed that there was a bit more urgency behind the movement. The circle was nearly complete, but there was no way for William to tell how much more there was to the ritual after that.
“Keep it up,” he urged. “I’ll do what I can to hold it off.”
William stopped just short of the shaky mage and turned to face the first of the reaching tendrils. He slashed at the dripping mess but the creature seemed to take as little notice of the wound as the zombies that made up its form had. The pulpy flesh twisted to show a stretched face to William, the ragged mouth gaping wide in an eternal scream. Acidic bile spewed from the open mouth in Atzar’s direction, as if the beast somehow understood that the mage had the ability to pull the two seekers out from under its grasp. William acted without thought and leapt in the acid’s arc, only to find himself falling through a gap in space in a way that he hadn’t expected to encounter.
What little rational thought he still had fled as the world dropped out from under him and William, in turn, flailed around in blind panic. Something slammed into William’s back and the air was driven from his lungs. The world above him spun around, gross and unfamiliar. Arztschlange’s arcing ribcage and mummified bits of flesh were gone, replaced with a roiling green ocean shot through with streaks of yellow and brown. It looked more like liquid than air and the sight of it left William feeling somewhat nauseated.
“You did it,” he puffed in disbelief, working his burning lungs hard to draw breath back into them. He paused for a moment, savoring the feeling of not having to stand face-to-face against the twisted flesh creature, only to realize that if Atzar had in fact succeeded then they were now in a far more precarious position. They had made their way to the domain of Pestilence.
“Are you still with me?” he asked, rolling unsteadily to his feet. He eyed the quiet mage, completely expecting to see nothing more than a lifeless corpse. To his surprise, Atzar was not only alive, but the mage somehow seemed to have recovered in the last few moments. Though there were signs of sickness still apparent on his face, he was far better looking than he had been. William opened his mouth to say something, then caught the look on Atzar’s face and thought better of it. The man wasn’t on death’s door but that didn’t mean that the sickness hadn’t affected him. William retrieved his weapons and moved away to give the mage some time to himself.
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