In complete silence, surrounded and embraced by the darkness of my room aboard the Ashen Bride, I armed myself.

  Some time ago, in the months before the Skyfall, Azarus and I had worked on a project together. It wasn’t meant to be anything special. More of a…thought experiment, really. My enchanted long coat was really more armor than I needed, with my fighting style and advantages. It would easily turn blades and even dampen Spells that came into contact with the specially treated and enchanted leather.

  However…

  It didn’t fulfill all of my purposes. The bright blue and red of it was very eye-catching after all, and that had been by design. I wanted to stand out while wearing it, to act as a beacon to my men.

  But I don’t think I would ever forget my roots.

  I had been trained and blooded as an assassin long before I had become the Marshall of the Order of the Polaris Reach. And I both didn’t have a good set of gear for my former role…and I did have an overabundance of Oninite.

  It was a very dark metal, after all. Very good at dispersing light when rays lit upon it.

  So, my best and currently missing friend had helped me design a set of armor, specifically for that purpose. I had brought it along with me on the expedition, of course. It would have been foolish not to. But up to this point, I’d never needed it. And why would I? I was both the figurehead and the leader of a Martial Order now. Those kinds of people didn’t skulk in the dark with drawn blades, hungry for blood.

  And then I had laid eyes upon the still corpse of an Elven raider. One of the ones currently working to sabotage Rhoscara, to soften it up for the coming Principality army, sailing for our doom.

  I’d barely been aware of the worried Maria, standing not far from her kill. I’d barely registered the horrified form of Walter, who had come to see what the commotion was. After all, my Squire had been with me when these Elves had captured and sold us into slavery. More than that, it was entirely possible that this Elf had been one of the ones who had killed his Mother and Father, as part of their refugee caravan, fleeing the chaos of the Construct war.

  But I hadn’t asked, nor had I sought to comfort the young man.

  Because my mind had gone blank at the sight of the Elf, and feelings had started to rage through me. Things that were only ever lurking beneath the surface. Raw emotions that threatened to send me into a black, vengeful mood when they crossed through me.

  And it had shocked me, even if only slightly.

  Hadn’t I had my revenge? Hadn’t I put the entire town of Addersfield to the torch? Hadn’t every single slaving Dwarf in that wretched hive of torturers been torn to pieces by endless hordes of monsters?

  Hadn’t I personally driven a dagger through the heart of Magnus?

  So why…

  Why did a vast well of seemingly endless hatred roll through me at the sight of that Elf?

  Ah…

  The job wasn’t done, was it? I may have killed my ‘masters’…

  But I hadn’t killed the ones who had put me there. And now here they were. Somehow, someway. In Rhoscara.

  The job wasn’t done.

  I finished slipping on my dulled black leather armor, with copious amounts of Oninite plates stitched within it, snapping on the vambraces as I did. And then I slipped my singular remaining collapsible spear into its sheath at the small of my back, slung the harness that held my equally collapsed shortbow over my shoulders, secured it…

  And considered Terractus, and my staff.

  I shook my head.

  No. Neither of them was suitable for this kind of work. I could make do with a single dagger and my bow.

  Plus a brace of Oninite throwing blades.

  Yes…

  That would do.

  Once fully armed and armored, I looked up through the window of my room. I dearly wished that actual darkness could greet my gaze, but alas. Here in the Skyfall, it was only grey skies forever. Through the window, I could see the yard of our command base, here in the tannery district of Rhoscara. My soldiers and Classers were busy at work, I could see, hammering our defenses into place for the coming battle. The counter-espionage team was nowhere to be seen, and that was…good.

  After I had seen the corpse, I had clamped down hard on my physical reactions with my newly returned Middle Lattice. Both of my clones had been recalled as soon as I had spotted the Elf, and they were in full agreement with me.

  We had to find them. Personally. And deal with them.

  Personally.

  Or else we would never know peace again.

  But none of this showed through on my face. Instead, I thanked them for the good work and ordered them back out. Perhaps…a bit brusquely, but nothing out of the ordinary. I don’t think even Maria had noticed anything strange.

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  I was…thankful that Sylvia hadn’t returned with her. She would have seen through me.

  My love always could.

  Once away from everyone, I had retreated straight here and began to arm myself. I knew it was irresponsible of me to decide to pursue these Elves myself. I knew I had duties to attend to here at the expedition. I even knew that I had already publicly expressed full confidence in my people’s ability to do this themselves.

  But I didn’t care.

  I picked up the last addition to this set of armor that Azarus had helped me create. Something I had been…reluctant to even own. He had convinced me that the armor wasn’t complete without it, though.

  A black Oninite face mask stared up at me, its blank surface expressing and reflecting nothing of the world.

  I considered it for a moment before slowly reaching out with a single finger, glowing with the rainbow hue of Aetherial Melding. Painstakingly, I traced an image across the surface of it. Where my finger passed, the color of the metal changed…into a stark, bone white.

  A line down the forehead, with extending curved lines that fell over the eye slits. A continuation of the curves beneath them, falling far down the mask to ultimately form…a circle, the bottom half of it in the position where a mouth would be.

  A noose.

  History repeats itself, I suppose.

  Before I could put the mask on, I heard my door creak open. For a moment, I feared the worst. If it were Sylvia standing there in the doorway, I’m…not sure I would have been able to go through with this. She would have been able to see right through me and what I was intending to do, and she would have been able to stop me. I would even let her, I think.

  But no.

  When I turned around, mask in hand, it was only Fade, nudging his way into the room with one antler. He had gotten surprisingly good at opening doors with those.

  We stared at each other silently for a moment before the wolf kicked back with a hind leg and closed the door behind him. Over the bond, I heard a sigh. “I never saw you like this, you know,” He said abruptly. At my raised eyebrow, he shrugged his lupine shoulders. “I was still with Taran when you were off being a spy in Elderwyck, so I never really…noticed what all of what that did to you. I regret it. Even if I had things to learn…I should have been there for you. I’m…sorry, Nate. I’ve wanted to say that for a long time.”

  I took a deep breath and set the mask back down on the table. In a few short strides, I had reached Fade and sunk to one knee. He didn’t resist when I (carefully) pulled him into a hug, his antlered head resting over my shoulder. We stayed like that for a few minutes, in comfortable silence, before I broke it. “You were very young, Fade,” I said quietly. “We weren’t even bonded yet. I wasn’t your responsibility, but you were mine. It was the right decision to leave you with Taran, and this…this is just something I have to do.”

  “Yeah,” Fade said in a resigned tone. “I understand. I mean, I don’t, not really. But I get it. This is just part of you, your whole…slavery thing. It all happened before we met, and all I can do for you with it is…I guess…support it.”

  I tightened my grip on Fade’s neck, but not enough to choke him. “You do more than you know, buddy.”

  I felt his head nod over my shoulder, and then I released him. When I backed away from him and stood up, we just looked at each other for a moment…

  And then he nodded at me. “Good luck, Nate. I’ll hold down the fort while you’re gone.”

  I ghosted a smile his way and turned back to the mask. This time, when I put it on…

  I felt my doubts fall away.

  This would have consequences. Maybe I was betraying a measure of trust that had been given to me, as the expedition's leader.

  But like all things, I would deal with it as it came.

  I activated my enhanced invisibility Skill, opened the window to the room, and slipped out of it.

  ……………………………

  Some time later, I found the perfect place to enact my plan. On an abandoned rooftop, in the equally sparse artists' district of the city, I drew my circle.

  Back before Skyfall, I’d discovered something about myself. Not only was I outright terrible at Mental Magic, I was so bad that I’d been dropped from the class. This had led me to needing to find a new class to attend if I wanted to remain in good standing with the Academy. It had taken some quick talking and a few recommendations from other Professors, but I’d gotten into one.

  That being the introduction course to Thaumaturgy, the Magic of Links.

  I hadn’t been in the class for very long before the world had essentially ended, but I had, at the very least, picked up one trick in my remedial studies. The first, most basic of Spells in the entire school.

  Similarity linking.

  When I had been confronted with the corpse of the Elf Maria and her team had slain, I’d retained a small amount of internal composure. Enough that I’d devised a snap plan. I had crouched down over the stiff body of the knife ear and faux brushed a hand over the surface of his mask. Using my middle finger, I had dug out a splinter from the wood of it, hiding it under my fingernail until I would need it.

  For the small, basic ritual I was setting up right now.

  With a small piece of chalk I kept in my utility pouch, I carefully drew out the circle on the roof, scribing out the required runes as I did. When it came to Thaumaturgy, I learned, there were a lot of them. It was a very rune-heavy kind of Magic. It was similar enough to Abjuration that most of the actual mystical effects of the school were accomplished through a complex combination of runes, directing the Mana in specific ways to create very specific effects. Unlike Abjuration, there didn’t appear to be a method of casting Thaumaturgic Spells on the fly. It was all done through specifically keyed circles, and I had learned maybe two of them.

  It was a lot to memorize, to be fair. But I was interested enough in the school to probably continue with it in the future.

  If there was a future, after the Skyfall.

  When I was done scribing the circle, I carefully picked out the now bloodied splinter of mask from under my fingernail, uncaring about the minor pain. The blood would help, anyway. I placed it into the center of the circle, and carefully positioned my hands over the outer rim of the circle.

  Please, please don’t fuck this up. I had only done this particular ritual like, two other times before.

  I formed the smallest amount of Mana I possibly could between my hands and let the glowing blue mote drift down to touch the rim of the circle.

  Luckily, I hadn’t screwed things up.

  The circle lit up with the same light blue glow as the Mana coursed through the runic circuit. Slowly, the Mana lit up every single rune inscribed upon and along the circle, in the exact sequence needed for the mystical effect to actualize. In the center of it, the splinter slowly floated off the ground and began to spin in place rapidly…

  Before abruptly stopping.

  I restrained a smile behind my mask. It had worked. From what I could tell, the bloodied end of the splinter was now pointing right towards the mask it had been pulled from, in the expedition camp. That was worthless to me, of course. Luckily…

  I reached out and tapped one of the larger runes of the circle. Smoothly, the splinter reoriented in midair, pointing in another direction.

  Now it was pointing towards the next most similar object to the mask it had been pulled from. In other words…

  Another wolf-shaped mask, hewn from the same kind of wood, somewhere in Rhoscara.