INTERLUDE 7E: COURAGE
“What is one fire to the next? Are they not one and the same in kind? Look at their faces! Your descendants are extensions of your spirit. Forget the unbridgeable divide between manifestations of consciousness. Forget the arbitrary subdivision of entities. The same spirit flows in the veins! Did you never wonder at the worth of blood to the denizens of the lower planes? Did you never think there was more to you than pipes and tubes and meat? Of course you did. But their cold reductionism played its trick on your mind. Now you must be invited even to step outside the meat. Very good. I hope this obsession with reduction of all phenomena to meat will not be paralleled by a reduction of all ethics to the same. It has a tendency to rot and you will not understand the transcendence of the metaphor until it is too late; the scent will cloy in your nostrils, and only then will you understand.”
– from ‘The Edgeless Light’, ch. 11
18th Mortifost, 998 NE
It was strange, how you could spend months and months training for that one moment – it might only last seconds or a few minutes when it arrived – but still never know until it came down to the test whether anything you’d learnt had actually paid off.
That was how Alrior felt when he woke up in the predawn darkness, listening to the mountain wind. It might’ve been winter but the weather down here didn’t seem to pay the seasons much attention. Winter was just a somewhat less-stifling summer, and he very much doubted spring and autumn even existed in this part of the world. Certainly not like they did back home in Mund. He woke in a sweat, and it wasn’t wholly to blame on the oppressive heat. It was the knowing. The knowledge of what today held in store.
The test.
It’d filled his dreams when he’d been sleeping but there was no escape from it in wakefulness either, and Alrior lay there, awaiting the summons from Piraeas that would force him and the rest of his slumbering companions out of the tent.
Still, anything short of an Incursion had to be better than the Box, right? He’d thought he might forget the sound of the Winter Door in the weeks since the Liberator of Zadhal earned his nickname, since he was made redundant – but no such luck. The incessant hissing of the portal he’d guarded for seven months was scratched into his brain. The noise was constantly playing itself, over and over in the background of his mind.
Maybe finally after today I’ll have something else to distract myself with. Get that stupid sound out of my skull.
He wondered how the others were faring now that the Winter Door was usable once more, now that the Magisterium had declared Zadhal safe and started moving their assets in. Some of his colleagues had been in the job, guarding the Door for twenty years, and those ones had seemed little better than zombies whenever he’d tried to make small talk. Had they found alternative employment? For many of them it probably hadn’t been necessary. There was serious remuneration for Box-work. It was likely a fair number of them had enough saved to retire. Al wasn’t quite there yet, but at least the Box had been closed down before he lost his mind to the portal’s endless drone…
He hoped.
He sat up in his bedroll and pawed about for the book he was reading. The Champions’ Charter.
Alrior wasn’t a brave man. He’d come into his powers when, following the tragic death of his wife, he’d been forced to scrounge in the bins for food to feed the kids. One minute he was there, sighing to himself as he drove his arms elbow-deep in a box of vegetable shavings. The next he was staring about the alley, suddenly aware of the carcass of a half-eaten dog in the gutter, rats crawling on it, in it.
He’d had a dog, when he was young; he remembered calling it to heel. The carcass-dog – it wanted to come to heel. He knew it.
He fled, and it took him almost three weeks to come to terms with what had happened to him. It wasn’t until he visited his wife at the shrine of Mortiforn, felt the tickle in dead flesh beneath the gravestones, that he even realised he was an arch-sorcerer.
Since then he’d stayed as far away from combat as he could – so long as he could just stay alive, this would be the greatest opportunity of his life. He’d gotten himself some nice clothes; within days he had interviews at the Wizard’s Hat and some of the other prestigious companies producing the finest ensorcellments… But none of the offers beat the Magisterium.
Minimal danger, they’d said. Most boring job in the universe, they’d called it. Well, that was true until the night of the last Incursion.
He’d seen them, up close – the demons. He’d even claimed one of them for himself, when it fought against his shields, though where exactly it went and how he had to gesture to bring it back were at least partially mysterious, still, having gone untested. Al didn’t like demons; didn’t even want to think about them. But then, just as everything had fallen apart and he started to regret his choice, Timesnatcher had arrived, mowing through fiends like he was getting paid per kill. Redgate came on his wings of black iron, and the immense rush of his power alone was enough to enslave almost half of the hellspawn.
Alrior had stared at the crimson-clad champion, all of a sudden wishing they could trade places, that he could be the one possessed of such grandeur, such authority –
Hence the reading material. Since setting out on the voyage Al had been using the book to soothe his nausea, and now, a couple of weeks later, he was almost adamant he was going to take the plunge.
Today will be the first day of the rest of my life, he said to himself. Fobby and Neleine will finally have a dad they can be proud of.
They’d known about his powers almost as long as he had, and they were sick of the long hours he’d spent working in the Box – at first when he lost his job, they’d been pleased to have him around more often, spend time with him instead of ‘evil’ Aunt Sayba. But the money dried up quickly with the expensive tutoring, the upkeep on the property… Becoming a champion seemed like the best of both worlds. If you captured darkmages regularly-enough the wages wouldn’t be much different, and you could still spend half your time at home with the kids. You could even afford to keep paying the servants.
There was just that first hurdle to cross. The cowardice. He had to be like Redgate. Had to ignore the thing inside him that wanted to curl up, give up.
Had to pass the test.
“The Charter, again,” mumbled Piraeas from his bedroll, a little sharpness in his voice – Alrior hoped he hadn’t woken him by turning the pages. “Have you even been to sleep, Al?”
“A bit,” he replied softly so as to not disturb the others sharing the tent. “Just tense, you know.”
To Alrior’s surprise, Piraeas gave a grunt of agreement.
“Oh, I’m sure this must be a tense time for you,” the veteran said. “You’ll get over it, once we get started. Maybe we’ll even see some things.”
Al frowned as Piraeas began waking the others, returning his attention to the text. He detested these outland students and their smug, knowing ways, these highborn brats with years of Maginox schooling under their belts. Sure, he wasn’t a full magister like his companions, but he’d passed the Box training without issue… It wasn’t like he was completely useless, and he was the archmage here…
I put on a mask, and suddenly I outrank them, he thought, reading the small-print of the Charter carefully. The text actually said that a Magisterium-recognised champion had the temporary authority to direct magister-bands in times of crisis, and though the magisters wouldn’t be beholden to any such requests (requests, not commands), there was no inverse rule that he could find – nothing that indicated a champion had to take orders from a magister.
But it was the content of the magister’s words that disturbed him. ‘Maybe we’ll even see some things’… The arch-sorcerer had no interest in actually seeing anything, not really, but Piraeas sounded eager.
Though I suppose it would be better experience for me, if I’m serious about putting on the mask… Am I serious about it?
Think like Redgate. He came this way, and he wasn’t scared. It was full of monsters and dragons, then, and that didn’t faze him. He strode boldly into the dragon’s lair, and killed it, even if he gave his own life in the process.
Why the people of Mund couldn’t be told his legend, why it had to be kept top secret on pain of twenty years’ imprisonment, he hadn’t the faintest idea.
Redgate – wherever you are now – lend me your courage, in the name of Kaile!
The Magisterium hadn’t told them much, but they had the basic information: adventurers had guided the champion to Ord Ylon, and Redgate brought down a city of kobolds into the bargain, choking the cave-mouth with a million tons of rock. There were a number of corpses located in the cavern beyond the boulders – the task of the expedition was to locate any corpses of interest, nothing more. Though one thing Mr. Zakimel said had confused him; at a certain point Alrior could’ve sworn the old man implied there might’ve been more than one draconic corpse down there. (How many of the creatures did Redgate slay? he had mused at the time.) He wondered whether his propensity for sensing non-human bodies had come to the Magisterium’s attention; whether this might’ve been the reason for the senior magister to show up on his doorstep rather than anyone else’s, waving a job offer in his face.
Or maybe I was the last to be offered it, and the only one stupid-enough to miss Yearsend for some quick cash.
The sum had been incredible, though. He suspected he was getting over ten times what the magisters earned for the same work, which suited him just fine.
Less work, even. All he had to do was walk around, let his sorcerous senses do their stuff. The wizards with their disintegration spells would take care of any intervening obstacles.
“Getting a read on it?” Piraeas was asking on the other side of the tent – not to Alrior but one of his subordinates, a half-elven diviner Al had come to think of as Flower Guy. The pointy-eared seer always had a lily in his belt, displayed prominently, for some reason.
“Nope,” said Flower Guy in his Westerman accent, shrugging with a nonchalance Alrior doubted he could’ve expressed in these circumstances. “Everything’s gone mad, Pir. Drovoss dreamt a bunch of drop that didn’t make sense, even on the surrealism scales –” the one who must’ve been called Drovoss looked over almost guiltily from where he sat on his bedroll, chewing on some nuts “– and I checked in with Falia; she just had the same one again.”
“And you?” Piraeas pressed him.
“Me?” Flower Guy grinned. “I dreamt of Falia.”
Chuckles rippled across the tent’s occupants. Fifteen magisters had come on the mission, so they’d brought two big tents; the women’s tent was pitched ten yards away, too far for them to make out the words that were being said.
Except for the fact that they were all magicians.
“What’s all this about Ovin and Falia?” one of the girls asked, poking her head in through the flap.
“Don’t you dare –” Flower Guy began.
“Should’ve seen this coming, shouldn’t ya?” the girl chirped, quickly withdrawing her head.
Laughter erupted, all at Flower Guy’s expense, and Alrior grinned tightly as his contribution to the teasing.
He wasn’t one of them, couldn’t even remember half of their names. But it wouldn’t matter, not for much longer.
He stayed out of the way while they cooked breakfast – well, reheated it. The fiery beans they’d picked up in Tirremuir were almost inedibly spicy when cold, but warmed-up they were tasty indeed. Afterwards they stowed their tents, sorted out their gear (both mundane and spellbound) and got ready to set off down the incline into the cavern. Alrior sat to one side on a wind-scoured rock, watching them do their thing, yet again impressed at their organisation – admiring the way one minute Piraeas would be joking around with them, and the next giving them crisp orders they were obeying to the letter.
Could I do that? Put on the wheel symbol, fight for them? Become one of their arch-magisters?
It wasn’t the first time his conscious mind had run across the possibility, and it probably wouldn’t be the last, but the unconscious mass beneath the surface wouldn’t even entertain the notion, speaking back clearly: No.
He’d seen Redgate’s silhouette sweeping across the blue flames of the portal, the razor-sharp pinions of his wings splayed.
No. I’m going to be a champion, damn it. The next arch-sorcerer champion of Mund… a champion to rival Redgate – Hellbane – maybe even the Liberator, Feychilde himself!
He held resolutely to his decision, fixed his purpose, and stared down into the jagged darkness of the sloping pit before them. Alrior was so enthralled in his own thoughts that he missed the fact they were moving ahead without him until they were almost out of sight – the magisters were plunging ahead without a care into the blackness, the coloured radiances of their light sources being swallowed by the gloom.
“Hey, arch-sorcerer!” cried one of the young girls. “You coming?”
It seemed Alrior wasn’t the only one having trouble remembering names.
* * *
“Over here!” Piraeas hissed, pointing. Hours of constant toil had passed, and the leader’s cool demeanour was finally starting to slip. “The rat’s gone under this one. Hurry!”
A wizard stepped forwards, reaching into her demiskin once more to produce the rod of destruction. The long, gnarled staff held in both hands, she took careful aim and started incanting, loosing the charges in short, focussed bursts.
The boulder didn’t last long, pulverised by gobbets of green-red energy.
“Enough,” Flower Guy said. “We’re going to bring down the ceiling if you continue, Kriss.”
“Cut it off,” Piraeas agreed. “We can fit through, now, if we go one by one.”
Alrior watched them go through, one after the other, sliding feet-first into the hole the wizard had created. Holding to the fact the magisters seemed to trust their ability to foresee danger, Alrior consented to squeezing through the crack, constantly reassuring himself as he did so that they wouldn’t all be doing this unless it were safe…
Once he was committed, halfway through the narrow space with his feet kicking out into the open zone beyond the crack, he heard Piraeas’s voice from above.
“Ovin. Brint. You stay up here, wait for a message.”
“Aw, but I –”
“If we all get crushed to death, you’ll need to contact the high-ups,” Piraeas finished grimly.
Alrior, several feet below him and with several thousand tons of rock poised to slam down and trap him, started to whimper.
Then he saw the shadows of Piraeas’s feet entering the groove over his head.
“Come on, Al, get a move on. The longer you’re in there…”
Piraeas left the rest unsaid – he didn’t need to continue. The moment Alrior took the magister’s meaning he hurled himself into his task, knowing there were only two options, two directions: down and up; in and out – and of the two options, only one made sense –
To be a champion. To not be made a laughing-stock by these rich runts. To be useful. To find the corpse of a dragon and –
His spiteful, selfish little mantra was enough to get him through the trial; within a few seconds he’d wriggled down deep enough to get his backside out of the crack, into airy freedom.
He half-dropped, half-scrambled down the face of the rock-pile, then turned and went to join the magisters on the lip of the ledge, staring out in wonder. Radiant illusions lit the scene, and it was like something from a dream.
After a few moments Piraeas stepped up, regarding their surroundings like the rest of them… A minute or so later he broke the silence, saying in a choked voice, “Alright, all of you. Listen. They’ll scrub our minds and they’ll know if any one of us takes so much as a single coin. We’ve got a job to do. Let’s do it.”
Alrior had never, ever before imagined such a treasure-trove. It was a hundred, a thousand times greater than the canvas his mind might’ve painted. The stories of the Ord’s hoard weren’t exaggerations – if anything, they undersold the sheer scope of this titanic cavern. Lagoons of sparkling platinum met meres of glinting gold, rivers of silver sitting like water-rapids between the boulders, bearing up a foam of electrum, a sand of pure, uncut jewels riding the surface, sparkling…
“Do you sense anything?” Piraeas asked him quietly. No one had moved so much as a muscle yet, paralysed by awe (and greed), and despite the fact Piraeas had been the one exhorting them all to get on with their jobs, he hadn’t moved either.
Alrior did sense something. He’d been trained on all manner of undead at a seminar with the late Dustbringer, but this shape he could sense, it was – it was too much –
“Yes,” he said hoarsely, his throat suddenly constricted, as tight as the passageway the wizard made through the rock. The magisters all turned to stare at him. “But I can’t tell what… what it is. It’s like the whole place is dead.”
The two sorcerer-magisters exchanged a long glance, then started casting spells, shaking sand and muttering in Netheric.
“Can you shield us?” Piraeas asked tautly. “Just as a precaution, you understand?”
“With pleasure!”
Alrior started spinning out his shields – if there was one thing he knew, it was shield-work.
“I’m getting peril,” said a male diviner.
“Seconded,” a female one immediately piped up. “It’s just saying, ‘Get out, get out, get out!'”
“Can you link me with Ovin?” Piraeas asked an enchantress, just as Flower Guy’s voice came echoing down through the narrow crevasse behind them:
“Thirded!” Flower Guy cried. “You guys need to get out of there!”
“You don’t know what we’re lookin’ at, man!” someone cried back.
Alrior had hunted coin all his life, like a ranger hunted deer. His ethical core sat deep, solid, fixed in its foundations: he wanted to provide for his family, so the children and his job came first and foremost in his calculations. The accolades that would come with championhood were secondary.
One choice pocketful from this hoard would set not just him and his kids up for life, but their kids too, even if they chose to have ten each…
Piraeas had crouched by the edge of the ledge overlooking the ocean of wealth, and he spoke quietly again: “We can’t just abandon the quest. It’s not about the bonus – look, guys, it’s not like I’m going to lie and say I’m not tempted to palm a few coins. I am. But it’s not going to happen – not me, not you. Not any of you, unless you want excommunicating.”
Nods and shivers, sighs and whispers; that was how the magisters of Mund responded. No mutiny to be found here, even in the face of the Ord-hoard.
But where is the dragon? Alrior found himself wondering. It was supposed to be right there, wasn’t it? And why is the cave so choked in death?
He suddenly felt as though a wolf, or wolves – dead ones – had been here. He looked for their shapes, but there was nothing distinct. Just a morass, a mire of shadow aspects that vanished even as his sorcerer’s-eye tried to seize upon them.
The sorcerers finished their spells, and agreed with Alrior’s assessment; they too were incapable of providing a precise reading on the place, why it might be so steeped in nethernal energies. After another five minutes of nervous back and forth, Piraeas finally gave the order Alrior had been waiting for – the order he’d been dreading.
“Al, Falia, you’re with me. We’re going out there, getting the lay of the land. Kriss, give us flight.” The wizard quickly got to work, drawing out her spell-components and starting to chant while he was still talking. “And Gholoros, Vosta, get started on wards. Fix them around the opening, yeah? That’s our only way out – we need it clear if things go wrong.”
“I can fix a shield here, as well,” Alrior said. “Maybe two.”
“Excellent!”
Piraeas seemed so enthused at his participation that Alrior managed to make three of his finest shields, bold bubbles of blue light surrounding the escape route. This success spurring him on, he floated off the ledge after the druid and diviner. It was only his third time flying and he was still wobbly on the air, but it was a hell of a lot easier than flying up the dropping mountain, and Piraeas led the way, filling Alrior with confidence.
Vast shields surrounding them, shapes circling lazily, the trio settled down on a huge mound of coins like a small golden hill.
“Anything else?” Piraeas asked at once. “I can’t feel much by way of animal life – nothing with enough of a memory to tell me what happened here.”
“Danger,” the brunette seeress said. “That’s all, Piraeas. Ovin was right. We shouldn’t be here.”
“Wait,” Alrior found himself saying.
What is that I’m feeling?
“That’s more like it.” Piraeas clapped a friendly hand on the arch-sorcerer’s shoulder. “You’re getting a better grip on what you’re detecting? Are there corpses under the treasure?”
It’s too big…
“No,” he said in a strangled voice. “I mean, yes… I think –” he dropped to a whisper “– I think the dragon is undead.”
“Undead,” Piraeas repeated blankly, seemingly failing to understand due to the strain he was under.
Alrior pointed, and the creature made itself visible, audible, a cacophony of coins raining down as it clawed its way out of the treasure-mound in which it had been hiding. Dull scales dripped like tattered banners from its pinions, wings bigger than ship sails. Legs powerful-enough to kick buildings apart like molehills. Tail longer than a dire worm. A mouth fit to devour fifteen magisters and a stupid arch-sorcerer whole.
Gigantic eyes, appearing like orbs of pure amethyst, but for the black slit of a pupil in the centre.
A wave of fetid air washed over the cavern.
His first thought was of terror, wanting to flee, scream, panic. Certainly the body language of Piraeas and the seeress – and the swearing the dragon’s appearance elicited from those on the ledge – seemed to indicate he wasn’t alone in that. But the second thought through his head was one of wonder, that an arch-sorcerer might have the magical reserves to reanimate such a tremendous beast. On the heels of that:
They were wrong about him.
“Redgate didn’t die! Look!” Alrior moved his pointing finger to the scarlet shape sitting astride the immense, stinking mass of gleaming ligament and bone. A masked shape, hunched over, unmoving. “Redgate!” he cried.
“That’s not Redgate,” the seeress said ominously, taking off almost instantly towards the others, towards the ledge. Towards escape.
Alrior hesitated for just a second before finally getting to grips with what he was sensing. It was no wonder he’d been confused – a dracolich was one thing, but an archlich…? He’d never thought to see such a thing, sense it, and yet it was the amethyst eyes behind the spider-mask he’d been perceiving all along.
He got to grips with it – and he fled.
He was halfway to the ledge, aloft in the air just behind Piraeas, when it started.
Nethernal gateways. Hundreds, thousands of them, each releasing a single zombified kobold. They poured across the serene sea of gold, disturbing it with their footfalls, the stench and sound of their arrival making Alrior sick to the stomach.
They were on the ledge, ahead of him, already straining the shields covering the exit. The wizards were hurling spells, the sorcerers were summoning their imps, but the kobolds they destroyed didn’t want to stay dead, pulling themselves back together, rejoining the fray.
Alrior was about to land on the ledge and glanced back over his shoulder at the unmoving dracolich and its unmoving rider. He had no idea what to do. He’d once read about using lines of force to cut through enemies, but he’d never had to try it before –
He set his foot down on the ledge, and his shields drove back over thirty of the arch-lich’s minions, allowing the trio to regroup with the others near the cracked boulder.
“What do we do?” an enchanter screamed desperately.
“Damn it,” Piraeas shoved the enchanter back towards the escape route, “just go! Withdraw! Withdraw!”
One by one, the magisters wedged themselves into the opening, squirming into the tight space. Alrior stood far from the group, grimly facing the undead hordes, using his personal shields to push them back. The zombie-kobolds would’ve been vile creatures even if they’d still been alive, but now their tufted bodies were broken, bestial faces frozen in maniacal death-grimaces – most of the monsters were useless drones but the ghouls and wights amongst them were clearly more formidable. They moved far faster, scraping away at his barriers with greater ferocity and diligence respectively.
It was just as the fourth magister clambered up that everything changed. Screams started to emanate down the crack, Flower Guy’s amongst them. One magister’s voice was lifted in a shrill shriek that cut off in a protracted gurgle, echoing out of the escape route. The fourth dropped back to the ledge, looking petrified.
Alrior sprang back towards them, bringing his larger shields with him, but by the time his lines were submerged deep enough in the boulders to cover the magisters trapped on the far side, the barriers covered only their corpses.
He was still desperately attempting to come to terms with the terrible mess he’d found himself in – the situation had evolved far too rapidly for his mind to fully grasp – but his sorcerous instincts came to the fore, came to his rescue. The training finally paid off.
He gripped his personal circle tight, shivering, as the acid rained from the dracolich’s maw, consuming the remaining shields, the remaining magisters. He stood alone in the centre of the stone-eating flood, protected on his tiny island from the gushing fluid, its noxious fumes. Piraeas, positioned at the rear of the group and facing the acid-breath as if to shield his subordinates with his body, disappeared beneath the wave – and when it receded he was gone, not even bones discernible where he’d been stood. They were all gone.
Except they weren’t. Their ghosts, twisting on the air, failed to evaporate. Wails left their insubstantial lips as they contorted, sickly purple light descending on them as though from a great height.
They’re outside my shield.
He turned to face the red rider upon the dragon.
They’re his now.
We’re all his now.
Alrior felt himself fainting, felt his shield disappear. Before he even hit the ground the acid started rushing in at his feet, but he breathed deep of the fumes; the merciful grey-green mist stole away what was left of his consciousness, letting him collapse into the darkness without fear.
* * *
“Am I dead?” he heard himself asking, as though from a great distance. He opened his eyes, and for the first time in his life he beheld Nethernum.
Black starless sky. Dozens of lavender moons wheeling at such speeds their motions were visibly measurable in real-time. An open expanse of flat, shattered stone, broken only by the withered spears of dead, dry trees. The wind cutting across the boundless courtyard was pink, a million tiny particles occluding his vision as the breeze whipped around him.
Purple shields, vast, stronger than a weave, spinning across the infinite space.
“No,” came a soft, urbane voice from at his side. “You’re merely here under my power.”
Alrior slowly became aware of the gentle but unbreakable bonds fixing his wrists and ankles together, the laces locking down his fingers.
“I had to save you. You’re different from the others. You’re like me.”
Fearing what he would find, Alrior rolled his head on the stone, looking to the side –
It was him – Redgate. The former champion wore his classic robe and mask, though it looked like they’d been damaged and then repaired by magical means, stitches of pure shadow binding the crimson fabrics back together, gluing one of the spider’s mandibles to the face-plate.
Redgate was sitting there on his backside like any man, his feet out in front of him, gloved hands clasped together with his elbows on his knees.
“Like… you?”
Redgate chuckled dryly. “Well… not yet. That’s really the point of all this, you know.”
“You – you want me to be an archlich?”
“That’s not something I can do for you, unfortunately; you’d have to do it for yourself. But to what avail, you might well ask. As you’re surely aware, I wouldn’t be able to formally bind your eternal archmage soul – merely condemn it to these lovely environs. Condemn it, keep it…” The black, reflective eyes centred on Alrior and Redgate’s voice had a hint of bitterness in it. “This is only one of several obstacles I must overcome, before I can be properly reunited with my brethren in Mund. Unseat and shrive my murderers.” He sighed. “We must run many experiments together, you and I. Might I ask your name?”
Be – reunited – Mund – experiments…!
Blood-red flames sprung up across the lich’s shoulders, heatless fire momentarily sitting along his neck and upper arms like a mantle – then a snake made from oily darkness appeared, coiled loosely about him. Its head, however, wasn’t serpentine – it looked rather like a tarantula’s, a white rune burning fiercely above the black mandibles, in the midst of the glossy crimson eye-nest.
The demon slowly wheeled about, the tarantula-head coming to rest on Redgate’s hand, staring across at Alrior in naked hunger.
He stared back, knowing that, despite all their apparent insubstantiality, those mandibles could easily penetrate his skin. Whether a low-ranked shapeshifting demon could carry poison, he was uncertain, but he didn’t want to find out.
“I know. Mizelikon. I had to find a new one, but the others I recovered without too much trouble. Rhimbelkina… pedheliorph… wyvarlinact… thinfinaran… even the gaumgalamar… All those to whose company I’d become accustomed. Death comes with its little foibles.”
“Whuh…” He felt sick. “What do you want?”
The former champion didn’t answer immediately, but the unseen gaze never wavered.
“What do I want?” The urbane voice lost its keen edge, rusted with emotion. “It is never so simple a thing for those whose lives hold meaning, to determine which meaning to embody. I have spent much time in thought, puzzling over the same question. What do I want?”
Alrior wanted to close his eyes, stop looking, but he couldn’t, and he couldn’t blink, couldn’t even look away. Even here, the pain of it felt physical. The spirit-flesh of his cheeks was becoming sore. His jaw hurt.
“I never saw archmagery as a gift, as we so often speak of it. It is more… a reward. Call it the will of Vaahn -”
The purple shield surrounding them rejoiced, flaring in recognition of the dreadful name.
“– call it the will of some lesser entity, or some nameless force, or even the random card fallen from the dealer’s hand –“
Redgate chuckled again.
“– it is still a reward. You must roll the dice to win, do you see? You won. Who did you kill?”
“I – I didn’t –“
“It doesn’t matter. You know the power of what we possess, you and I. What were you before it? You know nothing else can compare to the freedom afforded by the magic. You know how it feels to have the eyes of others, their hidden thoughts, drawn to you like moths to the light-globes. But in order to excel, and stand above one’s peers, one must be prepared to go beyond one’s inheritance. One must strive, work towards one’s goals without fear of failure or recrimination from outside sources. Long have I toiled, and much have I earned; yet for every answer I uproot, five more questions hang like dirty tendrils beneath the bulb. Do not take me for some bumbling fool, some dilettante. It isn’t what I want. We’re simply doing what’s logical. In any case, I digress – your name, sir.”
My name?
“A-Alrior…”
“Alrior…?”
“Habermine. Alrior Habermine.”
“Well, Mr. Habermine – I’m afraid I must inform you that you’ve inadvertently volunteered to take part in a series of obscure rituals. On the receiving end, so to speak. We shall do our best to be lenient with you, and not subject you to an excess of agony unless it proves necessary.”
“B-b-but – Redgate –”
“Hush now, Mr. Habermine. You need not be afraid. I’ve located a number of vampires whose blood we shall use to sustain you through the… process. Oh, doubtless an elixir few would dare drink, concerned as most are with the conditions of their mortal souls… but those simple anxieties are beneath the likes of us, aren’t they? Let us begin.”
The gloved hands reached up, removing the mask, eight glowering glass eyes replaced by two burning amethyst ones. The face – handsome, almost human, but drawn, nearly gaunt. The lich’s eye-sockets were sunken, shadowy pits, unlit by the purple flames they hid.
As quickly as Alrior had moved from respecting Redgate to fearing him, it took a long time for the fear to harden into hatred – and even longer for hatred to die, the stiff corpse of his heart finally softening, releasing all its rancid gasses, putrefying into a lovelorn affection.
A long time, in Nethernum. Perhaps just weeks or even days, in the real world. No one would ever know the years of torture he endured – not even him. For afterwards he would always look back on it as a time of simple transformation, a memory he would often refer back to in self-reflection, a smile on what remained of his face.
His mind was lost in the song of the shadowland, and thus it was that, in the end, Alrior did indeed get the sound of the Winter Door out of his head.
But he also the left behind the name of his dead wife.
The names of his children.
Forever.
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