Liria stood still in the gray silence.
The Ashen Wastes stretched around her in every direction, pale and sulphurous under the pre-dawn sky. The green light threaded through the cracked ground brightened vein by vein, forming a glowing web of necromantic energy that stretched as far as the eye could see.
She tried calling her siblings and found her attempts blocked. It would take her minutes to bypass the communication jamming.
Liria hated that, despite everything, a part of her felt vindicated.
Her hunch had been correct. She had gotten her all-important confirmation of a malign intellect behind the fragments of the dead god.
Across from her, Seris finally woke. He came to all at once, the way frightened children do, his breath catching in a sharp gasp. His wide, terrified eyes swept across the blasted landscape, taking in the pale ground veined with faintly luminous green, the dead sky above, the utter absence of birdsong or wind.
"Big sis?" His voice cracked on the words. "What happened? Where are we?"
Liria closed the distance between them in three quick strides, arms already reaching for him.
The blast hit her like a wall.
Pure force, omnidirectional, radiating outward from Seris's chest. She dug her heels in this time and did not fall, sliding back a few feet across the pale earth, robes snapping in the shockwave.
Kaerthis's medallion blazed an angry green against Seris's collarbone, its fine metalwork warping before her eyes. Necromantic fire tore through the sigils at blinding speed, rewriting them, bending their purpose inside out. One by one the glyphs ignited and changed. Before Seris could more than gasp and scrabble at it with his fingers, the corrupted circuit closed.
The enchantment was complete. Its new purpose was the opposite of what Liria had built.
Like a tide answering the moon, dark power gathered from all across the Ashen Wastes, wrapping Seris in a cocoon of pitch black shadow.
A death knight emerged from the inky darkness, an echo of lords past. The final glory of long lost heroes—immortalized in memory, honored by the world—has been twisted by the will of a dead god into something profane.
Green necromantic fire cast eerie shadows across the undead knight's obsidian black armor. The sword in its right hand was a wound in reality. The great shield strapped to its left arm reflected no light. Seris was tied spread-eagled over it, struggling futilely against his bonds.
Liria clamped down on her instinctive need to rush over and save him.
Her emotions cooled, logic taking over as she assessed the threat.
Level 300. The very upper limits of what Liria could handle without the backing of the natural world around her.
She had been operating under the premise that even if the dead god's remnants possessed reason and intellect, it still had to act through Seris, a malnourished child who had never known love. There were clear limits to its power, which she could extrapolate by using Seris as the basis.
She had been right. This much was still within expectations
But…
This was definitely a worst-case scenario, and the tactics involved felt disturbingly familiar. Liria suppressed her rising unease.
Defend herself. Retrieve Seris. Analyze and bypass the jamming frequency. Her immediate priorities were in that order. Suspicion could wait.
She faced the death knight across the gray and barren expanse. Her magic swirled around her like an aurora of white and gold. The undead knight tensed, gripping its sword. The green veins threading the pale earth pulsed brighter, as if the ground itself was holding its breath.
Their standoff ended with the boom of the sound barrier breaking.
The death knight decisively turned and fled, the ground shuddering under each footfall, ash billowing in great plumes behind it. Green radiance settled over Seris on the shield, a protective cushion against the sudden brutal acceleration.
Seris's scream of shock was swallowed almost immediately by the distance.
For one eternal moment, Liria simply stared.
No, what is this? Why is a level 300 running away from a level 112? Even caution should have limits!
She bit back a curse, adjusting her plans. Catching up would take everything she had. It was no longer possible for her to finish analyzing the communication jamming and call her siblings for a quick and easy resolution.
The Steps of Providence hurtled her forward. Her own improvised creation, based on her brother Aethon's divine sword art.
Mana swirled through her body in rhythm with the world's breath. She imbued each step with her memories of the future. Of thirty years of war. Of walking through a thousand battlefields undefeated.
Each step was communion, impressing her will and conviction upon the world: I am inevitable. I am invincible.
Once, in that erased future, with her victories engraved upon history and her will supported by the faith of millions, each step would have covered miles, each reposition could warp causality to create an opening in the enemies' defenses where none existed.
This was why Liria had dared to charge into the Ashen Wastes. After passing level 100, her body could finally handle this Conceptual Art without breaking down.
Though it was only a pale shadow of what it once was, it would have to do for now.
The undead knight continued its single-minded flight ahead of her, never hesitating, never looking back.
Liria was barely keeping up for now, but the distance between them was slowly but surely increasing. She had to make the death knight stop and fight.
She reached into Vaelir's bottomless magic pouch and summoned the magic sword he had given her. The sigils along its gleaming silver blade could store and hold up to ten spells, releasing them on her command.
She had imbued them with the most effective anti-undead spell she was capable of casting before setting off.
Ten overlapping Solar Beams could vaporize even a death knight. If Seris hadn't been taken hostage, the fight would have been over before it even began.
She aimed low and swung.
A beam of concentrated light and heat scoured the earth where the death knight's legs had been, turning the pale ground into a brief river of molten white. It dodged with a speed that should not have been possible at that size, twisting aside in the last instant. But not quite far enough. The beam caught its right leg below the knee.
The limb disintegrated. The death knight pitched sideways, hit the ground with a sound like a collapsing wall, and was still for one heartbeat.
The Steps of Providence shortened the distance between them to nothing. Liria reached for Seris, fingers brushing the edge of his sleeve.
The undead knight's sword swing was almost too fast to see with the naked eye. Impossibly slow in her soul sight. Her sluggish body screamed as it struggled to react in time. Never had the disconnect between her body and soul felt so apparent.
The Steps of Providence activated under her. Causality bent. The world folded, just slightly, around her conviction, and she was elsewhere, a little to the left, her hair and robes fluttering from the wind generated by the death knight's slash.
Liria reached out to negate its existence. The obsidian armor felt as cold as ice under her hand.
The last will and testament of the fallen lords of Brighthold rose against her. Their final courage and sacrifice. The last blaze of their existence as they stood firm in defense of their land. Now twisted to serve the whims of a dead god.
Liria hated necromancy.
Her mind pushed against that barrier of dying conviction. Please. Don't be deceived. This isn't what you should be protecting.
For a moment, the barrier almost wavered, then the death knight leapt backward, breaking the contact. Its right leg was already regenerating.
Liria quickly assessed her situation.
Five to ten seconds of sustained contact would be enough to negate it entirely, but grappling was out of the question. The physical disparity was too great; it would peel her off like a burr. And now that it had retreated once, it would keep retreating, using Seris as a shield whenever she brought a spell to bear.
She needed it to stop running. She needed it to attack her.
For that, it had to believe she was no longer a threat.
Two spells began building in her hands simultaneously, their somatic components stripped away and folded inward to hide them from casual detection. The process cost her a fraction of casting speed; she judged it worth the price.
One was Chains of Light, the strongest light-based binding spell she could cast at her level. She let the potent magical energy build to crescendo, then held it in place with her will, at the single moment before release.
The second was a cantrip, almost nothing: a visual spectacle to mask this magical energy as something destructive instead of binding. Aggressively bright light wrapped around her sword, until it blazed like a miniature sun.
The death knight warily raised its shield, hiding behind Seris. The brave child had stopped crying and struggling at some point during the chase, and was looking at her with teary but trusting eyes.
When their eyes met, he straightened as much as the bonds allowed.
"Big sis," he called out, his voice only slightly unsteady, "how can I help?"
The steadiness of it, from a malnourished child tied to the arm of a death knight in the middle of a dead wasteland, did something complicated to Liria's chest. She kept her expression level.
"Seris," she said, pitching her voice clearly across the distance, "that death knight was born from your power. Can you feel your connection to it?"
He furrowed his brows, concentrating. Then his face crumpled, and he nodded, looking as though he wanted to apologize for existing. Fresh tears flowed down his cheeks.
It was all Liria could do to hold back from immediately comforting him. This was not the time or place. She pressed on.
"Good, I need you to focus on that connection and command the death knight to stop moving. Can you do that, Seris?"
He pulled himself together with visible effort, his expression settling into something focused and hard. "Yes," he said. "I can do that."
The death knight froze.
The Steps of Providence carried her to its unprotected back in less than a heartbeat.
She swung her blazing sword in a tight arc, already knowing how this would unfold. The death knight broke Seris's hold in an instant, turning faster than any creature its size had the right to, interposing the shield between her sword and its body. Seris was directly in her line of attack.
In response, she ignited the blazing light on her sword that was all flash and no substance. As the world went white, she hurled herself backwards. Under the cover of this blinding light, she sealed the Chains of Light spell into her sword, saving it for her deciding blow.
The building magical energy vanished. Liria hit the ground rolling, taking care to scrape her face and cover it in dirt. She bit down hard on her tongue and let the flowing blood pool in her mouth.
When the light faded, and vision returned, Liria staggered to her feet while coughing up blood. She swayed on her feet like a drunken man.
From the outside, it would look exactly like a high-powered spell broken a fraction of a second before release, the interrupted energy turning inward and punishing the caster for it. A plausible, costly mistake. The kind of mistake someone makes when they are desperate and slightly too slow.
Did the enemy buy it?
Seris certainly did.
"Big sister?" he asked, staring at her with wide, horrified eyes. His wail was the sound of a wounded animal. "No! No no no no! It's all my fault!"
For once, Liria had no desire to comfort him.
I'm sorry Seris, but I need you to be determined and desperate.
"I'm fine, Seris. It's not your fault." She held his gaze across the distance, and spoke with serene authority. "You just need to do better next time. I'm counting on you."
Seris went quiet. His jaw tightened with stubborn determination, and he nodded once, short and fierce.
Across the ash, the death knight stood motionless. Its right leg had finished regenerating while her attention was on the child. Now it watched her, cold green fire burning steadily behind the eye-slits of its helm.
Come on. Liria thought, projecting exhaustion in every line of her posture. I'm weak. I'm vulnerable. Come and finish it.
For a long moment, the death knight stood still. Then its form blurred. Towards her instead of away from her.
Liria almost smiled in satisfaction, breaking her charade. She caught herself at the last moment.
Light gathered around her sword as she continued her performance. She needed to do this six more times. One Chains of Light spell may not be enough to immobilize the death knight for ten seconds, but seven of them layered over one another should do it.
Liria was certain that she wouldn't even need to go that far.
More than her magic and sword, Liria believed in Seris. Believed in the strength of will that had resisted the dead god's influence for so long. Believed in the untainted purity that had survived a mud pit of a life.
He was almost there, at the summit of desperation and determination, where limits are broken and miracles achieved.
Liria believed without doubt that Seris would succeed.
The Steps of Providence hurtled her away from a lunging strike. Again she hit the ground rolling, and laboriously staggered to her feet, looking wretched.
The second Chains of Light folded into her sword. She let the gathering glow on the blade flare and then sputter, as though something had gone wrong.
She bit her tongue again. More blood. She pressed a shaking hand against her mouth and made herself breathe audibly.
The death knight advanced. Each step shook the ground in a slow, patient cadence. His sword trailed in the dirt, the disturbed air around the blade hissing faintly.
Liria tracked it in her peripheral vision. She was watching Seris.
His face had gone completely white. The tears had stopped. His eyes, fixed on her, had taken on a quality she recognized from thirty years of war: the look of someone who has decided that they have nothing left to lose and found that this is, in its own terrible way, a kind of freedom.
The death knight raised its sword.
Liria adjusted her position to dodge, and at the last moment, let the blade graze her. She twisted so the movement looked involuntary, like a stumble rather than a choice, and the sword's tip cut off her ear.
Blood flowed crimson.
It was a superficial wound really. Easily healed by magic. But the visual impact…
All fear had faded from Seris' eyes now, replaced by burning fury and resolve.
For a moment he simply looked at her. At the blood. At her severed ear. Something shifted behind his eyes. The child who had cried and apologized all day was gone.
"Stop!" his young voice rang out, cold and imperious. "Undead abomination born from my power! I, your rightful lord and master, command you to stop!"
The death knight froze.
For a moment, Liria could almost see the image of the Lich King overlaid over Seris. So familiar was that tone and voice.
But where the Lich King had only inspired disgust, Liria thought that Seris had never looked more beautiful.
The Steps of Providence placed her behind the death knight in a single step, and this time, it did not react. Seris was holding it, all of him focused to a single point, his face white with the effort, the tendrils of shadow that bound his wrists straining and pulling.
Liria pressed both hands flat against the obsidian back plate.