“Dammit.” Dovik beat upon the man with his twin weapons, the heavy bars of steel pounding out a meaty echo against powerful forearms. An eye filled with anger and fear, more anger likely, bobbed in and out of his vision through the cracks between the two arms. The man was mostly a punching bag, six-and-a-half feet tall, almost three hundred pounds of muscle, blonde hair hanging in sweaty strands from a pale, chiseled face. A strong man, no doubt about it, but without any speed or skill.

  A streak of light, blue or white, it was hard for him to tell with all of the strobing magic and insanity going around, thudded into his back, knocking him forward and off-balance. His opponent saw the opportunity, dropping his arms for a moment, readying to lunge. Dovik vanished, appeared in the air slightly behind the man, and brought his fire poker down on the back of the man’s skull. He held back, held back a lot, but the strike still split his scalp and knocked him to the floor, blood pouring out to run down the side of his face. Still conscious, but unlikely to stand again any time soon.

  Dovik found a new stain, a mark of some magical projectile that had crashed into the back of his shoulder while he was working on his punching bag. It did nothing more than leave a lingering ache in his shoulder, not even powerful enough to injure his coat. He looked about for his attackers. Most mages turned away from him and found different targets when they saw how ineffective their magic was against him, this one seemed to have been no different.

  He found Macille next to him, the man grabbing someone by their elaborately embroidered silk robes and smashing the rim of his shield into their jaw over and over. There was a sickening rhythm to it, the man’s head whipping back, pulled forward again by his stretching neck just in time to meet another strike. Dovik winced, watching the slow deformation of the barely conscious man, he seemed to be a hardy bastard at least.

  “I think you got him,” Dovik said, grabbing Macille’s elbow as he pulled back for another strike. His heels dragged three inches across the stone as his friend’s arm continued straining forward for a moment. Macille’s fingers loosened on the man’s robe who then slumped to the stone floor, head lolling back, breaths a hiccupping flurry.

  Then it was Dovik pulling Macille as the strength in the man seemed to vanish all of a sudden. Dovik caught him as his legs wobbled, steadying him and patting his back, all the while searching the chamber for new threats. Macille pulled away, wiping his face with his free hand, leaving a smear of blood across his sweaty forehead that turned watery and left a tear streak down his cheek.

  “You alright?” Dovik asked. Balls, it was difficult to see anything. The ramp they stood on had a constant drift of green fog rolling down from above that tickled his throat, likely far worse for anyone else on his team. “Where is everyone at?” Adrius had been with them just a moment ago.

  “Sister Bella and her oaf ran past you while you were beating on that barbarian,” Macille said. He ranged around on the floor, eventually locating his sword in the fog. “I don’t know what happened to Adrius.”

  “I told him to stay near me,” Dovik crept to where he imagined the edge of the ramp to be, waving a hand about him to clear out the fog as best he could. He found it and looked out into the general gloom. They were probably a good hundred feet up by now, three spiraling ramps around the edge of the room filled with magical flashes and the ringing of metal on metal. He squinted into the dark, several motes of different color flames rising up the ramps, each marking a different magician. He knew some of the motes by their coloration, magicians that he had made a note of before. The color, intensity, and pulsation of the motes denoted them, as unique as a face, each a representation of their soul, information laid bare for him to seize. Soul reading could wait, he was looking for someone, and he could not find her among those he saw.

  Dovik noticed a group of five on the base level of the chamber running away from one of the rooms bleeding red light, another group entering the chamber. Did he wait–perhaps her group was delayed–or did he push forward, suspecting that she was above already?

  “Get back!” A hand grabbed hard on his collar, yanking him away from the ledge, Macille. His shoulders bounced hard against the wall twenty feet away. He fell, feet barely managing to stay beneath him, and noticed Macille barreling into the wall next to him.

  Before he could ask what that had been about, a huge monster, all dark scales and wriggling limbs, some kind of lizard-beast, cracked into the edge of the ramp in front of them. It landed on its back, an echoing crack splitting the air, before it rolled backward over the lip, its tail lashing about and disappearing from sight.

  “Are they really putting ones that large in here?” Dovik stared up the ramps, but the stone blocked his sight and information was scarce. The lizard’s bloody crash into the ramp cleared the fog for a brief expanse. In the hazy edges of green, Dovik noticed a boot sticking up.

  He was there in a blink, leaving behind Macille coughing against the wall. Adrius laid in front of him, prone body half in the mist and half out. Fear swelled in Dovik’s chest, hesitation pushing against him from leaning down to check the man’s neck. The sound of a saw going through wood pushed the fear away, Adrius’ face opening wide in a snore that would shame any self-respecting elf.

  “Sleeping?” Macille asked, making it over to Dovik. He kneeled and started tapping on Adrius’ cheek with a gauntleted hand, getting nowhere.

  “Lazy!” Dovik stuck the tip of Pokey into Adrius’ armpit and started turning it this way and that. “That’s what your uncle says about you. If you fall asleep in battles, I can’t really disagree.”

  “Ah,” Adrius grunted, eyes shooting awake, already trying to roll away from Pokey. “Ah. Stop. Bastard!”

  “Are you so hard now that you find our little battlefield boring?” Dovik asked, pulling Pokey back and spinning it in his hand.

  Adrius breathed, green mist puffing with the exhale, staring up toward the ceiling far overhead. “We were fighting something.”

  “Up you get.” Macille bent and helped Adrius to his feet. “Best to avoid breathing in poison smoke in the future.”

  Adrius coughed, rubbing a hand over his face, a small magical tremor running from his palm into his head. He snorted, looking much better after. “Yes, I’ll just stop breathing next time.”

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  “Let me know if that works for you,” Dovik stared up through the hole in the mist overhead, the entire fog was thinning somewhat. “Best to get–”

  An explosive burst of color high overhead cut off his words. The three inlets of white light from the stage above flashed with a brilliant orange, and even still far below he could feel the explosion of heat. Fire gouted, dripping from the holes in the ceiling like liquid, swimming across the stone like the roots of a tree, climbing downward. A drop of fire landed just near his boot, hissing as it melted through the fog. It smoldered there a moment, but slowly, ever so slowly, began to pool and stretch on the ground. Dovik ground it out beneath his boot before it could get far. Similar patches of boiling fire were breaking out throughout the chamber.

  A discharge of magic so potent that it shook the entire ramp he stood on sparked off down below, followed rapidly by more earthshaking displays throughout the room. Some beast roared, an entire section of one of the ramps further up began to collapse, crashing through the center of the chamber with two screaming climbers holding tight to it. A hole was ripped in a wall, pushing an avalanche of cold dirt and mud to spill out into the open air, the deluge pouring over anyone still at the bottom level.

  “What in three hells.” Dovik stared down at the pot of chaos mixing beneath him. Someone cried out as they were hurled from a ramp, screaming as they fell into darkness.

  He turned, looking to Macille, and narrowly avoided the swing of a blade aimed at his throat. Dovik ducked back, off-hand weapon rising to meet the crash of a shield rim, but he was too slow. The edge of Macille’s shield cracked into his arm, and Dovik felt his bones bend and bruise, not shattering thankfully. He vanished, appearing a few feet away, right hand coming up to point at his attacker.

  Macille stood, anger on his face, as he marched forward. Before he could take more than a step, Adrius was on his back, hands scrabbling at his face, teeth biting into Macille’s shoulder. They growled and wrestled, Macille throwing his shoulder back into the stone, trying to pulverize the healer.

  Another explosion overhead threatened to steal his attention, but Dovik kept his focus on his friends. Raising his weapons, he prepared.

  Stony cliffsides, mountains capped with sleet and ice, trees climbing up toward the sky, flew past a platform of steel sailing through the air. A hexagonal monolith, the craft bore riders standing on its surface, each hardly noticing the whipping wind or the deep chill as the craft was pushed to its extreme limits. Arabella stood at the fore, the control core clenched tight in her hand, a cylinder of amethyst that allowed for full control of the craft.

  They flew quickly, they better have considering how much gold she had spent to purchase the aircraft, just slightly faster than she was capable of on her own, far faster than her escort were. The limitations of the wind shield had long been exceeded, making the journey somewhat uncomfortable. The slightest lack of concentration in any of the magicians on board could potentially rip them off the craft, and she did not plan to stop for anyone who could not even hold on.

  Three sites checked so far, not even as much as a hint of their quarry spotted. As she steered her craft toward the mountain, toward its peak, she knew that this fourth site was different. Something shuddered through the air as she made the approach, slowing the craft from ludicrous speed toward something that wouldn’t have them all smashed to bits on the rocks.

  Arabella asked one of her escort to check the map, checking it again herself after to make certain that they were in the correct place. Her platform hovered still in the air, the maw of a cave leading into the dark earth before her. This was it.

  A jagged hole, replete with broken stone and hills of shale gravel stood ahead of her, a short bend plunging the path forward into the dark. The scale of her armor rippled as she moved forward, growing more jagged, rigid, shucking off the flowing comfortability that it offered in peace time, readying for the fight ahead. She grabbed Avalanche from her back, feeling the power of the weapon flow into her before finally allowing her soul free.

  She saw it as the blue that was her spread out, stretching to its relaxed state that she so seldom allowed it. The blue swam over the platform, crawling up the mountain edifice, rocks cracking and breaking as the cold seeped into the stone. She saw everything, felt every pebbly bump in the mountain, every pulse of blood pushing against the skin of the magicians around her, felt even the microbes floating through the air freeze and wither away as her soul spread out. A lone mountain goat stood watching with strange eyes, muscles stiffening, breath puffing air as it found itself suddenly unable to move. She spared the creature a thought, did not let it freeze so utterly, but she was hardly willing to restrain herself, not with what she feared might be down there in the dark.

  Her presence stopped fifty feet from her, its comfortable size, but nowhere near the extent she could push it to. She delighted in it, the feeling of power, of oneness with the materia about her, but she did not let it feed her ego, a danger many of her kind were prone to fall into.

  “We go,” she said, feet lifting from the platform as she flew forward. She sensed each of her escort rise into the air along with her, their own presences straining against her own, protecting them from the cold.

  The cave came to a shaft that led deep into the mountain. Her senses pushed through the dark, guiding her around obstacles, illuminating the cavernous dark. She became aware of an outlet and fell through space into an underground chamber, a lake in the dark marred by a solitary island. Arabella’s presence exploded, striking through the expanse in an instant. She alighted upon the shores of the lake now changed to a glacier crawling up the sides of the chamber, attention focused upon the island before her. A dome of stone stood, an eggshell of tan marble cracked and chipped. Somehow, the surface of the stone prevented her soul from entering, blocking any attempt to scry the insides with any magic she had at hand. No doubt about it then, this was it.

  Arabella raised her hand, four spears of ice forming in the dark about the stone hemisphere, growing and growing. She flooded this chamber, and what was inside of it was the same as being within her, her magic was ever-present. If it came to a fight, ceding this ground to her would prove fatal. She cut off the flow of mana as the spears reached adequate size, stakes the size and length of some of the hardiest trees in the forest beyond the mountain. As she clenched her fist, the stakes struck, diving and crashing into the stone dome. Three of the stakes shattered at contact, spinning shards of ice into the air that melted away into motes of mana. The fourth stuck, crashing through from the side.

  She waited a moment, tried to pour her soul in through the hole the spear had made, but again found herself rebuffed. The final spear of ice disappeared with a motion, leaving a black hole bored into the surface of the dome. With a breath to prepare, conjuring all of the magic she could to herself, Arabella descended inside.

  Inside the dome, her soul spread out, now able to see everything as clearly as if it were under the light of day. She felt it here, like an opposing presence pushing against her mind, trying to feed her thoughts of carnage and death. She pushed the influence aside, returning to focus, always returning to focus. A barren and curved room of stone stood out before her, featureless except for the intricate web of runes and symbolica carved into the stone. The pattern was so intricate that she could not off-handedly even guess at its meaning.

  In the center of the runic circle lay a mat of frayed linen cloth upon which sat a pack that had seen better days long, long ago. She set her feet upon the circle, sensing no power in the chamber any longer, only a lingering malice. The pack held nothing of particular interest, a hunting knife, a box of salt, and what might have been bread in some time long past. What held her interest was a container of titanium lying next to the pack, fallen over on its side like a discarded afterthought. Power rested inside of the container, traces of an orange liquid that still ran and formed a miniscule puddle at the bottom of the container when she picked it up.

  Everything in her body, everything in her soul, screamed a warning as she reached to touch the liquid, and Arabella had long learned to heed such warnings. She looked up, found two of her escort hovering inside of the dome along with her, the others left outside to guard against ambush.

  “This is the place,” Arabella said, holding up the container, finding the knack of its lid and sealing it tight. “Or at least it was.”

  “Nothing is here,” one of her escort, Tesha, said.

  “No. Not any longer.”

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