It felt strange, the stillness.

  It was over. For so long, every moment had borne such a terrible weight: the psychic assault, the battle around me, the fulfillment and reassessment of every tactical decision. Now these things fell away from me like a layer of shed skin, and I looked around at the cavern and felt like a newborn.

  My ears rang. Gradually I became more and more aware of the many kinds of pain that seeped into my body. The flesh around my shoulder was cooked black: I pulled my arm free of the shell’s crevice and saw that it was mostly gone, a twisted stump that ended above where the elbow had been.

  I turned, sat, and rested against the shell behind me. Every breath that I took seemed to help me discover a new source of agony: healing myself meant the discovery of more and more.

  Luthiel landed before me. Past him I could sense that the arachnids did little more than breathe, not even able to maintain their balance without their master. The function of their minds had been obliterated to aide in Palimpsest’s domination.

  Perhaps for safety, Luthiel killed those around us with rapidity and ease, breaking into their bodily claims and shaping their own held mana to freeze the water in their brains.

  He knelt. “Are you all right, Aziriel?”

  In response, I hissed in pain. I had begun to remake my hand—finger bones were growing inside musculature that was trying to knit itself together around them. Just a few more moments, I told him.

  Zirilla landed next to me a few moments later. “Elemental’s dead.”

  I nodded. Palimpsest probably couldn’t have permanently destroyed its mind the way they had with these other creatures. When I’d killed them, the elemental had likely begun behaving erratically, but stayed hostile.

  I took a few more breaths against Palimpest’s shell, wincing as the skin grew back over my hand.

  It was over, but it wasn’t over: the sheer number of things that we had to do now that Palimpsest was dead was staggering. The rewards would be great, but we had to act quickly. And no-one was going to do a better job of driving the elves toward the labors ahead but me.

  My face slowly spread into a smile. It was a relief to be free of the psychic assault for good.

  For the first time, I read the messages that the Verse had given me when Palimpsest died:

  Your level limit has increased to 36!

  + 1 633 385 Essence, 4 [Boon]

  Four levels’ worth of limit for finishing this fight. And the essence… assuming a fourth-tier class, Palimpsest had been above level 60. I reached into the boons, examining their magical texture… [Mind 5], [Sight 5], and various [Wild] aspects.

  What was more, one of the boons contained a [Stasis 5]... not an easy aspect to find, and an incredibly powerful tool when it came to defending against elementals.

  “[Stasis 5]. [Mind 5],” I said, nodding to myself. We hadn’t found any [Mind] aspects out in the wild, meaning we’d had to rely on the [*Mind] cores of all our telepaths to form all our [Mind]-containing abilities.

  “The mind-seeds also all grant [Mind],” Luthiel said. “They are separate lifeforms from Palimpsest.”

  “Okay,’ I said, nodding my head and rising. Back to work it was—Luthiel would have somewhere he was going, with this. “The seedlings. Tell me what you know.”

  “There’s some guesswork involved in my conclusions,” he said. “But they are, in my judgement, good guesses.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said.

  “The smaller seed-nodes that we fought were Palimpsest’s species,” Luthiel continued. “Perhaps their own offspring. Like the other creatures that Palimpsest subverts, they were extensively psychically conditioned, but in different ways: their minds are dysfunctional without their master, but still contain much more sophisticated thoughts than these other minions.”

  “They bore some of the cognitive load,” I said.

  He nodded. “I expect so. My guess is that Palimpsest themself commanded the living creatures, but the seed-nodes managed all or most of the connection that led back to Palimpsest. The living creatures have their minds shaped so that the simplest, least taxing commands can control them. And their ability to put creatures in some kind of stasis-induced hibernation meant that they had an extraordinary capacity for subjugated minions.”

  “Well I’ll say it, since you two haven’t,” said Zirilla. “This is unlike anything we’ve ever seen. This is a single lifeform that functions almost like a living necromancer, but can perhaps even command more troops in the field.”

  “There are a great many parallels,” said Luthiel. “And since we’re offering commentary….” He took a step toward the smoking shell behind me, eyes slowly moving up its height. “The existence of this creature is horrifying.”

  “Aye,” I said.

  “Fascinating, of course,” he said. “But until today the most troubling eventuality that the colony might have faced was either a rampaging elemental or an errant, intelligent behemoth. Palimpsest….”

  “They wanted elves because it saw how we build and what we were capable of,” I said. “They wanted technology, and when it became clear they couldn’t have it, they feared us enough to want us dead. Their nature seemingly made them impossible to negotiate with, and their psychic ability meant that they found us before we found them—and likely had days to prepare their assault.”

  I looked at the smoking shell in the center of the room, my eyes hard. “Yes, I’d say this creature is now the top of our threat model. The next question is whether they developed intelligence through exposure to mana, or whether we can expect to find these beings everywhere.”

  “It’s too hard to say for now,” Luthiel said. “The sympathetic bond between two seed-nodes seems like something an intelligent mind would need to conceive of. And yet how would Palimpsest craft such a thing on their own, with no access to prior knowledge?”

  “A troubling question,” I said.

  “Yet with so much primeval mana here, the wildlife likely undergoes so many adaptations that we should expect to see things we’ve never seen before. A plant that, even though it is unintelligent, manages enchantments as sophisticated as our own? It is not inconceivable.”

  I nodded, considering all of this as I looked at the shadow of the great shell ahead of me. “We need to harvest what we can,” I said at last. “Zirilla and I can work on getting me out of here and Luthiel can reap the chambers.” I turned to look at him. “What did you gain from the seed-nodes in the other chamber?”

  “A few rank 3 and 4 boons from each,” he said. “A scant few contain [Stasis]. The rest are [Mind] and aspects that I expect are less valuable to us.”

  “Well,” Zirilla said, smiling. “We needed some good news today, yeah?”

  [Mind] keys meant psychic power for everyone. If we could harvest them all….

  “How many seed-nodes in this network of caverns?” I asked Zirilla.

  “Almost a hundred.”

  An eager joy began rising in my gullet. “And each of them corresponds to a node somewhere outside?”

  “They do,” said Luthiel. Following my thought process, he added: “And without Palimpsest to shield their locations.”

  “We can find them all,” I said. “Find them, kill them, and search their environs for any more stored soldiers.”

  Who knew how many creatures were lying dormant or useless in caverns below the earth, waiting for any predator to come along and feast upon them now that their master was dead?

  “We want to move fast,” I said. “We have only so many elves to hunt out Palimpsest’s leavings, and it’s not clear how long it will take to get it all done. If their stored minions are like the beetles I found when I first arrived here, then wandering predators and insects could find and spoil them. If they’ve come out of whatever stasis they’re kept in, time will do that.”

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  “I’ll begin harvesting parts from and cataloguing the seedlings,” Luthiel said.

  “Good,” I said. “I want that essence and I want those keys. What we’ve already gathered just by defending ourselves is likely more than what we’d gain from weeks of hunting and keyshaping. If we can hunt out all their nodes, Palimpsest could set us forward by a year.”

  We set to work. Luthiel no longer needed to freeze the whole of a cave to kill everything in it, and very quickly he had killed everything in our current chamber. Zirilla followed the airflow to find which caverns were providing the ventilation, and soon we were led back to another perforated wall through which we could access the grand chamber at the base of the pit.

  Soon it was broken, and I emerged not far from the enormous pile of detritus left by the focused cave-in that Palimpsest had engineered in an attempt to stop our arrival.

  I left her with Zirilla so that he would have someone capable not just of excavation, but sound judgement when it came to avoiding cave-ins.

  “Don’t send anyone out without coming to get me first,” she said. “We’re going to need to invent a whole host of protocols for delving now that there’s a need.”

  We’d avoided sending anyone underground because [Earth] keys were so abundant on the surface, now that we had keyshapers. As such, we hadn’t set any rules for journeying beneath the earth beyond not to do it. But keeping safe when exploring underground was not a simple endeavor, and we’d have to decide just which of Palimpsest’s leftover seed-nodes we would leave where they lay if they were too far beneath the earth.

  “Aye,” I said. “Think on it before you return. There will be enough work to do back at the keep before I send anyone.”

  She nodded, and I left her to take to the air. A landscape of immobile insects passed by under me as I flew to the base of the pit and began to rise out of it.

  The wyverns twitched in the webbing that the spiders had lain across it, and the spiders that had caught them sat dumbly in their webs. They were all well and truly mindless.

  I rose out of the pit and began to fly back toward the keep, this time below the mists so that I could get a feel for the landscape along the route.

  I had only been flying for a few minutes before I came close enough to a group of our windcallers to contact them through the bond.

  Lux Irovex! Kannar, the woman in charge of the second windborne, greeted me as soon as she sensed me. I must say, we’re glad to see you.

  Give me a report, I said. How did we fare?

  The swarm came hard against us after you left, she said. Ranival’s creations doubtless spared our defenders from the worst of it, but….”

  I recognized her hesitation immediately, knew its source.

  Who? I asked.

  Lux Irovex, she said. Anaros and Luvere fell to the swarm in the air.

  A cold wind seemed to pass through my body, stripping it of all the lightness and gladness that had filled me as I looked forward to the days to come.

  Then they and their loved ones have paid the greatest cost for the safety that today’s battle will bring all of us, I said. Come. We must return to the keep.

  They recounted the broader strokes of the battle as we flew.

  The third wave had come upon the keep shortly after I left. Palimpsest had abandoned all hope of assaulting us successfully from below, focusing instead on mustering troops in the skies and on the ground.

  Palimpsest had fielded only one behemoth—a heavily armored insect that resembled a shorter centipede. Once it had emerged from one of the tunnels they’d dug, the attack began.

  As soon as the ground forces charged, Ranival and the other white necromancers raised the entirety of the deadvault, and the charging enemies met a smaller army of skeletal animals, including our own behemoth in the form of the undead wyvern.

  The two armies had clashed in the midst of a rain of elven arrows, and right from the first there was little doubt that ours had the upper hand, even through Palimpsest’s seemingly limitless reinforcements. They’d never faced a necromancer, and their conventional weapons and attacks were next to harmless against Ranival’s creations. Our arrows had likely thinned the skeleton army more than Palimpsest had.

  But the sky was a different matter. The aerial swarm had been bolstered far beyond what we’d seen in the second wave. Not only were there more longflies, but Palimpsest had added an uncountable number of insects slightly smaller than an elf’s head. These had essentially tried to swarm our windborne elves, relying on their high speeds so that they would impact them with the force of a thrown stone.

  Both Anaros and Luvere had died in such a manner: jostled and distracted by a strike from one of the smaller insect’s, they’d then been pierced by a hard light projectile thrown by one of the longflies as they worked to steady themselves.

  Soon enough Zirilla, Luthiel, and I had reached Palimpsest’s stronghold, at which point the invading insects had first begun to retreat, then fallen into inactivity all at once.

  Before long I reached the settlement again, flying over a field of countless insectile bodies to land upon the wall next to Valir.

  The elves around us cheered as he clasped my shoulder.

  “Where is Kiandar?” I asked. It was the name of Luvere’s husband—she’d been a wild elf rescued from Ellistara, and so had left behind both a husband and a young son.

  “They’re in the chapel,” said Valir.

  “Get everyone else to the great hall,” I told him. Then I left to move deeper inside the keep.

  The chapel was a small room that ran in a strip along one of the outer walls of the keep, four slitted windows letting in the mistlight, which mingled with the conjured magelights inside to give a warmer atmosphere to the otherwise cold stone walls that made up the keep’s interior.

  The dead lay on two biers inside, healed from the falls that would have broken their bodies.

  Anaros was a fair-haired man of three centuries, his features so lean as to seem gaunt. Luvere had vividly red hair, was the older of the two at eight centuries, and had a warm, round-faced beauty. Both of them lay side by side on biers.

  Hassina knelt by Anaros’s head, whispering in a language that was very, very old.

  There were several elves in the room with us, but it was Kiandar who I turned to as soon as I came into the room. He stood over his wife’s body, and he held the son they had—Lavaril, a boy of nine years—tight to his chest.

  “Lux Irovex,” he whispered.

  “I’m sorry, Kiandar,” I told him. “I’m so sorry.”

  I might have thought that I was the first person to tell him of his wife’s death, watching his face break as he looked upon me. I strode forward and clasped his hands as tears began to fall from his face. Lavaril, head on his father’s shoulder, simply looked at me, quiet.

  “Not me,” Kiandar said, “Not us. Please, not us.”

  I stepped forward and reached out to clasp his hand. Luvere’s body lay in our shadows, making the moment too sacred to brook any lie to her husband.

  “It’s you, Kiandar,” I said.

  He wailed and through himself against me. I embraced them both, and Kiandar sobbed against my chest.

  “You two must go on without her,” I whispered. “Until time unites you again. I’m sorry, Kiandar, Lavaril; it’s you.”

  As I felt Kiandar shaking against me, I felt an old fear rise in me once again, along with a question.

  What if the world we were building was not for us?

  We were all from Tel Telana or Ellistara, and so everyone we’d known in every other town was gone. All of the places that had nurtured us could never be visited again.

  Kiandar and Lavaril would face unknown centuries without the wife and mother that our immortality had promised them, but they weren’t alone in this.

  Surely we weren’t doomed to be nothing but old custodians from a different, lost world? Out of place and out of touch with this land’s true inheritors?

  I’d already lost a world before Aranar—I should have known the answer to my own question, and yet it only filled me with disquiet.

  I grimaced as Kiandar shuddered against me, wailing in inconsolable pain. It was a maudlin thought; perhaps I could shape it into something that sounded pretty for the funeral.

  “Today has given us cause for grief and cause for relief,” I said loudly. I stood in the great hall of the keep, chin high, the elves assembled around me.

  “All of us who stand to defend our people in the time of need know that battle is not a just arbiter of lives. Chance can kill the best of warriors and virtue is no guarantee of glory. When we rise to fight, we pass into the grip of chaos. Today, it was Anaros and Luvere who made the final sacrifice. Ever will their loved ones bear the cost of our survival.”

  I looked to Kiandar. He stood near the entrance to the hall, still holding Lavaril against his side.

  “We will exalt them as they deserve,” I said. “The very stones of this place will remember the names of these fallen heroes, so fiercely shall we venerate them. That begins by finishing the work that they gave their lives to—keeping this colony safe.”

  I looked around and saw stony determination in seemingly every face.

  “Mark me,” I said. “Today we cross a threshold. Already we’ve gathered so many keys, so much essence, and so much knowledge that if we had to fight today’s battle again, we would strike first and it would be over before any insect reached these walls. Yet there is more: our enemy left an abundance of power spread across these lands, and I intend for that power to be ours. We will gather more in the coming week than what our hunters and keyshapers might gather in a year.”

  I saw the faces before me shift from determination to awe and disbelief. I understood how they felt: a behemoth would have granted a treasure that was small, in comparison to the daily efforts of the colony. But Palimpsest, across all their minions, held the wealth of a princedom.

  And I intended to put it to use.

  “Soon, my kin,” I told them. “Soon I will complete my ritual.”