Her pain receded, and in its place, a cold calm enshrouded her like a cloak of ice. Her skin tingled, then went numb as everything faded around her. Even Sovina, shouting and frightened, disappeared. And yet, she was not alone. Something else was there, watching her. She met its gaze, staring out at nothing, feeling the weight of intent upon her.

  The blood of conviction, she thought, unwavering. I am ready.

  A man screamed.

  Emalia opened her eyes and glanced to the side, where one of the looters was stumbling back from the sarcophagus, hands held up before his face. They were grey. Dying. Veins black with Sorcerous Corruption, flesh cracked like flaking ashes, scream wilting away into a pathetic gasp. His eyes shriveled in the back of his head and his jaw fell open unnaturally wide.

  “Sadoch, you fucking fool,” Oskar shouted from the back. “Nifont!”

  Almost as soon as he shouted the man’s name, an arrow flew out, striking the dying man in the back of the neck, likely severing the spine. Oskar dashed forward and chopped down hard on his skull. He fell to the floor as an abandoned book falls from the hands, legs fluttering and bending in like unread pages. The guttural snarl that had begun to emerge from his throat died as quick as it began.

  A horrid thought burst from her mind at the sight, eking out from her lips in a whisper, breaking her peace. “A death curse.”

  Her hand was released suddenly, and she yanked it back, falling onto her rear. Sovina pulled her away quickly. She looked down at the freed hand. It was grey as the man Sadoch’s skin was. She flexed her fingers, but they barely cooperated. Gods above, she thought she whispered, but her voice was dead, teeth clenched and clattering in fear. Oh gods, not this. Oh gods.

  “Has she got it too?” Oskar’s voice barked out from behind, raised voices of the others mixing in, chaotic, senseless.

  Sovina stood so fast she blurred in the corner of Emalia’s vision, blade flashing out. “It is not a curse. She’s lost blood!”

  Grey like a corpse. Emalia swallowed. Was her mind going too? No, no, she remembered her name, where she was, and what she was doing. Right? What am I… Her eyes flicked up. The sarcophagus cracked open, a vertical seal splitting it across the center, once invisible, now widening. She scooted back again, hand still held up in front of her face. She yanked up her sleeve, exposing the small wound left by Feia. Her skin was flesh-colored there.

  “It’s not spreading!” she shouted, voice hoarse, hardly her own.

  Sovina pulled her up, supporting her weight with her free arm, other still warding the others off with her saber. “Back now, Column-sister.”

  “No,” she replied, voice cracking. “We need the creature’s heart.”

  Before Sovina could reply, the sarcophagus had fully opened, wing-like doors thumping to the full extent of their hinges, going still. The room went silent. Everyone turned and looked at the shadowed form within. Slowly, the shadow receded, and torchlight illuminated the form of a man.

  He was taller than nearly anyone she had met—taller than her by nearly two heads. His skin was odd too, the color of ashen bone, of quarry stone. He had no hair on his head, so his sharp facial features were exaggerated in their haunted gauntness. Only a simple and ancient-looking robe of roughly spun, undyed linen covered his body, fraying at the edges with patches almost entirely degraded. Close as she was, Emalia could see that a portion of the robe near the neck was a mere patchwork of time-ravaged cloth, revealing skin cracked with black Corruption, veins a dark contrast to his light skin. Ever so slowly, his eyelids cracked open, and the weak torchlight shone off his maroon-colored eyes.

  “By the Spirits of my ancestors,” Feia whispered, her voice only audible in the chamber's silence, “what horrid secrets have you unlocked, Priestess?”

  …

  Endless silence. Waiting. Breathless. Muted. An eternity extended.

  And then light. And pain. Rebirth.

  It felt as if my bones were being pulled from my body. Each of them run through by iron rods, twisted, wrenched, and heaved from my flesh like pulled teeth.

  Darkness recoiled, light invaded.

  The unending stretch of unconsciousness abandoned me to nothing but agony. Searing, impossible agony. I gripped the sides of my skull, skin cold and dry to the touch. Like a corpse’s. The cracking of bones was so loud it was pulling at my mind, stretching it with the sickening images of live dissection. More than that, my left side burned it was so frigid. I fell from wherever I was and onto the cold ground, twitching, heaving, my stomach contracting with useless attempts to wretch. Useless because it was empty—I didn’t know how I knew, but I just did. The hunger was there, too, a distant ache compared to everything else, heightening the desperation that wracked my body. I had to make the pain stop.

  I had to make it stop.

  My throat was cracked and dry, splitting my voice. Only then did I realize I had been screaming. My Soul was on fire! Madness and desperation drove me to the brink. To the end.

  And then it came to me.

  They cursed me. They killed me. They killed Maecia!

  No. Something was off. Through the pain, I looked up and saw others gathered around me, staring at me in shock and horror like I was some creature. Some monster. But I recognized none of their faces through the blur of my teary vision. Strangers, all of them, and wearing odd garb. My mind worked as I recovered, curled up on the stone floor that felt as cold as I. Time has passed. There was no conclusive evidence, but even through the delirium, I could feel it. Nothing but impulses and intuitions came to me in my broken state of animalism.

  One of the strangers was moving forward.

  I sat back, blinked away the tears, focused on my awareness, and pushed away the pain, as near-impossible as it was. I had to focus. She was dressed like a warrior and bore a curved blade like a scimitar. Threatening? Yes. The look in her eyes said death. So this is my execution, then.

  I clenched my teeth. The indignation. The sick, cruel arrogance of them. I was a Sorcerer. I was Magistros of Sorcery, bringer of Death, discoverer of lost Wonders, and they wanted to extinguish me with a blade? With some effort, I struggled to my feet and retreated a step till I bumped into the container which held me.

  “Halt, or I will eviscorate you,” I rasped out.

  She didn’t stop. She didn’t even seem to register my words.

  So I reached out, confident and ready, grasping for the Sorcery always so close at hand. But it wasn’t there. My breath stuttered. I searched through the air for the traces of Souls escaping the realm of below. Where was it? Where?

  She was closer. A few steps away.

  There! A slight trace, a faint glimpse. Something was limiting me. Perhaps an enchantment laid upon me? Doesn’t matter right now. Cast, Daecinus! So I did, tracing the withered line till it led me to a larger pocket of energy, and I heaved. Like pulling on the mooring line of a small vessel, I wrenched it from its entrenched position and into my shaking hands. I tried Soulfire, but there wasn’t enough power for it, so I chose something less extreme but still deadly. A curse of rotting flesh and boiling blood.

  Someone further back shouted something, though I didn’t know the language. An outlander woman amongst warriors. A few voices. The swordswoman stopped, blade still ready. Only a stride away now, penning me in. Another second, and I’d be dead. I held her gaze, then looked to those behind. Many. Over a half dozen. Too many in my current state, perhaps. So I held the Spell and let it linger. An arrow trained on an enemy, the head of it grinning, waiting to be delivered into waiting flesh. Find out information. Establish the situation. Recover. Act from an advantageous position, not violent desperation.

  There was a dead man nearby, a Shell only recently neutralized. Keeping one hand trained on holding the tentative line of magic, I held the other palm out as a sign to wait. I then pointed to the body.

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  One of them tried speaking. A man further back surrounded by warriors. When he saw I didn’t understand his words, he scowled and said something to the swordswoman. She didn’t seem to react, remaining still, eyes on me. But someone did make her move. There was another woman, slightly younger, unarmed, standing between the group of warriors and my attacker. Slowly, the swordswoman retreated. Not far, but offering just enough room to avoid immediate death. Good. I could make this work.

  It took far too much effort to do something so relatively simple. And yet, I puppeted up the Shell, which made the strangers gasp and pull back for some reason. Carefully, cautiously, I worked into its mind, pushing my intention through the mostly intact structure of its fading High Soul.

  And then I made it speak. “Spell ready. Stop or die.”

  That earned me a breath to think, for they all froze. Even the swordswoman, previously so determined and stoic, looked taken aback. Frightened even. So these aren’t Sorcerers then. No. One of them saw my Spell and warned the others. Still, they must not be very competent, or they would not be so alarmed. That was a strict advantage in my favor then. Good. Still, even as the horrid, mind-warping agony faded, my mind felt locked down, burdened by pain and exhaustion. Thinking still took enormous effort and was like wading through a waist-high bog. The grief, however, was almost more consuming. Maecia was gone. Killed. I knew it wasn’t recent, that time had passed, and I was no longer in the Grand Observatory, but anything more than that was an unknown. A black, empty void in my recollection. What else had happened in this vacant space where my memory should be? What else had been taken from me? And more, who was to blame? Regardless, the one constant among these looming questions was the certain truth. My sister had been assassinated. She was gone forever, and out there, somewhere, were her killers. For a moment, I wondered if she had been rendered the same fate as me, confined to some underground container for untold reasons, but I’d seen her blood turn black. Her Soul leaking from the Shell that once contained it. I’d seen it. Felt it.

  And once fully Corrupted, the person was gone forever.

  With effort, I pushed myself back from the structure that had contained me. Tottering, dizzy, it took a second to gain balance and bearing. But the swordswoman seemed intent on murder, so I swallowed the feeling of rising bile and called upon my diminished pool of Sorcerous power to make the Dead one speak in its native tongue again, barely holding its destroyed form together.

  “Is this an execution?” I asked through the diminished Fleshwalker, the Shell, then tried to focus through the dim understanding of the marred mind I was controlling.

  The younger woman spoke, the words still a foreign jumble, but the meaning came across. “No. Not an execution, but—”

  She was interrupted by the man in the line of warriors further back, the leader, so it seemed. “This one’s got a mean Spell pointed at all our hearts, and you want to try and stab him? He’s been locked inside that thing for gods-knows how long, making this bloody city float. No, what we’re gonna do is let the ancient fucker go on his way.”

  “We have a divine—”

  “Yes, yes, you and your quest. Well, you’ll just have to take care of it when we’re good and gone.” He waved, and his men shuffled to the bridge, slowly making their way across, leaving a single torch behind. “You wait till we’re gone and do as your heart desires.”

  My mind raced as I eyed the two women still standing nearby. I could kill them. But something was wrong with my access to Sorcery or the magic here itself—either way, it was a gamble that even a simple spell wouldn’t implode. And besides, there was uncertainty amongst them that I could exploit. “Leave, I kill you first. We leave together.”

  The man stopped, shoulders dropping. “Dammit. Fine. But I would wager using our dead comrade to speak is going to be tricky on the run, won’t it? Got another way that’s not so slow, let alone grizzly?”

  “Takes time.”

  “And likely not something you’ll want to be doing with a Column saber to your neck. Hm.” He let out a sigh and came forward, his men following with dark grimaces. He tapped the swordwoman’s blade with his own. “Step back from the pale man.”

  She scowled at him. “No.”

  “Nifont here can put an arrow in you faster than you can lunge for me. Step back.”

  “Shoot the necromancer, then.”

  He rolled his eyes. “He’s an ancient Sorcerer. Think an arrow’s gonna do anything?”

  “It might.”

  “Sovina,” the younger woman said, “back up.”

  “But—”

  “We can do nothing for Raizak if we are dead.”

  Raizak… Where have I heard this name before? I pondered, watching the scene play out. A god, naturally, but whose? A variation of a different pronunciation, certainly, but it was Vasian, wasn’t it? It had to be. The great betrayer god who sacrificed himself to give humanity consciousness, offering the wonders of Sorcery to the mortal plane. That, combined with what the man said about me being an ancient captive, used to fuel a floating city? Slowly, things came together. I’ve been in a stasis for some time. A decade, at least, perhaps more. And these two are here to kill me for their god as some sort of sacrifice. The others? Bystanders, perhaps hired mercenaries at most. My hold over the rotting curse was waning far more quickly than it should, like the Spell wanted to break and scatter rebelliously. I tried wrestling it back under control, but it almost launched without my command, so I let it disperse into unutilized Souls. Another infuriating variable.

  Inevitably, the woman named Sovina retreated, and I was left guarded by the party of warriors. With a wary glance to them, I beckoned my puppeted Fleshwalker closer. At the same time, I tried forming Soulfire into a defensive ward should any foreign object enter a close perimeter, but the strands of Sorcery were incessant in their obstinance, bucking from my grasp and fraying whenever I attempted to bind them into anything moderately complex. This chamber must be limiting my pull on Souls; that, or this stasis has drained me considerably. The former was far more preferable than the latter, but it was a possibility that sent a wave of prickles across my skin in fear. Either way, there’d be no Soulfire wards here, so instead, I used the same curse of decay and began.

  Working with the Higher Plane of a Soul was never my true specialty. Something I aspired to excel in, yes, but not something I had a natural talent for. Mass control and strength across the lower plane was my domain. Still, the process of extracting language, complicated as it might seem, was not an unfamiliar realm. Language was organically mapped across the mind, like a foundational system for the Higher Plane to operate on, and so identifying it was actually the first step in delving into the minds of the Dead. From there, it was the lengthier process of isolation and extraction. The Fleshwalker was a simple construct on its own, but lingering elements of its mind remained, allowing for my previous translations, so everything was already in place to be harvested. It took some time, and fortunately, I had no interruptions of the violent sort. But when I had the Dead come closer and placed my head adjacent to its to force the transfer, someone in my periphery made a move.

  The flash of a blade. A quick step. Something shouted in that odd language of theirs, but the warrior stopped. Not by my ward, which was worryingly faded already, I just noticed, but by the leader and his other subordinates holding him back. Not the warrior woman, but one of the band. An internal dispute, then. Someone not supportive of me using their dead ally. An argument ensued between them, so I took the opportunity to complete the transfer. The Fleshwalker finished its usual writhing and screaming, as they often did, and collapsed back into a still corpse, all potential ripped away.

  I had to keep my eyes closed for a moment to allow everything to settle in place. But I was no fool, so I kept my basic defensive perimeter ready. Nothing crossed it. I opened my eyes, burning red fading back to dull maroon. Not like those here, with their decidedly untouched, mundane biology quite unlike my own. When my mind settled, something still felt off. My side hurt fiercely.

  The side where they had struck me with a curse that should have been my death. I touched my side where it burned with recent pain, tracing it to form a mental map of the damage. My eyes widened as the fresh wave of exhaustion set in, assaulting my form, limbs heavy, head swimming. What is this? The damage was… new. A spell of that magnitude should only be a slight strain, but it had Corrupted me. As if I’d raised a legion of the dead, not completed a relatively simple spell.

  “Have you cursed me?” I rasped out, words a jumble in my throbbing, pain-ridden skull. “Have you tainted my magic?”

  They all looked at me, but it was the outlander woman from earlier who spoke. “You were woken from this prison, Ancient One. We have laid no hexes nor curses upon your form.”

  I swallowed, staring at her, then at my own shaking hands. A faint line of black showed past my left sleeve. Corrupted blood, my mind rattled off as I just stared. Fatal in excess. Permanent in accumulation. Another log to the fire consuming my being.

  The younger woman stepped forward. “We should leave and—”

  Her statement was cut short as the screams of Dead rang out below. All turned to look into the dark, weapons coming up.

  “Did you call the Dead upon us?” the one named Sovina asked, eying me.

  “No,” I said. “There must be another Sorcerer pursuing you.”

  “Doubt it,” the leader of the warriors said, giving me a wide berth as he strode toward the container behind, which I just realized resembled some sort of sarcophagus. “Just more dead. But first, Feia, see anything ugly with these jewels here?” He pointed a dagger to the rubies inlaid in the stone. “Any more curses?”

  “It all reeks of Sorcery,” the outlander responded.

  “Yes. But any curses on the rocks?”

  “I see nothing, but this is all beyond my—”

  “You see anything?” he asked me.

  I blinked, then frowned at the sarcophagus. Peeling back the layers of the mundane to view the works of Sorcery was simple in one sense but incredibly difficult in another. After all, it had taken the Grand Observatory to attempt to shed the final layer and view the essence of the Higher Plane. Stolen from me. It was all stolen! For all I knew, the Grand Observatory was gone, destroyed by my attackers. My sister’s killers.

  “Whatever curse befell your comrade is gone,” I said after a long glance.

  “A safe enough yes for me.” He approached and dug a blade in to pop out a jewel, quickly hiding it away. He continued to another, extracting the rubies with practiced familiarity.

  “We need to go. Now!” Sovina shouted, making for the bridge. “Come, Necromancer.”

  I took in a deep breath, letting my prepared ward fade, following the two women toward the bridge. The screams below were louder. Unchained Dead, then? Ah, a trap to protect this place. My bones ached with each step, side protesting as if continually seared with a fire poker. A glance spared to the precipitous crossing, and then I shuffled forward. Excess handling of Souls was dangerous in my current state; I’d have to be careful lest I push myself too far and blunder into further Corruption. Damn those who dared to do this to me. Damn those who are behind any of this! Once I escaped this place, I would find out the truth of what happened.

  And I would make this right again.