Noue, a devout Witness even if her personal congregation wasn’t represented in Coldpass, supposed that if the One God were merciful enough to allow them both into Heaven she would forgive Quill. But only if, and if not then it would be both of their personal Hells that she could not. Personally, she suspected it would be the former, because even if her heart was broken and he was a damned—she had just admitted he wouldn’t be damned—a blasted fool, his heart had been in the right place.

  The days immediately following the explosion hadn’t been the worst, outside the spires of steel. The stone of most of the buildings, used so cheaply, had served as a heat sink, and so nobody had realized that the geothermal tunnels had collapsed along with the artifact. In the days immediately after, all anyone knew was Tome’s rage and psychic raking of the city to find out who had thwarted his will. The Earth Guild was in shambles, Burner’s patented method of getting answers being applied indiscriminately and Parchment having disappeared entirely. Even Noue wasn’t sure whether she had been vanished by the Historians or Tome. The shambles only added to the chaos when homes started to be cold, fires burnt to coals wouldn’t light. Noue thought to herself, “People died, Quill.”

  But then, he had died too. She hadn’t seen his body or anything; with an explosion so large, there wouldn’t be one. And she wasn’t going to rely upon a spirit mage to summon up his restless soul; he would go to his final reward if he were anything like as concerned about the welfare of others as he claimed. But she knew. He wouldn’t have left her to do this alone.

  As the people froze, earth sorcerers worked to exhaustion to restore the geothermal heating of the city. Tome, despite being a fire dragon, had done nothing to help but call off Burner from interrogating the sorcerers themselves. By the time heat was restored, the hospital, generally used to mild frostbite and investigation into the lethality of swimming in the glacier lake, had been overwhelmed with sick, cold, and frostbitten people. The chaos continued as nobody was baking bread, showing up to work, or even managing their families.

  Glue had come to Noue. They didn’t want to lead the cell, for several reasons, not least the lack of grit necessary to make the tough calls. Noue was not Quill, she wouldn’t have destroyed the artifact and put the city into shambles, but she possessed the most durable moral compass of anyone Glue could contact. She accepted the role, and set Glue to three tasks. The first, opening up the halls of the Sanitorium to those who needed shelter. The second, which they had evidently already begun, the summoning of a spirit mage to raise an army of the wandering dead and throw off the yoke of draconic rule in the Sevens. Starting, first and foremost, with the dragon who had personally earned her ire: Tome. The third task was the one that took the longest, and the one that had earned Noue a strange look from Glue. She had directed Glue to reach out through the cell network to bring in Epilogue as their third member.

  Tome, flying through the sky on what Noue understood to be draconic psi, scourged the advancing ranks of walking dead, but Noue had timed the attack carefully. One hourglass past when the initial ranks had been seared, Mount Barber had emitted its necromantic pulse and they rose once more, after Tome had worn himself out exhaling flame. He fled to his mountain lair. Noue had personally directed the spirit mage in rock climbing techniques, before sending her to pursue Tome into his lair. The first line had burned. The second had been singed. The third reached the dragon before being rendered inoperable to the spirit mage. Many, many people had died in Barbery, being adjacent to the Fireplains, and a month allowed gathering a great many of them. In the end, Noue’s dream of throwing dragons out of the Sevens with an army of dead would prove infeasible, but Tome at least was put to an end.

  As for Burner, Noue had ended him personally as she felt she should have to begin with. He had come after her as soon as she made herself the highly visible head of an army of dead, using his psi to try and commandeer her mind even as he tried to gut her with a large knife. He was no Glue, and the wardings that they had put over her mind had deflected the worst of it until she could put a period to his existence. She’d been unable to find Decontextualized until, one night, the woman came in through a window of The Golden Spoil. Decontextualized had been intent upon burning out Noue’s brain, but when Noue had resisted for the moment it took her to draw her blade and thrust it at Decontextualized’s stomach, she fled. Ensuing searches couldn’t locate her in the city.

  Epilogue didn’t arrive until after some semblance of normalcy had been restored. “Normal” was a relative term, of course, seeing as it was a new normal. Epilogue was around Noue’s height, very short for a man, grew a beard that started below his chin, and he wore a number of layers over his stout frame. He grew an assortment of herbs for a tea that he assured Noue she would find unpalatable, and himself drank only once a week. Noue saw what Quill had liked about the man. He was blunt, bold, and brave. He was also a cold and air sorcerer. That he duplicated the talents of Glue explained his movement out of the cell, but his talent at branding proved more valuable upon his return. The volcanic heart of the mountain was artificial, a product of Tome’s elemental mastery, and the city turned cold once more. Epilogue applied his own specialized knowledge and set about branding large buildings such as the Sanitorium with cold runes that drew the chill right out of the stone they were placed upon. The city itself grew colder, but houses ultimately stayed warm, and the rains of ash ceased with the end of the mountain’s volcanism.

  They discussed Quill, first bitterly, then fondly, late into the night. Epilogue, who Noue would never refer to as Epi, hadn’t known what he was getting into when Quill had invited him into the Historians. He’d been a simple assassin, hired in hopes of ending a particularly difficult agent of Tome. He’d done the job, but also attracted Quill’s interest, and had found himself spending his time away from work in Coldpass. Patting his belly, he laughed; he was made for the cold. When he’d had the option to learn more about sorcery, he saw it as an opportunity for career advancement, not any kind of moral cause to take up. Noue asked if he still did contract work. Epilogue raised an eyebrow and toasted with his mug of blittero without answering. “What brought you to stay a Historian, then?” Epilogue stared into his mug for a while, clearly thinking hard. After a long while, he answered that he supposed Quill’s certainty had been the thing. He didn’t believe in much besides the Lord having given man dominion over the Orth, the foundation of his faith and if it was a sufficient answer for him to cast sorcery, it didn’t satisfy his soul. He asked her the same question in turn. “Before, I stole for things thieves break in and steal. The Historians gave me back my faith. Now I steal for God and humanity.” Epilogue laughed and said that was a very Quill-inspired answer. “Where’s your Quill inspiration, then?” Epilogue answered faster this time, replying that he believed that the One God made people like Quill, and gave them zeal for the cause, and he could respect that.

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  The Earth Guild, freed from Burner’s predation, reorganized itself. It had a hierarchy and an order of succession, it went on as organizations do. The lack of draconic patron decreased its status outside Coldpass, but within the city it remained the prime employer of labor. Noue, with Glue’s help, went about slowly making sure that nobody with draconic loyalties rose to a position of power. Noue herself, and her fellow Historians, remained in the shadows. Epilogue was no mind bender like Glue, though he began taking notes, but he had his own talents. Those with draconic aspirations developed a propensity for stroking out, small bubbles of air forming in their blood. It was only the second one onward which Noue directly requested.

  Noue wondered if using him as a tool was making her colder, or if Glue had used their recent developments in fire sorcery to reduce in her the value of human life. She asked them, once, just how extensively they had made changes in her mind. Glue had replied that the truly insane among the inmates of the Sanitorium had all recidivised, while those merely displaced by fate and desperate to survive were the only true successes with the application of air and fire sorcery upon their minds. In short, they said, the mind was not made of stone. They could not brand someone to make them think a certain way unless they themselves wanted it. Oh, the sorcery would have some effect, for a time, but it would ultimately be worn away by cognitive dissonance between what the person truly valued and the spell which lacked a material anchor from which to draw energy. They laughed. They couldn’t even make someone keep a secret they didn’t want to keep.

  The Manners Lounge was beyond the reach of Glue, and not to the taste of Epilogue, so the group took to meeting in Noue’s quarters; the rooms Quill had kept for himself she had bought outright. Noue had become an investor in truth, managing the sums she had gathered for herself during Tome’s trade embargo and the plunder of Tome’s caverns. Sometimes it caused her a twinge of guilt to be so wealthy, but she did what she could for the poor of Coldpass. Anyone who froze now did so because they couldn’t adhere to basic codes of good conduct. The Sanitorium remained a resource even for those, and so Noue soothed her conscience that she wasn’t abandoning her principles. Still, between Epilogue and her wealth she wasn’t always certain. Glue laughed when she asked if something could be done about it, and told her to come back when she knew what she wanted.

  “What do you suppose,” Noue began one evening, “will come of the rebellions against dragons?” Epilogue laughed and replied that, at least in his lifetime, nothing would. There were just too many dragons, and people were too divided on how and whether to do something about them. Glue’s reply was simpler, that as long as they could help people within their little corner of the world, they weren’t terribly concerned about it. Noue supposed she had tacitly taken the same stance, having retired from thievery in favor of managing her corner of… the… world. What Glue had just said. She narrowed her eyes and asked Glue again, more directly, whether they were playing games with her mind. Glue shook their head, and suggested that if she were concerned about her moral compass that she divest herself of her wealth. “Why would that help anything? It’s not as though I’m amassing a dragon hoard—”

  Glue pointed out that she literally did, in fact, have a dragon hoard, and she had since increased it. But, Glue set their mug of blittero on the table, the origins of the derogatory term thornseed might give her some picture of why they advised what they did. Noue did look it up, and it was a reference to one of the Gospels, the seed of the Word being choked by the thorns of worry and wealth. Wealth, the Savior had taught, was deceitful. Her eyes widened as she thought on it, and the next day contacted Spine looking for a replacement for herself. As she put it, she wished to retreat and contemplate the lore of the Historians. In truth, she wanted to find somewhere, anywhere, to take a vow of poverty and never again be able to order the death of another human being. She didn’t know how much was Glue’s influence, how much the influence of wealth, but somewhere along the line she had come to forget what things were worth in favor of how much they cost.

  She retired to a monastery of lore, on an island between Dominion and Spirithome, as soon as her replacement had been arranged and settled. She didn’t know what to think of him; he was no Quill, but talking to Epilogue had convinced her even more that there was only one Quill and he was buried under tons of rock. His name was Perigee, and he came from Peaceshield. His role would be that of complementing Glue’s skills, as an earth sorcerer skilled in healing, and he hoped to advance within the Earth Guild.

  Her wealth she had disbursed, giving in trust some of it to her cellmates, the rest donated to whatever worthy causes could feasibly digest such incredible sums. In the end she wound up funneling a great deal of it into arming various anti-dragon movements, a decision she came to regret only after it was irrevocable. With a carefully-counted reserve to get her to her next, and hopefully final, home, she set out from Coldpass to catch a ship in the northern sea. Within two weeks she was ensconced in a mud brick monastery, copying over ancient texts onto fresh scrolls, duplicating knowledge that it might be perpetuated and disseminated.

  A simple life agreed with her. She came to the conclusion that somewhere along the line she had lost the plot. She spent her days in prayer, contemplating the One God and praying to the Power of Beatrice, protector of humans from the allure of gold. She made her meditation the verse in which the Savior, shortly before his execution, asked, “Which is greater, the gold or the temple that sanctifies the gold?” So, too, did she contemplate the verse in which he warned: “All those who take the sword will die by the sword.” She supposed by extension that she would die by sorcery, or by the blind hand of someone whose only investment in her was gold. That made her chuckle with mirth when the idea came to her, startling those working near her. Gold and a violent death would twine together so neatly that way. Within months, her fellow monks concluded she was going to wind up an anchorite. With contemplation and poverty came clarity, but she remained devoted to her hermitic life until an attempt on her life by a red scaled young woman. But that was an entirely different story, and her part was only the beginning.