Lucas looked at her for a long moment in confusion before he asked, “Ummm… Excuse me? Is that some sort of prophecy or something?”

  “Nothing of the sort,” the Goddess said, “And hardly a problem you need to worry about. It's simple ecology. Dragons are a part of nature, but they rarely grow so old and powerful as to dispce nature.”

  “Dispce nature?” he asked, momentarily imagining the dragon as some kind of high-pressure front on a weather map, swirling just off the coast like some tropical storm. “I don’t follow.”

  “And you wouldn’t,” she agreed. “Not unless I spent a lot of time expining it to you. Now is not the time for such things, though. Your soul will need to return to your body soon or not at all.”

  “You can’t just throw something out there like that and then say never mind. That’s fucked up,” Lucas said. As much as the Goddess’ words scared him, Skyra scared him more. She was at least on his side to some small degree. The dragoness, on the other hand, was on no one’s side but her own, and the more time Lucas spent with her, the more that weighed on him.

  “Well, then I shall give you one final thought to consider, and then you must be away,” she answered with an inscrutable smile. “You King’s son, just like his father before him, and his father before him, uses the dragoness as a very expensive shield… no, an umbrel, to keep away the downpour of other forces that they would otherwise have to do their part to purge and keep under control. Lordanin grows fat and rich while the rest of the world suffers. What is it you think happens to all of those orcs and goblins that grow and churn in the hinternds? Do you think they just fade away?”

  Lucas wanted to answer, but before he could, she made a dismissive gesture, and he felt himself being almost dragged back to the door he’d entered from. He tried to resist it, but it was a painful sensation, and as he looked down, he could see a silver thread extending from his sor plexus and back to the door.

  “I wouldn’t do that, Lucas,” the Goddess called after him as he began to ungracefully take his leave. “Remember, those potions only work once for each person. If you ever try one again, I’ll keep your soul forever!”

  The eagerness in her voice then made Lucas wonder if she really had ever been on his side. He didn’t think about that long, though, as he followed the thread back out of the pace. If he kept up the pace, there was no pain, but no matter how fast he moved, there was never any sck or esticity. The thing just kept reeling up inside him.

  That was weird, but it didn’t bother him, at least until he got to the broad stairs he’d climbed up to gain entry. By then, the pace the thread demanded of him bordered on punishing, but he didn’t exactly have a choice in the matter. Instead, he just pushed past the people who were moving up it even as he jogged down the things at a breakneck pace.

  “Excuse me! Pardon me! Coming through!” he yelled, basking in their scowls of disapproval. The elves clearly didn’t like a non-elf here, but acting like a bull in a china shop added extra venom to those looks. He didn’t take that part personally. That wasn’t his fault. It was Lwyn’s fault. He hadn’t triggered whatever this was. He couldn’t even do anything to stop it.

  Instead, he was being drawn like a fish on a hook toward the pza he’d first started in. Specifically, he was being drawn toward a faintly glowing archway. It was only when he was almost there and running at a breakneck pace that he noticed the two angels were still standing there.

  “Enjoy your limited reprieve,” Darius said as Lucas ran past him, “Whether it takes a year or a century, you will die, and when you do, I’ll be back to retrieve you.”

  “I enjoy these little chats!” Lucas called out breathlessly, giving them both the finger as he ran past the two of them, hoping this wasn’t a trap. “Let’s make sure to do this again soon. How’s Nevuary work for you?”

  Before either of them could answer, though, he was already taking a running leap into the glowing rift that awaited him. It looked a little intimidating, but he couldn’t exactly slow down to investigate it first, and there was no way he was chilling while his parole officer was loitering around, looking for an excuse to grab him. He’d pyed that game before.

  Instead, he went in head first, and it was only as the darkness began to dissolve him he felt that might have been a mistake. He immediately started feeling cold and slow. Then, the aching started. It felt a little like an overdose or what he imagined death might feel like. There was a sense of weight and a dull, full-body ache, along with the certainty that there was nothing he could do about it.

  It was only with that revetion that he realized that was exactly what this was. He was dead. No, he was in his body, and it was dead. That was a hell of a thing to figure out, and Lucas shuddered in revulsion. Still, he forced himself to breathe. At least, he tried to. It was harder than he thought it would be. His flesh was cold, and his heart was still, so it refused to respond to him.

  Don’t let me go out like a bitch, man, he thought to himself, imagining the hard time that angel asshole would give him if he died again right after he flipped them off. That gave him the strength to try again, and this time, his dead flesh offered up a gasping, shuddering breath that wracked his whole body with painful coughing.

  That coughing was the best thing that ever happened to him, though, and Lucas embraced it, it wracked his body, and his heart grudgingly began to beat once more. The vomiting followed almost right after that, but Lucas had prepared for that and spewed up the thick, vicious poison that he’d willingly drunk earlier into the bronze chamber pot. When it was all done, several minutes ter, he felt positively horrible, but even more than that, he was happy to be alive.

  When there was nothing left in his stomach, he wiped his face and then flopped down on his bed. “I am never, ever, dying again,” he told himself. “Never. That shit sucks.”

  Part of him knew now was the time he should investigate his system and see just what had changed, but he couldn’t be fucked. As far as he could tell, almost no time at all had passed during whatever all that was. He would have called it a dream if he didn’t have the empty bottle and the full chamber pot.

  The dreams that followed after, though, had much the same character as his out-of-body experience, or whatever it was.

  Lucas didn’t even try to get out of bed for lunch or dinner, and when the servants found him passed out and half dead to the world, they sent for the healers immediately. Lucas didn’t remember much of that. Remembering anything when you were running a fever was hard. He recalled the taste of a very expensive healing potion and something about bed rest, though he couldn’t recall if the doctor had told Heisenburgle that he must let Lucas sleep for a week or for the rest of his life. It was a coin flip.

  Lucas didn’t care. When he was asked questions, he simply nodded and told everyone he’d be fine or that he was feeling better, even though he wasn’t. He cked the processing power or the strength for any more than that. Being dead, even for a few minutes, is pretty hard on the body, he decided. I guess that’s why Lwyn sent me away so forcefully.

  He had plenty of time to wonder if he would have managed to recover if he’d been away for one more minute, though. It haunted his dreams for days as he worked his way up from broth to solid food once more.

  On day five, he was sitting up and feeding himself for the first time since he’d done all of this when Heisenburgle paid him an uncharacteristic daytime visit. The gnome didn’t beat around the bush even a little. He just said, “I find the timing of all of this highly suspect. I don’t believe you are sick.”

  “You don’t?” Lucas asked, taken aback. The very st thing he wanted to do was to admit any part of what he’d done, but he might be forced to do just that.

  “No,” the gnome expined, “The timing, right after you finally triumph in your project, is just too suspect. I believe you were poisoned. By saboteurs working in league with the elves.”

  Lucas opened his mouth to discount that, but the alchemist talked right over him. “I know that you said that when you were attacked, elves were not involved, but surely now that you’ve created Lwynthenll, you can see that—”

  “Why is it always elves with you?” Lucas asked. “Why is it never the dwarves or the Prince or—”

  “If the Prince wanted you dead, he would simply have to ask me to do it. There is no need to go around me and my authority over this facility,” Heisenburgle said coolly. “As to the dwarves, they have no interest in alchemy. They occasionally try to spy on some of the advanced metallurgical techniques I am pursuing for the Hyperquadabutor, but that has nothing to do with the Lwynthenll. Now that we have a narcotic leash for our dragoness, it will very likely be mothballed. ”

  Lucas ignored all of that nonsense and refocused on the gnome's main point. He definitely had been poisoned, and he needed to come up with a good excuse for that, but he could do without the paranoia. Indeed, as the gnome talked about his pns to round up the kitchen staff and begin a very forceful questioning routine to find the source, he noped right out of there.

  “What if,” Lucas said, interrupting Heisenburgle’s deranged rant with as much strength as he could muster. “What if I was poisoned, and it was… and this will blow your mind... It was no one's fault?”

  “No, you aren’t making any sense at all!” the gnome compined.

  “You’re the master alchemist,” Lucas said, "figure it out."

  “This puzzle is not a job for an alchemist but a spymaster. Fortunately, I also happen to be—”

  “Heisenburgle, seriously, stop,” Lucas sighed. “I’m too weak for this shit. I don’t believe, for a second, someone pointed my eggs. I think that maybe I underestimated this potion of yours and might have dosed myself by accident. That’s all.”

  “Really?” Heisenburgle asked. “How?”

  Lucas had no idea how, but in that moment, he did what he did best and lied his ass off. He expined how they really didn’t have enough ventition for that kind of catalytic reaction. When the gnome seemed skeptical of that, Lucas suggested that he might have dripped some on his hands or touched some residue while cleaning the gssware. The gnome had less trouble accepting those options.

  “What if there really is a traitor in the kitchens, though?” Heisenburgle repeated. Surely, you don’t just expect me to ignore that possibility.

  “Please do not start any witch hunts until I’m feeling good enough to check out of this dump,” Lucas answered with a shake of his head. “If you do anything like what you suggested earlier, there will be a lot more than one poisoner on the loose. You can’t treat people that way.”