by Stone Thomas
“No!”
“Let go!”
“No!”
“This book is hot,” I said. “Like, it’s stolen, but also like, gods alive, how can you hold this damn thing!”
Our tug of war did nothing to turn the tide of this fight. Directly below us, the queenette gurgled and spat as she failed to pry her husband’s undead fingers from her throat. The kingling was just one story below, still held captive by Klimog’s dark spells.
With my hand gripping the edge of that burning book, I activated Vault for the extra oomph it would take to wrest the tome from Klimog’s hands.
The only problem was, I didn’t jump at all.
I couldn’t be out of AP. The lumentors hadn’t held me for long, and I hadn’t used enough skills to risk hitting zero. I checked my skillmeister menu. Being a pseudo-zombie had more disadvantages than just a rotten complexion. My skills were all grayed out, just like my Vivacity and my remaining AP. That would make it harder to take Klimog down.
“Klimog,” I said anyway, “I’m taking you down.”
I stepped back. I gaged the distance. I charged.
With one arm out, I grabbed Klimog by the waist at a running tackle, forcing us both off the edge of the balcony. We fell fast, landing on the kingling and snapping the bones in the dead elf’s body. The kingling didn’t seem to mind that, he just started scrambling toward his distraught wife. She crawled away on hands and knees, gasping to regain her breath.
The ghost book lay on the ground, halfway been Klimog and me. We both clawed toward it, but just as the necromancer raised his hand, an arrow shot through it.
Cindra. She stood in the middle of the fray. Her parasol sat trampled on the ground and she was unsteady on her feet, but she just couldn’t resist the fight. Her action drew the attention of a nearby lumentor who abandoned the elf it was siphoning energy from. That ghost thrust its arm inside her slime body instead.
“Oh,” Klimog said. “Let’s see how your woman fares against my ghosts. I’ll send them all.” He reached again for the book, but I kicked him in the face and grabbed it from him.
“Not today, Klimog,” I said. “Look.”
Forty cloaked figures raced into the courtyard. They cast off their hoods and whipped out their swords, a legion of women in lingerie ready to strike down the undead and return peace to the elven city.
Klimog’s eyes glazed over. Now for the lumentors.
I finally had it in my hands. Physical Emanations of Necromancy and Invocation of Spirits. The book Duul needed to rule Mournglory, and the book that would shut down his attempts at ruling the afterlife.
I held it. I opened it. I stifled the urge to scream out obscenities.
I’d never know how this book might control lumentors or coerce them to leave our world and return to the hell they came from. I couldn’t read it. The looping script and odd squiggles on each page were meaningless to me. I slammed it onto the ground.
Klimog pawed one foot against the floor and began to growl. I had to act before he charged me and took the book back. I gripped my weapon in both hands, pointed the spiral blade at the book’s cover, and thrust with all my strength.
A burst of swirling energies erupted from the book as I pierced through its cover and the parchment pages inside. Klimog shielded his face while the blast threw me off my feet.
One by one, the zombies around the courtyard collapsed. The necromancer shot spells from his hand, tangled black wads of disgusting evil, but each corpse he raised only caused another to fall. He couldn’t control that many, not without his precious book.
The lumentors, once emboldened by magic, now clawed at elves’ bodies in a panicked attempt to escape the sunlight, but each elf was surrounded by a wispy blue ward that protected against the lumentors’ attacks. Tanny stood on the palace balcony now, casting a shield spell over all of her people. Those lumentors would have to drain the magic from the ward before they could even start draining the elves beneath.
I, however, did not glow. Neither did Cindra, weak and kneeling in the center of the courtyard. Tanny’s spell was cast for elves alone.
Confused by Tanny’s magic and exposed to the sun’s rays, the lumentors turned on the slime pets. They climbed inside puppies and ferrets, turtles and toads. One tiny slime mouse radiated with the brilliant light of a full-grown human soul packed into a too-small body, its blue form pulsing like a grenade filled with light. It raced onto the stage to run past me and into the palace, but Queenette Glory raised a foot and stomped on the small creature.
A splat of blue slime under her foot was all that was left. The lumentors could be defeated in this form!
Zid’s girls and the glowing elven citizens erupted in a fury of blade and spell. Elves activated skills I couldn’t define, tossing every color of magic into the air. Some fought with weak pellets of light while others conjured mighty torrents of energy that blasted past the courtyard and through the leaves beyond. While they rooted out the last of the small slime pets and destroyed them, Cindra hunched under her cloak, a slime in hiding.
I was so captivated by the eruption of magic I didn’t notice when Klimog snatched the broken book that sat at my feet. He scurried away with it.
“Joke’s on you,” I yelled. “I couldn’t have read it anyway!”
The last zombie still under the necromancer’s spell was Kingling Mourn. He walked toward me in a slow, jerky stride. His decaying skin still leaked some long-stagnant fluid. He was no threat now. I stood and waited for the spell to break.
Instead, the elven monarch’s reanimated corpse grabbed my spear with both hands while I held it tight. He thrust its tip through his chest, smiled, and went limp.
I stood there for a moment, perplexed. Was I so fearsome an adversary that enemies threw themselves upon my blade to spare us both the trouble of me killing them? I couldn’t blame him. I was pretty heroic, my pinkish hue finally returning to my battle-hardened body. I was a hero now, a disarmer of necromancers, a displayer of ways to defeat lumentors, a preventer of the undead from overthrowing the city and adding it to Duul’s growing fiefdom. Any foe would be wise to—
“Murderer!” the queenette yelled. “Arrest him!”
Oh. Yeah, that makes more sense.
“It was the man in the black robe!” I yelled. “He’s getting away!”
It was no use. A pair of guards grabbed me from behind, then the queenette herself put her hand on my face. My vision darkened. My head felt woozy for a second, then it didn’t feel anything at all.
+41
I was in a small lake, surrounded by rock. A mountain spring. The air was crisp, with the sun just setting over the snow-capped peaks. I leaned back against a rocky ledge and dipped down until the cool water touched my chin.
“You started without us,” someone said. I turned left. It was Lily. She took her pointed blue hat from her head and tossed it to the rocky ground, letting her long brown hair cascade down her shoulders.
“Sorry,” I said. “You’re here now though.”
She reached behind her back for a moment, then her light blue witch’s robe fell from her shoulders and rumpled into a pile, forming a ring of fabric around her feet. I had no idea she hid such a tight, firm body under that flowing robe. Her pale skin was flawless, without a single beauty mark or mole. Only her face held any freckles at all.
Lily touched a toe to the water, testing its temperature. The movement tightened her calf and drew my eyes upward, past her thigh, toward her slender waist and firm stomach. Small pert breasts rested on her chest, as perfect and bare as the rest of her body.
“You’re acting like you’ve never seen me naked before,” she said, lowering herself into the water. She pulled her hair back and rested it against the rocks behind her, dipping the rest of her body into the water until it touched her chin.
“I haven’t,” I said.
“You must have,” she said, “in that imagination of yours. I give you a hard time sometimes, but you’re still a man. A
nd I’m still a woman.” This whole scenario took me by surprise. I never thought Lily had an interest in me.
“Cold,” Ambry said. She stood to my right, opposite Lily. She had tested the water, but it wasn’t to her standards. Just like Lily, she dropped her robe to the ground and descended into the water. Unlike Lily, however, she conjured her special skills, igniting her hands in red-hot magic and raising the water’s temperature until it was a hot spring.
Ambry’s body was much like her sister’s, a body sculpted to perfection from the purest materials. She was confident in her own skin, and no one could blame her. A trail of steam followed behind as she came closer to me.
Lily ran a wet hand through my hair. A thin trickle of warm water ran down my neck and cooled quickly against the wind. The rest of my body just relaxed against the hot water, and I tilted my head back to rest it against the rocks. I closed my eyes. Let Ambry and Lily explore with their hands. Let them surprise me.
A splash of water forced my eyes open again. Nola approached from the front.
Before I could say a word, she tugged at the golden strings that held together her plain white vest. She didn’t pause as she approached, just kicked off her sandals and stepped into the bubbling water. Her cloth skirt soaked as she got closer, then disappeared beneath the surface of the steaming water.
Now her vest was soaked through. Still, she approached. The golden goddess’s eyes locked on mine as her vest clung against her pale, yellow skin. She smiled while Lily’s and Ambry’s hands traced down my arms, my chest. Nola’s golden glow grew brighter as she lowered herself against me.
“Nola, I—”
“Shh,” she said. She pouted her lips and shook her head slightly, almost imperceptibly. We don’t need words, Arden. I know your thoughts before you form them. I know exactly what I’m doing.
She leaned forward, her long hair brushing down my face and toward the water. She pressed her lips against my skin, just below my ear.
A shooting pain rocketed through my body as sharp teeth sank deeply into my neck. “Ow!” I yelled.
My body spasmed and shook, but when my eyes opened, I wasn’t in a mountain spring. I was lying on a pile of dead leaves, covered in shadow and trapped inside a cage of glowing mesh wire.
I’ve got to stop waking up like this.
I swatted at the pain in my neck, knocking something off me. A fairyfly landed in the leaves at my side, stared up at me, and hissed before flying away. The lower half of its face was dripping in fresh red blood. Mine.
A force I didn’t expect lifted my body from the ground and pressed me against the wire mesh roof of my cage. The cage was only five feet high — too short to stand up in, but high enough that falling from the ceiling would hurt.
“Oy!” someone yelled from the other side of the cage. A yellow-skinned elf with a stern face pointed at me with one hand while the other glowed orange. The leaves rustled from the strong wind that erupted beneath me and held me against the prison cell’s ceiling.
The force of that wind made it hard to breathe at all. I felt like I was suffocating under the strain of his magic attack. “You don’t touch the inventory, it touches you. Don’t make me warn you again.”
He released my body and I fell flat against the leaves. After a few gulps of air, I noticed an elf staring at me from a few feet away. She looked wary and worn.
“Arden,” I said, “with, um, one D.”
“Awna two A’s,” she said.
“I thought these bugs only drank babies’ blood,” I said.
“That’s their preference,” she replied. “We don’t get many babies in here though, so they have to make due. There was that one time, a man turned himself into a baby to evade the law. He failed. Spectacularly. The fairyflies devoured him in a single day.”
I felt around for my Vile Lance, but it was nowhere. “My weapon,” I said.
“Is that why you’re here?” she asked. “Weapons are illegal.”
“They think I… yes. That’s it.” Better not to turn anyone against me with whisperings of regicide.
I found a twig and I thrust it forward, trying to activate Piercing Blow against the prison wall, but nothing happened. It wasn’t enough to trigger my polearm skills.
“Whatever you’re doing,” the woman said, “don’t bother. If you keep misbehaving they’ll tie you up. After that, they poke starter holes in you and set you up as a blood fountain so the fairyflies will dispose of you quicker. There are levels of prison in this prison, and you and I are as free and as safe as they get.
“Then again,” she said, “I should keep my mouth shut. Humans have more blood, and you’d keep the fairyflies away from me a little longer.”
She didn’t sound like one who valued others’ lives very highly, which may not be uncommon in a prison. Still, she didn’t look like a murderer. “What landed you here?”
She laughed. “Taxes.” She turned her back to me and started yelling. “I’m not paying them. You hear me?” She grabbed the wire cage frame and rattled it. “I know where that money goes, to the stinkin’ humans and their rotten empire!”
A guard stepped close. Awna opened her hands and backed away from the wall.
A fairyfly flitted into the space between us and I froze. So did Awna. The insect looked at each of us, then landed on Awna’s head. The elf woman just winced and waited. Guards outside the wire cage stepped closer, eyeing me instead of her. They must have expected me to swat the insect away, which is what I wanted to do.
Instead, the bug crept down Awna’s face, then climbed onto her long pointy ear. She perched there, a slender insect woman with shimmering purple eyes. Her four delicate wings rested behind her, sky blue with touches of yellow. She sprang open her mouth and bit Awna’s elf ear, drained away some blood, the flittered into the distance.
“Just what I need,” she said. “Another piercing.”
On her other ear sat a small bronze band, with the number 5616 inscribed on it. That was no jewelry. I clenched my eyes shut, breathed deep, and reached up. A fresh earring hung from the high part of my own ear. “What number am I?”
Awna leaned close. “You’re 5620,” she said. “That’s the highest I’ve seen.” She climbed on top of me and started patting me down, a feverish look in her eyes. Then her hands found my pockets and she dug her nimble elf fingers into them.
“No one’s gotten you yet!” she said. “Wait, what is this junk?” She tossed my map and compass into the leaves. “You didn’t carry any food with you?” Next she threw my seedpod aside. She held my lilac energem up and squinted, but tossed that away too. “No use for jewels in here, just food. Ah well, it was worth a shot.”
“If my number is only a little higher than yours, you must be recent too then,” I said.
“We’re all recent,” she said. “How long do you think anyone can survive this?”
“And what is this exactly?”
“The fairyfly farm,” she said. “These little ladies are Mournglory’s chief export, sold to adventurers in all the lands for minor healing, and to elves for a variety of other purposes.”
“Like wakes,” I said. “I understand prison. I understand punishment. What I don’t understand is what gives anyone the right to do this to the fairyflies, or to make criminals pay for their sins in blood. This isn’t just a prison term. This is capital punishment served with a side of torture.”
Awna shrugged. “We’re all complicit. You’ll see.” She waved her hand in the general direction of the prison and I scanned the complex in every direction.
For the first time, I registered the size and scope of this operation. Awna and I were in a small rectangular cage that narrowed to a small door. Beyond it was another cage, and another, creating a wire mesh maze that spanned the interior of the forest floor. It was confined only by the hollowed out trunk of the tree that formed Mournglory’s center, roughly a thousand yards across, and the eight monstrous trees that formed the city’s perimeter.
Above us
sat a distant wooden platform supporting the city’s temple, connected to the outer walkway by wooden bridges.
I could see through the entire prison, though I wasn’t sure which spaces beyond the wire mesh served as guards’ pathways and which served as the caged-in pens that kept the prisoners trapped. I couldn’t estimate the number of fairyflies that flitted around the prison with us. It could be a thousand. It could be ten thousand.
Most of my possessions were strewn about our prison cage, but my map was within arm’s reach. I unfolded it, but zooming in didn’t provide a clear enough display of the interconnected wire-walled cells for me to plan some great escape. I zoomed out afterward, expecting to see Valleyvale further south, but it was gone. Again. I spread past wide expanses of gray nothingness where I had never explored, and then it emerged. Valleyvale was impossibly far to the west. It was either in the beastkin lands, or it was further out amidst the wilds.
It was only a matter of time before Kāya brought the city somewhere I could find it, and then I’d have my second chance at liberating everyone she held hostage.
That is, if I survived this little prison sentence.
The low ceiling here forced me to hunch, just like in the first floor of Zid’s brothel. I wanted my things back, but I wasn’t going to argue with Awna about who should retrieve them. I brushed the leaves off my pants and started toward the other side of our holding pen.
After a slight tickle in my nose, a trickle of water dripped down my face from nowhere. The same happened to Awna.
“Revenge,” she said. She ran off, but before I could ask what she meant or start retrieving my things, I had a coughing fit. Water spewed from my mouth. When I stumbled toward the cage door Awna had gone through, the urge to cough subsided.
I turned back again, stepping toward my compass, but my body collapsed in another coughing fit. The trickle of water was a stream. Outside my cage, a guard’s hands pulsed with blue light. He was drowning me, forcing me toward another part of the prison complex on pain of a watery death. I left my things behind and followed Awna, regaining control of my lungs.
