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Hawkwood, holding aloft his sword with a loud cheer, felt every day of his age and then some.

White Company knights rushed forward alongside an assorted mix of Vaales and Chernlock soldiers present to fill some gaps in his ranks. Evestani’s primary garrison had surrendered. All it took was a massive shadowy spire holding a threatening leg over the building. There were still a few pockets of resistance holding out within the structure, but the vast majority of the city guards had already thrown down their weapons.

Once the garrison was secure and the unruly soldiers who hadn’t surrendered were either dead or thrown in their own dungeons, all that would be left was the palace. It was almost too easy. As Ilya assured, there was no sign of the avatar and his golden magics. No arrows turning his men into animated statues, no holy aura infused throughout their enemies, no rays of gold carving out chunks of terrain. Hawkwood hadn’t even had to swing his sword.

And he still felt exhausted. Clapping a hand to his side, he stretched his back as much as he was able. Though it was his usual armor, it weighed heavier than he was used to.

“We found two enemy soldiers capable and willing to assist with translating commands,” Neil said, stepping up next to Hawkwood. “They are encouraging their fellows to surrender. It won’t be long now… Sir, are you well?”

“Well enough,” Hawkwood said, sheathing his sword. “I think I’ll retire once we’re done here. Maybe serve as an advisor to my replacement. I can’t keep leading the men like this.”

A sudden look of alarm crossed Neil’s face. “Careful, Sir. You know what they say about talking on the battlefield of retirement, loved ones, or your past.”

“Bah. Bard’s tales and superstition. I’m not going to die out here. We’ve practically won already.”

“That’s another taboo,” Neil said, closing his eyes with a sad, mournful shake of his head.

Hawkwood stared at his adjutant. Neil, sensing the stare, looked up. They held the stare for a brief moment before both men erupted in a bout of laughter.

“Think the palace will be trouble?” Neil asked.

“Most of Evestani’s fighting force is in Mystakeen.” Hawkwood waved a hand around, gesturing to the line of enemy soldiers walking with their hands on their heads to a small holding area in the garrison courtyard. “These are the dregs. Either too stupid to contribute or too important—nobles and wealthy men—either way, not a threat. I imagine the palace guards will be mildly better trained, but even their position is ceremonial. Even if not…”

Hawkwood leaned back, freeing a crick in his spine as he stared up at the shadowy spire. It loomed overhead, an ominous sight if not for knowing its owner.

It couldn’t easily get to the palace. While the garrison was somewhat on the edge of the city, the palace was in deep. Had Arkk been in charge here, he might have crushed all the buildings en route, but Ilya struck him as someone wanting to cause the least amount of chaos possible.

Just the threat of it would have been enough for old Duke Woldair to throw up the white flags. He wasn’t expecting much resistance.

The loud squeal of metal ripping at metal made Hawkwood turn.

The tinny laughter of an orc echoed from the confines of one of those walking machines. The spinning blade on its arm crashed into a large gateway while Hawkwood’s men watched from a distance, shields raised and weapons ready. A slam of the machine’s other arm, capped with a spiked ball as wide as a sword was long, splintered the wood and bent the metal braces, cracking open the gate.

One stubborn fool of the Evestani army rushed out from the opening with a pike. That only made the orc laugh again—the sound coming from a conical brass speaking horn—before that spinning metal sawblade came down on the idiot, cleaving through armor, flesh, and the pike as if it were all made from air. Blood sprayed across the wall as the machine moved forward, shoulder slamming into the doorway.

“They told me to offer you a chance to surrender,” the orc barked from inside her machine. “So this is your chance. If I see even one single weapon in someone’s hands in three seconds, I’ll cleave through the lot of ya!” Another laugh punctuated her statement as a clatter of weaponry hit the ground from further within.

Hawkwood’s men moved inside, careful to keep their distance from the machine as they moved to secure the newest batch of captives.

Between the tower and those things Arkk had built, if the palace did put up resistance, he doubted it would be much. There were only ten of them, but each was practically an army on its own. He certainly didn’t rate his—admittedly diminished—forces as having a high chance of taking one down. Perhaps the right spell from an experienced battlecaster could stop one, but regular soldiers?

Not a chance.

“Is that the last holdout?” Hawkwood asked, turning to Neil.

There wasn’t much of a holdout anymore. It was a strange thing to attribute body language toward, but the machine almost looked disappointed that the soldiers inside hadn’t even tried to fight off the machine.

“Correct. Barring reinforcements from elsewhere in the city, the garrison is fully under our control.”

“Good. Get a detachment on round-the-clock guard duty over our captives. We’ll take a brief rest before rejoining with the other commanders to push further into the city.”

“Sir,” Neil said, acknowledging the orders. He turned and set to carry them out.

Hawkwood, remaining where he was, leaned up against a small banister in the courtyard—probably a post for some archery targets. He threw a glance over to the walking machine as it trudged out from the hole it had made in the garrison building, then a look up at the walking fortress looming overhead.

One or the other was a paradigm shift in how warfare would be carried out. Both together? And under the same banner, at that?

He shook his head, letting out a soft sigh. “Definitely too old for this.”

“Gah! What are these things?”

ᚱ. ᚲᛁᛏᛏ – IV twisted and bent, allowing a sharpened sheet of metal to slide directly alongside their left tool arm servos. Their right tool arm snapped out, reconfiguring to a cutting torch just as they made contact with the sheet of metal. A pulse of the torch cleanly sliced the sheet of offending metal, eliciting a cry of anguished rage from inside the metal suit.

The armored knight staggered back, drawing a shorter backup blade from somewhere on their person. ᚱ. ᚲᛁᛏᛏ – IV tilted their head, calculating. Their black box hummed, steam spouting from pipes and gears whirring in synchrony as they surveyed their opponent. Their opponent desired harm upon the automaton. That could not be allowed.

Around them, the clangor of battle echoed off metal plates of armor and automaton alike. Fellow engineers moved with mechanical grace, deploying tools that easily sliced through the nearly impenetrable armor. ᚱ. ᚲᛁᛏᛏ – IV detected magic on the armor. Analyzing it, they concluded that it had been magically enhanced to resist nearly any weapon. But engineers didn’t use weapons.

ᚱ. ᚲᛁᛏᛏ – IV focused back on their opponent, who had charged while their head was turned. They sidestepped, moving precisely far enough to avoid the attack without compromising their counterattack. Their left tool arm rotated, deploying a magnetic pulse generator. A flick of a latch in their core activated it, directing a focused wave at the knight. The pulse, designed to shape, join, or modify metals without physical contact, ignored the armor’s enchantments. Plates of articulating metal locked into place, flash welded, while the occupant of the armor began screaming in pain. Unable to move yet carried by momentum, the suit of armor toppled forward into the mud.

To the left, ᚾ. ᛞᛁᚷ – II utilized an array of cutting implements to slice away layers of their opponent’s armor. ᚹ. ᛒᚱᚨ – VII swung a pneumatic hammer with rhythmic efficiency, denting the armor of a knight who attempted to advance. A shadow-armored soldier swung a shadowy harvesting tool at one of the enemy knights who turned to fight back—shadow soldier categorized: ally; ignore. Sparks flew from ᚷ. ᚱᚲᚷ – X as they drifted overhead. The lightning was less effective against the armor. Analysis indicated it was too close to weaponry—spellcasting in particular—to ignore the enchantments. It was no less effective in startling and blinding the soldiers.

Right tool arm reconfiguring to a construction foam sprayer, ᚱ. ᚲᛁᛏᛏ – IV took advantage of the blindness by rushing forward and deploying construction foam. The liquid-like spray hit the legs of the nearest six soldiers. For a moment, nothing happened, but as the chemical reaction with air proceeded, the liquid began expanding, bubbling, and foaming before abruptly hardening into a material as strong as solid rock.

ᚱ. ᚲᛁᛏᛏ – IV had to end their spray early, spinning their torso to avoid a sudden arrow flying in from an oblique angle. A sharp static-like alert erupted from ᚱ. ᚲᛁᛏᛏ – IV, spreading information of a new threat in the vicinity to their fellow engineers. All incorporated the new data, readjusting their dismantling of the enemy forces.

ᚱ. ᚲᛁᛏᛏ – IV had seen a dozen engineers fall, all in need of repairs. More information meant less would fall in the future. That meant higher efficiency in carrying out their assigned task.

Their head twisted to face the new target, then their torso, then their mobility actuators. Consensus stated that ᚱ. ᚲᛁᛏᛏ – IV, momentarily disengaged already, was optimal to engage the long-range threat.

And so ᚱ. ᚲᛁᛏᛏ – IV moved.

Mags turned around, a small scowl forming on the current sheath he wore.

Up until a few moments ago, there had been an overwhelming source of magic nearby. Somewhere in the Evestani army. He had been heading in its direction for a while now, taking his time pulverizing anything in his path—no sense letting the opportunity for good suffering pass by—but now, he paused.

That source of magic was gone.

For a few minutes, it had only grown more distant. He could still sense that delectable smell of magic off in the direction of the tower—itself almost overwhelming in its vastness. That distance cut off abruptly. The target of his hunt was either dead or too far off to sense.

Mags thrust his hand out at one of the poor fools still brave enough—or stupid enough—to get near him. The blade bounced harmlessly off his skin as his fingers sought out the idiot’s throat. His nails bit into flesh. The sudden scream of pain died as Mags ripped out the man’s esophagus, and nothing else, slicing open his neck with such precision that all that snapped was the thick cartilage that gave his throat structure. The fool’s hands started grasping at his throat as if he could somehow put himself back together. Sharp, panicked breaths sucked in and blew out from the gaping hole in his throat, with none passing through the man’s mouth or nose.

Head tilting from left to right, Mags watched as the panic increased, trying to parse an odd sensation he felt deep within this sheath’s chest. It was something he had felt before, recently at that, but not something he could really put words to.

The man in front of Mags regained enough wherewithal to try to run. A single step from Mags moved him directly in the man’s path. He tried to turn, but Mags was already there. He turned again and again until he tripped over his own two feet. With the man on his hands and knees, Mags moved forward, turned around, and sat directly on the man’s spine. His arms buckled, forcing him down into the mud, but Mags didn’t move from his newfound seat no matter how it struggled. He simply propped an elbow on his knee and rested his head on his hand.

None of this was turning out as he had hoped. Sure, he had taken some fun from the situation. Traipsing through an army of mortals was always a good time. The few spellcasters among them had fed him, but nowhere to the point of satiation. He wasn’t sure that he had ever been satiated, but there were times when he felt close. Yet the Prince denied him Arkk and his fortress. Now that other source of magic had eluded him. Partially his fault, true, he could have rushed it immediately.

But then he wouldn’t have been able to savor the situation. Mags was a refined demon and as a refined demon, he enjoyed an appetizer before his meals.

Mags leaned over, grasping the head of the man he was using as a stool. He wrenched the head back, exposing the gaping airway to fresh air. Mud and blood and muck stuck around the blowhole, most of which was expelled as the man heaved.

“Is this frustration?” Mags asked, staring into the fearful eyes of the man. “I think I’m genuinely frustrated. Upset. Me? Normally, setbacks are just a little teaser for the meal to come. Sometimes I even set myself up to fail just to further whet my appetite. But when that promised meal never gets plated…”

The man’s mouth moved. Mags couldn’t tell if he was trying to answer the rhetorical question or if he was just screaming or babbling incoherently. Either way, with his esophagus hanging out, none of his words made it to his mouth.

“Useless,” Mags said, forcing the man’s face back down into the mud of the battlefield.

Head back on his fist, propped on his elbow, Mags stared out at that tower. Despite employing some guile and trickery, he had been unsuccessful in turning its inhabitants against the Prince. Normally, all it took was telling people that he was a demon summoned by Cedric. Most mortals didn’t take kindly to that kind of thing and instantly reframed their thoughts to view the summoner as hostile, especially if Mags was hostile to them in the first place.

A plot thwarted by the Prince himself, meddling where he wasn’t wanted.

He had tried turning the soldiers against the tower, forcing the issue.

Again, thwarted by that damned Prince.

He had tried convincing Arkk that Cedric was about to be his enemy because of a few missing nobodies.

That one hadn’t been thwarted, exactly. Instead, it resulted in the current situation. Not altogether a bad thing, but not exactly what Mags intended. Admittedly, that one would have been a bit of a long shot.

“Sir Mags?”

Mags first glanced down to the body—for that was what it was now, it must have drowned in the mud—before looking up to find one of the Prince’s soldiers standing at a distance that implied a healthy level of fear. Not enough distance if Mags attacked, but he wasn’t allowed to attack the Prince’s men under any circumstances, so the point was moot.

No one in the Prince’s army was aware of his true nature. Glancing around, he spotted two dozen bodies of enemy soldiers, all felled by his hand. And that was just in this little corner of the battlefield. They must have had some suspicions, though demon was probably last among them.

“You need something?” Mags asked, still glum.

“Evestani is surrendering. A few still fight, but it won’t be long. What are your orders for the prisoners?”

Mags just shrugged. He had already eaten the spellcasters. Under other circumstances, he might have killed the remainder personally, but he just couldn’t bring himself to be in the mood.

The soldier, some squad commander or other, shifted in obvious discomfort as he stared at Mags. When it became apparent that he wasn’t going to get a proper response, he continued speaking. “I have men taking record of our current status. A lot are dead, but most survive. I do not believe Prince Cedric will be disappointed with our performance today.”

“That’s great,” Mags said, hoping his utter apathy came through in his tone.

A dazzling array of light covered one side of the distant tower. White, bright light with an almost rainbow-like pattern barely visible within the glow. It lanced out from the tower in narrow beams, instantly crossing the distance between the tower and the airships hovering a distance away.

Mags licked his lips, idly wondering if he could get whoever was casting that to aim at him instead. Attacks on his person didn’t count as attacks against Cedric, so he wouldn’t have been able to retaliate. It wouldn’t have been satisfying, but it would at least have been some magic to lap up… like he was some mutt out slurping at a puddle after a rainfall. The thought only made Mags scowl more.

“We… maintain a fighting force,” said the increasingly exasperated commander. Even still, he maintained a note of respect in his voice. Which was a first. Mags was well aware that most in the army viewed him as a pudgy fool of a commander who only got the position out of nepotism. At least, they viewed him as that before his showing today. “Are we to assist our allies against the Eternal Empire? What are your orders?”

Mags followed the beams of light, staring up at the airships as they struggled to come up with a countermeasure against the attacks. He slowly stood from his body-seat, making the commander take a fearful step backward. “Commander…”

“Giles, Sir.”

“Commander Giles,” Mags said as bits of his clothes and skin and muscle sloughed off his back. The commander stumbled backward, tripping over a corpse. Even after hitting the mud, he still tried to scramble backward. “Congratulations on your promotion.”

Large, leathery wings sprouted from the meaty, exposed flesh. They unfurled wide, flapping once in the air as Mags tested them out.

“Do whatever you want. You’re in charge,” he said before beating his wings in one powerful stroke, taking to the skies.

Those airships were full of magic. He could almost taste them even from this distance. And somewhere on one of those airships, there was another presence. A mass of magic equivalent to the one he had been hunting.

Mags would be damned if he was denied his meal again.

 

 

“Have you been able to take any readings of ambient magic?” Arkk asked as he and his tethered group walked along a line of lesser servants. They all made sure to keep in physical contact with the servants at all times.

So far, no one had gotten lost in the Maze which, given the scattered lesser servants who felt right next to each other yet couldn’t find one another, seemed more like a miracle than not. Yet it couldn’t be a miracle. Not when the god of this realm was the one pushing them apart.

“You’re really worried about that now?” Zullie asked, using both hands to maintain constant contact. Although she had done something to her vision—even now, Arkk still wasn’t sure of the specifics—she still had occasional moments where she simply couldn’t see what she needed to see. The line of lesser servants was one of those things.

“As long as we’re here, we might as well.”

In truth, Arkk was growing nervous. Beyond the war and beyond the avatars, he had another concern. The Calamity. Neither he nor Vezta knew exactly how to repair the damage to the worlds, so they had mostly been stumbling about. However, somewhere around the time of the Anvil opening and the Burning Forge appearing in his temple, he had started developing theories. Some, he had voiced to Zullie, Vezta, and the others, but with the war taking precedence, proper research on the subject was delayed.

However, with every additional statue in his temple, feelings of foreboding grew. The time between them appearing was shortening and some, like the Fickle Wheel and the Laughing Prince, had appeared mostly spontaneously. As of this moment, there were only four empty spots in his temple. The Bloated Mother, the Veiled Dancer, the Whispering Gale, and Unknown, the Enigma.

“When we reconfigure the portals to return,” Arkk said, “I have a feeling another statue will appear. I don’t know if we’ll pass some critical threshold where the Calamity breaks apart or if we must collect them all, but one way or another, I doubt we have long to figure out what will happen to our world once that barrier falls.”

“Magic will flood into our realm. Can’t say whether it will be a trickle or a tidal wave.”

“Plants will die. People will starve. It’ll become as barren as the Underworld.”

“Probably not overnight,” Zullie said, though she didn’t contradict the inevitability. “Did some research on plants versus people after seeing the state of the Underworld way back when we first opened it. Something about the rigidity of plants makes infusions of magic toxic. Low levels can invigorate or add odd properties—alchemists use magical plants in a lot of their concoctions—but the little parts that make them up can’t stretch and mold around high levels of additional energy, bursting apart and killing them. People are far more squishy and thus more able to contain magic.”

“So in the short term, life will… flourish? Until it hits that point where it starts killing.”

“In a sense.” Zullie continued forward, humming to herself. “Can’t do rituals here, so the best I can give you is a feeling. This place isn’t suffering from high levels. Not that it matters. We have other realms we’ve seen. Either this place, like the Anvil, has managed to conjure up a solution… or it simply is too metaphysically distant from the end-point of the… drain.”

“Drain?”

“Magic flows through the realms. We know this. We have evidence for this. The Calamity is like a massive water dam, blocking magic from entering our world uncontrolled. The Underworld, the next closest realm to ours, has filled up because of that dam. Thus, we can theorize that whatever source of magic exists out there acts like a river flowing through the realms. It is only a trickle here because the next realm on the river’s downstream hasn’t flooded yet.” Zullie looked back over her shoulder, meeting Arkk’s gaze with her glasses. “If you ask me, the Calamity feels more like a response to some other catastrophe than anything malicious. Maybe wherever magic was supposed to drain to from our world, further on the downstream, flooded or erected their own dam.”

“I wonder…”

“Hm? Have you got alternate ideas?”

“Not so much alternate, but… additions?” Arkk thought back, far back. Before the incident at the Duke’s party. “I possessed Vezta one time. She doesn’t see the sky like we do. It’s… shattered. Broken. The Stars beyond that shattering aren’t like our stars. They’re more like… her, I think.”

“You mentioned not wanting to think about that.”

“It was quite shocking. Time and having seen far more insane things since have numbed that sensation quite a bit.”

“Do we know when the sky broke?”

Arkk shook his head. Realizing that Zullie probably wouldn’t be able to tell with her back turned and her sometimes-there-sometimes-not sight, he said a quick, “No.”

“It certainly sounds like a plausible theory. Something clearly happened. Though I don’t know how we might go about fixing it.”

Arkk didn’t have an answer for her. From what Vezta said, not even the god of boundaries and barriers had a solution to the shattered sky beyond the tiny, pinprick-sized holes used to rip servants out of that realm. If a god couldn’t do it, they probably didn’t have much hope.

But the shattered sky wasn’t the only deific-level incident that he was aware of. There was one other idea he had, something he had come across on complete accident during unrelated studies.

“Demons killed their god,” Arkk said. He wasn’t sure that it was true. There was a lot of misinformation, rumors, and outright lies surrounding demons. Yet most of the older sources, those Sylvara had dug up from her time at the Abbey’s archives especially, agreed that demons once had a god and now they didn’t.

Zullie hummed a light agreement. “Two potential inciting incidents for the magic problem. Neither solvable. Though, if you ask me, fixing a broken sky sounds a whole lot easier than reviving a god. Unless it isn’t quite dead. Then maybe even odds for both.”

There was a squawk of surprise from behind Arkk. “You think you can heal a dead god?” Camilla asked, sounding utterly incredulous.

Arkk did a quick headcount, making sure that everyone who was supposed to be behind him actually was. He had kept track of everyone in the back of his mind using the link, but it was good to check with his actual eyes. Luckily, both the tether keeping them together and the line of lesser servants were working as intended.

He gave a light chuckle. “You probably think we’re mad.”

“N-Not really.” Luthor waved a hand around. “This is mad. Can’t even w-walk in a straight line without going in a circle. We are making progress, right? If we wind up where we started, I might cry.”

“There are a limited number of lesser servants,” Arkk said, gesturing forward. “They might look the same to you, but I can tell the difference. We are making progress. We’re about to enter that forest I mentioned, the one with the liquid-like trees. Once there, we’ll have about half the line of servants left to traverse before we reach the portal.”

“I suppose I should explain to you what you’ll need to do to reconfigure the Al-Mir portal,” Zullie said as she fumbled along the line of servants. “I wish we had a Protector with us. It’d be easier.”

With Rekk’ar leading the men, he had felt it more important that their limited number of Protector bodies be with Rekk’ar and the various units in need of rapidly updated orders, leaving only one with Arkk—which had managed to escape their translocation because that Protector had been the furthest from the epicenter. Arkk had been just a little too quick.

It would have been more convenient, he was willing to admit.

Zullie proceeded to provide instructions for the modifications to the portal at Fortress Al-Mir, which Arkk carried out through a lesser servant. She wouldn’t know exactly what needed to be changed, besides carving a new keystone from some of the scraps left over from their efforts to bring Agnete back. Until they reached the portal here in the Maze, she wouldn’t know fully what to do, but experience in modifying portals gave her some ideas to lessen the time spent later.

“Back to our previous discussion,” Arkk said as Zullie ran out of adjustments to make. “I had an idea I wanted to run by you. I don’t know if this is a solution or just something to delay the magic toxicity problem—or if it would work at all—but… could demons solve the problem?”

“Demons?” Zullie said with a funny look on her face. “While true they break a lot of laws of magic if their contract dictates they must… I’m pretty sure there are still rules they have to follow. Just ones we’re unaware of.”

“Not like that,” Arkk quickly affirmed. “I have no intention of summoning demons. That’s wacky nonsense and possibly suicidal.”

There was a small sigh of relief from one of the scrying team.

“No. It happened when that demon got a hold of me. It ate—”

“Sir,” Harvey said, clearing his throat. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’ve kept up scrying. Something odd is going on with the airships around the tower. Bright beams of light keep appearing.”

Arkk stopped abruptly. Everyone else, tethered to him as they were, was forced to stop as well. “Everyone, keep holding onto the servants,” he said as he shimmied around Luthor and Camilla. Harvey was at the tail end of their tether. “Show me.”

The Empress stilled, sensing something amiss. Almost absentmindedly, she reached over and dipped a finger into the shallow bowl at her side, swirling the contents in long, gentle movements. A light flick disturbed the water, shattering its glassy surface.

There was no response.

“Adjutant,” she called out.

A wiry man, his perpetually furrowed brow somehow more furrowed than usual, stepped up. “Empress?”

“Turn one of the observers onto the Evestani army. Locate their leader and inform me of his status.”

“Yes, Empress.” Rather than rush out of the room, he approached a bank of brass pipes mounted on the wall. Depressing a small lever on the underside of one flipped open the cover, tugging on a string in the process. After a moment of waiting—during which a light chime echoed from the pipe—he cupped his mouth and began speaking.

As he worked, she focused inward.

Something had happened. Some shift in the world beyond the dangerous magic the Keeper was employing in his defense.

Things were going well, despite appearances to the contrary. The avatar of flames was an unexpected setback, but she had plans for removing that hurdle. The planar magic employed to defend against her attacks had already failed with no need to lift a finger on her part—evidence of its danger. It was only a matter of time until the Keeper slipped up and let one of the spores bloom or the magic sustaining the tower failed entirely and the whole thing came crashing down. It was an inevitability.

But now…

She wasn’t so sure. It was just a feeling she had. Like something had happened and she didn’t know what.

“We can’t find him,” the adjutant said, turning back to her. “They’re going to keep looking, but—”

A light feminine tone disturbed the liquid in the bowl, interrupting the adjutant. A brilliant white light pulsed in time with the spoken words. “He’s dead.”

“Not for long, I expect. Those puppets he uses are numerous.” The Empress snapped her wrist, waving away the adjutant. He departed the chamber, leaving her alone without complaint. “And you… You’re back, are you? Had enough fun annoying us?”

“You don’t understand. He is dead.”

“I do have functional ears.”

“But not a functioning brain. It isn’t his puppets that are dead. He is deceased. Bereft of life. He is no more. He has ceased to be. There is no current avatar of the Heart of Gold on this plane.”

Resting her elbows on the armrests of her chair, the Empress interlaced her fingers, mind running over possibilities. The first and foremost was the possibility that the Holy Light’s avatar was spreading falsehoods. It was the most obvious answer, given her recent duplicity and treachery. Yet, something about the situation rang true. As the avatar of knowledge and wisdom, she wasn’t one to outright lie. Twist words, agree to the letter rather than the spirit, and otherwise perform the bare minimum expected, perhaps, but not lie.

As further evidence, she always spoke with a hint of humor in her tone. Like she knew something that nobody else did and wasn’t about to bring them in on the joke. That humor was missing. That, more than anything, convinced the Empress that the sensation she felt had indeed been the avatar’s death.

Quite the surprise, given how much care he gave toward protecting his true body.

“How?”

Though often silent when she found ignorance amusing, the avatar of the Holy Light truly enjoyed showing off her knowledge. When suitably enticed, getting her to stop speaking was the challenge. Now, however, the Empress was met with nothing but silence.

A particularly damning silence.

“Your doing, I surmise?”

The light in the pool flickered before steadying out. “You are aware of my experiments with the avatars of other gods?”

“Vaguely. Continue.”

“The resources necessary to construct a restraining device for our golden counterpart may have found their way into the Keeper’s hands.”

The Empress could only sigh, shaking her head in light disappointment. “The Holy Light must be in tears over the wisdom of your decision.”

“This was no error in wisdom.” The light in the basin pulsed in anger that matched the spoken tone. “I’m not even upset he is dead. I don’t yet understand how he is dead—you know what he was like, so paranoid and careful. But if you think I’m going to shed tears, you’re insane. He wouldn’t have stopped at the Keeper. Unleashing his powers, showing off, and digging out weaponry like those golden arrows of his despite the treaty, he would have marched to Chernlock to take my head. The only thing that concerns me now is…”

“Our vigil is weakened.”

“Yes. The Calamity—”

“Solution.”

“Whatever you want to call it. It was threatened even before, but I presumed I would be able to deal with it after sending our greedy friend home with his tail tucked between his legs. I’ve built up a rapport with the Keeper, one I intended to use to convince him to cease his destructive efforts…”

“But with one of us dead—”

“I may not have the luxury of time,” the avatar of the Holy Light said, her tone firm and solemn “The Calamity is weakened by a third. Things are more precarious than they likely seem to you. I’m not entirely sure we can stop it anymore.”

The Empress turned a stern look onto the basin and, when she spoke, she spoke slowly and clear. “I hope, for your sake, you will find yourself incorrect for once in—”

The door to the chamber slammed open. “Empress! I am deeply sorry for disturbing—”

“On with it,” she interrupted, not caring in the slightest about her adjutant’s platitudes.

“Our armada, it’s under attack. Rays of light that penetrate the metal armor are shining forth from the tower, too fast to dodge and cannot be deflected.” He cowered back, faltering under the severity of her gaze. Even still, he pushed forward with his report. “They’re thin and narrow. Not enough to do significant damage. But if they hit the wrong spot—or you…”

The Empress leaned forward, gripping the ends of the chair’s armrests hard enough to bend the metal. Slowly, her gaze turned to the basin. “Avatar…”

“Oh. Sorry. Maybe should have mentioned this sooner.” A tinge of that irritating humor returned with the pulsing light in the basin. “I might have taught a few of the Keeper’s minions how to wield a sliver of power to get you off his back.”

“You…”

“Well! I’ll leave you to it. I need to get into contact with the Keeper and explain exactly why he needs to stop doing whatever he is doing before things really do end up out of control. Good luck!” The light in the bottom of the basin winked out, leaving the Empress glaring at a simple bowl of water.

“My Empress?”

A wave of her hand threw a sudden gust of air at the adjutant, knocking him aside as she strode out of the room. A greater well of power swept up as she moved, building beneath the airships momentarily before she hurtled them away from the tower. With the damage to her construction yards, the existing ships were irreplicable in the short term. She would need them alive if she intended to end this today.

“Damn her,” she snarled as she marched forward, moving to the observation room to see the trouble for herself.

With the Heart of Gold’s avatar gone and the thinning of the barrier, dispatching with the Holy Light’s avatar would be an ill-conceived plan. Once this irritant of a Keeper was gone and the proper Solution returned to strength, ridding herself of that menace would be far less of a detriment.

Until then, she had to grin and bear with the avatar’s machinations.

“Damn it all.”

 

 

“My plan worked,” Arkk announced to the silent darkness. “The avatar is dead.”

Zullie turned away from her work, lifting an eyebrow. “Your plan?”

Arkk let out a small sigh. “My plan, you and Sylvara’s efforts in making that effigy, Lexa’s efforts in actually getting it to the avatar, and Savren trapping the avatar’s mind solely in the host he was inhabiting. Whatever you want to call it, it worked.”

“Permanently?”

“I’d hope so. I think Savren is trying to check.”

“Shame I wasn’t there to see it,” Zullie said, leaning back over a large scrawling ritual.

The Maze, their best guess for where they were, wasn’t something to be taken lightly. Not if half of what Vezta had told him was true. Thus far, no one had left the command floor of the tower that had come with them. Using tunics, belts, curtains from the windows, and even Arkk’s trousers, they had fashioned a lengthy rope that looped around everyone’s waists, tied off at Arkk and Luthor at either end.

Ideally, they wouldn’t have to venture into the Maze at all. Zullie thought she could weaken the boundaries between here and home just as she had done from the other side to create the spell in the first place. Arkk was somewhat less optimistic.

The appearance of the Fickle Wheel in the Al-Mir temple had him on edge. It felt like everything they did was now being watched by a god known for random whims and false balance. The avatar being dead was a good thing. That only made Arkk worry that something unpleasant was going to happen to counterbalance that.

The increasingly frustrated looks on Zullie’s face weren’t reassuring.

Arkk closed his eyes momentarily, first scanning over the continuing battle, helping where he could, before moving to the lesser servants. He had summoned dozens of them, giving each orders to venture off into the Maze. If they could find a portal, they would have a much easier time getting home than hoping Zullie could recreate a magical accident intentionally.

The Maze was a strange land, he decided. When he had first heard of it, he expected walls, narrow passages, random dead ends, and a labyrinthine layout that was impossible to navigate. Instead, it appeared to be almost the opposite.

A bright light spell, thrown high into the air, provided illumination for the transported command chamber and its surroundings.

The command chamber sat in a vast, open plain that appeared simple enough. Grasses made of shimmering silver swayed in a gentle breeze. As the lesser servants traveled, the ground itself shifted, altering the landscape. Hills rose and fell, streams redirected their courses, and even the sky changed at seeming random from night to day at a whim, despite the light not changing elsewhere—whether that be for Arkk or other lesser servants searching the land.

More than once, he had sent a lesser servant off with orders to travel in a perfectly straight line, only for them to end up right back where they started a few minutes later. Yet, ordering one of the distant lesser servants to return ended in failure. He could feel them approaching yet they never actually drew near.

Three of his lesser servants made it beyond the plains. One reached a forest whose trees seemed to be made from liquid, all in the same silvery color as the grasses. One lesser servant had gotten itself trapped on a series of floating islands. They seemed to look down upon the plains, but the servant had managed to reach them without climbing or flying through the air.

The last lost servant wound up in a cave of sorts.

It had died. Nothing attacked it. It simply had been traveling forward when, in the span of a single step, it aged. Arkk could feel the centuries passing even though he was fairly certain that he wasn’t aging himself. At least not beyond the usual rate.

Above all, Arkk wanted to avoid that cave.

“Light,” Zullie started to swear, only to stop and shake her head. “This is impossible.”

More bad news. “We got here somehow. It should be possible to return.”

“Yes, but I can’t even draw a ritual circle. Look,” she said, scooting a step away from her work area. With a long piece of chalk in one hand, she dragged her arm in a perfectly straight line.

Arkk didn’t see anything wrong.

“Of course it works when I try to show somebody,” Zullie said with an annoyed click of her tongue. Her face brightened. “Observation? Maybe my lack of eyes is ruining things. Come, all of you, stare at me working.”

Arkk glanced around. The three members of the scrying team weren’t far away—they couldn’t be with the limited length of makeshift rope they had. He doubted they hadn’t been watching, but everyone still complied, squeezing a little closer to Zullie. She promptly started her work once more.

As she worked, Arkk started to notice discrepancies. Where she looped her hand in a wide, sweeping arc, a truncated line would appear. Where she marked down a cross, a ring would appear. In one case, she drew her arm along in a straight line and a straight line appeared, but it appeared on the opposite end of the circle from where she held her chalk.

With a snarl, Zullie flung her chalk across the room. Parts of it broke off as it bounced along the floor. The rest of it came around and struck her in the back of her neck.

“A-Are we trapped here?” Luthor asked, watching Zullie furiously rub at the chalk staining her cloak.

To be reassuring was to be a liar, at least in this situation. Arkk doubted they would be forever trapped. He had allies both here and at home who could work to bring them back. Unless, of course, the battle turned disastrous. With the avatar dead, the undead and Mags’ forces causing chaos in the Evestani army, and the machine lifeforms joining in the fray, using their power tools to dismantle the Eternal Empire’s invulnerable armor, things weren’t looking too poor at the moment, so he was cautiously optimistic.

At the same time, being stuck away from the battle, unable to directly assist, was concerning. There were still those airships. At some point, they stopped their repeated assaults. They were planning something, he knew. If they thought the battle was lost, they would surely have retreated by now, pulling themselves and their army back to rally for another attack.

There was still the matter of the Eternal Empire’s missing forces. They had marched across Mystakeen with only a few thousand less than Evestani, yet only about two thousand of their soldiers were assailing the tower. If the Fickle Wheel had anything to say about the matter, they would make themselves known at the worst time.

“I might have something,” Harvey said, looking up from his crystal ball. The others of the scrying team had mostly been fretting, but Harvey kept up with his duties. He waved Arkk over, showing off something in the crystal ball. “I can’t get a better view of it. Something is blocking the way—or maybe it is just this place—but that right there looks familiar, doesn’t it?”

The liquid-like trees of the forest his lesser servant had stumbled across dotted the crystal ball up to about the halfway point, where the land changed to octagonal pillars of stone, jutting up from the ground. Despite being equally sized on all eight sides, the columns of stone managed to fit together perfectly. Each face of the eight-sided stones matched the face of another eight-sided stone.

Harvey’s padded paw touched the scrying ball, drawing Arkk’s attention to a small gap in the stone columns. A golden crystal, covered in an iridescent sheen, just barely peaked out through the gap. Like someone had grown those stones in an attempt to hide the crystal only for the ravages of time to have worn away part of its facade.

“A portal,” Arkk said. The yellow crystal matched with every other portal they had seen. The full archway wasn’t visible, just the base of it on one side. Even if the rest had been destroyed, just having access to that crystal could be enough to get them home. After all, Zullie had already perfected portal construction while trying to get Agnete out of the Anvil. The only thing she needed was the material. “Do we know where it is in relation to us?”

Harvey looked up, giving Arkk a flat stare. “Does relation matter in this place?”

“Good point.” Arkk frowned, glaring into the crystal ball. “It exists, thus there must be a way to reach it. Something beyond stumbling about randomly and hoping for the best.”

Arkk waited a moment, looking around. The others were paying attention, but no suggestions came forth. He… really only expected Zullie to have ideas in a situation like this. The others, while good at their job, weren’t exactly idea people.

“I can summon more and more servants,” Arkk said. “Maybe have them all link together so they can’t get lost. Then if one finds the portal, we can just follow the trail of servants.”

“That could take an eternity,” Zullie said with a frown. Even without eyes, she fiddled with her glasses as she stared at the crystal ball. “Maybe some kind of… anchor? From my brief experience here, I would say that Xel’atriss, Lock and Key, and Unknown, the Enigma, are diametrically opposed gods. You and I have a deeper connection with the former. Though we would have to fashion some kind of spell without a ritual circle.” She shot an eyeless glare at the hodgepodge scrawls on the floor. “That’s right out.”

Arkk closed his eyes, rubbing at his temples. Verbal spells were much more difficult to craft than rituals, requiring the compression of all the scribbles and circles and symbols down into a few sounds. To the best of his knowledge, Zullie hadn’t crafted a single verbal spell since the disaster that took her eyes—though she had worked a little to safeguard that spell. But creating it in the first place had taken weeks if not longer. Its first use had turned out… poorly.

If rituals were out, that meant that that was the only spell either of them knew that had any connection with Xel’atriss. They couldn’t sit around for weeks, waiting for Zullie to cobble together another spell.

“You aren’t suggesting…” Arkk trailed off, glancing toward the scrying team.

They still didn’t know why Zullie had lost her eyes. Perhaps she saw something she wasn’t supposed to or something she couldn’t process, or perhaps Xel’atriss simply didn’t like being observed—Vezta had shielded Arkk’s eyes upon their encounter with Xel’atriss, presumably to prevent him from going mad upon witnessing something mortal minds simply weren’t capable of processing. But if Zullie was suggesting they repeat that incident, would having the scrying team close their eyes be enough?

Or would they wind up like Zullie, albeit lacking the drive and ambition to uncover magic’s secrets to keep themselves sane?

“If you—any of you—have better ideas, I’m waiting,” Zullie said, turning her head slowly over everyone else.

To Arkk’s great surprise, Luthor raised a hand. He waited to be called upon, acting as if he were a young boy attending a Suun lecture, until Arkk nodded his head.

“We’re all tied t-together,” he said, lightly tugging against the rope around his waist that was tied to Arkk’s trousers. “So linking together works in this place.”

Arkk nodded along, encouraging him to continue. They had done a few experiments shortly after realizing where they were. Two lesser servants walking side by side would eventually, and randomly, drift apart from one another even if they always tried to keep the same distance. Two lesser servants doing the same while touching each other didn’t.

“Rope. A rope of lesser servants. Send them out, all connected to here, and have them sweep over the entire place. When they find the portal, we put a hand on them and follow the rope.”

He didn’t see why that wouldn’t work. It sounded sensible, logical, and didn’t invoke a god to help get them out of this. Arkk looked over to Zullie, giving the woman a questioning tilt of his head. She looked… frustrated, scowling down at the complicated mess of a ritual circle that she had drawn out. He could almost see the thoughts flitting through her head as she tried to find a reason to reject the plan. It wasn’t complicated enough for her, not enough moving pieces, not enough things to go wrong.

Crouching down, Zullie picked up the broken piece of chalk that had hit her in the back of the head. She pressed it against the cracked tiles before spinning fully around, though she did have to stop and navigate the makeshift rope around her waist before completing her circle.

Except it wasn’t a circle. It wobbled, more like a bean despite her circular movement.

“It is possible that, even if line up an infinite number of lesser servants and send them about in a complete circle…” She jammed the chalk down on the odd bend in the bean-shaped circle. “We might still miss the portal.”

“But we might not,” Luthor said. “I… I don’t know what you two were referring to a moment ago, but if Arkk is hesitant, that means it is risky. This seems low risk, so why not try it? U-Unless I’m missing something,” he finished with a nervous look at his fellow scrying team.

“The only thing it will cost is time,” Arkk said. Lesser servants did press on his magic ever so slightly. He wouldn’t be able to summon an infinite number of them, but a few hundred would be fine. Malleable and amorphous as they were, one could stretch a great distance, reducing how many he would need to cover a larger area. “While we don’t have unlimited time, Zullie would need time to fully think through her plan anyway,” he said with a pointed look at the witch.

He was done with half-baked plans from Zullie. Capable though she was, genius though she might be, she was too interested in the creation process and not interested enough in perfection. If she spent a little more time to truly finalize one idea before the next one carried her off, her success rate would skyrocket. Arkk recognized that he was part of the problem, moving her from project to project especially as of late, but the problem still existed. Once they were out of their situation—the threat of the Eternal Empire and Evestani, that was—Arkk fully intended to recruit some more casters. An entire team he would have dedicated to nothing more than going over Zullie’s designs and ensuring they were finished, not half-baked.

Although Zullie bristled at his quip, she nodded her head. She sat down. Lacking eyes, she had grown adept at thinking about things without writing them down. Possibly another reason why her successes lately were few and far between, but useful in a realm where writing was forbidden.

As she began her ponderings, Arkk began summoning. Lesser servant after lesser servant warped into being, as if they oozed out from a tiny hole in reality. He had never possessed more servants than he did now, including those at Fortress Al-Mir, the tower, and now here. Idly, as he carried on the monotonous task, he wondered if they would ever deplete. They weren’t created from nothing, but drawn from the Stars.

The lesser servants scurried forth, all connected to each other. As one manifested, the line mushed forward. Although he could tell where one servant ended and the next began, he couldn’t see it. The oily, tar-like bodies they possessed merged together in a long, thin strand of mush, squirming forward like a snake crossed with a caterpillar.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Camilla whined.

“When I first found Fortress Al-Mir,” Arkk said between summonings, “I didn’t want to conjure them up at all, off-putting as they are. But they are necessary to run the fortress and, even outside that, useful.” He gestured to the long line of servants stretching off toward whatever horizon existed in this strange place.

“Still think I’m going to be sick.”

Arkk just chuckled as he continued summoning. “Vezz’ok is still at Fortress Al-Mir. I’ll move him to the portal room to have him assist the servants in reconfiguring the portal.”

“Won’t help unless we find the portal here.”

Two of his lonesome, earlier exploratory servants had found the liquid forest where the portal resided. Neither had set off in the same direction, but he still had them—and all the other servants out there—patrolling around, trying to find anything stable enough to resemble a landmark.

At the same time, he kept his eye on the continuing battle. A full tenth of the Eternal Empire’s army was lying dismantled in the mud, with Shieldbreakers and the Black Knights’s assistance. The rest had been pushed back from the base of the tower. A good thing too. When the disaster in the command center occurred, the Maze of Infinite Paths protecting the tower legs, and keeping the enemy army out, had failed as well.

The portion of the Empire’s army that had been inside the tower’s legs hadn’t returned when the spell failed. They accounted for a significant chunk of the army, so unless they randomly reappeared, that was one benefit to the spell failing.

Maybe the Fickle Wheel really was on his side after all.

Time would tell.

 

 

Golden eyes looked over a golden battlefield. Streaks of color lined everything. The grass, the trees, the soldiers. Even his host body now sported a thin stripe of gold from hip to shoulder. It was a wonder this body hadn’t been bisected, though he did suppose it was a lucky break. Switching bodies would have been a waste of his efforts.

The startled, frozen battle didn’t remain paused for long. A dazzling display of magical might should have seen his enemies surrendering immediately and unconditionally, yet they fought on. Irritants. Bolstered by the presence of that tower.

The soldiers in his immediate vicinity, once they recovered from their momentary fright over the situation , straightened up and took on looks of pride. As if the golden streaks of light now crossing over their armor had been an act of blessing. They probably wouldn’t have been as enthusiastic had the deadly magic remained deadly after splitting so much, but as it was, there was no need to hamper their bolstered morale.

Let the peons have their delusions.

Narrowing his eyes, he shot a glare at the tower. It was still standing. Still mostly unharmed. Certainly, he had been unable to cause much damage, though they had yet to reactivate the protective ritual he had first taken down. Now they were reflecting attacks at their attackers?

The irritant grew with every passing day.

That glare shifted upward. What was the Almighty Glory doing anyhow? She was the expert in destroying these things. Yet she was fiddling about. Clearly, her skills had rusted in the extended years since the last major fortress had been discovered. She had but a single trick. Even now, all she tried was dropping more nihilith pods onto the tower. At the start, they had been doing something. Now the flames employed by the tower burned them away with such ease that it was worthless. A waste of time and effort.

So rigid and stuck in her ways. She hadn’t developed an iota of creativity over the centuries. If anything, she had lost what little creativity she once possessed.

Well, if she wasn’t going to pull her weight, it was up to him to show the Almighty Glory the glory of the Gold.

Kneeling once more, he closed his eyes and began gathering himself.

So they could redirect his attacks? Hardly a concern. All magic had its limits and his limits were far, far beyond what some uppity Keeper could manage. He just needed to be at his full strength.

A few moments into his meditations and he felt something. Some tension in the very world. It built up slowly, over a few minutes. The final few seconds ramped up, reaching a crescendo in an instant.

Golden eyes snapped open just in time to witness an explosion in the tower. A tenth away from the top of its peak, bricks flew outward as if pushed by a bubble. Crackling blue-white lightning-like lines of pure arcane magic danced between the bricks, locking them into place. A tremor cascaded down the tower’s walls, rippling the stone as if it were made from water.

At first, he started to grin. His enemies having trouble was a benefit to him. It didn’t look like the tower was about to topple—it held on by a thread—but that could easily be rectified. Such a magically charged explosion wouldn’t have left that Keeper unscathed.

His smile slid askew as he felt a second wave coming from the tower. Not an explosion. A rush of magic cascaded over the battlefield. Pure, chaotic magic flooding into this world from elsewhere.

“What have you done?”

Apoplectic. That was the only word to describe the tone of the august voice coming from the shallow basin at his side.

“What have I done?” he snapped before his eyes flicked to the guards around him. They didn’t need to be here for this. The sounds of battle had drawn closer, so he jerked his head back toward the battle lines. “Assist our brothers,” he said, voice firm yet quieter. “Ensure I remain undisturbed.”

Although they looked anxious at being ordered away, they couldn’t disobey. Not him. He was their god. None could question his will. It wasn’t like he needed bodyguards anyway. Any mishap and he would simply take another body for his own.

As soon as they were gone, joined in merry battle, he looked back to the basin while keeping the crackling arcane tower in the corner of his vision. “Do you feel that?” he asked, wanting to confirm his suspicions.

The magic flooding into the battlefield had not stopped. Fortress Hearts were magic amplifiers, outputting more than they took in, but even they had limits. For such an infant tower as this, a short but loud thunderclap of magic should have been the only consequence if they had managed to damage its core. At the very least, the onrush of magic should have faded by now.

If anything, it was increasing.

“Feel it? The Solution is threatened. If we do not put a stop to this, all will end.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, sneering at the bowl of liquid. “Of course. Let me just snap my fingers and fix everything.”

“Your incongruous nature is unneeded. Where is our contemporary? The god of knowledge will have insight.”

A flare of angry golden light bathed the surroundings. “That traitor? Probably cheering on the Keeper, knowing that her end is our end.”

“Unacceptable.”

“Your inability to accept facts does not make them untrue. It just makes you a stubborn fool.”

He knocked aside the bowl of water after that taunt. Not spilling it, but sloshing the water to the point where he wouldn’t be forced to listen to whatever commentary the Almighty Glory would have for that. The fact that the noise would grate on her ears only made him grin. For all her pride, she sure knew how to whine.

Once again, he would simply have to handle things himself.

Kneeling, intending to use the momentary peace for something productive, he closed his eyes.

And felt another odd thing. The wash of magic still cascaded over the battlefield, drowning out most other sensations, but this one was different. Like something was specifically attuned to him. Cracking open an eye, he saw it.

A bright golden effigy hurtled through the air toward him. It wasn’t aimed properly. If he did nothing, it would sail right over his shoulder.

He reached forward, feeling a pull towards it. He wanted it. A golden effigy? Of course he wanted it.

The moment his fingers wrapped around its makeshift waist, he let out a content sigh.

Contentment. It wasn’t a feeling he could say he felt often. There was always more. More land to claim, more gold to hoard, more people to bow before him. To be content was to be anathema to the Heart of Gold. Yet content he felt. He settled down, smiling at the small doll. Did it look like him? Not this borrowed body, but the real him.

He was quite certain it did. Someone had gone to the trouble of carving a little statue in his honor. It was touching. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had done something nice for him. There were the servants and slaves and sycophants, but that wasn’t the same thing. They were obligated to serve him.

Someone cloaked in darkness slipped past the sparse soldiers around him. That cloak shouldn’t exist, but it did. But he didn’t care. Not now. Not while he was at such peace. Even her kicking over the basin and stomping on it didn’t bother him. It should have. Those basins were rare. Only a handful existed. Now, his was destroyed. But he had something greater. A treasure all for himself.

“Wow. That thing really did a number on you.”

Someone spoke now. The one in darkness. He didn’t even look up.

Not until the darkness grasped hold of his wrist.

“It’s mine,” he snarled, yanking his hand back. His anger, clearly felt, was enough for the darkness to release him. As soon as he was free, he settled back down, smiling as he gently ran his fingers over the golden surface.

“Okaaay… Tell you what, you can keep it if you just put on this little bracelet.”

His eyes drifted upward to find the shadowy figure holding a shiny silver bracelet. Manacles. Silver wasn’t really his color. It was just inferior to gold. It probably wasn’t even real silver. Did that make it better?

The shadowy figure stepped closer again, taking hold of his hand that wasn’t holding the little golden idol.

He allowed it. He wouldn’t have normally—it was his hand—but he didn’t feel quite so possessive at the moment. The shadowy clamped the manacle around his wrist and then around her own, smaller, arm.

“Great. You feeling nice and captive?”

He stared at the golden idol. “I can’t recall the last time I was feeling so captivated.”

“Right. Close enough I guess. We need to get out of here before that demon catches up.”

Demon should have been alarming. It wasn’t. Nothing was. If anything, getting away from a demon sounded like a great idea.

“I sure hope Arkk wasn’t in the middle of that explosion. Or else we’re going to have to get back the hard—”

A tug in his navel pulled at him, dragging him through a narrow tunnel of magic. The surroundings warped around him, removing him from the field of battle and dropping him down in the middle of a foul-smelling chamber of stone and metal bars. But he still had his idol, so he didn’t care.

“Oh good. You sit tight,” the gremlin—she removed her hood—said as she slipped her hand out of the manacles with ease. “I’m going to go find out what happened. Don’t lose that effigy now. Do you want me to tie it to your hand? That way you’ll never lose it.”

“Never lose it… Yes. Never.”

“What do you mean he’s gone again? This is the second time he’s disappeared in the middle of something important.”

“A worrying trend,” Inquisitrix Sylvara said, not that a hint of concern slipped into her tone. Her red eyes focused on the cage that held their esteemed guest. She hadn’t even blinked since Lexa brought her in. “Nothing to do about it, however. The fact that things are still moving and operational is a sign that he is paying attention.”

“Has he gotten himself kidnapped by the demon again?” Lexa asked, more to herself than to the rest of the audience. “No… The demon is tearing apart the Evestani army. Unless there are two of them.”

“I certainly hope not.”

Lexa scowled. There was no sign of anything being truly wrong. No unconscious dark elves popping up or lesser servants playing games of charades to communicate. He was teleporting people where they needed to go, even assisting with the battle against the Eternal Empire soldiers now that the visitors from the Anvil had joined the fray. All-in-all, the tides of battle had turned almost in their favor. The only things wrong were the airships still in the air, the lack of Arkk, and the top of the tower being blown up.

Anyone trying to climb the stairs got instantly teleported to a lower level once they got too close. So he was watching.

“What’s with those airships anyway?” Lexa asked, looking up at the inquisitrix. “I thought you and the abbess were going to take them down.”

“The avatar of the Holy Light was communicating with us, instructing us on how to use a portion of her abilities. Not making us avatars, but something more akin to Zullie’s utilization of the boundary god’s powers. But the communication cut off abruptly a few minutes ago. Same time as the explosion on the upper levels occurred.” Sylvara clenched a fist, still staring at the jail cell. “Abbess Hannah is remaining with the basin, awaiting further instructions. I elected to oversee this.”

Lexa didn’t like the sound of that. While it seemed like Agnete had the defense of the tower on lock, only an idiot continued to try the same strategies over and over when they obviously weren’t working. She doubted they had long before the paradigm shifted again and those airships became a threat once more.

That said, having the inquisitor present was something of a reassurance. Lexa had a lot of tricks up her sleeves but the inquisitor had knowledge and power. Especially when related to that golden effigy. She had created the thing, with Zullie and Savren, after all.

Savren was in the room as well. A series of cells—only one was occupied at the moment—lined half the room. The other half had been cleared out, providing space for Savren to make the final adjustments to the ritual circle he had designed. It was to be used in conjunction with the effigy.

Several guards stood about as well, weapons poised over the avatar’s head. Orcs, Kia, and a shieldbreaker weren’t about to let the avatar regain his wherewithal while still inside the tower. It would suck to have to kill him too soon, but they couldn’t jeopardize the fortress.

Alma ran about the room, bringing the flower to each guard as well as Savren, Lexa, and Sylvara in a circuit. With the avatar now holding onto the effigy, its effects didn’t seem to be affecting many others, but they still used the flower just in case. Having them all fall into apathy would end in disaster.

As for the avatar…

The avatar showed no signs of awareness of anything around. He sat on the floor with a vapid smile on his face, staring at the effigy. Some twine looped around his hand and wrist made it impossible for him to accidentally drop the effigy. Though that twine wouldn’t stop a dedicated attempt to get rid of it, he hadn’t even tried.

“He isn’t going to get tired of it, is he?”

“When crafting countermeasures for dealing with abominations of magic, a tuning is required before they can become purifiers. The Binding Agent needs to be powerful enough to stop their abominable powers from going out of control in an emergency but lenient enough to allow them to wield those powers in the first place.” Sylvara’s eyes flicked away from the avatar for the first time. It only lasted a moment, but she shot Lexa a tight smirk. “Naturally, I didn’t bother trying to limit this Binding Agent’s restraining power. If anything, I enhanced it.”

That didn’t exactly answer Lexa’s question. Sylvara probably didn’t know for sure. “The sooner this is done with, the happier everyone will be.”

“Indeed. Savren, are you still tweaking values?”

The warlock blinked long and slow, sighing. “Cease your complaints. I must be certain that the countermeasure carries out its purpose correctly. Complications would be cause for catastrophe. Counter to my communication, however, I am closing on completion.”

“Finally.”

“Carry the comatose captive to the center of the circle,” he said, waving a hand to the two orcs.

They looked at each other, swallowing. Normally, two burly orcs wouldn’t have hesitated to pick up a human child. Lexa doubted it was a task that required a pair. One of them could have picked up the avatar with a single hand. But therein was the problem. Avatar. They all knew what he could do if he suddenly returned to his senses.

“Just don’t try to take away the effigy,” Lexa said, offering her advice. It seemed to have worked when capturing him.

Carefully, as if he were an actual child and not their sworn enemy, the two orcs moved up to the avatar. One took his legs while the other took his back, tilting him so that he could be carried while keeping the effigy in sight. Kia followed close, her own sword humming with afterimages of her strange power, ready to eliminate the avatar before he could be a threat.

With even more care, they set the avatar down. Once out of their hands, they scattered, as if worried he was a viper ready to strike.

The avatar just sat there, staring at his little golden idol.

Savren swiftly moved about the circle, performing one final check to ensure nothing had gone wrong in the short few seconds since his last check. Normally, Lexa would have scoffed and rolled her eyes. Not now. If there was ever a bit of dangerous, experimental magic that she didn’t want going wrong, it was this ritual.

It came as some small relief that Zullie also hadn’t been seen since the explosion on the upper levels. Lexa didn’t wish the witch ill, but the witch had a habit of being overly ambitious to the point of ruination.

For every success like Kia, there were a dozen smoking craters. Or, rather, exploded chickens.

It was one of the many reasons why, despite witnessing Kia and Claire’s abilities, she hadn’t volunteered for the same thing. Nor had anybody else, to the best of her knowledge.

“Please promptly partition yourself,” Savren said with a look at Kia. “Proximity to your preternatural powers may prove problematic.”

The dark elf, still hovering over the avatar ready to strike, shot a glance at Savren. It took a second look at Sylvara—who nodded her head—before she was willing to take a step back. Savren then shooed her back even further with a little upward flick of both his hands. He continued, pushing her all the way back to the far wall. Only then did he stalk back to the ritual circle, pause at its edge to pull the sleeves of his robe up to his shoulders, and slam his hand down on the activation rune.

Bright golden light flooded into the prison. Lexa tensed, bracing for the inevitable end.

It never came. Blinking away the spots in her eyes, she squinted at the ritual circle. The golden light emitted from its markings, not from the avatar. The possessed boy still sat, a vapid smile on his face, even as the ritual raged around him. His fingers kept twitching, as if there was some struggle going on. Lexa had never been more relieved with her own foresight. If she hadn’t tied that idol to his hand, he likely would have dropped it by now.

As the light in the ritual circle intensified, the golden light on the ring of tattoos around the boy’s head began to fade. The bright tattoos dulled and blackened, drained of their power. Lexa would have expected that to mean that the avatar had left the body, but the boy’s eyes still glowed with bright golden light, doing their best to wash out the light from the ritual.

The brightness reached a peak, forcing Lexa to turn aside.

All at once, the light cut out. Savren pulled away from the ritual circle, panting, while everyone else in the room rushed forward, weapons raised. Lexa remained where she was, staring at the avatar, now with dull tattoos around his head but still-glowing eyes.

“Did it work?” Sylvara asked, staring at Savren.

The warlock, unable to find words for once, simply nodded his head as he tried to catch his breath.

Sylvara didn’t ask for a second confirmation. She strode forward, pulling a spiraled, needle-like dagger from behind her back. One of the counter-demon weapons they had ended up rejecting as viable. It was still overkill for non-demons, but perhaps the avatar warranted it. She tossed it to her other hand, the lizard-like mutation that Hale had regrown in place of the arm the avatar had taken from her.

Standing over the avatar, she waited one moment, just to stare. Lexa thought she was about to say something, some words of victory.

The only noise she made was a small grunt of effort as she plunged the knife deep into the avatar’s skull.

 

 

“Well, that looks good.”

Arkk snapped his gaze to Zullie, raising his eyebrows. “Why do you sound so surprised?” he asked.

The witch stood atop a freshly drawn ritual circle. One that he would rather not have had inside the command center if at all possible. They had a whole sealed room specifically for these kinds of rituals. The dangerous kinds. The Maze of Infinite Paths was beyond dangerous to the point where Arkk didn’t want it inside the tower at all. Yet, in a situation like they were in, compromises had to be made. Zullie didn’t have the time to figure out how to get it working from afar and did not want it down on the lower levels with the other maze ritual which was protecting the tower legs. The interference between the rituals could prove catastrophic, in her words.

Thus, she had set up in the command chamber.

He opened his mouth to say more, ready to berate her for experimenting in the middle of battle, only to brace himself as another volley rained down from the cannons overhead.

He didn’t feel a thing. The tower didn’t shake or tremble from an impact. He watched using his fortress-localized omniscience as each of the incoming projectiles hit the wobbly barrier Zullie had just erected. They warped, stretching into long, thin versions of themselves while looping about the air, bending at odd angles, and splitting into a hundred separate projectiles. After a few sections of the warping, they emerged from the field, aimed in completely random directions. Mostly random, anyway. They avoided the most important direction—toward the tower.

“Oh… That does look good,” he said, moving to the scrying team to get a few different perspectives on the situation.

Plenty fell down upon the army amassing for a second invasion, Arkk noted with some satisfaction. Some went right back up at their attacker, forcing them into an evasive movement. Unfortunately, most of the volley scattered randomly throughout the surrounding forest, not likely to do any immediate damage to the things he wanted to immediately damage.

“Can we aim the rebounding…” Arkk started, only to trail off as he felt a tingle on the back of his neck—his hair rising.

Having felt that before, his eyes widened. He immediately tried to move the tower. The legs were still trapped but it could lean.

A spear of golden light, aimed far too high, swept downward toward the tower. It wasn’t as large or as powerful as some he had seen the avatar use. That didn’t mean he wanted to take his chances. But with the tower trapped and the movement of the beam, there was no avoiding it.

Just before he teleported everyone in the tower down to the tunnels below, the ray crashed into the protective membrane around the tower.

Dazzling golden light filled Arkk’s vision, both inside the crystal ball and from his omniscience. It cut off almost immediately, but the brilliance of it all forced Arkk to blink several times. He busied himself inspecting the damage to the tower while he waited for his eyes to recover.

Except, the tower wasn’t damaged. Not in the slightest. A few lesser servants who had been out there at the time were still going about their tasks, repairing the damage to the tower without any sign they had even noticed the attack.

A drawback to his localized omniscience was that it focused on his fortress and its inhabitants. He couldn’t simply turn his head to see a different view. But what he could see on the edges of his vision was gold. Lots of thin gold streaks drawn across everything. The soldiers down below, trees, even the airships overhead.

“Report!” Arkk shouted. The command chamber was mostly empty. With the majority of the tower, including Rekk’ar, down managing the defenses of the tower from the army—just in case the protections on the tower legs failed—it was just him, Zullie, a Protector, and the three members of his scrying team. Hale, having finished her work on his arm and eye, was back to healing everyone else who ended up injured in the infirmary.

Camille and Harvey were both still blinking away the spots in their eyes, but Luthor heard him and took control of the crystal ball. Images flickered across its surface.

Arkk focused on the crystal ball with Luthor for a moment until he noticed something slightly more concerning.

“Damn, damn, damn…”

Arkk blinked away the last of his blindness to find Zullie rushing about the ritual circle. This one used a combination of the natural magic generation of the fortress to keep the ritual stable and glowstones to account for spikes in magic draw. At the moment, three of the six glowstones were smoking—a hissing and sputtering filled the air, accompanied by odd sparks. Black lightning-like streams of magical energy crackled over the ritual’s surface as it flickered and pulsed.

He felt a sudden uncomfortable reminder of the Duke’s party and the glowstone-based bombs Evestani set up in the throne room’s chandeliers.

“Don’t teleport us!” Zullie snapped as if she could sense what Arkk had been about to do, pointing a finger directly at him. “If this fails without being properly shut down, the entire tower will—”

The glowstone she had been reaching towards let out an enormous spark, shooting motes of magic directly into her face as she recoiled. She swiped her hand forward, knocking away the glowstone’s debris as she planted her own hand in the spot it had once occupied.

The ritual circle stabilized. The flickering in the ritual array steadied out, still oscillating but in much smoother, gradual pulses compared to the erratic pulsing from a moment ago. Zullie’s lips twisted in concentration as the lightning-like surges of magic still coursed around between the remaining glowstones, but even those were dimming and steadying out.

Arkk let out a small sigh of relief. He quickly started moving people about, resuming his management of the battle. The airships were dropping more eggs and they needed dealing with. He could figure out what had gone wrong with this ritual in a few minutes, once everything stabilized and returned to the status quo.

Except, that moment never came.

He heard a groaning in the stone around the room. The groan quickly shifted to a scream of stress. The air vibrated with the deafening sound of the fortress tiles cracking under pressure as arcs of energy lashed out, ripping through the command chamber. One struck the chair Arkk used. Another careened just over the heads of the scrying team in their depressed pit. The map and the entire table it was on took the brunt of one of the arcs, throwing it through the room as little cuboids of white matter trailed in its wake. The table slowed down abruptly, leaving it floating in the air with all the tiles and tokens they had used to mark positions drifting in the air around it.

A cataclysmic pulse erupted from the ritual circle, radiating outward in a wave of blinding magic.

It all happened in an instant. Arkk had no time to react.

The heatless shockwave struck him, knocking the breath out of his lungs. He felt his feet lift up off the ground, picked up with those same cuboids of white drifting in the air around him. The walls of the command center buckled. A ripple ran through them as if the stone were liquid. After an instant of a delay, the reinforced walls of the tower exploded outward, drifting a short ways before the cuboids and arcs of magic locked them into place in the air.

The cubes began to change. Their surfaces rippled and began to hollow themselves out. Tiny square-shaped voids appeared on each face, as if a sculptor was carefully carving away the solid material. Yet the cubes didn’t diminish. They became more intricate, more complex. And they grew. The material hollowed out from the smaller voids spread outward, building up more of the cube, only for more and more hollows to appear.

Chunks of the map table vanished as one of the cubes near it grew into it, eating away small hollows just like the source. The table didn’t break. Splinters didn’t go flying through the air. It was a lot like Purifier Tybalt’s abilities, simply removing small square chunks of the table as the cubes grew through it.

Arkk tried to teleport himself. That same locked-in feeling that stopped him from teleporting while trapped in the inquisitor’s ice blocked him. He tried to teleport Zullie, the Protector, Camilla, Harvey, and Luthor.

Only the Protector made it, being the furthest from the ritual circle.

The cubes didn’t stop growing. They didn’t stop spreading. They closed in on him, chunking away bits of his body. He tried to scream. It didn’t hurt, but the sensation was anything but pleasant.

One of the cubes spread in front of his face, hollowing out as it grew more and more, closer and closer. It closed in on his face and—

Darkness enveloped Arkk.

But his awareness didn’t cease. He couldn’t see, but the tower was still there. One of its walls had blown out from the explosion, but some part of it was still connected. Somehow. The sponge-like magic cubes slowed their growth about halfway through the floors above and below the command chamber. Arcs of magic tethered the stones, keeping them from falling to the ground below.

“Damn, damn, damn.”

It took Arkk far too long to realize that he was intact. Hearing Zullie’s voice in the distance, swearing up a storm, brought some level of comfort. He patted himself down, feeling relief with each touch of fabric and skin and hair. His vision was still gone, but not because his eyes had been removed by those expanding cubes. It was more like someone had simply snuffed out the lights.

“Zullie?” He tried calling out.

“I’m not an idiot,” she snarled. Arkk didn’t get the impression that she was angry with him, but at herself. “I planned for that.”

He tried looking in on her through the employee link, but he only got darkness there. Other employees were fine. Rekk’ar was still organizing the defense, Lexa was making her way through the Evestani army, and Ilya was rapidly approaching the Evestani capital. It was just Zullie, Camilla, Luthor, and Harvey. And himself. The five of them were somewhere trapped in utter darkness.

“Of course we were going to be hit by something the avatar could throw out but the ritual couldn’t withstand. I deliberately designed a weak point in the ritual that would fail if overloaded first, saving the rest.”

“Zullie? Can you hear me?”

“I’m not an idiot!” she shouted again.

Fingers clutched at Arkk’s tunic, yanking him through the darkness. He stumbled only to stop abruptly as a head thumped against his chest.

“I planned for that.” She ground her face into his chest, still clawing at his tunic. “It was just… too weak of an attack to overload the failsafe component but too strong for the ritual to withstand. Pure luck. Nothing else.”

That Fickle Wheel appearing in the temple hovered in the back of Arkk’s mind. He didn’t know if that god had anything to do with the current situation, but he was starting to dislike the Fickle Wheel despite that. Of all the Pantheon, the Fickle Wheel might just be his least favorite.

The light, squeaky voice of a terrified fairy called out into the darkness. “Is someone there?”

Arkk pursed his lips, disappointed. “Camilla?” he called out, gently resting a hand on Zullie’s back. The construction of a failsafe implied she knew this was a possibility. She had neglected to warn him of it, likely because of a supreme confidence in her own work. “Camilla, can you hear me?”

“I hear you. I—”

“Wh-Where are where?”

Luthor was out there as well. Harvey too.

“Follow the sound of my voice,” Arkk shouted. He tried to teleport them, but there was no nearby destination. The tower itself felt distant and far off. “Gather together.”

This was partially his fault. As much as he could blame Zullie, they had secure chambers for a reason. Compromising by having her set up in the command center was entirely his fault. He could have denied her, hastily built a new containment room away from the others, or just not have her set up inside the command room but a floor below.

“Gah!” Harvey grunted after a slight thump echoed in the darkness. “There’s some kind of wall here.”

“Wall?” Arkk asked. “Just a minute.”

If they were safe, he had other things to focus on for a moment.

He could still see the tower. It was distant, yes, but still his. It was like looking in on the tower from the Underworld. Moving things and personnel about was doable as well. He tested on a few lesser servants, moving them to try to repair the damaged command chamber. The whale ships, seeing the weakness for what it was, tried launching another volley of their eggs.

Several splattered against the walls of the tower. Arkk simply moved Agnete to the furnace room, opening the vents for her to blast her flames up along the walls of the tower. He could send her out to take care of the few that she would inevitably miss afterward.

Though he would have to be careful.

The sponge-like cubes looked like they had stopped growing. The entire top portion of the tower looked disconnected from the rest because of them. But that couldn’t be the case because he still had control over the territory both above and below the command room. Some connection existed.

The eggs that crashed down near the command floor didn’t quite make it. Lashings of magical arcs scattered through the air, pinning the eggs in place just as Arkk had been stuck. The cubes didn’t continue spreading to the new victims, however, leaving the eggs and their tendrils squirming helplessly in the air. He would have to teleport Agnete out there, though at a distance.

The lesser servants he sent to try to repair that chunk of the tower ended up stuck and floating as well, just like the eggs.

As a test, he tried to teleport one directly into the command chamber, only to… fail. It was like the command room wasn’t there at all. It was probably broken apart, hidden behind the endless cubes, but there should still be something there. He could sense it.

But he couldn’t see it.

Raising an eyebrow, he slowly let go of Zullie, lightly patting her on the back in some form of reassurance. Kneeling, he felt the floor.

It was made up of stone tiles. Familiar stone tiles engraved with a faint maze-like pattern on their surface.

He was still in the command room. It was just…

Not in the tower?

“W-Where are we?” Luthor asked, sounding much closer than before.

Arkk tried a small light spell, murmuring the incantation.

It didn’t so much as light up the room as the darkness pulled back. Either way, he could see. The large seat he used was toppled on its side, cracked and broken. The map table had finally crashed into the floor. All its pieces and markers were scattered about. A few steps away, down in the scrying pit, Luthor’s nose poked up above its edge.

Zullie still clung to him, though she had loosened her grip enough for him to move. Anguish and distress lined her face. It wasn’t hard to imagine what was going through her head. More than a couple of her projects failed, many quite catastrophically. To have one that started out so promising end up like this? Arkk was angry with her for several good reasons, but he still felt a pang of sympathy somewhere underneath.

“Everyone alright?” Arkk said, earning a frightened nod from Luthor. He stepped toward the pit. Rather than have them try to navigate toward the stairs in the inky darkness, Arkk extended a hand. At the same time, he teleported Agnete around the exterior of the tower to handle the straggler eggs. “Let’s get you out of there.”

Luthor accepted his hand without reservation, practically clawing his way up Arkk’s arm like it was a rope thrown down an oubliette. Harvey and Camilla, being much shorter as a flopkin and a fairy, forced him to kneel. On the plus side, they were much lighter and easier to help out of the shallow pit. Harvey even had the wherewithal to grab hold of the crystal ball on his way out of the pit.

“Where…?” Harvey asked, trying to look around as he found his feet.

“A very good question,” Arkk said, trying to keep his voice calm and reassuring. The last thing they needed was panic. “Zullie. You can be angry with yourself later. I’ll even join you in your anger—”

The witch wilted, making him regret his words before he finished his sentence.

Nothing to do about it now. Words couldn’t be unspoken. Unless you were Savren and could wipe minds. “I need you to focus. Where are we?”

“Where?” she asked, turning her head this way and that. “We’re… likely in one of two places. One bad. The other worse.”

“Lovely,” Arkk bit out. “Where?”

“It would be better if we were in the domain of Xel’atriss, Lock and Key. The Maze of Infinite Paths utilized her boundary magic to try to weaken the barrier between our reality and other planes, just enough to warp everything. Like a portal without the portal itself providing structure. Chaotic and wild.”

“We’re in another plane?” Arkk said, feeling a sudden chill down his back. No wonder it felt like controlling his tower from the Underworld.

“Yes,” she said before a sudden look of worry crossed her face. “I hope we’re in another plane. Let me rephrase my earlier answer. We’re likely in one of three places, one bad, one worse, and the other… disastrous.”

“Disastrous being?”

“Between planes. I… Planes are accessible through the portals. But if we’ve somehow ended up between planes—No. It couldn’t be. We wouldn’t be alive. It has to be one of the two planes… yes. Definitely.”

Arkk let out a sigh, not feeling reassured in the slightest. “We’re either with Xel’atriss or where?”

“The plane the Maze of Infinite Paths is designed to weaken barriers between is… well, the Maze. We could very well be in the domain of Unknown, the Enigma.”

That chill down Arkk’s spine turned to a cascade of ice. The one domain that Vezta had warned him against entering, fearing a single step would see him lost for eternity, and he had somehow found himself there.

Arkk swallowed, lips pursed into a thin line. “Lovely.

“Just lovely.”

 

 

The tower loomed in the distance, taking hit after hit from the bombardment. Flames spread around it every few minutes only for the bombardments to resume. Even from the corner of Lexa’s eye, she could tell that it was being worn down. Arkk had stopped trying to repair less essential parts of the tower and the areas he was focusing on didn’t manage to recover in the brief reprieves. Worrying, but nothing that Lexa could focus on.

She had her hands occupied with the endless demands of the battlefield. The avatar was somewhere nearby. She could almost feel him. The golden aura had faded before she could get her eyes on him, leaving her searching.

Lexa had figured he would be easy to locate once she got close enough. The avatar’s host bodies were distinctive, both in that they were shorter than what was typical of the human-dominant army and their tattoos stood out. Especially when the tattoos were glowing. Venerated as he was, Lexa assumed that whoever he was possessing would have been surrounded by retainers, sycophants, and other attendants. At least someone to manage the child when he wasn’t possessing them.

Lexa couldn’t find a hint. This was a battlefield, not even one at the Evestani base of operations. It was possible he would have left such attendants back at Woodly Rhyme. With all the bulky armor of the soldiers blocking her view and Lexa’s own deficient stature, she was having more trouble than she would have thought.

The frustration left her looking around.

She found her gaze drawn to the distance. She had been focusing on her task, not the status of the tower, trusting that Arkk would figure something out. But a subtle distortion rippling through the air around the fortress drew her attention to it in full. It was like waves of heat rising from a sunbaked stone. Initially, it seemed inconsequential. Just another anomaly amid the tumult of war. Lexa started to dismiss it, knowing that Zullie was trying to get something better than her previous defensive spell so that Arkk might have a window for an offensive maneuver, but as the distortion intensified, it became impossible to ignore.

Out of the corner of her eye, Lexa caught sight of an impossible phenomenon—a second tower, identical to the first, materialized beside it. Her curiosity piqued, she turned her head sharply to focus on the spectacle.

That swift motion proved a disorienting mistake.

Every degree her gaze shifted, the tower transformed. Its shape and presence fluctuated wildly. One moment, it stood as a solitary monolith. The next, it vanished completely, only to reappear in the next movement of her head as a multiplied, chaotic assembly of towers jumbled together at bizarre angles. Some iterations soared skyward, impossibly tall, as if trying to swat down the airships hovering high over the battlefield. It was as if she peered through the slits of a lattice, each narrow gap revealing a wildly different scene.

Lexa wasn’t the only one to have noticed. A chorus of gasps, hisses, and even the sounds of retching from those overwhelmed cascaded throughout the battlefield. Unfortunately, with Evestani’s backs to the tower, Prince’s forces bore the brunt of the disorienting vision. In a fight to the death, even a brief instant of distraction and disorientation cost more than most could afford.

A practiced flick of her wrist sent one of her daggers flying through the air, catching one sand-gold-clad soldier in the side of his neck, just below the bulbous shape of the helmets characteristic of their elites. It saved one of the Prince’s men from certain death. Another dagger flew true and struck one of the soldiers just to the left of his nasal bar, digging into his eye and cheek. But alone, Lexa couldn’t help everyone. Even if she had enough daggers hidden under her cloak, she didn’t have enough hands.

Soldiers fell. They weren’t of Company Al-Mir, nor were they innocent children. Lexa wasn’t going to shed tears over them. Still, it rankled, their losses gnawed at her. Every advantage for the Evestani army was a disadvantage for her.

The mesmerizing distraction of the tower’s transformation didn’t remain isolated to one side of the battlefield for long. Even outside the visual spectacle of whatever Zullie had done to the tower, which drew plenty of eyes, the airship overhead continued its destruction from the skies. Or tried to.

The streaks of alchemical cannon fire in the sky never quite reached the tower. It was hard to tell with the shifting mirage that the tower had become. The shifting mirage of the tower defied the trajectories of the shots. Instead of striking true, the shoots veered unpredictably, scattering in wild arcs around the fortress. Some even ricocheted back toward the airship, similar to light reflecting off a well-polished mirror. One such rebounding shot forced the airship to veer sharply, cutting off its bombardment as a fierce gust of wind drove the projectile in the opposite direction.

More chaos in the already disordered battle.

Evestani had been setting up at a distance, right at the edge of the range for their bombardment magics and siege engines. That distance protected them from most of the reflected shots, but not all.

Lexa’s eyes widened as a hurling ball of flame, arced high in the air from the tower, started its descent straight toward her.

Wrapped in the cloak of darkness, she was as notable as any other shadow on the battlefield. That kept her safe from the soldiers. It would not help against a giant ball of fire. Springing off, muttering every agility and speed-enhancing spell she knew, Lexa ran as hard as she could perpendicular to the incoming fireball.

A beam of golden light shot up into the air, making Lexa skid to a stop in the dirt and muck. The light wasn’t as large or as powerful as the one that had knocked out the tower’s first protective array, but it was enough to scatter the ball of fire into a thousand harmless embers. The beam of gold didn’t stop there. It swept downward, aimed for the tower. It probably wouldn’t be enough to do much damage, but the avatar must not have wanted to waste what power he had gathered.

As soon as the light crossed into whatever shifting effect enveloped the tower, the beam split. It split and split and split. A million rays of gold lanced out from the tower in every possible direction. Lexa hurled herself to the ground, taking cover behind a fallen soldier whose colors were so caked in mud and blood that she had no idea to whose faction he had once belonged. One thin beam of gold strafed the ground directly in front of her nose.

It barely left a mark on the ground.

Already weaker than the beam that punched a hole into a mountain, splitting the beam so many times must have weakened it further. Everyone on both sides of the battlefield cowered away, hunkered down, but ended up looking surprised as the rays passed over them mostly harmlessly. The only real effects were faint streaks of gold now adorning everyone’s armor.

A beat of unusual silence hung over the battlefield before a surge of wind just about swept Lexa off her feet. It rushed toward the multitude of towers. Dark lightning reminiscent of some of Zullie’s more dangerous spells crackled along the surface of some of the towers, right at the mid-point. Bits of brick peeled away, pulled outward while still connected by those streaks of lightning. They froze in the air, looking like time stopped just as an explosion had gone off.

Lexa wasn’t sure what that was about. Hopefully nothing bad.

Some idiot shouted and started the fight once again.

Lexa paid it little mind, focused on her task.

She had seen where that ray had come from.

Throwing herself to her feet, still enhanced by all her spells, Lexa rushed through the battlefield, dodging soldiers and weaving through battle lines.

There he was. A small ring of guards surrounded him, but none of them were particularly notable. None of those gold-armored knights like the one Dakka had slain in Elmshadow. They were simple sand-gold elites with those bulbous domed helmets. In the middle of the ring, a young boy, human and probably no older than fifteen years, stood with glowing gold eyes and intricate tattoos etched into the crown of his head. The snarling look of anger didn’t quite fit the boy’s face.

He was upset.

Good.

Lexa didn’t know who the avatar was possessing. It was probably someone he had brought with him rather than an unwilling captured child. The children she had tried to rescue in Elmshadow hadn’t been well taken care of, dressed in rags and imprisoned in the remnants of that church building. This one had ornate robes, lined with golden threads and flashy mosaic patterns of blue, gold, and white.

Would it have made a difference if he had obviously been possessing a slave? Not to Lexa. Even if he had been in the body of someone so obviously innocent, such as a mere baby, she would still have proceeded. She had already resolved herself to do so. One baby’s death was worth preventing what happened in that Elmshadow church from ever happening again.

Lexa’s fingers brushed over the silver sphere she carried beneath her cloak. The sphere sealed off the effigy’s effects for now, but as soon as she opened it, things would change. The avatar would surely notice. She needed a full plan, a fool-proof plan, both to get in and to get out. Arkk said he would teleport her, but he had warned her that his magic didn’t work on employees who ended up captured. That included immobilized people, such as those who had been trapped in ice during an engagement with the inquisitors before her joining.

It also worked in reverse. His captives could be teleported even if they weren’t employees. Prisoners at Fortress Al-Mir could be moved about at will—Arkk’s will.

Lexa eyed the surroundings, narrowing her gaze. A distraction would work best. The avatar would probably be most distracted right as he began to attack again. Unfortunately, Lexa didn’t know when that might happen. If the avatar swapped bodies before she struck, she might lose him completely.

The avatar knelt as Lexa watched, resting on a large rug that covered the ground. The rug matched the rest of Evestani aesthetics with its mosaic pattern and predominant gold. Despite the gaudy and eye-catching attire of the avatar, the rug gave him enough camouflage to make him almost invisible except for his head. Fortunately for Lexa, the camouflage only extended to the edges of the rug. The entire assortment stuck out in the forest to the point where she had trouble believing she had been having difficulty finding him.

The anger on the boy’s face vanished as he closed his eyes and took up a meditative pose. Lexa’s heart lurched, fearing she had missed her window of opportunity. The glow in the tattoos didn’t subside, however, letting her calm back down. The avatar was probably trying to hasten his recovery so that he might try one of the large rays again.

Lexa wasn’t sure if that was a wise idea with what happened to the weaker beam. It might end the conflict, but probably not in the way the avatar wanted. Then again, when one didn’t put themselves at risk, obliterating everything on the battlefield including their borrowed body probably didn’t sound like that big of a dealbreaker if there was even a slight chance at success. Though Lexa doubted Evestani’s imperial allies would agree.

The meditation gave her an opportunity. The avatar’s eyes were closed. A part of her wanted to rush forward now, not wanting to waste that opportunity, but she couldn’t be too careful. She wasn’t about to underestimate the avatar and believe that he had simply decided to take a nap. A misstep here and she would surely die.

Except for two, his bodyguards were focused on the nearby battle raging on. It hadn’t gotten close yet, but it wasn’t far off. The tide had turned back against Evestani with the addition of the hordes of undead goblins. The little skeletal beings were utter menaces, hopping and bouncing around like they had coiled springs for shoes. They would jump on someone’s back and stab them in the neck before bounding away to find another target.

None lasted long if they took a hit. Small and barely held together as it was, a single slash of a sword or, more effectively, a blunt hit from a mace or hammer would scatter their bones across the battlefield. The only reason they hadn’t been destroyed within seconds of clawing their way out of the ground was their size and agility.

It wasn’t quite enough for the Prince’s forces to surge forward and claim victory. Three hundred goblin skeletons added to a conflict of nearly twenty thousand just wasn’t enough on its own, not even when some of their victims got back to their feet only to attack their own side. Especially not with the Prince’s army viewing the skeletons with just as much hostility as the Evestani. More than once, Lexa had witnessed a skeleton get clobbered from behind by the very people they were supposed to be helping.

But if Lexa could rope a few of them into helping her, it might just prove the distraction she would need to deal with the avatar. If she could push the battle a little closer to the avatar—just close enough for his bodyguards to be forced into more active defense but not close enough for the avatar to take action himself—she would have the best opportunity she would be getting.

Hopping away and climbing a small tree, Lexa surveyed the larger battlefield, looking for what she needed.

A cadre of goblins acted just like real goblins as they worked together to take out a few larger targets. The poor Evestani soldier ended up isolated in the middle of the battlefield. They likely would have been overran by the Prince’s forces already had the presence of the goblins not been keeping them wary.

They weren’t close to the avatar. Not by half. There were a lot of people to fight through on the way. But again, Lexa didn’t need them to reach the avatar. They just needed to get close enough to cause a disturbance.

With one last glance at the avatar, making sure the tattoos were still glowing and that he didn’t look like he was going anywhere anytime soon, Lexa took off.

Three minutes after setting off, one of the soldiers the goblins were having trouble with had a dagger through the front of his throat. The other soldier didn’t have time to look surprised before he joined his friend in the mud at the hands of one of the goblins.

The rest of the little skeletal creatures froze upon her arrival, their bones clattering and their jaws grinding. Lexa wasn’t sure if they could sense her or not. They lacked eyes that could track anything, leaving their heads just vaguely pointed in her direction. It was as if they were trying to decide if she should be a target as well.

With a suppressed shudder, Lexa didn’t stick around. She started back the way she had come, driving a dagger into the back of some knight’s knee on her way. The goblins mostly followed her, drifting around to do their part in causing chaos. More importantly, the rapid deaths they were causing made a hole in Evestani’s defensive line. The Prince’s army started pouring in, adding their own blades to the mix. They still kept a ways away from the goblins, but that was fine for her purposes.

Fine until they got a reinforcement of their own.

A short, stout man bounded into the fray. Blood coated him from head to foot as if he had deliberately bathed in it. He knocked aside a goblin with an absent-minded backhand, dispersing the skeleton’s bones in every direction as he took over the goblin’s target. The Evestani knight didn’t stand a chance. Despite his rotund belly, the man easily slid around the swing of the knight’s sword. His arm thrust out, slamming into the knight’s armored elbow, shattering the metal with the blow even as the man’s elbow bent in the wrong direction. The knight didn’t even get to scream before the man reached forward with his bare hands, thrusting his fingers through the knight’s breastplate, only to rip out the man’s heart and crush it in front of his face before the light left his eyes.

All with an expression of absolute rapture on the rotund man’s face.

He then turned, eyes finding another target. He rushed forward and ripped off someone’s head. Another knight lost his arms, only to be beaten to death with them. The man continued, charging through the opening Lexa had created with an unstoppable frenzy. He didn’t even use a weapon.

It took Lexa far too long to recognize the man underneath all that blood. The leader of the Prince’s forces. She had considered assassinating the man after his foiled mutiny to retake the leadership position over Arkk, but had been sent off on a mission before she could start plotting. Seeing him now, Lexa wondered how much she owed her life to that distracting mission.

She hadn’t realized the Prince’s force contained any specialists like Company Al-Mir had. The man fought like a less dignified version of Kia.

The man, Mags, turned. Despite her cloak of darkness, despite all the stealthy spells that even the avatar failed to notice, Mags turned to directly face her. With the way his head angled downward to her height, there was no mistaking his look as mere coincidence.

There was something different about Mags. Something other than the thick layer of blood he wore as clothes.

His eyes shifted, catching the light. They were green, bright, and divided in two by a long slit-shaped pupil.

Demon.

He grinned at her, smiling as if daring her to do something about it.

There was nothing she could do about it. She wasn’t equipped with counter-demon weaponry. Even if she was, she wasn’t suicidal enough to think she could take him on. Not when he easily bent in half, dodging a sword strike he couldn’t possibly have seen coming for his back. He righted himself fast enough that his headbutt dented the attacking knight’s armor, knocking him clean on his back. Mags pounced on him, straddling his armored chest as he started crushing the knight’s skull with his bare hands.

The head burst apart like a watermelon, sparking movement in Lexa’s feet. She took off, running back toward the avatar. The demon fought Evestani. That was good. She wasn’t an enemy of the Prince. He couldn’t attack her.

And what could be more distracting than a demon?

But she had to act fast. If the demon got to the avatar before she did, he would kill him. Easily, even. The avatar would survive and probably possess someone else, but then Lexa would have to start all over again to find him.

That couldn’t be allowed to happen.

 

 

On a map, Evestani was a large territory, sweeping out over the northern quarter of the continent. South of Evestani, the Beastman Tribes ruled over an expansive wasteland with little outside interference. Further south, the Tetrarchy maintained their borders at the edge of their jungle. Each of the three was far, far larger than the entire peninsula that the Greater Kingdom of Chernlock occupied and enormous compared to Mystakeen.

However, in Evestani’s case, a large portion of their territory was the same wasteland that the Tribes occupied. It wasn’t uninhabitable. Ilya had learned from her mother that much of that wasteland was filled with buried riches in the forms of rare metals, opal mines, and more than a few gold mines. But it wasn’t the lush plains or dense forests that covered much of Mystakeen. The kind of land that made life comfortable. It was difficult to live when you couldn’t put a piece of bread on your golden plate. For that reason, beyond a few scattered villages and frontier towns mostly occupied by miners and fortune-seekers, Evestani’s population was concentrated not far from the border of Mystakeen.

In the past, Ilya might have thought all the wars between Mystakeen and Evestani stemmed from the latter wanting the former’s land. Any other excuse, whether ideological, political, or religious, was simply that: an excuse to push the border forward and claim better land. Knowing what she knew now, even land was nothing more than an excuse. All the wars in the past thousand years boiled down to the personal wants of a single man.

The avatar.

Ilya never would have expected that she would be the one to put an end to it all. Granted, she wasn’t fighting the avatar himself—at least, she hoped she wasn’t as her spire wasn’t prepared to fight him—but even without him, the constant back and forth between nations wouldn’t come to a dead stop immediately. Yet here she was, standing, arms folded across her chest, staring out through the smoked windows as Evestani’s land moved beneath the spire.

Because of the less hospitable land in much of Evestani’s territory, the Sultanate’s palace wasn’t that far from Mystakeen’s border.

“We’re going to arrive before nightfall.”

Ilya glanced back over her shoulder at the more agreeable of the two commanders she was hosting. Sydney Roman stood almost directly behind her, eyes wide as he stared out the window. From the lines on his face and the graying color of his short beard, Ilya guessed that he had seen plenty in his time. Still, nothing quite compared to the view from one of the walking fortresses. Maybe the peak of a mountain would come in a close second, but mountains didn’t tend to move.

“The spire isn’t fast relative to its size, but it can still cross a field in a few steps,” Ilya said, keeping her tone polite. The man had been incessant in his questions about how the spire worked, what it cost to build, how tall it was, how long it took to build, how much weight it could carry, and everything else that popped into his mind. Ilya understood that he was curious, but they were invading another country. Now wasn’t the time.

Besides that, she didn’t know the answer to any of his questions beyond magic did everything.

“Another outpost,” Hawkwood said at Ilya’s other side. He held a spyglass to his eye, frowning.

Ilya squinted. Her eyes were better than human eyes, but distance was distance. Still, she followed the line of Hawkwood’s gaze to a small fort constructed from wood, surrounded by palisades and a few smaller buildings. It was the fifth such fort that they had come across. This one didn’t look to have the same upkeep budget as the ones closer to the border. Ilya was a little surprised there were so many, all deeper and deeper into Evestani territory.

Mystakeen maintained several similar forts, but they were all in one long row at the border, not staggered into the land.

Maybe these forts had been built at old borders that had since been pushed in. That made a disturbing amount of sense.

“Splendid,” Sydney said, almost giddy despite his age and appearance. “If possible, I’d like to be on the ground watching from a short distance before you kick over the walls.”

“Is that necessary?” Hawkwood asked, lowering the spyglass. He shot a doubtful glance at Sydney, lightly shaking his head. “I see a dozen people already fleeing. I imagine that is everybody stationed there. Hardly a threat worth delaying for.”

“We aren’t the only group advancing into Evestani. This operation is large with several of the King’s lords all moving their own armies forward in our wake,” Sydney said. “If they get stopped at a keep like that, forced to siege it, it will only drag this war on longer.”

“Forced to siege a keep of a dozen men? I’m surprised that the place is staffed at all. Even the border outposts only had three dozen. I imagine Evestani had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to get their army together after their losses at Gleeful and Elmshadow.”

Sydney tutted in disappointment. “Given the right terrain and circumstances, an army of a mere three hundred could hold off an army of a hundred thousand.”

The doubtful look on Hawkwood’s face deepened. The way his eyes flicked to Ilya made her feel a hint of his exasperation. Not that she disagreed.

“We won’t stop,” Ilya said. “We can swing wide to knock it down on our way past, but we won’t go out and capture prisoners or supplies this time. Or to let anyone out to watch. None of the other outposts had anything worth stopping for. This one won’t either.”

Although she spoke with confidence, she still cast a glance around the room, one she tried to disguise as one of those meaningful looks to ensure the others wouldn’t argue. Hawkwood gave an almost relieved nod of his head while Sydney looked disappointed. A fair distance back, off near the wall, Olatt’an nodded as well. The old orc seemed to understand why she was glancing around, giving her a nod of reassurance rather than simple acknowledgment. The only other person in the room, the red-gold adorned commander from Vaales who had still not named himself—not that Ilya cared to ask—remained impassive and stiff on the opposite side of the room from Olatt’an. Were it not for his faint breathing, Ilya might have thought he had befallen the petrifying gaze of a gorgon.

That was another good reason to not stop. The sooner he was out of her spire, the better.

Even with Olatt’an keeping an eye on him and her own Black Knight guards posted around the room, Ilya still felt a little nervous about turning her back to the commander.

At the same time, his silence and menacing distance were almost welcome compared to Sydney’s general excitement.

True to her words, the spire took a slight detour. While not as tall or bulky as Arkk’s tower, it still caused minor quakes with each step. She didn’t need to kick down the walls. Just walking alongside the fort tore its aged structure apart. The men from the fort were gone, hiding out in the wilderness, probably trying to avoid being noticed by the giant walking building. Even if they returned, the rest of the King’s men following behind the tower shouldn’t have a problem with them.

If an army did have a problem with a dozen morale-broken men who lacked walls to hide behind, this invasion would end up in dire straits.

Well, the invasion would be fine. Ilya and the spire would see to that. How they handled themselves afterward was their business.

“The roads are slowly growing nicer, more obviously used,” Hawkwood said once they were well past the outpost and two smaller villages. “You think… Look! Is that it?”

Ilya flicked her eyes over the horizon, quickly finding what Hawkwood was pointing out. Rather than force herself to squint, she held out her hand. “Spyglass.”

To his credit, Hawkwood didn’t hesitate. He passed it to her and she quickly brought it up to her eye.

The mountains were the first notable thing. Ilya might have passed them off as any other mountain range had she not accidentally started out looking too high. The Auric Mountains weren’t as tall as Cliff’s ridges, nor were the mountains as close to the city, but they had a certain odd quality. They caught the light of the sun and reflected it, gleaming in shimmering golden light. As if where snow would normally dust the peaks of the mountains, someone had instead gone out and cast them in gold.

It could have been the hour of the day. The sun would be setting to the west—behind the mountains—but at the same time, Ilya couldn’t help but wonder if the mountains were capped in gold. If so, which came first? The avatar or the mountains? It couldn’t be a coincidence. That golden avatar either settled here because of the way the mountains looked or changed the mountains to fit with his favorite metal.

The spire crested a small hill as it continued its forward march, leaving a clear view of Chrysopelea sprawled out before the jagged ridges of the Auric Mountains. The city was a labyrinthine maze of winding streets, broken apart by towering obelisks that jutted upward, each capped with a small golden pyramid. From the height of the spire, the city appeared as an intricate mosaic. She could almost see where the different districts of the city divided it up. The styles of the buildings changed. The more reserved, smaller buildings were homes. They dotted the majority of the city. The large domes—also capped in gold—might have been churches or temples or whatever the Golden Order called their places of worship. The rugged buildings had to be garrisons.

A river snaked its way through Chrysopelea, a dark ribbon of water that reflected every hint of gold in the city. Bridges arched over it, joining the two halves of the city. A large barge moved slowly along its surface, headed toward Ilya, with its cargo hidden beneath protective tarps.

The central part of the city had to be the ruling quarter. The Sultan’s palace wasn’t anything particularly grand or special, but it was large enough to be notable from afar. Ilya had heard that the previous palace had been extravagant, but it had been sacked and ruined in the wake of Evestani’s civil war. Now, the modest palace had white-washed walls rather than gold, for some odd reason, and simple obelisks at each of the four corners. An onion-like dome sat in the center. More notable than the building itself were its surroundings, predominantly green from a lush garden. A little oasis in the otherwise arid city.

“What must they be thinking right now?” Sydney mused, more to himself than anyone else present. “They’ll have noticed us now if they hadn’t before. Do they have defenses they can raise? Will they roll over and allow us to take the city unimpeded?”

The palace’s relative humbleness made her wonder about the Sultan. Ilya didn’t know much about the man. From the few letters exchanged between him and Arkk, it almost sounded like the Sultan didn’t want this war, as if he were being forced into it against his will. From the words of her mother, the Sultan was someone who, for the last fifteen or so years, had been entirely devoted to easing tensions between Mystakeen and Evestani.

For all she knew, he would roll over and allow them to take the city.

But that wasn’t something they could rely on. Focusing the spyglass in response to Sydney’s words, Ilya scanned over the edges of the city. There were no walls to hide behind or ballistae mounted on tall towers like Cliff had. Just an open city.

They surely weren’t defenseless. Even without the avatar, the fact that Evestani had been in so many wars meant they had to have some preparations. Whatever those preparations were, Ilya couldn’t spot them from up high.

She did see people fleeing from the sparsely scattered homes and buildings that dotted the fields outside the city. Ilya wasn’t sure of the wisdom in fleeing toward the city though. It should have been obvious where the spire was headed. If she were in their positions, she would have fled away. Not toward the city and not toward the spire, but off in other directions. But panicked people didn’t often behave rationally.

It should have been impossible at this distance and with the tower stomping along, but Ilya could have sworn she heard the city tolling its warning bells.

“Are we certain we won’t be facing the avatar?” Hawkwood asked, squinting as he stared into the distance. Ilya handed his spyglass back, but he didn’t resume using it. Instead, he looked at her, serious eyes betraying a hint of nervousness.

“Coward.”

Ilya flicked a frown in the Vaales commander’s direction. She wasn’t about to dignify the man with a response.

“I saw what that thing was capable of in Elmshadow,” Hawkwood said, failing to follow her example. “It isn’t human—or demihuman or beastman. More of a force of nature. It wiped out a quarter of my men in an instant. It punched a hole through the Elm Mountains. It isn’t something we can fight.”

In response, the commander pushed off from where he had been leaning against the wall. “My Prince won’t have sent us to our deaths.” He scoffed, shaking his head. “Stay if you fear so much. Hide in the tower. I will wrap up this city and gift it to Prince Cedric without your aid.”

With a final sneer, he turned, shoved past the orc guards—who let him go after a small wave of Ilya’s hand—and started descending through the spire’s stairwells. Hawkwood, Ilya, Sydney, and Olatt’an simply watched him go. Vezta didn’t bother turning her head to track him, but with the multitude of eyes dotted around her body, she couldn’t have missed him.

A short silence followed. Sydney broke it with a small shake of his head. “Where does he think he is going? Can’t exactly leave this place while it is in motion.”

“Probably to his men. Rally them for the fight,” Hawkwood said.

Ilya, able to watch the commander even after he left the room, made sure to keep him in an active part of her mind. She doubted he would try to do anything to sabotage the rest of them, but Ilya didn’t like him and she didn’t like the Prince. Neither could be trusted.

“Arkk is handling the avatar,” Ilya said, returning to Hawkwood’s actual question. The commander didn’t warrant any further thought or discussion. “We shouldn’t have to worry about him.”

“The avatar possesses bodies. In addition, his real body is likely here.”

“As I said, Arkk is handling that. You and your soldiers secure the palace.” Ilya narrowed her eyes, gazing out the window at the rapidly approaching city. She turned, meeting Olatt’an and Vezta’s eyes. “We’ll find the avatar’s real body and ensure he isn’t a problem.”

“On your own,” Hawkwood said as if he didn’t believe that she could do it.

Ilya didn’t blame him for doubting. Not with him having seen the avatar in person. But Arkk had taught her all the spells he knew and she could cast them. Olatt’an had a trinket from Zullie and Savren that should point them in the right direction. Vezta was present and would hopefully get them anywhere that they couldn’t reach.

They weren’t expecting a fight, however. That was the only reason they might succeed.

“We’ll take care of it,” Ilya said, voice firm. “It’s time to end this.”

 

 

“Zullie!” Arkk barked as the tower rocked again under fire from the Eternal Empire airship. “You told me we would have defenses.”

“All things in time, Arkk. All things in time…”

“Don’t exactly have time,” Arkk snapped back.

Brickwork, reinforced by the tower’s magic, cracked and fractured under the sustained bombardment. Small cracks of daylight made it inside before the lesser servants could repair the walls. The Eternal Empire’s continued cannon firing was getting stronger, each volley shaved away more layers of the tower than the last, like the bricks had been designed to ablate rather than be the nigh-invulnerable material that the walls were supposed to be. Part of it was those eggs. Anywhere the eggs touched the tower crumbled away far easier than any other section, like they had permanently damaged the reinforcement magic.

Arkk wanted to send out the lesser servants to dismantle and rebuild whole sections of the tower entirely, but with the bombardment, they wouldn’t last more than a second.

If they could get rid of the spell holding them in place, he would have rotated the tower just to give the one side a break.

Once the servant got the daylight sealed away, reforming the brickwork from inside the tower, the heavy thumping and explosions on the outside of the tower came to a stop.

It wasn’t a reprieve. The only times when the cannons stopped were when the whale ships were about to begin another round of their bombardment.

Several walls slid aside with a thought, moving to open periodic vents around the base of the tower. Agnete, seated in the middle of the otherwise empty chamber, tilted her head up. The embers in her eyes ignited into plumes of flame that billowed out around her. Fire flooded the chamber, exploding out the vents where it swept up the exterior of the tower. Just in time to incinerate the first of the eggs crashing into the walls.

Something about the avatar’s latest golden ray left behind golden residue on the tower, dripping and leaking. The eggs weren’t able to find purchase on it, either bouncing off or sliding down it depending on the angle they came in on. Neither could Agnete’s fire reach above it. It didn’t seem to harm the tower as much as it was an obstacle in defending it. It somewhat reminded him of those golden statues, except it was affecting his tower instead of people.

The encroaching, dripping gold had slowed its spread since the initial attack. Arkk hoped Lexa would finish her task before the avatar felt up to a repeat performance.

Arkk teleported outside to several preconstructed ledges, using his own fire spells to fry off eggs above the gold where Agnete’s flames failed. As he did so, he teleported Agnete out of the tower to another ledge. The brief pause in the bombardment made it safe to go outside, temporarily.

The armored soldiers of the Eternal Empire surrounded the base of the tower. Their armor wasn’t as good as that golden knight, but it was enough to resist Agnete’s flames. They had already tried to sweep the fire through their forces and, while it did cause some damage, the soldiers weren’t the priority.

She lifted her hand, sweeping the fire around her arm and up to a point. A thin beam of concentrated flame rushed upward. It wasn’t fast. Faster than most fire should move naturally, but quite a bit slower than a magical fireball and far, far slower than the near-instant golden rays the Heart of Gold’s avatar could produce. The airships overhead, both whale and regular, ceased their attacks as they drifted to the sides, separating to avoid the flames.

Arkk dropped a black marble onto the bombardment team’s docket.

The defensive array had shattered. The feedback from taking the brunt of the golden beam had almost killed Kassa. The rest of the rituals were still intact. Lelith didn’t waste time.

One of the whale ships drifted in the opposite direction as the primary ship. The primary ship was the one defending them from all Arkk’s efforts to bring them down. Separated, they were vulnerable.

A black void opened above the separated ship. One of Zullie’s spells, the same one he had used at Elmshadow’s recapture. Hurled out from the void, orbs of tiny stars warped the world around them, bending sight as they drifted toward the whale ship.

The metal shell encasing the organic interiors twisted and bent, ripped away and pulled into oblivion as the orb skimmed the ship’s surface. Exposed red flesh, meaty and bloody, began dripping in large, chunky slews. Some were pulled into the starry orbs, the rest fell atop the army below.

Lyra had said that they were vulnerable from the inside. That was well and good. Currently, Abbess Hannah and Sylvara were conversing with the avatar of the Holy Light to allegedly learn some spell that would ignore the whale ship’s armor, overseen by Savren. It would be great if it worked, especially because there was at least one more intact whale ship that had yet to join in on the fight. But just because the avatar said it would work didn’t mean Arkk wasn’t about to give up trying his way.

He couldn’t trust the avatar any further than he could throw the Holy Light’s statue.

At the same time, Agnete wasn’t finished. Sweeping her arm downward pulled the beam of fire, drawing it back toward the ground as if it were a massive, tower-long whip. The prime airship, in the process of maneuvering back toward the separated whale ship, had to abort and dive to avoid the flames. The second whale got away with a scorching of its metal, but nothing more.

The flame whip crashed into the ground. The Eternal Empire’s soldiers, caught in its direct path, did not look like they survived. The following explosion as the compressed flames spread outward and upward threw several of the armored knights into the air and over the heads of their comrades.

As the cannons on the underside of the prime ship began glowing once again, Arkk teleported both Agnete and himself back inside. Just in time to avoid the renewed bombardment.

At least the first wave struck the ground where Agnete had been standing rather than the tower. That gave the lesser servants clinging to its exterior precious few extra seconds to conduct their repairs.

“Report!” Arkk shouted the moment he was back in the command center.

“Some kind of… wind came from the prime ship,” Camilla said, peering into the crystal ball. “It disturbed the void spell enough to destroy it.”

“Damage to the whale? How severe is it?”

“It looks bad,” Harvey said. “Wouldn’t want the wound on myself. But the ship is still in the air. Doesn’t look like we hit it hard enough to knock it out of the sky.”

Arkk scowled as a flash of anger stirred inside. He did not want to have to rely on Lyra. “We hurt it. We do that a few more times and we can take it down.”

“If we can,” Agnete said, taking a deep breath. Heat haze clung to her bare shoulders, wafting off in waves that distorted the air. The light in her eyes was as bright as Arkk’s, if a bit more yellow-orange than red. “I doubt they’ll be foolish enough to split apart like that again.”

“We’ll just have to make them split apart.”

“E-Egg report:” Luthor said, looking like he wasn’t sure he wanted to interrupt. “All lower tower eggs were incinerated before they could form proper tendrils. The ones you dealt with, A-Arkk, weren’t removed as… uh… swiftly.” His face contorted like the report was causing physical pain. “Faster than last time though!”

“Thank you, Luthor,” Arkk said. That wasn’t anything he hadn’t expected. He wasn’t Agnete. He wasn’t an avatar. Frankly, it was lucky he knew a flame spell good enough to get rid of them.

Those things were made to take out towers like his. The way they drained magic and weakened the reinforced walls would have seen his tower crumbling around him if Priscilla hadn’t given him that inferno spell. Even with it, they were still being worn down.

The situation needed to change. Fast.

“Your mechanical forces are almost fully assembled down below,” Arkk said, looking to Agnete. “Do you think the voltcoil wyrms can damage any of the airships?”

Agnete hummed, pursing her lips. She strode toward where the window used to be, peering slightly upward as if she could see the ships through the opaque bricks. “Now that I’ve seen them in person, I doubt it. They may be able to cause some damage to the prime ship, seeing as it is made from wood, but not the whales.”

“A distraction might suffice. Enough for you or our bombardment to get a good hit in.”

“True. If the airship is focused on them rather than me—”

“Sir,” Camilla shouted. The fairy looked up with wide yellow eyes. “The army is moving again. Back towards the tower.”

“In addition, I’ve s-spotted at least a portion of the Eternal Empire’s other soldiers. Estimated one thousand are heading to reinforce Evestani.”

Rekk’ar, leaning over the large map table, curled his lips in a scowl that showed off his tusks. “The King’s army is still engaged with Evestani’s soldiers. They got in a good hit against Evestani spellcasters and siege weapons. Hmm… Maybe we just let them get torn apart?” he said, scowl changing to thoughtful reflection.

“Careful,” Arkk hissed, throwing a glance around as if the demon might have heard. At the moment, the demon was presumably clashing with Evestani. He didn’t want to do anything that would change that. “I have my undead goblins in place, ready to support Mags. Three hundred isn’t much, but their very nature will make them a perfect distraction to let them get the upper hand. Especially if they remind Evestani of their previous encounter with undeath.”

In a single battle that resulted in no losses for Arkk, he had cut down nearly one-fifth of the Evestani army. They would be hard-pressed to not remember that.

Lexa was out there as well. A quick check showed her skirting around the edges of an ongoing battle. Presumably to get closer to the avatar.

She needed to pick up the pace.

Arkk muttered a small prayer that the effigy would work. He had never been much for religion. He participated in the Suun lectures more because they were something to do in his little village and less because he was an actual believer. Ironically, he felt he believed less now. Not that the gods didn’t exist—they empirically did—just that they cared. Even still, a whisper to the Eternal Silence or Xel’atriss, Lock and Key, or anyone who might listen felt appropriate. That effigy had to work.

If it didn’t, he had likely sent Lexa to her death.

If it didn’t and the avatar used another golden ray, he might have consigned everyone present to their deaths. Unless Zullie could get her impenetrable barrier working. Speaking of… “Zullie—”

“Sir,” Camilla interrupted before he could start, “soldiers at the base of the tower are reorganizing. I believe they’re prepared to renew their assault.”

Arkk let out a small breath. Finally some good news. “Zullie, the Maze of Infinite Paths?”

“Ready to go. Just drop me off in the containment room.”

“Good. Make it happen.” Command given, Arkk sent her off. It would delay the barrier, but it would hopefully solve one issue.

“Sir?” Camilla asked. “Maze?”

“Nothing you need to worry about. In fact, avoid scrying into the tower legs for the time being.” Arkk stumbled slightly as another volley struck the tower. The maze wouldn’t take long to activate, but they really needed to get their defenses operational again. Lesser servants were in the process of repairing the ritual room, but even once it was repaired, Lelith would still have to scrawl out the protective ritual.

With daylight peaking through parts of the tower walls again, they might not have that kind of time.

“Shall I hear out what the other avatar has to say?” Agnete asked, apparently reading his mind.

Arkk pursed his lips into a heavy frown. “Not knowing what she wants from you, I’m wary. She wanted me to return you to her, which is how someone speaks of property, not people. I would prefer if we heard second-hand through Abbess Hannah and Sylvara. But I’m also not going to stop you if that is what you wish.”

“I don’t know if we have the option of waiting,” Agnete said, watching the lesser servant form a fresh layer of bricks in the command center’s walls. “Barring mind-altering elements in the avatar’s speech, I don’t see harm in hearing her out.”

That was one of the reasons why Savren was in the room as well. It hurt taking him off the research projects that Arkk needed done as soon as possible, but he was the expert in mind magics. If Lyra Zann did have some way of controlling other’s thoughts, he would hopefully notice before they could take effect.

The other main reason was that he also was loyal to Arkk, which meant that if Lyra put forth some ideas that Sylvara or Hannah should betray him, Savren would be able to warn Arkk well in advance, before Hannah even tried to break her link with him, hopefully. He was well aware that Sylvara’s motivations were a lot like those of Lexa—both wanted the Heart of Gold’s avatar wiped off the face of the realm—but without the fallback of gold and general comradery to ensure she wouldn’t turn on him. He didn’t think she would do that. Sylvara was pragmatic more than dogmatic, but he well knew she would likely leave his services once the war ended.

Whether her inquisitorial nature meant she would be forced against him or not was another matter entirely. It would be good if he could reach some kind of agreement with Lyra, keep the Abbey off his back through her, but with her repeated insistence on wanting Agnete returned and his repeated denial, he wasn’t sure that was possible.

But that would be a problem for the future. For now, “I’ll send you down there. Be forewarned that I may teleport you away at any moment once the whale ships begin another of their egg attacks. Or should an opportunity arise in the current situation.”

“I’ll keep myself running hot.”

With a nod of his head, Arkk sent her off.

A brief dizzying sensation hit him a moment later. Nothing to do with Agnete. It was Zullie activating her maze. It suddenly felt as if his arms were twisted into chaotic breaded pretzels. The stairs expanded, continually moving upwards and downwards. The tower legs split into a multitude, all slightly different yet all slightly the same, all occupying the same space. Corridors and chambers divided, splitting apart even as more and more grew to fill in the gaps. Both legs of the tower became a liminal space of conflicting passages. The kind, once one entered, they would never be able to find their way out from.

There was a sudden urge to look into the affected area, just to see what it looked like from an outside perspective. It wouldn’t kill him, but keeping his head on straight was too much of a priority in the current situation.

As soon as Zullie tugged on the link, he teleported her back up. Her research station had been relocated here so that she might inform him of any immediate changes to her progress faster than otherwise. Every second could count.

“That went well,” she said with a smile. “And it gave me an idea.”

“No,” Arkk said. “Defensive spell or something to destroy those ships. No more ideas. You’re the one who didn’t want to swap projects until you finished.”

“But that’s just the thing,” Zullie said, casually taking off her glasses. She pulled at the side of her robes and started cleaning off some bit of dust. “The maze project is already finished. Any further applications of it won’t take long to implement. Not like crafting new ideas from scratch.

“We’ll power it with the Heart—by the fortress itself—so no need to rely on glowstones at all! No personnel to get blasted apart if that golden boy hits us. Just a weak connection that will snap if it tries to drain too much at once. The perfect spell, utilizing the fortress to its fullest potential.”

Arkk let out a small sigh. This again. Zullie had the notion that the Heart could be used to power all rituals. It didn’t work like that in practice. Unlike the portal, rituals weren’t part of the fortress, but something overlaid on top of it. Small amounts of magic could go to rituals under certain circumstances, but that was closer to what happened to rituals in the Underworld. The abundance of ambient magic helped activate them.

“No, no. I know that look,” Zullie said, reseating her glasses on her nose. “It will work. Imagine a bottle with no end… it has no openings and no volume, yet can hold… No, imagine a torus which can’t… A ribbon with both sides…” The witch stopped, lips pressed together.

“Zullie…”

“It’s hard to explain,” she said. “But it will work. Our little maze downstairs is evidence. Look in at the ritual. No glowstones, right?”

Arkk blinked twice, doing as she asked. The containment room was one of several similar rooms that were completely sealed from outside access. Only teleportation could get in and out. There were some glowstones set to the side, meant to power rituals, but the predominant ritual circle in the center of the chamber didn’t have any. Its inscribed rings still glowed a faint, pulsing violet.

At the three points where glowstones or spellcasters would have been required, something was strange. The space there twisted, folding in on itself. It was as if, sweeping his eyes from left to right over the ritual circle, he suddenly started staring all over the place—up, down, inside-out, and all around—before his vision simply continued sweeping to the side. Staring too long, trying to figure out what happened there, was starting to give him a headache.

He pulled back, frowning at Zullie. “You experimented in a situation like this?”

“Naturally. It is in my nature to constantly seek improvement.”

“In less time than it would take to finish your other research.”

“Ten minutes. I’ll be reusing almost all principles in the Infinite Maze for this.”

That was better than her expected hour for her other idea.

“And you think this will get us protected again? Properly? No flickering out or failure.”

“For anything less than a golden ray? Yes,” Zullie said with a confident nod of her head. “In fact, I think I can do more than protect us.” A smile spread across her face. “Why waste all that energy just blocking attacks, Arkk? Let’s use their own weapons against them.”

 

 

The damp air of the tunnel clung to their skin as the soldiers huddled together. Dim glowstone lights flickered as a tremble ran through the ground. At the center of the group stood Eadric, the unit’s seasoned hypeman. His voice was a steady beacon amidst the low murmur of anticipation. His words pulsed like the beat of a drum, charging the air with energy. Soldiers, gripping their weapons, nodded along, their fear transmuting into a steely resolve.

Eadric moved among them, clasping shoulders and meeting eyes. He knew his presence was a tangible reassurance. A reassurance they needed. Even as an experienced warrior, one of the King’s men who had fought in seven different battles for the realm, served in a mercenary company for over a decade, and possessed more accolades than any two others in the entire army, he had seen things here that he could never have imagined. Monsters of all varieties, massive walking buildings, and flying ships to name a few. And they hadn’t even encountered the enemy yet.

That was soon to change.

War was upon them. Quite literally. In a few minutes, they would burst forth from the ground, assailing the Evestani invaders from the rear. Some, those inexperienced, called it a cowardly move not to face them head-on. Eadric called it smart. Only bards cared about honor. For everyone else, it was life or death.

They would understand. They would understand or they would die.

“Ready men!” a call rang through the tunnels.

Eadric let his own words fall silent as he turned.

Prince Cedric’s commander held a large copper cone in front of his mouth, projecting his voice through the tunnel. Eadric wasn’t sure what to think of the man. A pompous sort like him who clearly got his position out of kinship more than ability normally grated on Eadric’s nerves, yet the man was the head of the army, fully ready to be the first to charge into battle. Whether he had a death wish or was just ignorant of the brutality they would face in a few minutes, Eadric couldn’t decide. If anything, he wished the man would move back.

He wasn’t well-liked among the soldiers, but if the banner the commander carried fell, it would harm morale.

“Tonight, we bathe in the blood of our enemies! Tomorrow, we dance upon their corpses. Huzzah!”

Eadric expected more, but Mags was finished. He tossed the copper cone aside, whipped his horse’s hindquarters, and shot off out of the tunnel. He was the first into the daylight. The first to meet the enemy.

Probably the first to die.

Eadric could only shake his head before echoing the cry. With any luck, Mags would die with the majority of the army none the wiser. It would only be after the fact that anyone would realize they had trampled over his body in the opening minutes of the engagement.

The army surged forward, following after Mags. It was divided up, split between a few different exits to the tunnels so that they might better encircle Evestani, getting the drop on them from all sides with the element of surprise.

Eadric stepped out into the sun, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the brightness. He didn’t stop moving. He knew his role. His own banner hung from his back, rallying his men. He was here to be seen, to bolster everyone. He couldn’t be seen to falter or waver. Heavy armor-crushing mace gripped in one hand and his shield on his other arm, he waded forward.

Evestani’s army stood in the distance. Most still had their backs facing the oncoming battle. Siege weapons, bombardment magics, and all manner of spellwork had been set up as far from the front as possible. That left them open to be the first to go down. Spellcasters normally wanted as much heavy armor and shields between them and conflict as possible. Coming up behind them like this would rip away the advantage of magic from Evestani.

It wouldn’t be an easy battle, but compared to some of his engagements? Evestani still outnumbered them. That said, Eadric could get used to fighting like this. Spellcasters were often the most troublesome part of a proper army.

In the distance, dwarfing the mass of soldiers, a giant sphere of swirling wind raged amid a forest. With the sun angled just right, he could almost make out the silhouette of the walking building that his army chased across the land. Floating above it, one ship somehow hovered in the air while a second metal monster lingered in the air nearby. The latter looked like some kind of creature with a wide, gaping maw and thin tendrils dangling down below it. If not for the metal hull, he might have thought it was a monster.

And a second monster was drifting overhead, moving to join the first two flying ships.

Eadric pulled his gaze back down as the clash in front of him began. There was no time to pay attention to anything else.

Trails of blood arced through the air as Eadric pulled his mace back. The stubby spikes were made to break armor. Bones couldn’t hold up. He bashed one fleeing caster straight down his spine, hearing that crack over the yells, shouts, and clashing metal. A magical array of unknown intent dimmed and faded as the maintainers fell or fled. He let out a shout of his own, indistinct among the cries of his comrades, doing nothing but hyping up his unit as they charged.

Chaos amid the blood, dirt, and bodies reigned. A whirlwind swirled around him, threatening to rip him off his feet. One of his unit shoved a pike through the caster’s head, freeing him to bash down someone’s skull who was conjuring up a wall of ice to buy time.

The first armored opponent charged at Eadric with a stubby straight sword, swinging as if he had never used it before. Eadric batted it away with his shield, using the opening to thrust his mace forward into the chest of the soldier. The metal chestplate dented. That alone wouldn’t have been enough, but it knocked the soldier off balance. A second strike to the side of the head and a third to the man’s shield arm elicited that cracking of breaking bones along with a pained scream as the soldier went down. Another follow-up strike to the helmet made the man still.

Eadric didn’t stop. Even as he bashed down the soldier, his eyes roamed around, seeking his next target. A caster was giving one of his men a hard time. A row of hastily assembled archers were readying their bows. More soldiers were moving forward, disorganized and erratic.

He took a single step.

Bright golden light flooded his vision. Eadric reared back, raising his shield as a distant heat washed over him, soaking into his armor. He blinked as fast as he could, trying to regain his vision even as he kept his shield up and pointed at where he thought the enemy was.

He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t hurt. Whatever that had been, it hadn’t been aimed toward him.

Fearing the worst, he quickly looked around the moment he could see more than spots.

Everyone was in a similar state. Not just his army, but Evestani’s as well. Everyone was cowering, waiting, as if they expected that to have been an attack from an enemy. There wasn’t even any noise. The only one moving, Eadric noted, was Mags. Seeing the portly man slam his fist through the helmet of some Evestani soldier, smiling with a toothy grin on his face, made him wonder if he wasn’t seeing things.

Nobody seemed hurt beyond the momentary blindness. Eadric swung his mace, knocking aside some soldier who was still recovering, before realizing what had happened.

The tower was visible. The swirling maelstrom that had been protecting it was nowhere to be seen. A chunk of its smokey walls was covered in what appeared to be liquid gold, dripping down its sides.

The airships overhead, the monstrous ones, opened their mouths. Dozens of sacks of meat came spewing out, flying through the air toward the tower.

At the same time, flames erupted around the tower, swirling around as it moved up the sides of the walls. Some of the meat sacks burned away in an instant while others struck the tower, sticking to its bricks.

Arrows striking Eadric’s shield pulled his eyes back to the ground. One punctured deep enough to clip his arm. The pinch of pain wasn’t much, but it did make him hiss.

There was no time to worry about the tower. He had a war to win.

Lexa felt the hairs on her skin stand on end. An instant later, the tower rocked, tilting back far enough that she felt like she was going to go flying.

“Confirmed location of the avatar,” shouted one of the people hunched over the crystal ball. They weren’t disturbed at all by the sudden shock to the fortress. None even blinked. “Location displayed.”

Lexa didn’t have a clue who they were talking to. Arkk wasn’t here. He had rushed back to Fortress Al-Mir to get Agnete and her machines. The Protector loomed over their crystal balls. Maybe to distribute information to Rekk’ar who would then use more Protectors to order around other teams.

“External d-damage appears minimal—” another of the scrying team started as the image in the glass flickered.

“Incoming attacks from above. Egg drop!”

“Agnete is already outside, teleported by Arkk. Nothing to worry over.”

“The protective spell is down,” a fairy said, quickly changing the crystal ball to show somewhere inside the tower. Her face twisted into a grimace as it flickered to whatever else she needed to keep track of. “Looks like an explosion went off inside the ritual chamber. Kassa is down and Lelith looks like she got slammed against a wall. Backlash from the spell hitting the shield?”

“We’ll be vulnerable to sustained bombardment…”

“Where is Arkk?”

That was what Lexa wanted to know. He said he would only be gone for a minute, just long enough to get Agnete and her machines moving. The avatar had attacked. Now was the optimal time to enact their countermeasure against him and she was stuck sitting here, twiddling her thumbs. Agnete warranted a teleport out to take care of the eggs, meanwhile, that avatar was recovering.

Fate, or perhaps some Fickle Wheel, chose that moment to strike. The moment the thought crossed her mind, Lexa felt that tug that came with teleportation. Like someone picked her up by the scruff of her neck, whisked her through space, and dropped her off in a long, empty tunnel. Not having been expecting the teleport, Lexa stumbled slightly as she whipped her head around to get her bearings.

Arkk had not dropped her into the middle of combat. That let her relax ever so slightly. The tunnel she was in had two ways to go. One way narrowed to a small hole that not even a gremlin could fit into. A slime or one of the servants would be the only ones capable of traversing that route. The other way was an upward-leading ramp where the majority of the tunnel’s light came from.

With only one direction to go, Lexa didn’t need telling twice.

She quickly checked herself over, making sure she wasn’t missing anything. Her shadow cloak, wrapped loosely around her, fluttered in the faint breeze coming from the tunnel’s entrance. All her knives were in place in their holders—she withdrew two, one in each hand—the flower was still pinned to her shirt, and a small metal sphere engraved with runes hung from the belt on her hip. Within, the effigy sat, safe and contained for the moment.

A surge of doubt crossed through Lexa’s mind. It was the only effigy. She wasn’t sure if it was because another one couldn’t be made or if Zullie and the others had simply focused on perfecting this one, but its weight suddenly felt ten times what it had been a moment ago. If she failed, if she lost it, if it didn’t work…

Well, if any of those happened, she would probably end up dead. Then it wouldn’t be her problem anymore.

With a shake of her head, Lexa ascended the sloped path out of the tunnel.

War raged around her.

The tunnel’s exit led directly to a battle. Red and gold armored soldiers fought alongside blue and yellow against an army clothed in white, black, and gold. Metal clashed against metal. Spells flew overhead in both directions. People screamed as they were cut down. Soldiers stampeded over the bodies of the fallen, too frightened and too hyped up on adrenaline to think. Blood soaked into the ground as arrows thunked against armor, shields, and people.

Lexa had seen fighting before. She had been one of Katja’s bandits for around ten years. They raided caravans and killed people, even assaulted a small village one year for food and supplies. People bled out and died. Plenty at her own hand. With Arkk, she had seen plenty more. Between assassinating the Duke, Gleeful Burg, and reclaiming Elmshadow, she had seen her fair share of blood and death. But she had never been in the thick of a war. She had always been off on the side, targeting special objectives.

The scale of the battle before her couldn’t compare to everything else she had seen even if she combined all her experiences into one bloody lump. Tides of people clashed, dozens fell on both sides only to be replaced with more yelling and charging from the ones behind them.

Lexa had to dart and weave, using all her skills and even a few agility-enhancing spells to keep from being crushed underneath metal boots. It helped that she couldn’t stand around in a stupor. Being forced to move kept her active.

She narrowed her eyes, cursing her short height as she tried to figure out where her target might be. If Arkk dropped her off here, that meant the avatar should be somewhere nearby. White and gold, with a light brown thrown in, were the predominant colors of Evestani. Maneuvering around a clash between them and some of Vaales’ red and gold, she headed further into the Evestani line.

It wasn’t easy. Even with nobody paying attention to her thanks to her spells and cloak, the battlefield was packed. If she remembered right, Evestani marched with roughly ten thousand men. The King’s army was smaller, but it sure didn’t feel that way. Combined they formed a wall. Not just a wall—she could have gotten over a wall. It was a mass of swinging blades that extended outward in every direction, constantly moving back and forth. She wasn’t sure how she was supposed to get anywhere.

Trees were standing. Evestani had set up their siege equipment in a relatively clear spot in the forest, but it wasn’t completely devoid of trees. Most fighters on both sides avoided them. At most, people used them as cover against the archers, but, from a short observation, most archers didn’t bother to aim their shots at trees when they could randomly arch their shot high into the air and likely hit someone.

Lexa kept a wary eye out for any golden arrows. The ones that turned people into living statues that then infected more people. So far, neither the statues nor the arrows were present. She wondered if it had something to do with the avatar. Although powerful enough to blast a hole into a mountain, he did not have infinite power. It took time to rebuild that power or else he would simply walk on his own, blasting down everything in his path with rays of gold. If maintaining or otherwise using those gold statues or arrows took some of that power, he might ignore it in favor of focusing on the tower.

Clinging to the side of a tree, Lexa flicked her eyes up. The tower stood in the distance, looking worse for wear. Smoke billowed out of one of the floors in the upper levels. The ritual room, probably. Fire wreathed the tower, trying to keep it clean of those meaty eggs the whale ships were spewing. Gold dripped down its sides where the ray had struck, seeming to snuff out the flames. All the while, the cannons of the airship didn’t let up, blasting off lesser servants in droves as they clung to the exterior, trying to repair the damage.

A black void opened, intercepting a few volleys of cannon fire and eggs. It flickered and collapsed before long. The small reprieve it bought did allow a few focused beams of fire to fry several of the eggs the larger wreath had missed.

Lexa forced her gaze back down. Dealing with that wasn’t her job. She had to find the avatar. She had to find the avatar before he gathered enough strength to strike the tower a second time.

Again, the Fickle Wheel thought it must be funny to coincide events with her thoughts. As soon as she turned her eyes back to the battlefield, a warm, golden aura spread out from the center of Evestani’s army. The tides of war below her shifted, with the King’s army pulling back in response to the unknown magics, readying themselves to defend from spells. Protective shields popped up all throughout their side of the battle. Evestani, on the other hand, found themselves bolstered. Everyone wearing their colors straightened, gripped their weapons with newfound strength, and raised their banners as they shouted war cries.

The clash began again as the light faded. This time, the side with the advantage was plain and obvious. Evestani’s forces still died. It wasn’t like they had become immortal or even gained any amount of strength. Lexa watched their blades clash with those of the King’s army. Nothing looked too different.

Had anything even happened? Was it pure morale that shifted the flow of battle? If Lexa were in the avatar’s position, she wouldn’t have bothered wasting power on her followers while her true target stood ahead, taunting in its very existence. But if a little trick of light was enough to turn a fighting retreat into a forward push, she would have thrown up a quick sparkle too.

Unfortunately for the avatar, her elevated position gave her the perfect vantage point to see where that light had originated from. She might not have long. The avatar wasn’t immobile, after all, and he might decide to swap possessed bodies at any point. But it was the best lead she had.

Scanning through the ocean of fighters below, she picked a route, keeping close to the more densely packed trees and far from the actual people. It would be a roundabout path, but one actually traversable compared to pushing through an active battle.

“I’m coming for you,” Lexa hissed as she hopped to the ground and took off in a sprint. “Just you wait…”

 

 

Arkk had a brief window of reprieve. He had to make the best of it.

After changing their tactics, the airship overhead fired all their cannons at once, then the whale ship spewed eggs, both took a few minutes of rest following that—presumably, time taken to reset things for their next attack. The main army was outside the tower, reevaluating their tactics. Evestani was about to engage with Mags and his men.

Arkk did not like the idea of leaving the tower during the battle. He could move about personnel whether or not he was present, but there were some things that he could respond to far better in person—for example, teleporting someone like Dakka, Kia, or Lyssa to him and casting a haste spell before throwing them back into combat. In addition, while he had spoken with the bombardment team about targeting the tower with an inferno spell to burn off those eggs, it had not been tested.

But there were some things only he could take care of.

“Agnete,” Arkk said, starting and ending his greeting with just her name. There wasn’t time for more. “I’ve prepared teleportation rituals leading directly beneath the tower’s current location. However…”

Arkk looked around the portal chamber. The vastly enlarged portal chamber. Having seen what Agnete was bringing through from his link with her, he had known in advance that the machines from the Anvil wouldn’t fit in the room’s previous configuration.

They barely fit now. The lesser servants had torn down the walls and joined the nearest dozen rooms together, moving everything of value off to some other corner of Fortress Al-Mir. Even with the modifications, the room was packed to the brim with bulky machines that, despite owning a much larger walking tower, he still felt a little intimidated by purely from a sense of scale.

“The teleportation rituals strain at moving a large carriage,” Arkk said with a frown. If only they had a full-scale portal out at Elmshadow.

“They are transports. If given access to the surface, they can move on their own,” Agnete said, gesturing to the bulky, brick-like machines that moved on treads.

“The battle is ongoing. I need to be back now.” Arkk frowned, watching as Agnete made a noise of understanding. “They won’t have time to cross half of Mystakeen.”

“You’ll find them faster than you expecᛏ,” Who said, stepping up alongside Agnete.

“While true,” Agnete said, looking to her mechanical contemporary, “the distance they must traverse to reach Elmshadow is… roughly the distance from the molten metal refinery stack to our workshop.”

“Ah…” Who’s cogs whirred down in what Arkk assumed was disappointment.

“I have had the lesser servants copying the ritual circles,” Arkk said. “About twenty individuals can move at once, at least as long as they can spark the circles with magic on their own. Otherwise, I’ll have to dedicate my men to doing so.” He turned, looking at one of the large Iron Mongers, as Agnete had dubbed them. They were like an entire foundry on treaded legs. “No idea how to get the larger things through.”

“Throughput issues,” Who said with an odd hiss of steam that Arkk equated with a scoff. The disappointed shake of her head only reinforced his guess.

Arkk chose to ignore her comment, focusing on the task at hand. There wasn’t time for banter. “Before that, however, there is one thing. If you… If it is possible to hire you as employees, I can assist in keeping you and yours safe. I’ve been teleporting people around, dodging attacks, and setting them up for perfect blind-side strikes.”

He honestly hadn’t the slightest idea whether or not he could hire them. They were metal constructs. Machines. Mobile statues. It sounded absurd to think that he could hire a statue. But at the same time, they were beings. His interactions with Who weren’t any different than his interactions with Agnete or Perr’ok. They could make decisions and act autonomously.

So which did the Heart consider them? Statues? Or beings?

Agnete and Who looked at one another. Arkk imagined their thoughts were running along the same path.

“Safety isn’t as important for us as it might be for squishy meatbags. If our casings are destroyed, we can simply construct a new one. Our black boxes are us. They were built by a god. They won’t be destroyed so easily.”

“That sounds time-consuming. Why waste that time when I can prevent ninety percent of your casualties in the first place?”

Who hesitated again. Arkk wondered if she was coming up with excuses just so she wouldn’t have to test this out. Rather than debate philosophy, he conjured up a gold coin from one of the increasingly sparse stacks in the treasury and held it out for Who to take. It was the quickest way to get an answer.

“Accept the payment and I’ll hire you. If you can speak for the rest of the Anvil’s forces, I can hire you all at once.” That had worked with Richter and his men, after all.

Who hesitated a moment longer throwing another glance at Agnete, before she reached forward and took the coin.

The link formed immediately, first with Who then it branched out to the rest of the assembled machine lifeforms. In one exchange of a coin, Arkk had tripled his number of employees. And it wasn’t just the Who-like machines who were mostly inside the transports or the flying serpents. Everything from the anvil gained an employee link. That included the transports as well as the large smithies on legs.

Arkk staggered in place as a sudden wave of vertigo slammed into him. Before this, Richter’s three hundred deserters had been the largest group to join him at once. But even aside from the numbers, there was something different about the group from the Anvil. Normally, he received some small amount of magic, an increase in his reserves, when someone joined.

If anything, he felt drained after they joined. Not completely. If he were to apply numbers to it, each of his new employees increased his reserves by ten, but at the same time, they started siphoning off nine. A net increase but only by a minuscule amount.

Who straightened further, her visible cogs and gears whirring with vigor Arkk hadn’t seen on her before. “Interesting,” she said, looking over the coin as if that was the source of her feelings.

Arkk had a theory. Or rather, an extension of Zullie’s theory. Zullie suggested that the Anvil’s relatively low ambient magic and extremely active environment were related. The Burning Forge was using the heightened magic levels caused by the Calamity to power everything, including the living machines. They were a drain on the magic of the Anvil, keeping the levels low. The theory didn’t quite fit, given that he was still gaining more from them than they were taking, but he chalked that up to some magical oddity he wasn’t aware of. Zullie might care to research it further.

He had more practical things to worry about.

“It worked,” Arkk said, alleviating the concern on Agnete’s face. “Who, you know your fellows better than anyone in my employ. If you can command them—”

“I possess no combat experience,” Who said, only to pause in a brief moment of thought. “None of us do. There are hostile lifeforms in the Anvil, but automated stationary defenses handle them, pushing them back so the Infernal Engine can expand. Some of the serpents occasionally assist, but that is far from their primary duty. However!” she quickly added, as if worried Arkk might send them away. “We are fully combat capable.

“From when Agnete made her petition to the Burning Forge to now, weapons development increased,” she continued. “Most carry portable lightning slingers—Agnete described your favored spell and we already had similar technology in the wyrms. It was simple to adapt to an automaton-portable, albeit less powerful, version. Our plasma cutters are also well beyond capable of inflicting damage on meatbags like yourselves. I believe most engineers, being familiar with the cutters, would prefer that.

“We just don’t know how best to use them.”

Arkk pressed his lips together. He preferred to keep cliques within Company Al-Mir together. They tended to work best like that. That was why Richter had near full command of the men who came with him, why Joanne was in charge of the Claymores, why the orcs were all mostly grouped, and so on. He mixed the groups often enough when he felt the situation called for more diversity, but the ones in charge were still the ones with the most authority over their respective factions.

“It sounds like your automatons using lightning will mostly serve a similar role as battlecasters while the remainder will engage in the frontlines,” Arkk said, musing on the lightning weapons they wielded. “I have a few casters who I can move into a leadership position with you, though I would still prefer if you stayed on as an advisor. They won’t know the capabilities of the Anvil forces, nor what might be too much for you or what might be a waste of your talents.”

“I’m an engineer. I’d prefer being in the production line. Agnete could—”

“Agnete’s power will go to waste as a commander. She needs to remain an independent specialist.” Arkk shook his head. “Would that we had more time, we could have come to a more satisfactory arrangement. For now, we need to move and you’re in charge. I’ll start teleporting them to the ritual circles. You’ve used one before, can you inform the rest of your men what to do?”

Who sighed. A long, crackling, static-filled sigh. A few odd notes and pitch changes filled certain parts of the static before she finally went silent. It was a bit exaggerated, in Arkk’s opinion. If she didn’t want to be in charge to that extent, it probably was best if he replaced her with anyone else. A few of the other machines in the chamber echoed her sigh, including deep noises from the transports. He was about to say so when she straightened again.

“Done. Everyone is informed.”

“Uh…”

“Some strange way of speaking among their kind,” Agnete helpfully provided. “While I can understand most of their other language, this one is well beyond me.”

“I see…” Arkk shook his head. If that sigh hadn’t been a complaint, he supposed he would let it by for now. “We’ve wasted enough time. Agnete, Who, and myself through the hops first. I’ll move individuals to the ritual rooms to follow. We…”

Arkk trailed off, frowning as a change in the fortress caught his attention. “Agnete and Who will go through first. I’ll be following shortly. There is something else here I need to take care of while I have a moment. Agnete, the enemy has been launching some kind of egg-like things at the tower. If I’m not back by the time of their next attack, I may teleport you outside the tower. Burn them off as fast as you can.”

“Understood,” the former inquisitor said with a nod of her head. The smoldering coals in her eyes brightened as if someone shoved a set of bellows in her ears.

“Everyone else will regroup while I take care of things and find some battlecasters to take over.”

“The walking factories can remain here,” Who said after a deep noise erupted from one of the machines. “They’ll manufacture spare parts, armaments, and other items. A logistic team can move the created parts. We set up material conveyors in the Anvil to deliver raw materials for the factories to use, so not being able to move is probably best for them.”

“We’ll have to swap the portal back to the Underworld to charge glowstones before long, but we can switch it back and forth in a relatively short amount of time.”

“Excellent.”

Arkk waited for a bare instant to see if there were any further questions before he took a breath. “Teleporting you two and the first batch of automatons—along with a few of the serpents—to the rituals now.”

With just one extra moment for objections, passed in silence, Arkk moved them out. He teleported himself as well, reappearing in the temple room.

He swept his gaze over the statues, ensuring that none of them had changed, before settling back on the Holy Light. The statue wasn’t in its usual heroic pose. Arms crossed and a frown on its face, it looked occupied. As he teleported another group of automatons to the ritual room, he stalked closer to the statue. Two silver candles at the base of the statue burned slowly, sparking occasionally. Those were what had drawn his attention in the first place.

“Anyone home?” he asked. “Avatar?”

The statue shifted, its eyes swapped from a vacant, distant look to a glare at Arkk. “I believe I have said to call me Lyra.”

“Right,” Arkk said with a frown of his own. “Do you have anything valuable to say? Or are you here to waste my time begging for my employees.”

The statue let out an audible sigh. “I understand you have made contact with our enemies.”

“Our enemies? I’m sorry, I don’t see you out there fighting.” Arkk was a little upset with the avatar of the Light. He wasn’t sure what he had expected. The avatar came to him with an offer of an alliance and then told him a bunch of half-truths before demanding Agnete, among other concessions, for her offers of intelligence. Every time they spoke, his opinion of the Light diminished more and more.

Vezta was right. The Light couldn’t be trusted.

“And I have a fight to get back to,” Arkk said, turning away. “If you’ll excuse me.”

“Hold, Arkk,” Lyra said with a soft note in her tone. Almost begging. Arkk knew she would try to stop him. It was why he hadn’t simply disappeared. But begging? “We haven’t seen eye-to-eye on a number of matters—”

“Just your insistence on returning Agnete to you, as if she can’t make her own decisions.”

“But! I do have a vested interest in seeing my contemporaries fail before they decide to turn their armies on Chernlock.”

“You have an interesting way of showing that interest,” Arkk said, folding his arms over his chest, only to stop and hesitate. One of his arms wasn’t there anymore. With his cloak, it wasn’t obvious. Otherwise Agnete or Who would surely have said something about building him a replacement. There wasn’t time for that now anyway. He teleported another batch of automatons. “Two minutes. That is all I can spare.”

“Before anything, you have not let any eggs hatch, have you?”

Arkk shook his head, deepening his frown. He hardly needed the avatar of enlightenment to tell him that it would probably be a bad idea. After that first had shocked him, he had egg removal duties as the highest priority. Even above saving his men. He did not wish to find out what would happen if the eggs were allowed to mature.

“Good,” Lyra said. “Don’t.”

“You could have warned me about them.”

“I warned you that the Eternal Empire would be deploying ancient weapons long since banned,” the statue said, transitioning to a shrugging pose.

“Well thanks for the advice,” Arkk said, purposefully injecting as much sarcasm as possible into his tone. “But unless you’ve got a way of taking those airships down, I think we’re done here.”

This time, the statue adopted a smug pose. “I do, actually.”

Arkk could only sigh. If Lyra had said no, he could have simply left. Now he had to hear her out. “They avoid, deflect, or otherwise ignore all the bombardment magic I’ve thrown at them. The only thing that worked was an overpowered Electro Deus, and that took more out of me than it took out of them.”

“They aren’t invincible. The creatures within are vulnerable on the inside.”

Arkk already knew that as well. Lexa’s successful destruction of one of the incomplete whale ships attested to that. But he didn’t exactly have a good way of getting someone up into an already flying ship. The harpies and syrens had wings, to be sure, but if the airship could knock a massive boulder off course, he doubted human-sized creatures would manage. He had already tried forming a boulder—and some of the other bombardment spells—directly inside the airship holds. Unfortunately, the magic that generated the stone required an absence of solids in its vicinity. It was one of the reasons they formed so high up, to ensure nothing would leech the magic before the boulder fully formed.

And those whale ships were leeches. Even trying to conjure a boulder, flames, or anything else in their relative vicinity ended up with the spell eaten before it could do anything. It was one of the reasons Arkk had ordered the stop on the continued attacks. If those eggs inside the whales ate magic, he didn’t want to feed them more than he had to.

Unless those eggs hatching inside the ship would be bad for it. If that were the case, he could spare a bit of magic.

He posed the question to Lyra.

The horrified look on her face told him the answer well before she could speak the words. “Light, no. I don’t know which specific weapon the Eternal Empire has deployed against you. I can think of four egg-shaped entities that absorb magic in their arsenal. The least of which absorbs that magic until it reaches a critical point and erupts. I did mention that our wars reshaped entire landscapes, did I not?”

Arkk just sighed. “Then how do you propose I damage their insides to take them down? And that regular-looking airship too, I’ve hardly been able to damage it either.”

At this point, he was hoping that Agnete’s return would provide some solutions. With her increased control over her abilities thanks to her time in the Anvil, she could almost mimic the golden rays with her flames. If that couldn’t damage the ships…

A tug across the link, coming from his scrying team, had him jolting. “I have to return to the—”

“Wait! Accept this.” The statue of the Holy Light changed once again, kneeling with its arms outstretched. Its hands were just above the height of Arkk’s head, holding a shallow bowl. “It will allow us to remain in communication. In addition, you have an inquisitor among your ranks other than Agnete, correct?”

“Sylvara…”

“Bring her to the basin at your earliest convenience and I shall impart knowledge of spells that can pierce any material. Any other trained Abbey clergy may also benefit, if you have any others in your company.”

Arkk pressed his lips together, still not trusting the Light’s avatar. But at this point, any additions to his arsenal weren’t something he could overlook. Taking the bowl in hand, he stepped back, only to freeze as he noticed one more oddity in the room.

Another statue.

All the other statues in the room were beings, most in a humanoid shape. This statue was a thing. A large round wheel made from rich, polished wood. Large golden symbols adorned each of the wheel’s spokes. Cards, chance cubes, stars, a black cat, a shattered mirror, and more. All symbols of luck—both good and ill. Engravings along the rim, written in a language Arkk didn’t understand, gleamed with a bright orange light. At the front, attached to the spoke of the wheel, a set of scales hung. Unlike the other statues, the wheel was in motion. It lazily turned, rotating forward and then reversing. The scales at the front tipped side to side, never remaining perfectly balanced.

The Fickle Wheel.

It had appeared during his conversation with Lyra. He couldn’t say during what part. He hadn’t noticed. If not for the subtle movement in the corner of his eye, he might have teleported away without noticing.

The sight of it made Arkk feel sick. The only other statue to have spontaneously appeared was that of the Laughing Prince immediately after Arkk wielded a massive undead army. Undeath being in the Laughing Prince’s domain, that made sense to him. But the Fickle Wheel was the god of random chance, gambling, and luck. And not necessarily good luck.

Arkk teleported, feeling an urgent need to find out what had happened in the last few minutes.