you can't deny high noon - Chapter 46 - grayintogreen (2024)

Chapter Text

The world will not end. Not in a scream, not in a whimper, not in the cacophonous rattling of chains and the laughter of a hateful entity that was never a god and yet was never accepted as being anything else, because what other aspects can you describe to the End of Everything to make it more than what it is and less than what it could be? It is the inevitable entropy that claims the world. To fight against it is pointless. You have walked into a battle foretold in prophecy and starlight, a battle that the gods manifested encouraged, a battle that a bet with the goddess of Fate herself rests upon.

But the world will not end.

Imagine if you will an entity that has spent its many, many long lifetimes feeling nothing but cold impartial hatred to existence, with countless worlds and realities sacrificed to its crucible of death and rebirth. Imagine an entity that cannot be stopped, only slowed, but has never been properly challenged. Imagine a group of adventurers who looked at the growing signs of an End Times long foretold and said ‘no.’

Imagine being the one thing that the great yawning maw of hatred and destruction truly, truly personally despises.

The world will not end. Oblivion will not either. It is as old as eons and a necessary part of the balance of the cosmos. To eliminate it would spell disaster for all of reality. No matter how this fight comes to pass, there is no hatred like the one the quiet, devouring darkness has for the healing pulse of light. It will remain until the bones of the Mighty Nein are dust.

The world will not end.

But the Mighty Nein have walked into the lair of a powerful enemy, backed by something that will not stop until their light is snuffed out.

The world will not end.

But it’s going to hurt all the way to the finish.

Mighty Nein Battle Tactic: Switcheroo.

Mighty Nein Battle Tactic: Bunny Hop.

Mighty Nein Battle Tactic: Purple Rain.

Mighty Nein Battle Tactic: Inclement Weather.

The Somnovem’s crowing, maddening laughter, echoed by the voices of their legion, filled the air, as round after round they tore through the Nein’s best laid plans, their collection of accrued teamwork strategies, as if they were nothing, as if they were saying this is what all of your efforts are good for.

The Pattern kept revealing itself, aborting actions as the Nein tried to force themselves to look away, but new red eyes blossomed on unmarred skin despite everything. The Somnovem were in their heads, picking out their strategies and unraveling them and that was just the lair. The nine slimy, red-eyed, protean forms moved across the battlefield, uninhibited by anything in their way, throwing spells and attempting to usher them deeper into the mire, to become their puppets.

Lucien looked to Caduceus, thrown aside after being lured to Elatis’s side during the ruined Bunny Hop that should have had him waiting for his signal from Beau and Jester. There was an ugly, sucking wound on his neck from where Elatis had kissed a red eye there and the ichor from her gaping maw had turned the area around it raw and infected. There was a desperate pain in his eyes that was mirrored by the rest of the Nein, still fighting against the Somnovem, who took hits, but only seemed to get heartier.

The Chained Oblivion is feeding them. So long as they’re connected, there’s no way to best them. They would wear the Nein down long before they ever managed a hit that would actually stick. All of their zeal and preparation for this fight would come to nothing. Their enemies were counting on them to fight until they were nothing but flesh and bone and hoarded souls to add to their collection.

Lucien exhaled, his breath coming through heaving lungs, fighting through the brutal blows he’d taken. He glowered up at the Aether Crux. “This won’t stop. Not with the Chained Oblivion holding their leashes.”

A memory popped into his head, one he’d almost forgotten because it had come during a time when it was important to make Mollymauk positive that his way was the only way, that he had full control over the situation. The world moved on and so did he, but that thought remained, waiting to be dug up again.

”Imagine what I could do if I had their names.”

Names were important. Names had power. Names defined things. You cannot be part of the hive so long as you cling to the fragments of your identity. That was why he had never fallen to it. Despite everything they tried, he refused to bend.

They would bend, though. That was his victory, the culmination of everything he had fought and bled for. He pushed himself to his feet, clutching his bleeding midsection from a blow that had come from friendly fire courteous of Gaudius’s particular brand of combat, and staggered towards the Aether Crux.

“You’re infinite, unyielding, stretched beyond what a mortal mind can hold and have been that way for a long, long time,” he whispered, with all the somberness of a prayer. “Nothing can fathom you and nothing should. To do so is to go as mad as you.”

He lifted his shaking, bleeding hand to dig into the rotten flesh of the Aether Crux, reaching beyond the physical, to the Dream Within the Dream, where all the truth of Cognouza lay. As it began there, so it would end there.

He ground his teeth together as his words became a snarl. “I’m going to make you fathomable. I’m going to make you small. I’m going to remind you of what you are.”

With a flash of light behind his eyes and a sudden scream of shock from Cree, his mind disconnected from his body and spiraled off into the darkness, searching for what had long since been lost.

Behind him, the fight raged on.

On a field this chaotic, it was impossible to keep track of everyone. The Somnovem toyed with them, bent their lair to their whims, and exposed them to the Pattern every few seconds, desperate to brand them with their marks, to make them their own. Cree alone seemed to be immune to the effects, having accidentally stared into the Pattern twice now and never felt anything bloom on her skin.

She figured out why quickly, when Gaudius oozed up to her, pressing his dripping, ichor-coated hand to her chin, the red eyes in his shapeless face flashing with a strobe-like effect to try and charm her. “You’re the failure. We loved you and you left us, so we don’t want you anymore. But you still have your uses, don’t you? Why don’t you fail someone else you were supposed to love?”

Cree jerked her head away, shaking away the charm effect. Gaudius swore and melted back into the ground, leaving her with only the reminder of his burning touch and the violating feeling of a spell being brushed away. This abrupt shift put Lucien in her eyeline, kneeling in front of the Aether Crux with his hand stuck inside it, his eyes wide open the way they always used to be when he first became the Nonagon.

“Lucien?” She started to move towards him, only to be stopped by a spell that did actually take hold of her, slowing her steps until it felt like the flesh below her was dragging her down into them. A cruel, jovial laugh filled her ears.

“Nice one, Luctus! Now, now not so fast, failure!” Culpasi trilled. “What makes you think you’ve a right to save him? After everything you did… The fact that he forgave you is kinda f*cked up, honestly! You don’t deserve it.”

No. I don’t. Cree swallowed down a sudden sob. What right do I have to go to him when I’ve failed him more than he ever failed me? He barely knew what he was doing. I enabled him, pushed him, and then because he didn’t love me the way I loved him, I punished him…

A wave of psychic damage tore through her mind, causing her to whimper, as if the memories of her cruelty were causing her true, physical pain, cutting into her like knives.

“Cree! Do not let them into your head!” Caleb’s voice, right on the heels of a soothing dispel magic that filled the air with the scent of a bonfire. She shook off the remains of the spell and burst into action, rushing to Lucien’s side, calling out a thank you to the wizard while Culpasi and Luctus both cursed that their tag team had failed.

Lucien was unresponsive, deep in the Aether Crux. No matter how she shook him or called to him, he would not answer. She was so close to pulling him free when Timorei suddenly gasped.

“The Nonagon is in the Dream Within the Dream!” He shouted, fearfully. “He is…” The sentence was cut off by him collapsing into ichor and sliding across the ground. Cree stabbed at the ooze with her glaive, but it only separated into two parts before coming back together and slipping into the Aether Crux.

He was doing something to them from inside and she needed to have faith in him. Swallowing down her worry, she leaned down and pressed a kiss to the back of his head to grant him guidance before rushing back to join the others.

“Give them hell, Lucien.”

It had been too long since Lucien had first found himself in the muck and mire of the minds of Cognouza and the initial plunge was overwhelming, like the moment you leap into the creek at first thaw. The numbness crept into his very soul, until his own thoughts were lost among the desperately vying souls demanding attention. He had not felt this ache since he first died and came here and if it didn’t kill him then, it wouldn’t kill him now.

The only way to bear it was to fight through it. His mind would adjust. He focused on the pieces of himself, lest they get swept away in the current, and willed the world to settle into something that he could shape. The white void of the Dream Within a Dream returned, formless and without feature, thoughts and ideas and memories pinging against it, waiting to be let in and made useful, but he wasn’t here to shape things to the Somnovem’s specifications anymore. He was searching for something.

Tell me what you remember of your leaders,” he willed all the minds clamoring for his help, his attention, his mercy- anything that might alleviate their miserable, tortuous existence. They shied away from the request, so he pressed harder, reaching beyond the space until he could find something. This would never have been possible when he was trapped here- they would have noticed and put a stop it, pressed him down and told him what to focus on, chastising him like a child the whole time. Now they were distracted and he had free reign over every door, locked or not. They made their Nonagon to control this space, build the dream in their image. They had believed he would always be pliant and now he was a châtelaine with all the keys and a desperate hunger for vengeance.

He felt something warm against the back of his neck that reminded him of cold nights curled in a too small hunter’s blind, the smell of musk and blood and snowdrops. He laughed, despite himself. Cree my love, you truly are my guiding light.

With that sudden burst of guidance showing him a new way, a path opened up and he took it, blindly, trusting instinct, Cree’s magic, and the minds of thousands that wanted freedom to lead him to a name, believed to be lost to time. The dream tilted on its axis, spilling him out into an ocean of stars, the white void rapidly flying out of reach as he plummeted until it was just one more star. He landed hard on his back on a floor made of polished black marble that reflected the sky back until it was almost impossible to get his bearings. He wheezed, wondering how he could feel bruised ribs when he was only a soul, half-missing the lack of sensation that had been his prison when he was trapped here. Tethered to his body as he was and tethered to Molly, as well, he felt too much, instead. It was all far too overwhelming, like pins and needles stabbing into the very fabric of his existence.

A obsidian structure rose out of the floor in this shrine to the cosmos, something of a make Lucien had never seen before, like a spyglass but grander. His interest having never been towards anything but the horizon, he had never once indulged in trips to observatories. If he had, he might have recognized the shape of this place for what it was.

He staggered to his feet and stared up and around him, spinning in dizzying circles to try and get a read on this endless night sky. Constellations twisted and moved above him, comets flashed by, stars exploded and guttered out, and new ones burst into life in their place. Portents of something great and terrible told through the rise and fall of celestial bodies.

And then, suddenly, in the overwhelming quiet, a trembling voice spoke up. “Aren’t they beautiful? Portents in starlight! I’ve always sensed great dangers through my visions, but I prefer to divine through the movements of the heavens. They are so much less taxing than a horrible, exhausting prophecy!”

At the top of the massive structure perched a squat humanoid creature made of shifting, roiling stars with antlers made out of astral vapors. It crouched, terrified, staring at Lucien with two bright red eyes in the middle of its starry void of a face.

“Hello, Timorei,” Lucien smirked, conversationally. “Is this what you used to be? A prophet?”

“I am who I am. What business do you have to come here and demand to know more?” Timorei’s form shuddered, vanished, and then appeared again in front of Lucien- smaller than him, but still dangerous in his own way. Being this close to his raw, true presence, the fear threatened to choke him, and only the taste of the heroes’ feast still lingering on his tongue kept him faltering.

That seemed to give Timorei pause and Lucien leered at him. “I think it’s time you found yourself again.”

A meteor swarm of stars suddenly exploded at Lucien’s feet, knocking him backwards. He almost lost his grip on the dream, shunted out to return to his body and forced to start this over again. His will was stronger than that- he held firm, choking on stardust and glowering at the shaking, miserable little wretch before him.

“I don’t want to remember!” He wailed, childishly.

“You remember enough, prophet,” he wheezed in a voice as cold as ice.

Timorei staggered back, realizing what being here in this palace of memories, trying to beat him back meant. In protecting himself he was just making himself more vulnerable. “Nonono,” he wailed, gripping his antlers like he was going to wrench himself in two. “You can’t! You mustn’t!”

Stars began to fall, exploding at Lucien’s feet as he rushed to the giant spyglass- telescope, that was the word. The marble cracked with every explosion, threatening to trip him, but he leapt and dodged and flung himself at the instrument, pressing his eye to the lens. He saw the stars as close as if he could reach out and grab them and in the constellations, there was a name spelled out plain as day.

“Balbus Delphina,” he whispered.

With Timorei’s shriek of rage, the entire world went supernova, flinging Lucien back into the void.

A fireball went off in the center of the Aether Crux.

Molly hit the wall with enough force that he bounced off the spongey surface and landed facefirst on the ground, hard enough to break his nose. He choked on the blood that seeped down his throat and rolled over on his back, his body still vibrating from the haste spell. Despite everything, he had kept his grip on his swords, the radiant rite on Summer’s Dance still glowing faintly. He pushed himself up on his elbows and took stock of the terrain.

The blast hadn’t just flung him- it had been centered in a way to catch the most people in its radius- and Veth, Caleb, and Yasha were clambering out of piles of stones coated in layers of fatty tissue, slipping and sliding to get their footing on a battlefield walloped hard enough to make everything difficult to maneuver around. Only Beau seemed to have no trouble finding her footing, dancing across the stones on the balls of her feet, her staff coming down hard on the source of the spell- an oozing, massive reptilian shape growling its hate and rage. There was a scattering splash of ichor and Ira sank back through the cracks to avoid a second blow. Beau swore and turned her attention elsewhere, only to be immediately swept up in the slimy arms of what Molly knew from experience was Gaudius.

“Such fierce devotion. You’d be nothing without the love for your friends, wouldn’t you? But what if you loved me instead?”

Beau’s blue eyes took on a slight reddish sheen and just before the charm spell fully took hold, there was Yasha, wielding Striga practically like a blunt instrument as she brought it down across Gaudius’s head, splattering him and forcing him to regroup.

“No! No!! Not today! Absolutely not!” She spat, driving her foot into a slimy bit of Gaudius that hadn’t quite escaped with the rest, as if she were stepping on a slug in a garden.

Beau blinked away the last vestiges of the spell, thrown by Yasha’s rage. “Babe, come on. Not the time to get me all hot and bothered.”

Yasha responded with a peck on the cheek as an apology and the two went back to back, calculating their next attack as Ira and Gaudius reformed for another assault.

“What the f*ck is Lucien doing?” Veth shrieked from somewhere, hidden so well that Molly couldn’t quite track her voice. A gunshot blared, but just as Molly locked onto the location, he saw Veth’s shadow move across the ground and then she was gone again.

“Good question,” he wheezed, still disoriented from the blast. Caduceus came to his aid, healing his broken nose with a light tap.

“He knows what he’s doing,” he explained, as if he were the one with the link to Lucien’s mind. Molly blinked at him.

“How can you tell?”

“When has Lucien ever done anything without a good reason for it in his mind?”

“…That’s fair.”

Still, Molly’s curiosity could not sit idle. He reached for Lucien, finding his mind not quite in the same place as his body, which was… odd, but explained a lot about why he was sitting with his fist knotted in a f*cking cancerous growth like that. ”What are you up to?”

Lucien’s voice came back, smugly victorious. ”Watch and learn, sliver. I’m going to show you how to kill gods that were once men. There was a reason the Raven Queen erased her name from the minds of everyone who ever knew her. It was the only way to lay her low again. Names have power. They always have.”

Molly sucked in a breath between his teeth. ”You clever f*cking bastard.”

Moments later, there was a shriek so high and so forlorn and terrified that it nearly broke through the heroes’ feast, reaching deep into Molly’s soul where only true fear resides. One of the ichorous Somnovem burst like a popped pimple, scattering its acrid slime in every direction that burned on contact with skin. Molly shielded his eyes and hissed as some of it licked at his knuckles, leaving painful, open sores.

When he lowered his arm, where something protean and shapeless had been, there knelt a small, portly man with a bald head, dressed in red robes. He wailed and gnashed his teeth, grabbing for the slime as it bled away into the cracks of the battlefield, hissing when it burned as it slipped from his grip, a single word spewing from his quivering mouth over and over.

“No, no, no, no!” A high-pitched keen drove all eyes- including his fellow Somnovem’s- towards him. “This cannot be! He cannot do this! Traitor! Usurper! Ira, this is your job! Do something!”

Ira rose back up to a massive height, dragon-like in shape, and then sank beneath the ground, a pulsing glow of red underfoot. Molly traced the path all the way to the Aether Crux.

Gulping, he sent a word of warning to Lucien. ”You’ve got trouble on its way.”

Lucien didn’t respond, which wasn’t necessarily great, but there was no ping of danger or desperation, so whatever it was, he was handling it. The Nein needed to help him by focusing on what he brought to the table- an enemy that was no longer connected to the hive, that could be defeated because it wasn’t being fed by its untouchable master. A person instead of an idea.

“Jester!” Molly called. “We could use some healing if you’ve got it.”

Jester blew a lock of her hair out of her face, stuck two fingers in her mouth, and whistled- her duplicates, dancing merrily about the field and not dispelled through luck and avoiding Vigilan entirely, got themselves into place.

Mighty Nein Battle Tactic: Double Trouble Mass Heal

He breathed in the sweet, sweet scent of oleander and mint as the cool wash of healing knit the skin back onto his knuckles, leaving nothing but new pale scars. The rest of the Nein rose up similarly, their scars faded, their health returned, and their eyes alight with murderous intent.

Timorei wasn’t the only Somnovem who trembled.

Molly’s words came a second too late for Lucien to prepare. A wave of hot rage washed over him, scruffing him by the neck in the shape of clawed hand and flinging him out of the space between and throwing him roughly onto cobblestone streets lit by lamps that were on fire, burning steadily, the heat filling the space until it was almost suffocating.

The streets tangled and went everywhere and nowhere and the heat mirages from the fire around him kept him from getting his bearings and seeing beyond a few feet anyway. Only his fire resistance kept it from being overwhelming, but a furnace was still a furnace and Lucien felt uncomfortably reminded of the kiln he’d almost been shut in as a child by Dodger’s other kids.

A shadow moved beyond the flames, constantly just out of his vision. A voice spoke up, starting as Ira’s low draconic snarl, but slowly Lucien began to hear something beneath it, something more human, the lisping voice of someone with a scarred tongue.

“These streets were mine to protect. These people were mine. I joined the Somnovem out of diligence, but my heart belonged to Cognouza, itself.”

“And you let the others lead them to slaughter,” Lucien snapped. “Well done.”

“And you?” Ira laughed. “All paths lead you back here, you selfish, angry bastard. What would you sacrifice to see us put down? You only cared about your vengeance. What will you do when there is nothing left to turn your anger towards?”

Lucien felt doubt seep into his heart. When the Somnovem were dead, when the Run was secure, when the slavers were ripped to pieces, would he finally stop being angry? Or would he then start picking apart all the little injustices again, turn on his… his friends for all that they failed to do, even as they tried to do better, because why weren’t they more understanding at the start? And what if they all left him, no longer tethered to his side by a common goal? Would he be angry that he was left alone again?

Of course I will be.

Was it worth it anyway?

Of course. This wasn’t about him. It was about the world, a world that he could actually make better without destruction and pain. A world that deserved more than just his anger.

Seeing his sell was not working, Ira’s shadow shifted again- now Lucien could see the shape of a dragon in the smoke wafting up from the burning lamps. He blinked and it was gone again.

He’s distracting you. Find his name and get out before he drives you mad, he chastised himself.

He began to search, but the harder he pressed on the memories that conjured this place, the more the flames burned until all he could see was blue instead of red and orange. He fell back, shielding his eyes as he began to feel like they were going to melt out of his head.

Ira laughed. “What is a name to a soldier? I might have been the leader and I might have numbered myself among the elite, but that was all I ever was to them and to everyone else.”

“Is that what made you angry?” Lucien coughed. “Or was it the fact that your magic was innate and they resented you because they had to work for it all?”

He got something in that flare- a little flash of inspiration, a child with red dragon scales growing in, conjuring flame without a book. Not a wizard at all, but a sorcerer.

The flames surged, knocking Lucien back onto the cobblestones again. Now it was his turn to laugh. “Struck a nerve, did I? You were better than they were and they treated you like their attack dog and then they burned your sheep to make their new world. You poor bastard. No wonder you’re so angry.”

The shadow in the smoke leered at him with glowing red coals for eyes. “You don’t know anger until you’ve been trapped in it for centuries.”

Lucien pushed himself back onto his feet, swaying. Maybe it was time to try a different tactic, one that Jester might have used if she were here instead of him. “Then why don’t you set yourself free of it? You don’t have to hold onto it anymore. Your people are dead. The best you can do for them is lead them home.”

That gave the creature pause, the flames seemed to gutter, but did not fail entirely. The blue light remained, hotter and more focused and threatening to overwhelm everything.

“You are not the Nonagon we nurtured,” Ira growled.

“No,” Lucien smiled. “I’m worthless to you now. I’ve gotten a bit of perspective.”

The heat began to lessen. “You will not win the others over like this.”

“I don’t want to. I was your favorite and you were mine. We understood each other, didn’t we, Ira?”

The shadow stepped forwards, bowing its head close enough for Lucien to reach out and touch the snout of the great red dragon that had driven him. He would always carry it, always find reason to use it, but it didn’t have to define him. He could let it go if he had to.

“I will not lie down for your friends. I will kill them if they get in my way. I have nothing left but to protect Cognouza from Oblivion, but I would like to die as myself in doing so.”

“Then I hope they give you a noble death.” The name came to him, almost as if it was given freely, but if Ira had always known his name, he would not be Ira. It felt more like the lamps were giving it to him and he wondered if they had once been the soldiers under his command, giving their last vestiges of flame to call their leader by what they had known him as, forgiving him for his hand in their cruel fate.

“Valerius Severna, Marshall of Cognouza,” he whispered. “I’ll forget the others, but I think I might remember you.”

The flames all died at once.

Another fireball detonated upon Ira’s true arrival on the field, ripping apart the viscous draconic mass of ichor and leaving a gasping, screaming humanoid form with red dragon scales and the haunted, enraged look of something gone rabid. For all the human flesh that went into bringing substance onto liberated soul, the only thing roiling beneath that surface was an angry red dragon looking for something to tear apart.

Veth had enough experience with dragons to know not to push her luck. She left that nightmare for someone else and darted behind a large broken column made of stone and shattered, jagged bone, guns held at the ready.

An ominous chuckle, followed by breath on her neck as someone leaned closer, proving she’d picked the wrong hiding place. “Oh little girl, pretty little halfling girl,” a tremulous voice whispered in her ear. “Why are you so frightened?”

I’m not afraid. The heroes’ feast had done its job. She wasn’t afraid. Timorei had already proven that when he tried, and failed, to summon up their nightmares to bind them when the first first began. The memory was still too raw and the voice was too familiar for her not to know who she was dealing with. The eye she’d gotten from it still burned on her neck.

She felt a pudgy finger trace it and shuddered, but she still refused to turn around, to face the source of the voice leaning in her space, speaking the words that hovered in the back of her mind that she was fighting every moment not to hear. “You’re shaking. Oh no, oh no, that won’t do, will it? But it’s all right. Stay here with me. I know you don’t want to be doing this. You’re too small to be walking in the shadows of these giants. You should have stayed behind where you were truly needed. All you’ll be here is a liability.”

The word liability triggered something in her and she fired off a shot without looking, the bullet pinging off stone- missed. Timorei chuckled again. “Why won’t you look at me? Is it because you know we are the same? The smallest and slightest of our number, the ones who tremble while others stand tall? How can you hold that instrument when your hands are shaking?”

“I just don’t have time to get more f*cking eyes today,” she snapped. She already had three, burned into her from the Pattern sneaking up on her and the Somnovem getting too close on top of the one that had come by her would-be opponent’s own tantrum about his failure. She fired off another shot without looking that also went wide. She heard Fjord yelp.

“Veth! What the f*ck are you doing?”

“Proving a point! Don’t get in my way!” She shrieked back.

“You shot me in the ass because you weren’t looking. How is that being in your way?”

“IT JUST IS.” She exhaled, huffily. She was running out of bullets, but she still had that fancy Aeoran crossbow to use. That, however, would be even harder to try to fire behind herself.

“What are you doing?” Timorei asked. She could feel him hovering even closer, the cold of his corpse-like skin sending the hairs on the back of her neck up as he touched her neck again. That was a mistake on his part- once was annoying, but twice was way too fresh for her tastes. She lifted the gun and the barrel pressed against flesh that had too much give, like there was no skull there, just the memory of one.

“I’m not afraid of you,” she whispered. “I’m still afraid, but I’m not afraid of you.”

“Then why won’t you look at me?”

“Because I’m facing my fear.”

That gave Timorei pause, like he was trying to figure out what her words meant by tracing her eyeline- her friends were mostly in front of her, fighting for their lives against the Somnovem, tearing through them even when it was fruitless as they waited for Lucien to drag them all out of the hive. Losing them in this fight, walking away from it as the last one standing because Caleb wouldn’t conceive of a world where she didn’t go home to her family? That scared her more than any ancient, blustering wizard.

She could do so many things to prevent that- run headlong into danger, protect them all from the shadows, but she was choosing to have faith in them and faith in herself. They were all going to walk away from this. If she was scared of a world where they didn’t, they would never win.

That was the fear that was worth facing, not this useless, timid wizard behind her. “You’re not worth it.”

She pulled the trigger. Only when she was certain that Timorei was dead did she turn to regard the wreckage of his corpse- a portly, balding wizard with a face caved in by her bullet. Not a monster, just a man- or at least he had been once.

“I’ve seen scarier,” she quipped and then darted into the shadows.

He had barely returned to the between spaces when Lucien felt something yank him forwards again, flinging him away from the voices of the legions of souls clamoring out to be noticed and into a cloud of pure white feathers. He flailed out a hand, desperate to push them away, feeling as though he were drowning inside of a pillow as the feathers tried to find their way into his mouth and nose. He twisted in mid-air and then finally landed hard on his back on a crystalline surface, feathers raining down on him to add insult to injury.

He coughed and choked and pulled feathers from his mouth, slick with spittle, as he pushed himself up onto his elbows. He saw his own reflection, distorted and refracted, and when he dared to look up, he was met with the same- a hall of twisted mirrors that showed his reflection but slightly to the left, as if he was looking at himself through the eyes of people who loved him, filling him with a warmth that nearly broke him.

A flapping of wings diverted his attention away from the reflections, which all followed his gaze to the centerpiece of the chamber- a tall platform like a stage where an angelic being of red light with multiple white wings bursting from its form hovered, waiting. Red eyes formed a halo around what was approximately its head.

“What do you think? It’s not every day that one can see themselves from the perspective of their loved ones.”

Gaudius. Lucien gathered himself to his feet, spitting another feather onto the ground. “Aye, it’s an interesting perspective, but there’s a catch, eh? You wouldn’t show me something like this unless there was another shoe to drop.”

The wings of the angel mantled. He could feel the smirk even if there were no features on its face. “You value these bonds where you once didn’t, but it’s not enough. Of course these people love you, but not enough to save you. The only ones who could do that were yourself… and us. That’s why you came to us, that’s why you needed us as we needed you. There is no salvation in these people.”

The mirrors cracked one by one, sending glass raining down and plunging the world into brilliant white light until there was only the stage and Gaudius and Lucien and a rain of feathers and glass. “You are difficult to love, Nonagon. You fight against it at every turn because you simply cannot trust those around you to simply not give up when you make it too hard for them. You have seen it, haven’t you?”

The shattered glass reformed, showing vision after vision of fights, arguments, disagreements, and at the center of it, he kept seeing Cree as she was when he was first pulled free of the mire, angry and stubborn and cruel and pushing his buttons. A horrible, niggling feeling at his core threatened to overwhelm him and he sank an inch into the floor, glass shards digging into his ankles through his boots, cutting him to ribbons and adding blood to the crystalline surface coated with feathers.

The angel slid closer to him, reaching out a hand to cup his face, the warmth spreading, so inviting, so utterly encompassing. Gaudius always was the one who could break him. “You’re going to disappoint them. Come back to us- come back to me, where love is eternal.”

He sank another inch. Gaudius leaned in as if to kiss him.

No.

He wrenched himself free, staggering backwards and away. Gaudius flapped his wings and hissed like some sort of agitated bird, wings raised high above his head in a threat display. The images in the mirrors changed again, back to visions that proved that the Nein were willing to try to love him. Yes, he was wary. Yes, he was scared there would come a time when he would be seen as something not worth loving, but there were bigger things at stake than his pride and the world didn’t deserve to burn because he was scared of being left alone again.

“What did your love really get anyone?” He asked, turning the tables on his opponent without mercy, voice filled with malice. The images changed again as Lucien reached for Gaudius’s memories, dragging them to the forefront of the mirrors. He saw glimpses of a figure with white-blond hair and a dazzling halo, smiling and laughing and mingling with his people. The angel’s form began to falter, began to take on a more substantial form as the hive’s influence diminished the more he was forced to face who he had been outside of him.

He remembered Ira and how his anger had been borne of something pure. How dare Gaudius call his love holy and just when he had never once felt shame for what he had done to the people he claimed to care about?

He snarled, “You let your people die for a dream. How can you really say you loved anyone when you’d do something like that?”

Once you would have done the same. But not anymore. He had perspective that Gaudius would never have and he had earned it before it was too late.

“Nononono,” Gaudius covered his ears- he had ears now- as his form flickered between reality and dream. “I loved them all! They were going to be a part of everything! They’re a part of me! What greater love is that?”

“Letting them be themselves and loving them anyway,” Lucien spat. “What do you really know of love, Calpurnius Amabilia?”

Gaudius’s form stabilized into that of an aasimar with a halo of red light around his head, casting an eerie glow on his otherwise pure form. He let out a maddening howl and lunged for Lucien as the world shattered in a torrent of glass and feathers and blood and Lucien began to freefall back into oblivion to continue his hunt, cackling all the while.

This was bad.

It was bad for a lot of reasons, none of which Caduceus had the mental wherewithal to really list right now, focused as he was on the bless spell. Bane had proven to be a bust, judging by Cree’s swearing, her bloody cat’s cradle falling to pieces courtesy of Timorei’s immediate use of dispel magic to liberate his fellow Somnovem from her binds before Veth dispatched him, but at least they seemed to be oblivious to the boons of their enemies- so far.

And now there was a dragon on the field, which was an altogether new kind of bad.

At first Caduceus tried to write it off as Caleb indulging in whimsy and using shapechange- it wasn’t as if he knew the exact number of dragons that Caleb had seen in his life, just because he, himself, had never run into a red dragon. A quick glance around located Caleb and with no other likely alternative, he had to accept that he was dealing with another Somnovem having come into an even worse transformation while he was otherwise occupied.

It was a horrible thing, its red scales rotting away to reveal chunks missing, showing no bones or organs but black void, more like a puzzle than a living creature. It was also smaller than Gelidon had been- smaller even than Reani’s own dragon form, like a young dragon with the proportions of an adult’s half-eaten corpse. In its eyes burned the rage of something ancient and when it locked eyes on Caduceus it recognized something in him.

It couldn’t fly on its stunted wings, the webbing eaten away in places, their shape malformed from an absence of bones, so it hobbled across the field, sending combatants on both sides scattering. One of the slimy, formless Somnovem slid out of its way with a cheerful laugh.

“Oooh! Now you’ve gone and done it. Ira’s really mad now.”

Caduceus walked to meet it, seeing a challenge he didn’t want, but felt drawn to anyway. He wasn’t supposed to be the one to fight the dragons, but this one wanted to be fought and fought by him. When destiny called, you had to act.

Half the dragon’s skull was caved into the void. It shuddered with the effort of maintaining this form- all that rage and the only way to get it out was to become something this place’s memories could barely hold onto. ”You have such anger in you,” it snarled.

Not something you necessarily wanted to hear, especially when you were trying to get a handle on that very thing, but what good would denying it do? He placed both hands on his staff and sighed. “The world isn’t as kind as I thought it would be. I don’t think that’s the world’s fault. Is that what you think?”

The dragon snorted. ”I was born with this bloodline. Rage has been a constant companion through my entire existence. It was never the world. It was only me and when the storm came, that was the part of me that was strongest.”

How long have you been angry? Caduceus asked himself, taking that moment of reflection in a difficult moment, where every second counted, because he needed it. He needed to meet this pitiful creature where it lived.

Caduceus had started to get angry after the first two seasons passed and he found himself alone, but he’d bottled it up and swallowed it down. Over time, the locks began to break down, more and more with each passing cruelty, until he could feel it threatening to spill over and leave him… What?

This.

He stared into the dragon’s golden eyes and sighed. “I’m sorry for what happened to you. It isn’t fair. None of it ever is.”

”I don’t need your f*cking pity,” the dragon snarled, flecks of ichor pouring from its mouth as it stumbled. Caduceus had met a squirrel with rabies once out in the wood that Colt had to put down before it bit someone. It looked a lot like that.

“You have it anyway.”

The dragon lunged and Caduceus transformed himself into a great white bear with flecks of lichen pink in his fur, the form conjured by the vestige he bore (for now). One of its legs gave out before it could close its jaws around the massive neck and Caduceus leapt upon it. He could give into the anger, claw and rip this beast asunder. The idea of doing so certainly occurred to him. otherwise he wouldn’t have used his vestige to take this form and chosen the swiftness of a strong, damaging spell.

But he had a point to prove. Nature is monstrous, but it is also merciful. We’re not solely what nature has intended us to be. Firbolgs were stewards of nature, calm and grounded and peaceful, but he had never met a single one wh0 didn’t have a fire in their belly. He tried to pretend he was immune to such things, tried to be the perfect example because it was comforting to mourners when things were what they expected.

But that wasn’t him. He was so many things and he needed to feel and experience all of them. He would feel anger later, just as he would feel sadness and sorrow and despair, as he would, eventually, feel hope and warmth and love again, when this was over, when the weight of the world wasn’t on his shoulders.

For now, he chose mercy as only nature could give it, grabbing the dragon by the throat and crushing until it shook itself apart in his teeth, no longer committed to the idea of holding itself together and embracing oblivion. Caduceus spat out chunks and stared at the dissolving gore that was once something so great and terrible and wondered about his story, if he had ever believed in this, if in liberating him from the hivemind, Ira’s commitment to the cause was as much in shambles as his body.

And then he stopped wondering so much because thinking was hard in general, much less in combat, much less when you were a bear. He roared just to say he had done it once and nodded to himself that it definitely felt good to get that out. He couldn’t get used to this, of course. He’d promised Calliope the armor when he got home.

He shook himself off and slowly transformed back into a skinny firbolg with a staff and eyed the tableau of battle, a riot of magic and spilled gore and screaming, and rushed to find himself somewhere to hide and keep an eye on things before someone else targeted him when he wasn’t in a better form to fight back.

Lucien blinked once and found himself standing in the middle of a puppet show, marionettes with chipped paint and brightly colored clothing dancing before a backdrop that depicted an island surrounded by a painted wooden sea that moved up and down on levers to depict waves. The marionettes sang and danced in perfect sync, their voices raised as if in worship.

Slinking among them was a coyote made of painted paper mache with eyes made of real gold. The marionettes fell down and fawned before the creature as it walked among them, stringless- a god among their wayward souls.

“So you had to go looking,” Culpasi’s voice sighed from the coyote’s perpetual open mouth, his disappointment clear. “Well. Do you like what you see? What do you think of my little congregation? Will knowing our miserable histories make you feel better?”

The marionettes lifted hands to touch the coyote as he passed. The creature seemed to bask in their praise and grow larger. “Nosy, nosy, nosy… All you’re seeing is a failed experiment. It wasn’t until we came here that I realized how wrong I was to think that I could control a population from the outside. They need to be in here with me, of me, a part of me, where their individuality can’t cause them to succumb to the burden and guilt of failure.”

Lucien swallowed as he stared at those hollow-eyed puppets dancing to Culpasi’s tune. For some reason, he thought of Azraharai and all of those children Dodger couldn’t control that he sent away to be hollowed out and added to her collection. “What did you do to them?”

”I nurtured them,” Culpasi’s lilting, musical voice seemed to come from everywhere, spoken from every marionette. The backdrop shifted, going through season after season as the puppets began to go slack on their strings. “But even under my guidance, my charms, they withered, unable to grow beyond what I fed them. My utopia could only exist so long as my hands were on it. It would stagnate, no one truly living up to the potential I set. They were dying even as they lived. I couldn’t let anyone know of my failure and I couldn’t let them blame me for their wasted lives. And so…”

The strings were cut; the marionettes dropped, and the beautiful painted island sky turned black and starless.

“It wasn’t my fault!” Culpasi howled, leering down at Lucien with his gold chip eyes, despite the fact that Lucien had never said otherwise- but how he was thinking it and thoughts made things real here. “They were the ones who couldn’t rise to the challenge that I inspired them to! They were the ones who wasted their potential.”

“They were charmed,” Lucien spat back. “They couldn’t get out from under you. You made them so dependent, what could they do but stagnate?”

Yet another leader who wanted total obedience, who used magic to muddle the minds of his followers to make them follow and then got annoyed when that was all they could do, because total obedience stifled creativity and progress. What did potential matter when you had to force it by hand?

Minds discovering potential, he recalled from that initial sales pitch when he’d first stumbled upon the tome. Gods, he must have been so happy to see the Pattern and what it promised, unaware that he was looking into a fragment of something that could only destroy.

Two of kind, really.

“I will have my perfect world.” Culpasi stepped down from his stage, the painted coyote limping towards him, needle teeth in paper jaws poised and ready to tear out a throat.

One of the marionettes quivered, catching Lucien’s eye. It looked at him with its hollow gaze and he saw a flash of true memory- a girl in a pretty blue dress dancing circles and fawning over a tall man with dark hair and those same coyote gold eyes. On her lips was a name.

Lucien gave a nod to the marionette as she dropped again, fading back into oblivion and he turned to face Culpasi. “I don’t think you will… Tacitus Camilus.”

Red paint struck Lucien in the face, sending him toppling out of the dream world. The last thing he heard was Culpasi’s agonized, furious spitting. “THIS WAS YOUR FAULT. YOU’RE THE ONE WHO RUINED THE DREAM. WHATEVER COMES NEXT IN THIS MISERABLE, FORSAKEN WORLD, IT’S ON YOU.”

As Lucien dropped through the vibe, he smirked. I certainly hope so.

The air was filled with bitter ash, hot and choking, from all the fire spells being thrown around. Everything was suffocatingly hot and Jester peeled away her layers, eyes widening when she saw a flash of bare skin with a fresh red eye staring, mockingly back at her. She whimpered deep in her throat, trying to figure out how it come to be and how many others she might have, still hidden under her heavy layers. She’d been losing track of everything in this Hell. Her spells, her accrued damage, the damage her friends were taking…

That was more pressing. She waved a hand in front of her face to disperse the ash, wrinkling her nose at the cooked meat smell of the chamber. It felt like they were in a barbecue pit, roasting slowly to be eventually devoured. The only solace she could find in that imagery was the Somnovem would be devoured too.

The Chained Oblivion didn’t care. It would take what it wanted, no matter what else it had to sacrifice to get it. That was the true course of destruction- nothing was ever safe or spared.

Not today, she vowed.

A figure stepped over to her with a rustle of wings. She knew it wasn’t Yasha- the happiness and love radiating off of it was different than hers. It lacked empathy- love for the sake of loving, not for the sake of care. Love that was selfish and cruel. Love that possessed and needed and yet never truly gave back.

“Hey, Gaudius,” she said, blowing a raspberry at the angel in Hell before her. Free of the ichor, he was a handsome fairy tale prince with white-blond hair, blue eyes, and big white wings that were shedding feathers like globs of decaying flesh. His dazzling smile didn’t meet his eyes as he stared at her. She could feel the disdain underneath it- the wrath of love disappointed, barely hidden. “I was hoping you’d find me.”

“You are the one who changes people with the power of her love. You’re just like me.” He tilted his head at an angle that would be impossible if there were any bones in this flesh sock of a form he’d been forced into. Listening to him talk, she could see a world where she’d fawn over him, the vision coming to her so clearly it was as if the whole world she’d lived in before now had been nothing but a dream and she was waking up in a cozy bed with gold brocade curtains, a crystal at her bedside blaring with Gaudius- no Calpurnius Amabilia’s- dulcet tones, his accent tumbling the words in his mouth like polished stones and creating gems. She felt the love he had for his city in every sentence and, more importantly, felt the love for her, specifically, as if this broadcast were only for her ears.

She tumbled out of bed to dress herself to the tune of Aeor’s mocking weather report because weather was something that happened to other people, not the ones in flying cities, pausing in front of a floor-length mirror.

Her reflection wasn’t her own.

Oh, she could see the idea of herself in the elven features- her chubby cheeks, her sturdy build, the black of her hair tinted with the vague promise of blue, but it wasn’t her. It was an idealized version of her, free of Infernal heritage and made perfect in the mind of someone who loved with conditions. That alone was enough to break the charm holding her in sway and she blinked away the last vestiges of the dream and found herself in Hell, once again, held in the arms of a monster whose grip was light, yet sticky.

She could see it now, the abhorrence beneath his love, the way he forced himself to adhere to a strict set of standards to keep himself as part of the pack- an aasimar in a den of people who had no love for the holy. He could love, yes. He was love incarnate, but love with conditions, love with fickle promises, love that changed people against their will, manipulating and cloying. It was not the kind of love that she held in high regard. It was not the love that the Changebringer had chosen her for.

She jerked away, globs of flesh clinging to her arms. Gaudius’s form rapidly adjusted to fix the gaps, the placid smile never leaving his face. “Do you really think you’re better than me, little girl? To love is to be changed. To be loved is to change further. The world could worship at your feet, desperate to be loved and changed by your diligent hands.”

She stared at her hands, the very ones she had spent all of Rumblecusp fearing. She thought of her mother, loved so much and so hard that she was practically made a goddess, trapped upon a high pedestal, never touched, always worshiped. She thought of how lonely it must be to be a god and how cruel it was to use the love you sowed to undermine free will because it was the only way to keep your own.

She saw him- the real him- in that moment. Someone different, elevated to a high station, and determined not to end up in a terrible situation, throwing love around to prove that he had worth and value and using it to keep control, keep himself off the chopping block. It wasn’t fair that he had kept his wings through all of that when Yasha, liberated from choice, lost hers.

“You never loved anyone,” she whispered like an oath. “You just loved the idea of people.”

Gaudius’s rotting wings shifted angrily, shedding more feathers. Good- let him die the monster he really was. “I am the embodiment of love.” Nostrils flaring, the blue-eyed aasimar purred, “And I would love for you to die.”

The breath was knocked out of Jester’s lungs as Gaudius drove his fist through her chest and seized her heart. She wheezed around the pain, her vision going black. She could see her death rapidly coming for her and with nothing to do but pray, she did so. Artie, I could really use you right now. Anything. I don’t want to die here.

Seconds before she collapsed into the cold void of death to meet with Cree’s Champion on the other side, she inhaled a huge gulp of air, previously only met with the taste and scent of rot and her friends’ specific magical signatures, and found absinthe and evergreen on her tongue. Her heart began to beat again as healing magic took hold and something threw Gaudius from her.

He hit the ground with such force that his form began to dissolve, the hits he’d already taken from other opponents no longer capable of being hidden. Jester met his eyes with sympathy, for she could feel bad for him, even knowing what she had to do next.

There was an archfey behind her, hand on her shoulder, and there were people all around here who needed her. She loved them so much and she would make sure they lived and they would make sure she lived.

“Look closely,” she smiled. “This is what real love looks like.”

She unleashed a hellish rebuke, charged by the power of the archfey behind her. The ice shards exploded upwards through the fleshy ground, trapping him within a prison before one last jagged shard skewered him through the torso. With a final scream, Gaudius dissolved into a pool of putrid flesh and Jester sank to her knees.

Artagan went with her. “I am so sorry, dear, but I could only keep you from dying. The rules are very unfair.” He palmed her cheeks, warm like an autumn afternoon when she was so very cold.

“S’okay,” she murmured. “I can take it from here.” She gave herself a little bit of healing, just enough to keep her on her feet and keep helping her friends, because that was what you did for people you loved. “This really sucks, man,” she laughed. “Are we finally at the end, Artie?”

“Oh my darling Jester,” he kissed the top of her head. “Stories like yours don’t end.”

He vanished in a wash of evergreen and Jester exhaled, frustrated. “That’s super not as helpful as you think it is.”

Lucien did not so much find Fastidan as she found him, dragging him out of the endless sea of screaming, agonized minds into her private sanctum, all the better to keep him from stumbling in and wrecking house before she could catch him out as the others had. He was thrown to the floor, feeling the ghosts of clawed fingers in his shoulders. Beneath him, the cold, unfeeling tile that reeked of something sharp and antiseptic began to writhe, becoming an ocean of bright green snakes that bit and wriggled to try and drown him. He threw them off, recklessly, tossing them against walls, staining the pristine white in flashes of scarlet. He found refuge by clambering up on a surgical table, only to be followed, the snakes coiling around his arms, his waist, becoming restraints that pinned him down to the table. He breathed through his nose to steel the panic as bright lines burned into his eyes, shadowed suddenly by an army of white-robed figures in surgical masks, their exposed skin showing lines of bright green sutures, their eyes gray and dead.

“Necromancy was never a respected science, you know? At least not in Aeor, but, of course, that’s where I was stuck,” Fastidan’s voice drawled. “It was always disgusting. I was a snake in their garden from the moment I had enough balls to preach my truth at the podiums.”

Lucien struggled in his bonds. “Couldn’t have had anything to do with your personality, could it? I find that more intolerable than the undead.”

And he really, really didn’t care for the undead. The Orders had made certain of that. Even now he could feel his guts churning with an urge to kill, but the restraints held firm.

The ocean of writing snakes parted for a massive naga, all bright green scales with a cobra hood of burnished gold, red eyes sharp and full of hate, her humanoid face painted up like a skull in bright gold and green. She dug her clawed fingers into his cheek to grip his chin, forcing her to look into those murderous serpentine eyes. “We’ve always been too much alike, you and I. How I hated you, the way you pranced about like a prince, trying to bully us- and they all allowed it, forced me to fawn at your feet, to keep the fattened calf we intended slaughter ever so content. I was grateful the day you turned on us. I could finally do what I always wanted. We’ve been here before, haven’t we?”

A nightmare within a dream within a dream. It had been Vess DeRogna’s shape in a room not unlike this one, but the emotions were the same, the intent was the same.

He wasn’t the same. He exhaled through his nose, ignoring her words, probing the walls to find the give to them- anything to let the memories she had long sacrificed to become who she was now. He had found the others. He would find her too, even if he had to do it with his hands behind his back.

The blood on the walls swirled into spirals as the scene began to warp and twist. He saw a glimpse of curly hair beyond the illusion of the hood and the naga-Fastidan hissed. “Stop fighting us. You and I both know there’s no place for dreamers like you and us. That’s why we chose you.”

“There you go, fawning,” Lucien chuckled. “I thought you didn’t have to do that anymore.”

But she did, didn’t she? In the dizzying spirals of the contorting walls, he could see skeletons, dangling on bright green strings, dancing like marionettes. He watched one, small at first, holding up one of the snakes as people shied away. More bones were added as the marionette grew from child to teenager, standing in a sea of other skeletons, held apart, but eager to find her way into the crowd, the snake draped around her neck. They shied away until she tossed the snake away to please them. On and on, conflict after conflict, the play continued, skeletons dancing through life while one stumbled, desperate to please.

“SSSSTOP THIS,” she hissed louder, driving her hands around his neck, looking to choke the life out of him, but the time has passed for her to be able to do anything about it. He had her now. “You are a thing, a toy for us to use as we see fit. All the power you have here, you would never have had without us. You don’t get to know me.”

“But that’s the thing, isn’t it?” Lucien smirked. They gave him the keys to their destruction when they asked him to pull from their memories their vision of a better world. They had signed their death warrants in the same breath as they had believed they were signing away his personhood.

The play continued on and on, the skeleton Fastidan growing angrier and angrier and more disgusted with the people around her, constantly dismissed, constantly laughed at for her ideas. “I would’ve known this story blind. We really are quite alike.”

A name came to him, a name that allowed a dozen others break through the fabric of this dream. He saw a taller skeleton puppet leaning over a sullen, bitter Fastidan, one with eyes that glowed red from deep within its sockets.

“That’s unfortunate. Isn’t it, Cassia Livio?”

The dream shattered as Fastidan screamed.

Something jerked Lucien backwards, tearing him from the Dream Within the Dream like a leech being peeled from skin. Within a span of a blink, he found himself no longer standing in the dissipating remains of Fastidan’s citadel prepared to find the last of her remaining Somnovem siblings, but staring up at the pulsing, black ichor-bleeding flesh walls of the Aether Crux chamber, a brutal fight still going on.

He could see the results of his actions- the Nein laying down attack after attack on the newly physical Somnovem who were screaming in anguish as they deflected and tossed out spells of their own, agonized by the return to even an idea of a humanoid form.

And they were merely ideas. What had grabbed him felt like taffy stuck in his hair more than an iron grip and when it pulled, it stretched unpleasantly, like raw dough pulled into shapes. He tore himself free, violently, and felt bits of flesh and pulverized muscle and bone slough off of him, dripping ooze into his eyes that he frantically wiped away.

When he could look up again, he was staring at a woman with curly blonde hair, cat’s-eye glasses and a hand that was reforming back into shape. Her form wobbled and he felt like if he tried to touch her, she would fall apart in his hands. No organs, no bones, just a flesh covering over destroyed remains and a mind that hadn’t been allowed to die.

And a fury that had nowhere to direct itself but at him.

“Was I the only idiot smart enough to go after the one tearing us free?” Fastidan shrieked, though the other Somnovem, occupied in their own fights, gave no response. “I have to do everything around here.”

Boneless fingers could still cast. Lucien watched them wobble, conjuring up a spell, and he started to rise to his feet to meet her, but she snapped out with her free hand and grasped his jaw by pressing her thumb into the hollow of his throat and three fingers into his mouth as if he were snared fish. He tried to bite down and only got a choking, nauseating gush of blood and gore that slipped down his throat and strangle him for his trouble.

He saw a sickly green light play across her fingers and then a sudden flash of red that knocked a hole through Fastidan’s torso. With a stomach-churning squelch, the flesh pulled itself back together and she whirled around, still holding Lucien by the mouth while he choked.

Cree.

“There she is.” Fastidan released Lucien’s mouth, leaving him vomiting up tar and chunks of flesh, his entire body shaken. She slipped within the soft ground as if it had sucked her down into it and then reappeared behind Cree, who swung her glaive at her, bisecting her cleanly down the middle, only for tendrils of flesh to yank her back into solidity again. The way she panted spoke volumes to how she was taking damage, at least. Soon she wouldn’t be able to reform again.

But soon needed to come faster.

“You want to put me down, little girl? Fine. I’ll take you with me,” she hissed and wrapped her arms around Cree before slipping beneath the ground and dragging her along.

“No!” Lucien screamed and scrambled to his feet, only to trip when his legs refused to move correctly after kneeling for so long. He dragged himself bodily to the place where Cree and Fastidan vanished and clawed at the flesh, desperate to dig her out.

“No, no, no. Not you. It can’t be you.”

“Lucien!” Molly was suddenly beside him, grabbing his shoulder to pull him away. “You need to get back in there. We’re not done.”

Two words left Lucien’s mouth before he could even consider the weight of what he was saying. “You go.”

Molly froze, taken aback. “What?”

Lucien squeezed his eyes shut, his fingers bleeding from all the digging. He couldn’t be entirely certain it was all his blood, that he hadn’t simply torn open a wound in the Aether Crux in his fury. “You’ve been there. You could do it just as easily as I could.”

“No I couldn’t. Lucien, you know I can’t do this…. And besides this is your victory. This is what you wanted.”

That tragic gnoll cackle of a laugh of his burst free of his chest like a bird escaping a cage. Lucien laughed himself hoarse and whipped towards Molly, a half-crazed expression. “What good is a victory if I have to sacrifice her to get it?”

That seemed to startle Molly, but he still shook his head, violently. “I can go after her. I can-“

“I’m choosing her, Mollymauk.” Lucien jerked him down to his level by the collar of his coat, forcing their foreheads together. His fingers fumbled, tightening in his hair, instead. “And you need to choose bravery. You need to give them Hell. I gave them all I could and I’m satisfied with what I’ve done. It’s your turn.”

He shoved him off and Molly stumbled, shaken, but understanding. He looked to Yasha, currently harrying one of the slimy, cackling Somnovem and not getting anywhere with it. Seeing the frustration in her and knowing what hesitation would cost as the remaining four Somnovem remained tied to the hive and the crux of Tharizdun’s power, he nodded.

“Yash’! I need you to cover me. I’m going in!”

“What?!” She balked, swinging her sword down to cleave the slimy, ichor-coated creature in twain before it reformed and draped itself over her shoulders like a coat. She screamed and released her wings, throwing it off and unleashing a battle cry to bolster the fight on. “f*ck! Okay, okay!”

Lucien stayed long enough to make sure Molly made it to the Aether Crux and then turned and ran for the exit, searching for Cree’s scent among all the blood and gore and rot as the Beast snarled within.

Find her, Cu. I’m not going to lose her to them.

Molly tumbled in freefall, completely oblivious as to which way was up and which was down, the white dreaming void barely giving him any way to orient himself. The last time he had been here, it had been in chains, held down and forced to dream, barely cognizant of the way Lucien did it beyond some vague inclinations through the tether. For a brief second, he panicked, grief-stricken at the idea that he would lose before he had ever had the chance to begin, that in allowing Lucien to make an unselfish choice, he had damned his friends because he simply wasn’t good enough.

This preemptive mourning must have lured someone towards him, because he saw a flash of red lightning light up the void as he spun in mid-air and then there was ground coming hard and fast for him. He adjusted himself, like an acrobat hoping to diminish a fall, knowing that there was no net or safety to be had, and landed softer than he expected, as if someone had cast feather fall at the last moment.

He felt a cold hand on his neck and he knew that the Moonweaver was with him, somehow, breaking through to reclaim her domain of dreams from the monsters who would see fit to steal it.

The ground was hot beneath his bare palms when he pushed himself up to get his bearings. He was in a graveyard, the headstones made of rusted metal, the mist, steam from various pipes. He could barely move without having to duck underneath them and each time he brushed one, he winced as they burned on contact.

“Hello?” He yelled, awkwardly. He backed away as a pipe released another gout of hot steam just seconds from overwhelming him. As he recovered from the shock, there came a sound like the flapping of bird wings alongside the shriek and scrape of metal.

“Do you mind?” A soft, sad feminine voice said. “I am in mourning.”

He followed the voice up to see a figure in a suit of plate armor, the feet bird-like talons, the helmet an ugly rusted vulture’s head. Metal wings sprouted from its back, mantling with ear-piercing metallic sounds that echoed, like a mother bird doing a call-and-respond to her children.

“Luctus, I presume?” Molly dared to ask.

He received no confirmation, but the sadness and grief in her voice said it all, really. “You think we’re monsters, that everything we’ve done was done with selfishness in our hearts. We sacrificed too. You have no idea what I gave up.”

The way she had spoken of the automatons they had faced when searching and how this place looked like an uncorrupted version of where they had met them said a great deal. He looked down at one of the tombstones and saw a sequence of numbers.

“You mourned those things, but what about the people you killed?” He snapped, suddenly full of anger.

Luctus crouched on her perch, her wings fully spread. He saw that her gauntlets were also capped with cruel metal talons. “I mourned everything. I mourned it all when the storm came that made us as we are. It was my duty to be the one who mourned! I even mourned our Nonagon when he was dragged away from us, when you and your people turned him from his sacred duty. What right do you have to call my children things when you, yourself, are barely more than a concept! An abomination given life with a spark of a soul that was not yours. You were made in the image of a fickle goddess, but I have never been fickle. I have loved and I have grieved with all the strength of a mortal heart.”

“And what did it get you besides a kingdom of rot?”

From beneath the beak of her helmet, Luctus smiled. “All returns to rot, but metal and steel and adamantine remain if you can put enough magic into it. When Cognouza returns, I will have my time again. All mortal life will become one with the Pattern, but my children will roam freely as extensions of myself, stealing sparks of life so that they will know what it is to truly live. No one will grieve again because all will be eternal under us. Don’t you see that it’s better? You’ve watched your friends fall time and again? Wouldn’t you love to be part of something that never dies? To see our world through the eyes of something new?”

Molly was young, still new to grief. He had barely lost anything that he hadn’t immediately gotten back and hadn’t had time to grieve the things he never would. He thought of Wake and hoped Levitica or her rangers found her body and gave her a proper Moonweaver funeral. He wished there’d been more time for him to apologize for his part in it, even if he hadn’t been there when it happened.

Eventually, no spell would bring back his friends. They would be lost and so would he, but there was joy in that too, because he’d seen the Blooming Grove and watched Caduceus make beauty out of remains. People lived on in nature and in memories, not in this cold metal or in the aether of dreams made real.

Among the tombstones labeled in precise numbers, he found a name, half hidden, but drawing the eye all the same. He read it off under his breath to sound it out.

Luctus shrieked, leaping down to grab him by the throat with her talons, flinging him against one of the steaming pipes. It burned, but he could take it. “Don’t! Don’t make me real! The pain is bearable in dreams! I do not want to remember!”

“That’s the curse of living, isn’t it?” Molly choked out. “You want to be eternal so badly, but the only way to really live forever is to be remembered.” Luctus dug her fingers harder into his throat and with the last breath before his throat was crushed, he screamed, “CLAUDIA FELICE.”

Her hands fell away and Molly had time to catch his breath before every pipe burst, flooding the world with hot steam.

Her screams still echoed even when her world fell away to nothing.

Caleb ran combat equations in his head as he watched the fight play out, determined not to look at Molly, vulnerable and straining against the effort of searching the muck and the mire for a single name. Yasha had stationed herself in front of him to prevent what happened to Lucien from happening again. He would be fine. Surely, he would be fine.

A mournful scream tore its way out of one of the remaining protean ichor-based creatures as it exploded and then reformed as a figure of flesh- a short blond half-elf with a pixie cut and a film of tears already covering her limpid blue eyes. She dropped to her knees and clawed at the ground with fingers that ground themselves to nothing but stubs in her effort, but reformed again- not with the healing of Tharizdun, but with the desperation of a single entity trying to hold onto its sense of self against all odds. No matter how she fought, she wanted this. They all wanted this.

They were setting them free from a centuries long prison that drove them mad and like all caged beasts, they were not made for freedom. Caleb would feel genuine sorrow for their lot had they not paved the way to their gilded cage with the bones of people who had believed in them.

Luctus, panting, looked at him and saw some recognition in his eyes. She began to move towards him, only to be stopped by the dark-haired, dark-eyed handsome wizard that was Culpasi, having just thrown Beauregard aside with a bit of telekinesis as if she were a toy he was bored with.

“Luctus, Luctus, Luctus…” He purred, pivoting her away from Caleb and towards Yasha. “Allow me.”

She went without protest, looking like a moth drawn to a flame. Yasha thrust her sword out, ready to pincushion her if she tried to come towards Molly, but her placating hands and wide, sorrowful eyes were meant only for the barbarian. “You have such sorrow in your heart…”

And that was all Caleb could see as Culpasi, with fingers that were impossibly tight despite being boneless, grabbed him by the chin and jerked his gaze to meet his. He was taller by a good two inches, with shoulder-length dark hair and tanned skin. Impossibly gorgeous for a corpse. There was a world where he would have fallen in love with him.

Culpasi eyed him and sighed with disappointment as if he found him wanting. The knot that had settled in his stomach hardened into a stone of regret and guilt at what he could have possibly done to deserve such appraisal and his head only filled with different equations, threatening to undo his concentration spells, of how he could make it up to him.

“They’re going to die, you know,” Culpasi said, sweetly. “They’re going to die and they’re going to stay here forever, losing themselves bit by bit, just like we did. And when it’s all over, I want you to know that it was your fault.”

He giggled. Caleb blinked, a faint niggling of logic working its way through the feeling of compulsion holding him here, making him want to please this impossible to satisfy monster. “Why?”

The giggle cut off abruptly with a sharp exhale of a ‘heh.’ “Why? Why? Because you fail everyone! You’re always too late. Just imagine if you had broken before you set that fire. If you had seen your chums’ parents writhing on the floor and realized it was going to happen to yours and run then. Why, they’d still be alive, wouldn’t they?”

Hard logic to argue with. Caleb felt himself sinking back into that horrible mire of his guilt, his movements slowed, his eyes only on Culpasi. And then with one surge of control, he yanked himself out of it. “You burden others with their guilt, but you’re still the embodiment of it. Who did you fail, Tacitus?”

He didn’t know how he knew the name, until he listened closely to what he thought were only the whimpers of the screaming, laughing souls of Cognouza and realized that they had taken up a litany of names, whispering them over and over again, desperate to remember who had done this to them, giving the long-ignored blame back to the monsters.

Culpasi backed away, his feet sliding across the fleshy ground. There was a hitch in his step, like someone limping who knew they could never fall over and yet took each step as though they might.

He thrust a finger at Caleb’s face, accusingly. “I never failed anyone. They failed me.” A dry cackle reverberated from deep within his throat. He leaned forwards, fingers now working through the motions for a spell. Caleb tried to slap it out of the air with a counterspell but it fizzled and died.

“You know, Caleb,” the Somnovem put so much venom into the name that there was a brief moment that Caleb thought it would be tainted forever now, constantly associated with how it was spat out like a curse, “were you ever really punished for what you did? You weren’t, were you? Not in any way that matters. Let me help. What’s the term? An eye for an eye?”

The spell was thrown like a javelin straight for Caleb’s face. A pain like he’d never felt before tore through his mind, ripping up his half-recalled memories of his time in Vergessen as if they were pages from a diary. His left eye burst from the pressure of the psychic assault and he lost all sense of self for a brief moment. There was no Caleb Widogast, no Bren Aldric Ermendrud, there was only a white-hot agonizing pain.

And then it faded into nothing, leaving only the stickiness on his face and a sudden absence of depth perception as he dropped to his knees. He pawed at his ruined eye socket, mouth opening and closing like a fish.

Culpasi laughed again, sliding forwards, kneeling before Caleb so that he could take his chin in his clammy, boneless fingers that felt more like the suckers of some great squid than anything human. He tried to flinch away, but the grip held fast, stinging his cheek as it pulled his flesh too taut. He fought the urge to whimper and instead stared defiance into the golden brown eyes of his opponent with his one good eye.

“What do you think? What’s one less eye to make up for all the new ones you’re getting? You’ll still be able to see everything.” He circled Caleb’s neck with a free hand and he felt the burn of a new eye blossom onto his skin. “I could take the other one and you wouldn’t even miss it.” He released Caleb’s face, leaving horrible bruises behind. His head was becoming a tapestry to various agonies and all of them were rattling about in his skull, driving his attention to everything but what he needed to focus on. He felt two concentration spells die at once.

Culpasi straightened, snickering, and turned to leave him there, weak and shaken, and no longer worth his time. That was his second mistake.

His first was not finishing him off.

He knew Culpasi’s type. He knew the exact sort of man he was just by how he spoke and carried himself. He had been made by similar men and he had been made better by the people around him- the same people who were fighting these monsters to the death for the fate of the world, but more importantly, for the fate of each other. He would not falter in the face of the rod and lash of wizards who only coaxed dragons out of innocent people to make them their monsters.

He was his own monster and if there was ever any penance to be had it was in making sure that men who laid innocents on the altars of their ambitions never raised a hand to anyone ever again.

“You must have been a stern schoolteacher,” he murmured as blood poured down his face. He let Culpasi stop and sit with whatever feeling those words conjured up in him- guilt or something else (gods only knew if he could feel anything else after so long embodying a singular emotion), and then he reached for his fire in retaliation.

The last thing Culpasi saw was the fireball coming right for his face as he turned to regard the opponent he underestimated.

For the first time, Caleb turned his back and let the flames burn his victim into ash without fear of slipping into an old memory to the tune of someone’s helpless screams. The guilt wasn’t gone- it would never be. But it would not hold sway over him in this fight. Instead of watching the fire burn and feeling that old ache again like a bruise he couldn’t stop pressing on, he looked to Veth, pulling herself out from underneath a pile of rubble and smiled back when she gave him a proud nod, barely hiding her concern for his ruined eye.

He’d let her fuss at him to her heart’s content until it was time for her to go home once this was over.

“Stay on task, Widogast,” he mumbled, smearing the blood on his face with the back of his hand. “There will be time for that later.”

Because there would be a later. No more sacrifices laid upon the pyre this night, only justice finally given.

Molly had barely oriented himself from the collapse of Luctus’s world when another practically plucked him out of the air, yanking him so hard that when he hit solid ground he slid across cold marble floor and underneath a long table. He stood up too quickly, bonked his head on the underside and then jolted in surprise as beakers full of strange concoctions crashed to the floor, sending up plumes of red smoke that began to take shape. Slowly, he slid out from under the table to orient himself and get away from the choking miasma, staggering to his feet as he shook off the effects of having his bell rung so hard.

He was in a laboratory, pristine and endless, full of things he had no name for- scientific and official and altogether beyond his comprehension. The tables were lined up like a hedge maze, boxing him in unless he was willing to go up and over and risk knocking over more of the bubbling beakers.

“It would be difficult to find a name in a mind so focused on a task,” a dry, laconic voice he recognized as Mirumus’s spoke up. He couldn’t see him, only hear him, his form hidden from view, somewhere in the endless maze. “I often forgot everything except the work I was doing when I was living.”

Molly ground his teeth and tried to go under a table again, only for it to rattle and collapse without him having touched it at all. More vials rained down, spilling toxic fumes. Molly gasped and choked and dragged himself out from under it.

“You can’t cheat,” Mirumus laughed. “There’s a process to everything. Shortcuts are anathema to science. If you don’t go through things properly, you’ll get a nasty surprise.”

“Isn’t that your thing?” Molly coughed.

“What have I always been to you but a prevention of surprises? Truesight is my gift for a reason. Now then, Nonagon, do you have the same cunning mind as your better half or are you the lousy, brainless cast-off that he didn’t need? Come and find me, if you can, but be quick about it. Who knows what surprises might wait for you if you take too long?”

“I don’t have time for games!” Molly snapped, desperately trying to find a way around, but only finding himself met with blockade after blockade, leaving him to double back on his steps and try again. The tables weren’t that high- he should be able to see where the gaps were.

He tried to go incorporeal, hoping to be rewarded for cleverness only to find that the power didn’t work here. He balked and then swore at himself for being shocked- yes, it was a place of dreams where anything was possible, but he couldn’t manipulate it the way Lucien could.

You’re not thinking, he chastised himself. You’re just getting desperate and frustrated and trying to con and brute force your way through it, like you always do. How would Lucien go about this?

He thought back to the Nightmare King’s trap in the Pearlbow Wilderness, the first time he had ever asked Lucien for help. It was because he had practice tracking and Molly hadn’t… But things had changed since then, even if a lot of Molly hadn’t- or maybe he had. Stubborn as he was, he had learned a little bit about stopping to think before he acted, even if he rarely put it into practice. He’d combined a Blood Hunter’s natural instincts with the things Wake had taught him when he agreed to become a ranger. If you can’t be tricky, then you have to be a hunter.

So hunt, he swore he heard Lucien hiss in his head. It was just a lingering voice, not the real him, occupied as he was with saving Cree.

He closed his eyes and began to feel out the presence of an aberration, his senses pinging immediately on something at the heart of the maze, using that sense and not his eyes, he moved through the maze as easily as if he’d been born knowing the exact pattern.

“No,” Mirumus spat.

The beakers began to explode, spilling their contents at Molly’s feet, melting the floor beneath him and forcing him to hold his breath as he rushed through deadly gases. He jumped over gaps, dodged flying glass, and kept his target in sight, the ache in his gut growing stronger the closer he got to the center.

“What can I say?” Molly laughed as he moved through another hurdle. “I’m full of surprises.”

The ache became overwhelming as he rounded another corner and suddenly the world changed to a ordinary laboratory, no maze in sight. Shades of faceless people moved about, hovering around one form that was clearer than the others- a dark-skinned elven lad, bent over his work, so focused he seemed to care nothing for the world around him. Voices whispered a name over and over: Spurius, Spurius? Are you paying attention, Spurius? It’s time to leave. We have to close down.

Spurius Juventus, do you have cotton in those big ears? It’s time to go!

Molly gasped and snatched the name out of the air. The scene fell apart and for a brief second Molly found himself floating in the ether with a human sized stoat made of twirling red gases, baring its teeth at him.

Molly just howled in laughter. “Surprise, motherf*cker!”

The gaseous stoat hissed at him, “You still have to face Elatis. She won’t let you reach Vigilan.” He blew apart as he lunged at Molly, sending him choking and coughing into a dizzying spiral down, down deeper into the void to the next Somnovem.

Yasha wiped blood from her lip as some of her wounds knitted together from a slash she made on the the little elf who had just emerged, screaming from the void and made to run before she forced him to stop. Striga could drink deeply of these forms the way it couldn’t with the gross slimy ones. The vitality it gave her capped her off a bit, leaving her feeling heartier and ready for a fight.

Beau engaged with the frozen, shuddering elf, and Yasha found her sights settled elsewhere, towards a pale blond half-elf with a pixie cut and the saddest eyes she’d ever seen outside of a mirror. She’d been watching her for some time, content to stare, and Yasha would not move to engage her, because it would mean abandoning her post. She smiled at her when she met her eyes, which was precisely the wrong thing to do to a barbarian seeking a target.

She was getting too close to Molly. She must have been moving closer gradually the more Yasha didn’t pay attention to her, her sights clear.

Yasha lowered Striga and strode forwards, picking up speed when she saw the spell working its way to her fingers, aimed for Molly’s back. Seconds before it went off, someone counterspelled it- Caleb, the left side of his face a bleeding mess, flashed her a weak thumb’s up, and she gave him a nod.

“It would break you to fail to save him again, wouldn’t it?” The girl said- Luctus, it had to be. She was the grief one.

“I’ll break you first,” she spat. She wasn’t in the mood to mince words- not that she was ever in the mood for it. She preferred the direct approach. In this case, the most direct approach to this conversation was her sword going through her pretty pale neck.

Luctus sad little smile only seemed to get sadder, almost disappointed, like she expected something different out of her. “You are wrought with grief at every turn. I thought we would understand each other.”

That gave her pause, her grip on Striga loosening slightly. A dangerous thing- if she were facing an armed combatant then she would have been easily disarmed and at their mercy, but Luctus seemed to be fighting a battle with only words, reaching into her heart to crush it the same way she had when she was merely an eye in the middle of a dripping form of slime- as if she had been summoning chains to bind her. She resisted the slow effect, shaking it off like a dog and glowered.

“I’m not bound by chains anymore,” she snapped. “And I don’t miss it the way you do.”

The Somnovem staggered back, though her feet wouldn’t leave the ground. She was still bound to Cognouza, even if she wasn’t bound to Tharizdun any longer. Freedom wasn’t the option for her that it was for Yasha- she was too far gone. The only salvation for her was a swift death.

But she refused to simply die. Not before taking the Nein down with her. “Lonely girl, you do miss it. You miss the simplicity of having your tumult of emotions validated by something greater than you. You miss the peace of oblivion.”

The dark, horrible feeling of being in Obann’s thrall, the oily blackness that curdled in her mind, drowning her, filling her with hate and anger until all she was was an extension of that hate. It hates and hates and hates and it doesn’t know how to do anything but destroy?

Yasha felt a dribble of acidic black tar down her lips again as it tried to take hold of her again, the memory of broken chains were still chains that could easily be reforged by the right hand. She heard the Stormlord in the back of her mind roaring for her to fight, the belt around her waist crackling with lightning that shocked her back into reality.

You don’t hate like that, my herald.

She thought of petrichor, of flowers blooming from soaked-through ground after a rainstorm. She thought of Molly’s laugh and Beau’s co*cky grin and Jester’s playfulness and Fjord’s sturdiness and Caduceus teaching her how to grow while she taught him how to be angry in a way that didn’t destroy. She thought of Caleb understanding her the way no one else did and Veth teasing her. She thought of Cree and Lucien and how they proved more than anything that the past didn’t have to hold you bound.

She would lose them all some day or they would lose her, in whatever order the world saw fit to claim them. But like Zuala, that loss would not be allowed to be a shackle, but another garden to plant. Grief was not cold steel and fear of loss, but flowers every spring and a promise to keep moving towards tomorrow.

She twisted Striga in her grip so that she could bludgeon with with it, rather than pierce or slash and swung it hard. She saw Luctus’s expression change from sadness to shock in an instant, promising that she’d die with an emotion different than the one she’d spent centuries locked into. Thunder boomed as the blade made contact, tearing her boneless, fleshy form apart. Yasha, with the heart of a storm churning inside of her, her eyes sparking, delivered the finishing blow by summoning lightning that burned Luctus’s remains to naught but ash.

Knowing Molly still had a ways to go, she posted herself fully in front of him again, the Storm’s Herald in all of her glory, prepared to accept grief when it came, but not about to let this be what killed her friends.

I love them more than you hate anything, she spat at the Chained Oblivion, knowing that it heard her from its prison and hoped it quivered in its chains at her rage.

Molly stepped down into a labyrinth of mechanical fixtures, domes with interlocking metal rings that spun in various directions, obeying laws that he didn’t understand and measuring things that were beyond his comprehension. Everything here was red and gold and each strut and bolt that held the pieces together was in the shape of an eye. Each step he took echoed and when he glanced down, he realized that the path he walked down dangled impossibly over an endless black void. Everything hung suspended in mid-air, ready to drop at a word.

The phrase pride before the fall popped into Molly’s head unabated and he knew then whose world he had stepped into, just as Mirumus had warned.

He kept walking at a steady clop, any hope of stealth ruined by the fact that his opponent knew he was here whether he made a sound or not. The platform swayed with every step, but like a tightrope walker, he kept his center of gravity focused until finally he reached the end- a massive circular disc floating in space bearing a singular glowing machine surrounded by poles that sparked with red lightning, each one topped with a single red eye. The machine itself was covered in arcane sigils, flashing in time to some symphony conducted by a singular figure, draped in a cape made out of a massive red boar. When she turned to face him, the entire top half of her face was dominated by the hood, giving her the impression of a dire boar with the jaw of a humanoid woman. Despite its heaviness, the cloak shifted in a wind that didn’t exist as the pair faced one another.

“You want my name?” Elatis smiled, cruelly, lowering her head so he could stare into the empty eye sockets of the boar. “Which one do you want? The one my human mother gave me after a disastrous affair with a wizard prodigy that had no time for her? The one I gave myself when I realized I wasn’t the son she hoped to surpass him? Or the one inscribed in every sigil across this machine. I am the Aether Crux, the Architect Arcane of Cognouza. It was by my hand all of this came to pass. I am Cognouza, itself.”

“You’re an arrogant bitch,” Molly quipped back. He took a step forwards and the platform shuddered. He backed away, waiting for it to stop moving. “Was it all worth this? You’re a monster in the world’s history. When this is over, you’ll be forgotten. You sold your soul to Oblivion to win and do you really think there’s going to be glory in that?”

She laughed. “Oblivion is just one more god. I’m of a culture that sought to defy them. I won’t let anything stand in my way. I’m not bound.”

As she went to circle the machine, Molly noted a length of chain around her ankle, binding her to the machine. “Oh you’re not, are you?”

She tried to cover it with her cloak, kick it away so that it might remain unseen, but the damage was done. “I’m not bound to anything that matters. The work must be done. The work is all that matters. It has to have been worth it. We didn’t suffer as we did to come to nothing.”

A soft, weeping voice rose up from everywhere and nowhere, rising and falling. Molly could barely make out the words beyond a pleading: ”Please… help… Sister.”

Elatis’s breath hitched, her fingertips hovering over a lever on the machine, its humming filling the space, ready to be unleashed. “No,” she whispered. “No, this is more important. It always has been. You know it to be true.”

She wasn’t talking to him. Molly took another tentative step closer. “What did you give up for your pride, Elatis? Is it really worth losing everything? Your people are falling. The Somnovem are done.”

“If I remain, it still gets done,” she hissed between her teeth. “Vigilan and I can finish it alone. You’ll never best him.”

“That’s what they’ve all said and Lucien and I have torn through your defenses. Your people are rebelling. Maybe you’ve forgotten, but they remember and they’re dying to get their revenge.”

Elatis shook her head, stubborn to the end. “They never knew what was good for them. It was all for the dream they believed they wanted. They lived forever as part of us.”

“You killed them for your dream!” Molly snapped. “You lied to them all and made them believe this was for their benefit, but it was only ever about what you all desired. You’d burn the world because you’re in too deep. You’ve lost sight of what really matters.”

The voice cried out again. ”SISTER, PLEASE…”

A hitching breath pushed itself out from between Elatis’s teeth as she bent double over the machine. “I will not lose.”

With a shriek of anguish the voice in the distance rose up one last time, screeching a name like a curse. ”Augusta Felice.”

Every bolt and strut came loose. The machine guttered, sparked and then died. Elatis’s scream of rage, done in by her own sister’s vengeance due to her own immeasurable pride, was lost to the sound of shrieking metal as the labyrinth came apart and both Molly and Elatis plunged into the darkness.

Only one was saved from oblivion by the feather light touch of a goddess.

The narrative was turning on its head, the Somnovem falling like dominoes one by one to the might of the Nein. Victory seemed assured, but only a fool counted their winnings before the last hand was dealt. Beau blew a lock of her hair out of her face and scouted the field, wrecked beyond all possible recognition from what it once was. Molly was still elbows deep in the Aether Crux, zonked out and dead to the world with Yasha standing before him, wings out and mantling, daring anyone to come near him. Jester was badly injured, limping her way across the field to anyone who needed her. Veth was nowhere to be seen, which could mean any number of things. Cree and Lucien had vanished and there was no way of knowing where they might be. Caduceus was leaning heavily on his staff, exhausted and focusing on holding concentration. Caleb was a mess, but holding steady.

Seconds were precious in combat- Beau knew this better than anyone. It still came as a shock when she felt a spell strike her right between the shoulder blades, locking her muscles in place and leaving her dazed and frozen. A new eye burned its way above her heart- eight. She was cutting it dangerously close now. She swallowed down bile as a young, dark-skinned elf crossed into her eyeline.

“You’re so close now,” he said, his voice stilted and a little awkward, as if he wasn’t used to speaking. There was something about him that reminded her a bit of Yasha and it made her chest hurt with a quiet, burning rage that these monsters could be anything like her friends.

But that was the point in all this, wasn’t it? To lay the godlike low and show them that they weren’t so different, to put them in the ground where they should have been the day Aeor fell from the sky. They were course-correcting history.

Not that any of those facts mattered when her limbs were presently locked up- stunning people was all fun and games until she was the one on the other end of it.

“You think you’ve won, but you haven’t. It’s not going to end the way you think it will. It’s illogical to think that there weren’t a dozen failsafes to prevent this from failing. Maybe the others don’t realize it, but I make a habit out of not being surprised.”

Surprise. Mirumus. Her jaw twitched as she started to come out of her stun incrementally. She twitched her fingers, willing them to ball into a fist.

She heard Veth scream, but she couldn’t turn to look. Caduceus groaned somewhere to her left and that, too, she had to simply trust would be fine, unable to look anywhere else but at Mirumus. To win, she would have to accept there were things that were beyond her sight, truths that were not hers to rush towards. She had to trust that things were out of her control and that could be okay.

She had to wait.

“We had to embrace Oblivion, but it will claim us all, as it will claim you. Too much went into this.”

Beau’s knuckles cracked as she clenched them, readying her strike. Not yet.

“We will not-“

The stun broke as Beau jerked her fist upwards and pounded it straight through Mirumus’s face, emerging from the other side in a splash of viscera. It made a wet sloppy sound as she freed it.

“Didn’t see that coming, did you?” She snapped before unleashing Hell on him one punch at a time until he was nothing more than a smear on the broken stones.

Molly fell back into the dreaming with practiced ease, the Moonweaver’s presence at his back never wavering, as if her pale blue hand were settled on the small of his back, like a proud parent guiding her child into a school for one last lesson before the final exam. This was the last one. He had done so well. Her emotions drowned out all of the others around him, allowing him to find the final thread in the sea of endless suffering- a single, vigilant thread, holding steady, determined to maintain its control in a hive that was rapidly falling to pieces.

Molly sucked in a breath and dove under, blinded by white light that he realized was skin and hair and clothing, a figure of porcelain with the most intensely red eyes he had ever seen outside of a mirror. He saw a child, a teenager, an adult, and then finally a stately elderly elf, each as white as the first, all standing in a perfect line before they turned to wisps of parchment folded into paper cranes and flew at Molly. He shielded his face with his crossed arms, the paper biting into his exposed skin with dozens of stinging cuts, and when he finally felt safe enough to lower them, he was standing in another dream world.

It was a room of white marble, the striations of veins in bloody red. White hounds made of folded parchment paper prowled the perimeter, circling him, keeping him from going anywhere but the space the pack left for him in the middle of the room. Above him, a domed ceiling boasted many red eyes staring down at him and before him was a orator’s podium of the same cold, unfeeling, bloody marble, a figure leaning over it.

He had the head of a white dog as interpreted on ancient pottery, wide red eyes and jaws with uneven, pointed teeth and a stylized muzzle. White hair fell in a shaggy mane down his back, spilling over blood-red robes. The hound snarled in Vigilan’s deep, booming voice.

“So, you who have dug our names out of the mire, false Nonagon, fraction of the True Whole, it is you who comes before me, the beating heart of the Somnovem. It is a miracle you have gotten this far, but my Somnovem are not careful. They have not watched, they have not guarded. I am the last bastion between us and Oblivion.”

Molly snarled and stepped forwards. The folded paper dogs snapped with jaws of moving, grinding paper teeth that seemed far more threatening than they should be. Had he not bled from the paper cranes, he might have dared to challenge them to prove it. “Oblivion has you already. Don’t you want to be free of it? Don’t you want to finally be at peace?”

The dog-headed figure pulled back its jaws in a violent, horrific laugh. “Do you truly believe that there is any true peace in individuality? All of these different opinions, these arguments. Here in my amphitheater, the only opinion that matters is mine.”

The paper dogs howled in a chorus of agreement, circling Molly like a pack of wolves hungry for a feast. There was nowhere he could go unless he got creative.

Lucien could shape this world. You can too. He tried to reach beyond himself, beyond this space, the Moonweaver with him all the way. The mark on his hand began to burn like wrapping his hand around an icicle. ”It’s just a dream, my albatross. Show him yours.”

He focused so hard he felt his nose began to bleed from the strain of forcing himself into a state he was never meant for. He willed the dogs to transform, fluttering away as they unfolded, becoming fliers from the Fletchling and Moondrop Carnival. The white marble shifted until it became red and white stripes, the floor fading into dirt.

Vigilan snarled as his podium fell away, forcing him to his knees in the center ring. All around him, the stands began to fill with people that Molly reached out for, voiceless in the hive, but perfectly intact in the dream space if someone would only go looking for more than what they knew. Molly reached out to pull them in and they gave him names, little facts about themselves to humanize them as more than just a body count in one of the most ruthless slaughters in history.

Molly kissed their aether-blessed fingertips and guided them into seats while Vigilan struggled to regain his control, but he was only one Somnovem and the people of Cognouza were many. They filled every seat in this tent, glowering with hate and anger in their eyes.

We trusted you.

You betrayed us.

We were supposed to all dream together.

It was never supposed to be like this.

Aeor was right about you.

Vigilan howled, tearing at his dog ears with his hands and shredding them to pieces. Beneath the ripped paper shell, Molly could see a pale elven form with red eyes peering out, looking everywhere, frantic. The people of Cognouza stood up, pointing their fingers, shaming the source of their torture. On every lip was a name.

”Seneca Candidus.

With a horrible sound of tearing paper and flesh, Vigilan ripped himself apart and Molly was guided out of the dream in the arms of thousands of grateful souls, eager to finally see this finished.

Cree hit the spongey ground of one of the aortic tunnels with enough force to rattle her bones. She coughed up chunks of flesh from her impromptu trip through Cognouza, sputtering like a drowning victim. Above her, Fastidan’s small form leered.

“Look at you, failure,” she spat as she circled her. “What did you really think was going to happen when you came here? You were ours and you gave it up. Do you want to know a secret?” She knelt beside Cree’s form, snatching her arm before she could go to cast a spell. “When we take everyone else, you’re going to be the one left behind. You’ll be trapped here, forced to watch. If our time is done, then the Chains will simply take your friends. And you? You’ll just rot.”

She screamed as a blight spell ate its way up her arm, melting the fur and weakening the bones until they snapped. She screamed in agony and kicked out, violently, trying to get away, but Fastidan kept coming, undaunted, toying with her prey.

And then Lucien’s voice echoed down the tunnel. “FASTIDAN.”

“No…” Cree murmured, tears stinging her eyes both from pain and frustration. He was supposed to be taking care of them. He wasn’t supposed to give up his finishing blow for her. “Lucien, you fool.”

Fastidan rolled her serpent-green eyes. “Well, I wasn’t expecting this. I was under the impression you wanted to beat us down, Nonagon? Take our names and liberate us? Wasn’t that your precious victory?”

Lucien ignored her, running past her to get to Cree. He tsked over her arm. “What have you gone and done to yourself?”

“You’re such an ass,” she hissed. He gripped her head and she rubbed it against his cheek, purring involuntarily. “Why did you come?”

“I wasn’t gonna leave you. Not this time.”

The tears came freely now, matting into the fur around her face. She pulled him close with her good arm and buried her face in his cheek. It would have been a glorious moment of true reconciliation after everything they had been through and everything they had done to one another, had their audience not been a cruel, vicious wizard who signaled her presence with an acid arrow right into Lucien’s back. He yelped in pain and slipped from her arms onto the ground beside her, shuddering.

“Disgusting,” Fastidan crooned. “And I thought you were so ripe for my element, Nonagon. I was under the impression you still harbored so much disgust and resentment for how she betrayed you. Did all that friendship rattle your brains? Did you forget that you were abandoned by her? She left you to us and then dragged you out with caveats and insults. Is that all you’re worth, Lucien Khar? A kicked dog that lies down when his masters show him the slightest bit of affection again?”

Lucien sucked in a breath as he got back up and paused only to kiss between Cree’s eyes. “Stay back,” he whispered.

“Oh is this how it’s going to be? A duel to the death?” Fastidan’s little simper was as cold and cruel as the rest of her. “Fine. How do you want to die? Pig or dog.”

“Neither.” Lucien’s eyes began to glow, his form shifting beneath his skin as the Beast began to surface, ready for the chance to be unleashed in this hellscape. “And for the record, Fastidan? It’s just Lucien.”

The Beast burst forth, nearly as tall and as wide as the tunnel, itself. Fastidan had time to wipe the smile off her face before she was grabbed violently by the middle and snapped in half, her two halves falling short of one another. The flesh of Cognouza rose to try and pull her back together, but the damage, itself wasn’t healing. Even when she came together, there was a chunk missing out of her boneless torso and she was sputtering in rage. She threw a spell that hit true, staggering the Beast. Blood poured in rivulets from his snarling mouth in horrible puddles at his feet and still he lunged, the tight quarters making evasive maneuvers impossible. Fastidan being smaller and more in control of the terrain meant she could get out of his way and retaliate far too easily. Left alone, she would surely win this battle by exhausting him.

Cree was panicking watching this, backing away to avoid being crushed by Lucien’s uncontrollable wolf form. Fastidan’s wicked laugh echoed down the hall and her mouth filled with disgusted bile, both at the presence of such a foul creature toying with them and because even as a whole person, liberated from the hive, she invoked disgust in everything she did.

What do I do? She asked the aether and it gave no reply. She was out of spells, helpless as a newborn kitten, cowering here in this place while Lucien protected her when she had done this solely to protect him, grateful for the opportunity to do right by him and here he was doing right by her, even if it ended him. She felt an intense spike of fear at this realization- it wasn’t supposed to be like that. No version of this story ended with him dying to save her. She wouldn’t allow it. He needed to live, not for Molly’s sake, but for his own. He had a future to reach for, a world to create that was better than the one that led him here. He deserved that chance.

And she… She was always defined by how much she had to give. Yes, she could have a future. Yes, she had spun herself a better thread of Fate, but part of her knew that out of a thousand possible Fates, too many of them always led her right here. An unstable element like her could not be allowed to live for too long. She would have to find her way back to the moment it was supposed to end, regardless of what she did.

She stared at her good arm, calculated how much damage she could take, and decided to pull a trick from Lucien’s book, a trick that was too dangerous under the circ*mstances but it would be worth it if she managed to pull it off. With a decisive snarl, she sank her teeth into it, biting down until the blood filled her mouth. Sanguine Mastery- a blood cleric’s final gambit. Her vision grayed as she drew upon her own vitality until she knew she could summon one last spell.

She spat excess blood onto the flesh-coated ground and wobbled her way to her feet. Her head spun, but her teeth were stained with blood and that had an effect no one could deny. “Fastidan,” she purred, drawing the necromancer’s attention to her, while Lucien struggled to get to his feet after yet another devastating blow. “You should have stayed a dream.” Off Fastidan’s look of shock, she smirked. “Dreams don’t bleed.”

Contagion reached out and claimed the wizard, blood pouring from every pore and orifice, leaving her a viscous ball of shaped flesh. She screamed in horror as Cree felt herself tip backwards into darkness.

The last thing she saw was Lucien dropping his wolf form and coming up behind Fastidan to drive her through and tear her into pieces with his blades.

And then darkness.

Looking at the battlefield, Fjord, fully in strategic mindset, could see where the Somnovem had failed to grasp a victory. Within their hive, their powers were limited, but potent, driving them down into their madness and holding them there, attacking them psychically and violently to try and get them under their thrall, but freed from it, they scrambled maddeningly. With a strong sense of identity they had lost for nine hundred years, even with access to a myriad of powerful spells to upset the board, they fixated on singular enemies, drawn like moths to the flame of the strong emotions that had held them.

The Nein were their mirrors, their fears and twisted virtues and vices all lined up to be feasted upon and used. If they could not be brought out, then their enemies could be dragged within. Tharizdun had driven them so mad that if they were to be freed from its grasp, left to rot at long last, then the only salvation for them was to nurture a replacement.

And one by one, the Nein rejected their domains, held up the pieces of themselves that drew the Somnovem in and said this is mine and it’s only a piece of me. You will find no profane rights of desecration here- my emotions are divine and true and uncorrupted.

With that in mind, content so far to provide utility spells and back-up, Fjord faced his opposite number, the red-robed figure, pale as death, with eyes ever-watchful. In his mind, he heard an old man’s voice, wizened and regal, whispering, beckoning him. What was your sin, Fjord Stone, Killer of Kings? What has driven you this whole time?

Thrown from the dock of a ship, you saw a looming golden eye and gave yourself over to it. It said watch and you watched, didn’t you? You, who had never learned to watch your own back, who was constantly upstaged and overturned at every moment. The moment you had the power to be, you were vigilant.

Standing in the High Richter’s home with a blade to Caleb’s neck. Months later, holding that blade to Cree’s neck in a vault. Always leaping, never thinking, constantly on a knife’s edge of needing to act, to watch, to keep things moving.

You would be a fine leader. You would be efficient in spreading the Pattern. You would be vigilant in bringing this world to heel. You have seen the same sides of it that our failed Nonagon has seen.

Fjord stopped, the eyes on his skin burning. In a show of dominance, he did to Vigilan the same thing he had done to Uk’otoa, alone in front of a pit of lava, determined to bargain with something that was not to be trifled with- he gave him blood.

Fjord tore the glove from his hand with his teeth to show the pair of eyes on either side of his hand and then drove the Star-Razor through it. He buried his wince behind a tight, furious smile. “I’ve seen more of this world than you will ever have. My eyes have never been closed.”

The shattered bones screamed as he pulled his hand free and gripped it around the hilt of his sword. Blood dripped down onto the flesh beneath him to be devoured greedily, but it was the only taste of him this place would get. The Somnovem were down to two. They had already lost.

Vigilan threw up a shield to block his blow, the arcane force ringing up his arm and nearly causing him to drop the blade when the pain became nearly unbearable. Stupid move, really, but powerful. Sometimes sending a message was more important. His next blow came wreathed with a divine smite, shattering the shield into pieces as it came down, splitting Vigilan’s face open. Black ichor poured down a ruined white face, matting in long ivory hair, the pale flesh peeling in places to reveal he’d opened a sucking, puckered void, as dark as a starless night. The flesh knit itself together with horrific, sticky globs of flesh, but the eyes were uneven now, sliding down the perfect face, as if it was melting into nothing.

Elatis was struggling, trying to get to Molly, preying on the Nein who had been weakened in the previous fights. It occurred to Fjord how very exhausted he was, all things considered, but here he was, willing to bleed a little more, willing to get closer to this bastard, all in the name of saving them, because that was what his vigilance was for.

“You know what the difference between you and I is?” He snarled, dropping the sword, entirely. The man who taught him how to stand up for himself, how to fight for what was right, and how to steer a course by his heart- for all that he was messy and complex and made mistakes, he was mortal and mortals were hardly perfect, hardly the embodiment of their worst emotions- had taught him that some fights were only to be solved by fists, not blades.

He grabbed hold of Vigilan’s head. A spell detonated between them, singing Fjord’s beard enough to leave scars along his neck and patches where his beard would never grow in correctly again.

“You never protected them.” He drove his thumbs into his opponent’s eyes, the flesh giving as easily as pastry, ichor burning as it touched his skin, leaving long pale burns that he would carry alongside the matching scars on either side of his hand, like a closed eye. He drove his knee into Vigilan’s middle and watched the fleshy construct swallow the blow, but that only made Fjord’s following blows bolder, more savage, unconcerned with damaging himself in the melee. He smashed the head into rivulets of gore that streamed between his fingers, burning as they touched his open wounds and then began to tear and rip the leader of the Somnovem asunder with his bare hands- the great hound of the Somnovem felled by a far bigger and more protective guard dog.

Only when Vigilan’s remains lay in chunks, smashed under his booted feet did he drop to his knees beside his discarded sword and scream out the agony of his many wounds. A cool, shaking hand fell on his cheek, healing some of them, and then the body attached, having crawled all the way to him, ultimately collapsed weakly into his arms with the scent of mint and oleander permeating the air. He kissed the top of Jester’s head and the two of them fell to the side, too spent to do more than hold each other as their bodies gave out.

The fight was drawing to a close and even with all the victories at their hands, it was too early to promise they would get out in the end, that they would not be so weak that Cognouza would take them all in the end. All he could do was make sure no one hit Jester while she was down. If that was his last act, it was a vigilant one.

And wasn’t that how it all started? He saw it in that moment- a psychic flash that proved his point. Vigilan’s last act before his fall had been to warn his people, but it was already too late. Fjord threw himself upon the danger and willed it to take him first.

“What if we do die here and become the new Somnovem? We could have do this better,” he laughed, the joke ringing false, but gods if you couldn’t laugh at the horror of your misfortune, what could you laugh at?

Jester headbutted him weakly, the only sign she was still conscious. “No, we couldn’t. That’s the point. There’s no way to be just one thing right. We have to stay people, Fjord. No matter how it ends… We have to stay people. Gods have to stay in cages, we don’t.”

And with that powerful bit of wisdom, Fjord and Jester closed their eyes.

Molly floated in the white empty space of Cognouza’s dream-space, disoriented from his confrontation with Elatis. He hadn’t considered how he might pull himself free when it came down to the last moment. Direction was meaningless.

Maybe that was fine. Maybe if his soul was lost here, having delivered the last Somnovem from the hive, then everything would be fine. He could be satisfied with oblivion. It would be lonely, torturous, and awful, but at least his friends lived.

Moonweaver, can you hear me? Can you take me home? Am I done now?

The voices that answered him didn’t belong to her, but to thousands of disconnected voices, all speaking in unison, excitedly. They spoke different words in different languages and seemed thrilled that they weren’t committed to a singular language, a singular order of operations as dictated by their cruel masters.

The souls of Cognouza, free at last.

They pushed on him, guiding him, and he followed their lead towards a dark red spot on the horizon he had missed. They whispered their thank yous, told him more of their names, because they were still so happy that could remember them, and he hoped he could remember them well enough to tell Beau so she could write them down. These people suffered so much. They deserved to be remembered by name.

He tumbled back into his own consciousness with a gasp and whipped around to see the carnage laid before him. His friends were struggling to get to their feet, determined for one last stand against the furious, proud woman in red standing above them in the wreck of her greatest invention.

“It isn’t over until the last of us falls,” Elatis screamed. “Do you think you have the strength to challenge me? After what the others have done to you?”

Molly looked out at the ruin of his friends, all of them determined to keep going even when they were bleeding and broken. He had led them here to this fight. It was in loving him that made this their war. If he had never invited them to that f*cking circus, if he had never met them in that inn… There would have been fewer to brave this storm.

But the albatross yet lived and so this story would end happily. They hadn’t suffered and bled so much for it to come to nothing.

He pulled his swords from his belt and strolled through the wreckage, his eyes entirely on Elatis. Pride filled up his chest- not the selfish, dangerous pride that had awakened her barely nine days ago, but the pride in his friends. He smiled at each of them, fretted over their wounds with knitted brows, but mentally promised to kiss them all senseless when this was done. He could feel Lucien through the tether, close by, if not here, and grief-stricken, and that would have to be his first priority.

But first he had a wizard to kill.

Elatis tilted her chin up, defiantly, as he made his intentions plain. This was a duel- a proper one, something he rarely engaged with. “Well. You are mine, after all. It should come down to just us.”

She summoned a lance made out of pure magic and lunged. Molly met her with both blades, whipping and twirling, his haste spell having worn off ages ago and Summer’s Dance’s charges depleted. It was just him now, him and whatever blood magic he had left. Each time his blades struck the lance, Elatis’s form shivered and rippled like it was a struggle to hold herself together, but she managed, her fist fused to the magic blade- flesh and magecraft made one in the absence of any real substance to her form. She was mere will made out of flesh, dragged out of the comforts of an all-encompassing, deadly hive. More free than she had been in ages and too weak now to do much with it but fight until her will caught up with the rest of her and just f*cking died already.

But Molly was stubborn and willful and a damned good swordsman. He could keep up- and he did for a good while, but the difference between a being of will and a being of flesh and bone was that flesh and bone got exhausted and worn down and will persisted. Elatis was the strongest of the Somnovem, held together by her pride in this place. If this lair belonged to anyone, then it belonged to her and her alone. It bent to her in a way it didn’t for Molly, constantly tripping over bones and rocks and pieces of ancient metal until he eventually faltered and hit the ground.

The lance pressed into his chest, the magic sharp enough to draw blood, tracing a line down the scar from Lorenzo’s glaive. He bit back a whimper.

“Long live the new Cognouza,” Elatis purred.

Beau struck her with her staff so hard that her head completely spun around with no bones to break or stop it. She staggered back and it slid back into place with a disgusting pop, the smashed in flesh of the left side of her face sloughing off, leaving a void with a single red eye. She started to whirl, to drive the lance towards Beau and suddenly Caduceus was there to prevent the blow from being critical. Yasha pulled Molly to his feet and gave him the last of her healing.

“You got this, Molly,” she whispered.

Caleb stepped in, pressing a bloodied kiss to his forehead, followed by a single pearl that vanished into dust that peppered his nose and almost made him sneeze. Jester, Fjord, and Veth slid in to offer their support.

Elatis drove Beau to her knees, prepared to drive the lance down and decapitate her and Molly bit his hand and invoked his last blood curse- Blood Curse of the Eyeless. Just like last time.

Only this time his knees didn’t buckle, his vision didn’t gray- Yasha’s healing prevented it. He could have laughed or cried, but he was too exhausted to do either. Later. Time for that later.

The Moonweaver’s voice echoed in his head, either a memory or her presence coming through now that the Somnovem were at their weakest. Trust your heart.

“You’re wrong, Elatis. I’m not yours,” he spat as she stumbled back, her attack missing Beau entirely. “I’m theirs.”

The black ichor left Elatis’s eyes just in time for her to see the seven adventurers who started this journey staring back at her, bloodied but determined.

He smiled. “We’re the Mighty Nein. Long may we reign.”

With a single sword blow, the last of the Somnovem fell, unmourned. Cognouza only breathed a sigh of relief.

And the chains holding it went slack as an ancient being lost interest and slunk back to its shadows to wait out its vengeance.