In Brinn’s unconscious mind, a sea of images bore their way into his dreaming mind.

  They waved, and shimmered. A dull pain echoed in the back of his consciousness. They all layered over each other, pounding into his mind; layered on top of one another. A grand castle overlooking the sea. Acres and acres of bright, beautiful, green forest past by in an instant. A woman, looking down at him with a warm smile. A city of elves.

  He stood in a grand hall. A man in a wide-brimmed hat whispered in the ear of an elf on a great silver throne. The pale king raised a single, wizened finger.

  The images swirled again, twisting.

  He stood atop a cliff, an army faced off against a wild militia in the valley below. The other visions had been of wonder, and excitement, but something awful tore through Brinn. The overwhelming sense of grief and regret. The militia looked poor and ill-equipped, but they had the numbers advantage. It looked like a peasant uprising. They wore ill fitting, makeshift sets of armor and waved banners of all different colors and designs. They battled against an orderly formation of plated knights, an idyllic army, like something from a story book.

  It should have been easy for the knights—an untrained group of farmers with makeshift spears. And yet—every single one of them fought to the death.

  A mail-clad knight arrived, and nodded. Horns blared.

  He felt something on his cheek. A tear?

  All at once, the knights lowered their shields, and began a controlled retreat. Cheers came up in the elves below.

  They thought they had pushed them back.

  He was there to show them that they were wrong.

  He hesitated, this time—for but a moment—but fell into line when he sensed the knight go for his sword.

  He raised a single palm and spoke that single, accursed word:

  “Annihilation.”

  The militia erupted into a pulsing orange-red sphere behind, writhing red-hot metal and ash. The guilt and regret washed over him in waves. Favel had never wanted to become a weapon. Yet he had become something monstrous. He could end thousands with the wave of a hand yet it brought him no peace. It never would. The guilt tore into him.

  He was a child. He stood in the same grand throne room, holding onto the robe of his mother. The smiling woman from before. A younger king wore the crown—or perhaps the same man, some centuries before. There was a group of wizards, wearing long black robes. The image faded.

  Each scene seemed to burn itself into his mind, then blow away like ashes.

  He sees a box, made of what looked to be steel, but with a dark sheen. Something felt wrong. He looked down at his hands. Child’s hands. They were shaking. He stared at the door. The box got bigger, and bigger, until it filled up his entire vision with the door at its center.

  There was a bar across the door. Tiny fists pounded against the walls of the box—from the inside.

  “Let me out,” said a tiny voice. His.

  The room began to fill with a red light. It cast shadows across the metal walls like scarlet embers.

  And then the pain came.

  Another battle. Another army or city left in devastation.

  The box again. This time the pain was duller; and the boy, more able to withstand the torrents of mana, began to make out the world around him. The red glow came from a sigil on the floor. He strained, through the pain and the dull red glow. The moment he read it, everything went white. The pain renewed itself tenfold.

  He was standing in front of an alchemist’s shop. The man behind the counter looked much younger than his reputation implied. Such were the ways of alchemy. He was an old acquaintance of the Paladin, some years before. The wrongness seemed to flood the scene, far stronger than before.

  “And you think this is better than a cleric?”

  “You came to me because you didn’t want the church involved,” said the paladin.

  The door opened. A boy stepped out, goggles over his face, thick leather gloves on.

  Something lit aflame in the room behind him. He can’t have been older than nineteen.

  “He’s older than he looks,” promised the paladin.

  “He’ll have to do.”

  —

  Brinn shot up, waking the instant when he realized he’d been staring at himself through Favel’s eyes. He lay on a pile of rocks some feet away from the crater. He looked down. His sash had burnt away. His vials, they were gone—his ingredients were still present, but he’d nothing to mix them in. He’d be reduced to raw ingredients alchemy again. But, panic wasn’t what flooded Brinn’s mind. If the explosions had destroyed the explosive vials in his sash, they should have gone off, killing him instantly—the invocation itself should have killed him in seconds. He strained his mind, trying to think of the sequence of events that had lead him here, but they just didn’t add up. He was in the garden, about to die in the great blast of Favel’s invocation—and then, as the magic had begun to course through him, something had shifted and he was in the crater. He felt a headache coming on as he mulled over the lost time.

  Then an orange shock of burning mana shot down his arm and out the end of a finger with a fizzling noise, coming out as heat. Images of his first mana crucible event—the life mana surging through him as he’d created his philosophers stone. He recognized what he’d just experienced for what it was. Hesitantly, he tried to summon an alchemical flame—only to tear his glove off as it was set completely on fire. The flame was white. He deactivated the spell immediately.

  But the dreams. They hadn’t just been dreams. Those had been Favel’s memories. The world in front of him was a flashing red-orange mess. Favel’s mana was still raging across the chamber—they were in a cavern. He could feel from the mana in the air this was still part of the dungeon. The garden was gone. It had been her phylactery, and what little was left of it faded with her. Alexander was gone. Brinn thought he could make out something left of the man’s armor, glowing white hot somewhere near the epicenter of the great, glowing crater. Favel was gone—or at least, Brinn had to assume as much. The elf had made it clear his flame was dangerous. Brinn hadn’t realized just how dangerous he meant.

  To his astonishment, he noticed something just below the rocks. An envelope, tied with a pink ribbon. He didn’t open it. He didn’t even pull it from the clutches of the ash below. He knew what it was. An invitation. The vile thing wanted another tea party. How she was going to do that without her garden, he didn’t know. He didn’t care.

  He was going to end it either way.

  Slowly, painfully, he pushed himself to his feet. The crater still gave off an incredible amount of heat. It wasn’t so much that Favel had had all this mana stored within him—one’s mana capacity wasn’t about that. It was about your ability to channel the ambient mana through you. A mage was a conduit.

  The invocation hadn’t simply destroyed the pocket dimension of the garden. It had torn its way out of it. This cavern was the room in ‘real’ space that had contained the garden. It had driven a massive crater into this room—what Brinn realized now as whatever had really been behind the space of the door he and Favel had found the day before. The only reason it hadn’t torn into the rest of the labyrinth was that it had gone through the labyrinth first. Had it only been a day? No. It had probably been longer.

  Brinn trudged his way towards the entrance, just past the lip of the crater. Confirming his earlier suspicions, it was the same door. Brinn couldn’t shake the feeling he was being watched. Amelia? Maybe the bard.

  Brinn opened the door, leaving the writhing wasteland behind him. Leaving the ashes of his friends behind him. He wondered about the others. Greta and Spinny might still be out there somewhere. They might even have been trapped in that forest when Favel destroyed the garden. Brinn had to hold out hope that only some of his friends lay in the ashes below.

  Brinn opened the door.