Chapter 2.1: The Siege of Safeholme

[Straken]

The Cottage

This was right. One last bellowing boom of a bark rattled the cottage as the thief began to bolt. Alva bounded down the stairs and reached the ground floor in two leaps. As the adolescent mastiff rounded the corner from the hall into the living space where the thief had run he remained prepared for a confrontation. Confirm the cottage was clear, and then he would stand vigilant at the door.



The Grounds

If the revenant Mealla was phased by the collapse of her disrespected corpse it gave no sign of it. She no longer faced a single opponent, now there were two; and those two looked mobile. Her pinpoint focus broadened, her feet squared more towards the wraiths, and her saber now gripped in two hands as its point raised above and behind her head; showcasing the curiously long hilt.

Not waiting for the wraiths to close in, Mealla rushed forward with a flurry of broad arching swings. Flowing like the wind, the master duelist struck out with several swings. There were no breaks or sudden stops as each move led into the next. Similarly her feet never stopped moving. Every step was deliberate, every strike practiced a thousand times before. This was her last opportunity to prove the merit of her life’s accomplishments. This was her swan song, and her form was beautiful.



The Wilderwood

Skarnir’s heart was gripped tighter with contention than his body was by encroaching vines. His brain, or rather the voice in it, told him to leave. His heart told him to hold the line and fight to the last man. His body was being told to die. Conflict rose within him, and the inability to reach a consensus caused friction. His head ordered his heart, and his heart howled at his head. They did however have a mutual foe. The vines threatened to make both his head and his heart irrelevant, and above all else Skarnir as an entity refused to ever become irrelevant. Red began to grow on the peripherals of his vision, and his clenched jaw risked shattering teeth. Skarnir’s rage was surfacing.

The howling of his heart became a thunderous roar that rose from his chest before reverberating through the woods and valley. There was no declaration, no posturing, no bragging, nor story being carried by his voice. Simply a pure, bestial fury. Flexing every fiber of his body every muscle, tendon, and joint strained to a point that would have torn tissue of a normal man. But Skarnir was strong. Every single one of them. The spirit would not break, and the spirit forced the body to fight until it couldn’t possibly fight any longer. Which was where his gear came in.

Even without his gear Skarnir was herculean, but his storied past of great triumphs brought with it more than a large reputation; it also brought a veritable hoard of loot and trinkets. In this particular instance, fueled by rage and sheer force of determination, Skarnir felt a heat from his waist. His Belt of Giant’s Strength was kicking in. The sound of roaring and straining leather and mail was joined by the sound of tearing foliage. His off hand tore free, which he used to pull oat his long knife. The vines and the thorns were ripped and cut as the armored titan of a man caught sight of his assailant and refused to be hindered. He had slaughtered bigger foes who had gotten in his way; of men, spirits, beasts, and even gods. The voice in his head told him to leave, but his heart was roaring that he needed to complete his duty; false gods must be slain. Raising his sword, Skarnir made to strike.

The blade never fell though. Or at least the sword’s blade didn’t. In Skarnir’s off hand he still clutched his knife, and the knife had been stabbed in between some of the scales of his own armor. Skarnir’s roaring subsided into growling, and eventually into grunts of exertion. The rage faded from his eyes, his mind tempered by pain. He had been given an order, and while he may not like it he wouldn’t disobey it. Sword raised now in a defensive stance, Skarnir moved to leave with the one that had given him his directive.

[Kokuten]

Modeka jumped as Skarnir tore himself from the viney prison she had made for him. The man seemed to ignore her, carrying himself away from the fight. Gripped by madness, she was unsure what he was now, and she began hobbling to her knees. Vicious memories tore at her mind, waking nightmares of betrayal. Death. Betrayal. Death. Betrayal. Hate. Hate Hate Hate.

”Mmngh…" Modeka's voice piped up under the band that muffled it.

Armor.

Years ago, when she served Percival Caxton in his time as a summoner, Modeka never spoke.

Sword.

If she did, a single word would put anyone within earshot asleep. It was how she sent the Menagerie to the Elementalia the first time.

Rage.

Now, her power was diminished, twisted. Something held her back, and it was why these days her snarls would bring on drowsiness at best, sleep at worst.

It's him.

The twisted vines at Modeka's feet began to coil and tighten into a gnarled shaft with two handles. At the end of the shaft formed a curved blade, turning it into something akin to a tool for harvesting grain. With a fierce intensity, Modeka tore over the grass as it carried her like waves on water. She clawed the mask from her face, and brought the scythe in a swift arc to Skarnir's legs, shrieking.

"AURUS!"

[Kai]

In the time it took for the Arcanist to call for a retreat, that indescribable something, the feeling of power beyond simple magic emitting from the ball of ice Miyuki had enshrouded herself with, seemed complete. Suddenly, the glowing force of blue light from within dimmed, not slowly, but suddenly, and the ball itself just as suddenly seemed to disappear with a cracking explosion, except, it had not simply disappeared. Shattered into thousands upon thousands of diamond-hard shards, it had flung with immense force all about the grounds- The shards somehow missing the defenders; even the giant dragon. In the center of where the sphere had been, Miyuki hovered, floating gracefully above the ground with whisps of frozen mist lazily wafting down from her. Her eyes had been taken by that ice blue glow from before, and the seam along her arm where it met her prosthetic also glowed, the artificial limb itself sporting the runes and spell inscriptions that allowed it to work in that same blue.

"You. You come here, You hurt my friends, You hurt the people I love, the place I love, the memories of those we held dear who have departed? You trample on this sacred institution of learning, and then simply run? I think not." Miyuki growled, her voice low and quiet, and yet echoing in the ears and minds of all those around.

She reached her had forward, and a skeletal, crystalized arm of ice even larger than that of a giant's appeared, grasping at the Arcanist, all the while a feeling of cold dread descended over the grounds. It was as if in instant, the Osakan fall had become a permafrosted tundra, one that felt more of the cool rage of a blizzard than the fiery passion of a volcano. It gripped at everyone, even those in the menagerie, but mostly, it gripped the arcanist with a feeling of a power that very few had ever witnessed, and even less had been able to return from witnessing.

Even Miyuiki's familiars, deep beneath the grounds, felt the frost, and they huddled together for warmth, ceasing their underground onslaught. They had known, all those years ago when that teenage girl had first found them and become their master, that she was strong, that she held more power than it seemed, but even this was beyond the guardian beasts' wildest expectations. The was no simple master. No simple human. Within Miyuki's veins flowed the blood of a god.

And it had awakened.

[Gwathdraug]

The elementalist's mass of earth ripped through the head of the dragon; the white flesh of the great wyrm offering no resistance against the projectile and clinging to it as it passed through as if it had only been so much mist. Falling out from the rapidly dwindling body, Riley hit the ground on her knees and only managed to stay upright by leaning heavily against Dyrnwyn as the flaming blade sunk into the ground.

She'd relinquished her body that had required such a glut of mana to support it. But, the arcanist's binding was still linking all the gathered power to her despite it having no place to flow towards.

If nothing changed it would become the arcanist's weapon.

Trying to bring a draconic word into being in this body was nothing but pain and heat and acid that forced her muscles to twist and heave and empty her stomach. Giving herself no time to recover the stage magician twisted her lips and spoke:

Burn.

Dyrnwyn's blue flames frantically twisted to embrace and protect its wielder as all the mana that had been trapped between the enemy leader and the dragon caught fire. Riley was engulfed and swallowed from view as the area where she knelt become a roar of red and yellow screaming out against Miyuki's blizzard.

--

Riley pulled their talon'd hand free from the earth and the circuit they had created with the school's leyline. The air around them shimmered with heat distortions. Burns and blisters broke out spontaneously against their skin and just as fast embers and sparks shed out from the wounds and caused them to disappear. The process was a broken loop repeating over and over again.

Their throat was too dry. Their lungs too hot. The stage magician couldn't do anything - couldn't make anything - as they quietly folded in on themself their claws digging bloodily into their leg.

--

The mageslayer's knife was caught - blade first - in Lyra's fist. Blood freely ran down the large woman's hand from where she had stopped the thrown weapon from biting into the flesh of her neck. She had begun to move before her enemy's enchanted blade had even begun to reverse and had slammed the flying sword out of the air by sending her own weapon whirling into its flight path.

The swordswoman tossed aside the knife she had caught without slowing down and with a singular focus that ignored the wraiths at his back she was suddenly in the mageslayer's face. Grabbing him by his armour with her uninjured hand Lyra drew the man forward as she caught him with a skull shaking headbutt.

[Mr. Blackbird Lore]

Time Slowed for a Surreal Moment

This was not a magical dilation of time, but a biological one as both the menagerie and their attackers sensed the criticality of the moment. The scene was frenetic, hellish. Gathered at Safeholme in that frozen flash of time were some of the world's greatest mages of a dozen different arts, from raw arcana to academic alchemy. Everyone was either committed to one of their greatest feats, or a corpse growing cold. The Siege of Safeholme would be historic, regardless of the outcome: another reminder in the mystic annals of why such forces should not be brought to belligerence. And the outcome would soon be known. It all hinged on this moment.

The Ravaged Festival Grounds

Frost streaked down from the sky from the staff of a fire-blessed, demon-winged warlock. Some intuition in the smallest player on this stage of giants told her to wait, to look closer. She squinted and a man without a shirt seemed to simply appear in the air. He grew with frightening speed and had eyes only for Professor Caxton. She turned the heavy revolver toward this newest threat and pulled the trigger.

CRACK!

The bullet went low, striking the AXETONNE in the shoulder plate. The alchemecha was suddenly twelve inches elsewhere. The kineticist's only reaction was a widening of the eyes as his target deftly slipped away.

A man crashed into the earth with force nearly equal to an alchemical airship falling out of the sky. Packed into such a small form factor, that energy drove him deep into the earth. Or, it would have. But like everyone else in this conflict, he was a master of his art. In the last moments before impact, he thrust as much of the energy outward from his impact. The soil rippled like a still pond, and an oval-shaped basin formed around the impact site, at least eight feet deep and twenty feet across at its greatest length. It was an imperfect shape, though, like a surfboard with a perfectly circular bite taken out of one side. At the epicenter of that figurative bite mark was Tanuki Issei, a field of chaotic mana pulsing out around her.

The kineticist looked up in time to see her pull the trigger a second time. Furious, he threw a punch. In a mundane context, it would have been comical: she was at least fifteen feet away. But as a kineticist, he was capable of condensing his physical exertion into a laser-focused channel of energy that would punch a hole through an inch of steel. Thwarting a bullet was- pardon the pun- child's play with the amount of energy he had stolen.

But this bullet was treated in ghostwater, a manaphobic substance. The heat-wave lance of kinetic energy burst and fizzled out on first contact. The kineticist merely scowled and closed his eyes. The bullet took him clean through the heart, and he collapsed with barely a sound.

Far above, the warlock continued her dive. She had expected the AXETONNE to endure her second strike as well as the first. In preparation, she had spun her staff over. With an instinctive push of mana, it transformed into a thin-bladed sword, as twisted and gnarled as the staff it had once been, and a glimmering purple gem in the pommel. Its many edges began to glow red-hot like a freshly forged rod. Uninterrupted, she was poised to drive her blade home through the AXETONNE's canopy and Percival's precious brain.

In another world, just a hundred yards away, many strange and wonderful things happened nearly at once. Mealla leaped into what was believed to be her final foray. The last dance of a dying druid. Then, a necromancer died. As she leaped forward, the sudden freedom- and loss of coordination- was enough to disrupt the wraiths. In only four strokes she had felled them both and advanced on Brenya Lillibloom.

Fearful hands rose to shield her from a decapitating blow. Mealla halted her strike, confused. Brenya uncovered herself, then looked at her hands, as if seeing them for the first time. "This... Is most unusual," she commented. Then she barked a laugh. It was the laugh of a dead woman's genuine joy. Tears sprang at the corner of the walking corpse's eyes as she gingerly took the hand of the druid's shadow and drew her to kneel beside her former body.

"You're going back." Without another word, the undead nurse of Safeholme began the most complex spell she'd ever performed, untangling Mealla's soul from the shadow-host, rebinding it to its original body, summoning the other splinter of her soul, and healing the body-- almost all simultaneously.

The Center of the Festival Grounds

The mageslayer had slain his last mage. He would never take another life. He wouldn't even live long enough to witness the awe-inspiring, earth-shattering, spectacle of power that defied description. His eyes couldn't focus; his hands couldn't find purchase on a weapon or trinket; his legs couldn't hold still. The only thing he could undeniably do was focus on the spike of agony lodged in his chest as Lyra drove one of his own venomous daggers into his chest once, twice, thrice. The needle-point shards of ice that struck him were unnecessary but carried enough force to pull him free of Lyra's grip and toss him several feet.

The elementalist had closed the gap between herself and the dragon-turned-performer on her winds. Before she could strike, however, she was engulfed in flame and beleaguered by dozens of lethal, frozen crystals. As the flames withered, a bloodied but still conscious elementalist was revealed. The fire in her eyes burned brighter than ever-- and then was snuffed out as the exhaustion of fending off simultaneous assaults from a true dragon and an ice goddess proved too much for even her. She collapsed, alive and much the worse for wear.

"AURUS!" The armored miniature man heard his name; he saw that his ally was in no further need; and he sprinted toward the call without hesitation. Even though he knew the demons of his past had come to call. He charged onward, toward fate, to--

The Edge of the Wilderwood

Aurus's armored forearm first blocked the strike for Skarnir, then looped through the crook of the scythe and he twisted his body to pull Modeka off balance. "I'm here," he declared in a low growl, quite contrary to his usual bombastic baritone. The little gods stared each other down as ice whistled through the air, slicing clean through leaves and branches. Debris slowly drizzled slowly to the earth around them.

A cold wind blew. The leaves and debris froze mid-air and clattered like tiny, breaking bells on delicate crystals of grass. What had already slowed was now a fraction of a moment, almost truly frozen, as the Ice Queen unleashed the entirety of her power.

A torus of mana whipped up around the arcanist, deflecting the many missiles aimed his way before dissipating. The sudden shift in the tide of battle was not only unexpected, it was absolutely unprecedented. A team of nearly a dozen of the East's greatest war mages had crumbled in minutes. But they had proven the menagerie was not invincible, and their friends were soft, supple targets.

Deeply glowing tentacles whipped out of the Wilderwood and snatched Skarnir away before this one victory could be stolen. With a smirk, the arcanist looked up at Miyuki and answered simply, "Yes." Then he thrust a torrent of mana before him, gouging the earth and rocketing himself away after the kidnapped warrior. Riley sagged with relief as he relinquished their tether; she could also sense his grim amusement and reluctance as they separated.

A Frozen Moment

These few seconds were pivotal in the secret world. They would change the course of history. They would be studied and reviewed and audited and examined and second-guessed and armchaired until the original actions and intent could only be imagined. This snapshot would be dissected and dismantled and rearranged and from it would be extrapolated a dozen hundred thousand different, "What ifs?"

What if the necromancer had not been slain in the midst of his spell? What if Brenya Lillibloom had not survived Shadow-Mealla's attack? What if the elementalist had snuffed her pride and focused on the true threat from Miyuki? What if the mageslayer had chosen his amulet instead of his knife? What if Aurus had not missed the second thief, and thus never come to the battlefield? What if Tanuki had perished in the fall and never drawn the alchemical pistol? What if Modeka or Miyuki had been captured by the mind spell instead?

What if the necromancer's fall hadn't triggered his hell grenade?

Reflections in Flame

The contents of the crystalline flask exploded. An unholy conflagration of fire, brimstone, death energy, and darkness erupted in all directions. The necromancer's body and the shadow hound were less than a memory after that instantaneous flash. So were the souls he still held captive-- like the splinter of Mealla.

"Hold on!" Brenya cried as she somehow found the willpower and fortitude to weave a second spell during her first, throwing up a glowing dome around the two women and the body between them. The world outside that golden hemisphere was searing crimson and acrid black, like liquid fire and living smoke. It consumed everything around them.

Aurus's kineticist victim was next, simply evaporating in the leading heat wave. Then came the elementalist's body, picked up and pulled apart into individual molecules.

The others had that singular moment to process what had happened and what desperate measure they would take to survive. Lyra had little more than her own disruptive powers and the myriad trinkets on the dead mageslayer. Tanuki had even less: she sprinted desperately toward Percival Caxton, whose incredible intellect had to calculate her safety, the trajectory of the twisted blade looming above, and the AXETONNE's capacity for death magic. In an ironic twist of fate, Riley was blessed with an incredible surge of power as elements of fire and darkness responded to the dragon within and the Dyrnwyn blade, supercharging both. By comparison, the physical harm of the death energy surrounding her was minor.

Floating above the carnage, safe in her blizzard's aura, Miyuki could do little more than watch as the yard of Safeholme and a half dozen of her dear friends were consumed in an eldritch blast of seismic proportions. The pair of gods, too, were swept over and disappeared within the infernal explosion.

Beyond those lives, Safeholme itself strained under the onslaught of all that force and power. Patios cracked and buckled. The tents of the fair disintegrated. Food, chairs, utensils: gone, leaving no trace of the joy and community that had been present only minutes-- MINUTES-- ago! Trees nearest the detonation left patterns in the ash. Farther away, they burned like effigies in a funeral pyre. Those caught somewhere in the middle were disfigured shadows of their former selves, aflame also, and soon to be ash. The school mansion groaned. Cracks split the foundation and the walls; windows burst like fractal zits; but she held together. Far in its cozy corner of the territory, the groundskeeper's cottage was singed black along one side and all those grenade-facing windows were blown in. Alva, barked wildly at the startling sound and bounded over to investigate.

The wards of this wizarding school could only do so much. Though the others were contending with far too much to sense the change, the Chosen of Babylon could feel the barrier shrink. The Wilderwood was the first to be sacrificed by the shrinking wards. And beyond the wards, she was sure, even the insensitive mundies could feel the incredible quakes and shakes of world-shattering magic. In the quiet and stillness of the cold, she could perceive the far-reaching consequences of this absurd, outlandish, unforgivable battle.

And there would be hell to pay.

[Kokuten]

Percival had forgotten what it was like to be in a battle. Years of wasting away, waiting for death, had dulled his senses, but had left his intellect, thankfully intact. Precious moments were lost just trying to understand why the kineticist never struck. There was a theory to why he had moved exactly twelve inches, but his instincts weren't sharp enough. Percival was a lecturer fumbling in the field with warriors.

The sickness in his stomach was made worse by his real form trying to catch up with his husk. Teleporting, even shifting like this always imposed nausea.

Looking back, he could see the welt in the earth left by the shirtless bastard. The clarion sounds of gunfire from Tanuki's direction helped confirm his theory. He would have turned to her aid immediately, but the warlock was on her descent, coming to deliver his death.

"It's just you, Watson," remarked Percival, quietly, "no one here to save you…"

It was then that the unmistakable tenor of a hell grenade rattled his ears. "... just you, old bean."

Much like a computer, Percival processed equations on a stack. Each problem was arrayed, sorted and then processed so that each element was accounted for. Tanuki was running toward him, and that time had to be factored. She was only so large, and outside the frame she would need an adequate amount of protection. The solution? Ghostwater. How much? The reagents of a hell grenade varied, but Percival could guess by the spread and the initial crack. At least a quarter of the shield's contents would be sufficient. How to bleed the contents of the shield?

The solution was right above him. The Warlock. Her probable angle and descent were considered. She was coming to kill him, so it was a simple matter of reversing the approach. Now he needed to alter it. Probability of hitting her? Low. Agile, young, filled with brimstone and evil. She needed to be redirected at the last possible moment. He simulated the shot a few times in his mind, before lining up the right numbers. If he cut the flow cycle of the ghostwater, she would penetrate it just so, without disrupting her magic.

Solved.

"Under the shield!" roared the AXETONNE, as its only actions were to raise the shield laterally. Percival waited only a couple heartbeats more, raising the cannon and discharging the large, glass alchemical container up at the Warlock. It was fired just so that she'd need to redirect her strike to the shield or take a massive glass bottle to the face. The Alchemist ensured enough lead time to guide her to the shield.

The warlock's magic would last long enough to ruin the piping and spill the ghostwater on Tanuki below. Soaked, the young girl would be spared the effect of the magic.

As for Percival, and perhaps the Warlock. Well. Barring any unaccounted variables, they would both die.

[Straken]

The armored form of Skarnir paused as he was perplexed by the scene in front of him. Why in the world was the Erlking helping him fight the Ancient Dryad? Regardless, it gave him an opening to return to his fight with Auril. Hopefully Stormy hadn’t gotten too full of himself again, but it seemed to be his best skill. Alas, however, the day would get weirder as it appeared he was now being abducted by MIND-FLAYERS.

“Come on! Not again!” Skarnir bellowed as he lost his feet and tried desperately to grab at some foliage. Without his axe he might actually have a tough time fending off the aberrations.



From within the dome Mealla could do little besides sit in stunned silence. Her mind raced, but all of the thoughts tripped over themselves to the point where she barely registered the conflagration beyond Brenya’s dome. She felt numb, she felt sick, she felt… horrified. A hand drifted to the place where she had been run through by a spike. She’d been impaled. She had died. Even beyond that she had been turned into a damn zombie and a wraith. Then, after all that, amid all the other absolutely insanity going on around her, she’d been resurrected. How in the world was she supposed to come back from that? She wretched. Looking over at Lilybloom, Mealla’s eyes were distant and pleading to know why this was happening to her.


Nope. Things were wrong again. Things got loud, and not the normal loud. Louder even then the rowdy people outside have been. And they broke the windows!? Not on Alva’s watch! The booming barks began once more as the towering adolescent mastiff stood in the safety of the stairwell. Once the tumult had died down he hurried downstairs once more. It was a disaster. The windows had broken, and the blast had scattered a lot of stuff. Dad was not going to like this, considering how much Alva had been scolded when he had pulled a nice towel off of the counter to chew on. Dad was outside, but he might need Alva’s help since Alva was great at standing by Dad’s leg and looking mean. How to get outside though? The windows were now open, surely to let Alva out to help scold people for breaking the windows.

Yelp. The ground by the window hurt now. The windows didn’t used to hurt Alva when he pressed his nose against them, but maybe the windows just didn’t like being on the ground. Plodding back out of the room, Alva eventually returned with a blanket in tow. Blankets always made Alva feel better, so maybe the window will feel better with a blanket too. A few twists of Alva’s head and the blanket had most of the ground window covered. A quick step and the window didn’t bite Alva. Blankets always work. Hopping his front legs up towards the window, Alva sniffed away at the opening. Alva sneezed. He didn’t like how it smelled outside, but that just made him want to go help Dad more. A few tentative hops, and then a quick backup, and then Alva changed and jumped through the opening left by now ground window.

Alva froze as he landed. Outside was worse than inside. Was this a new outside? This wasn’t his outside. His outside was green and smelled like Dad’s flowers. This outside hurt his nose. This was wrong. Worry began to fill the young dog. Alva glanced back. His house was gone. Sure there was a house there, but looked wrong and smelled worse. Panting, Alva looked around. Alva began barking. Where was Dad? Where was Dad?!

[Gwathdraug]

Lyra let go of what had been a knife as the body of the dead mageslayer disintegrated in front of her. There were no licking flames or roar of an inferno in her silent world. Everything in perception had been reduced to an undulating, undifferentiated mass of destruction with as close as she had been to the point of explosion. Her mana thrashed and squeezed and fought beneath her skin as the foreign power sought entrance - made every attempt to find somewhere she was not whole.

Whether the ground beneath her feet ceased to be or if she had been lifted off of it was impossible to tell as the incompatible existences built up tangible, physical force against her body.

The swordswoman's vision went black - joining the emptiness of sound - as she was accelerated out of the boiling, explosive cloud like a rod from a railgun and slammed back first through the wall of the cottage Alva had just left.

--

A long time ago in a dark beneath the earth that had no entrance or exit a dragon starved and feasted upon its own flesh down to the bone. The shadow left behind could not remember and made pacts in trade for the names, memories, and deaths of the living. Each treasure won was ill-fitting. Each life worn was worn in turn until the dark only remained. The creature that could not be called a dragon was a broken soul.

There is a memory in which a sister who would not follow and a brother who had to leave meet again after they both broke a childhood promise. The room where they meet has no entrance or exit and exists in a darkness that is not the dark for in it eyes can still see. The girl juggles five balls: red, blue, green, yellow, and grey. The boy worries because these balls are more her than she is sometimes herself. The girl smiles because she can explain. She has broken her soul.

In a place that was, and was not, a dragon and a girl met each other for the sake of a brother. In the face of god, goddess, and wyrm the two filled the cracks found in each other. Their story ends in a field of sun far from the dark neither dead- yet, when they left for home there was only one. As is often in tales of love two had created something new.

--

The death from the hell grenade came for Riley before the fire and darkness. She was in her swirling mass of fire - a statue in repose against her flaming blade. They were blood and pain and animal struggle writhing in pain against the earth.

The death came first. Shrapnel of souls, twisted and tortured and trailing so much dark, giggling and trumpeting and screaming around the stage magician. They cooed at her flames and embraced her destruction. They accepted their pain as their own. The souls recognised this magician and came as heralds to share their joke.

Knock, knock. Their own fires were coming. Could she stop them?

Riley's talons left their leg and clawed and pushed through shadow instead of earth as they pushed themself to their feet. The stage magician unfolded herself from the dark formed between a child and a mech. The sparks bleeding from Riley's wounds were already twinkling to nothing as they loosed their control of the burns forming across their body.

Tendrils of smoke began to drift off from the magician's black "SWEET MERCHANT" t-shirt and Riley ripped it off and draped it over Tanuki's head before it could catch alight. "Don't watch kid."

From their right hip, across their ribs, and engulfing their arm Riley's skin cracked, blackened, and tore as spurts of flame bursts through their skin. In her cocoon of fire, far away, the stage magician screamed as she willed Dyrnwyn's protection away from her right side. The pain had a purpose. The pain was purpose.

Their feet stumbled them past where Percy stood in his armour his shield raised high. The fight against the warlock was one he would win. Riley straightened their body and looked back towards their brother. The young woman's smile was lit from beneath by the torch of their own body. "Heya, Watson." The words said couldn't contain all they needed to say. He had run and she hadn't followed. He wasn't running now.

Riley looked away. Their breath came out as steam - heavy and burning but necessary. Lifting their burning arm to eye level the stage magician made a fist in the center of their vision with blackened fingers and then pulled.

The death, the broken souls, the destruction, the fire all knew the stage magician - knew this necromancer. The gouts of flame breaking through their shattered skin turned the purple-red of exposed viscera and sputtered with smoke that was more shadow than dust. The burns flared hotter and hotter as they were bound not with bandages but instead became a binding against the pieces of souls bursting out from the hell grenade.

The axe slams into pallid flesh ripping arcs of black blood through the air as it strikes again and again. Useless. Impotent. The weapon can no more fight the being in front of me than it can fight the empty home with empty halls never to be filled with the sound of little footsteps ever again. The necromancer's cold fingers rot the weapon from out of my grip and find my throat. He took everyth-

Wrath. The shrapnel of a soul that was once whole is pulled into the burns and the fire spreads. Pain creeps across Riley's shoulder and collar bone.

In front of Percy a red reflection of his sibling joins his sister. Like the ball so long ago it is her and it carves another degree of safety out of the blast for him.

Tears catch in the wrinkles of my face. Everything is sore and dry and it shouldn't still hurt but it hurts deeper than an eternity of torment. The old have buried the young again and again in a graveyard that stretches beyond the horizon. The old have buried the young again and again until there is no one old left. No village. Just me. Snow drifts across grave markers and I watch it until it takes me back to them.

Sorrow. Blue joins at the side of red and the gap widens.

I push the body off of me. Dead. Dead. Dead. Laughter bubbles in my chest and only blood passes past my lips. The ground meets me and I suck in shallow breaths against it. The wealth. The wealth of the body I dream of as the dagger the body left in my stomach kills me. I am rich now and that means death is a happy thing.

Green Envy with a sneer on its face joins into the line of protection as flames dance through the skin of its throat.

There is joy. Something great and bright and so consuming it can't remember itself. It can't remember shapes or sounds. But, there was joy. And it had been ended. It had been captured and scrubbed and chained away from everything important. But, it was still joy. It was still joy when it shouldn't be.

Yellow stands next to green. A phalanx of two colours to either side with Riley in the middle. The hell grenade has not been consumed. The explosion still roils and burns, but it has been cut. The slice in which the AXETONNE and Tanuki stand the air is still.

A final spectre blooms out of the shadows. Like the other's this one is Percy's sister, only grey. Logic he would remember. There is no memory for this one. She is the girl that broke her soul and it is right that she is here as herself with the other broken souls.

The grey doppelganger steps forward and past his shield and armour, close enough now that Percy can see the flames taking and changing the eye on the right side of its face. Then it is all gone as his sister steps through the AXETONNE and folds him into a hug.

--

Once upon a time a father burned for his own ego and withdrew from the world. Once upon a time a sister burned for their love and stood tall.