It was a squat, ugly thing.

  Isaac had always imagined something grander. In all the millennia that the necromancer had reigned inside the ruins of this tomb, she must’ve built some extravagant nest for herself. A throne room deep in the earth, buttressed by the feet of a giant corpse. Marble columns adorned with cornices, fine carpets, furs and paintings, braziers alight with necrotic fire. The necromancer herself, splayed on a throne of bones, all the gold of her empire’s conquests spilling from wall to wall, such was their magnitude. Glittering jewels, hordes of beasts, evil magic still burning through the eons.

  What Isaac saw now was just a flat, rectangular building. It was nestled against the bedrock of the cavern wall in such a way that he could’ve easily missed it in the shade. The walls were made of the same grey concrete that paved the floor, like the building had merely been an air bubble carved into shape. There were some signs of wealth—the windows had glass in their panes, which had been coated in a thick layer of dirt and dust, and there were metal objects on the roof, molded into strange shapes. Concave dishes, long poles, a few bits of scaffolding capped with spheres. It couldn’t have been decoration, but he was in no mood to speculate on their function.

  He panted for breath. The walk towards the building had covered more than two miles, winding through the destruction of concrete, ossein and sandwyrm blood, and it had left him gasping to the point of desperation. His limbs were weak. His mind was dizzy. He felt that, if he stopped to rest now, he would never rise again.

  But it was right there. After all this time, after all he had suffered, his destination was finally at hand.

  He was about to meet his father.

  “Hold,” Zaria said. She stopped walking, and the world seemed to lurch with her. “Park your arse.”

  “What—”

  Before he knew it, he was sitting on the floor. It took all his concentration to keep himself upright and breathing at the same time. She squatted over him, reaching for his leg. “You’re wheezin’ like a sow, and your burn needs cleaning again.”

  Isaac didn’t have the strength to argue. Using her hand as little as possible, she slung off her pack and tossed Soren’s cutlass to the floor. Gingerly, she peeled back the bandages on his thigh. Some of his skin came off with it. If it wasn’t for the poultice packed between the mottled grooves of flesh, he would’ve been screaming.

  She retrieved some new bandaging and wet it with a waterskin. “Isaac, you sure about this?”

  He was listening for sound in the small building. He heard none. The cavern was silent, save for the occasional tumble of rock at the ruins of the necropolis.

  “Look,” she said. “Let’s just go.”

  “Go?”

  “Beat sticks. Haul arse. Fuck on off. Something you should’ve been doin’ from the start.”

  “Z, I can’t—”

  He hissed. She had started rubbing the cloth through the outer edges of the burn, digging out the sand and grit.

  “Gonna hurt,” she said.

  He nodded, gripping one of her leather pauldrons. She kneaded his scabbing flesh. He barely had enough strength to groan.

  “He started all this,” Zaria said. “All your wizards were just reacting to what he done to you.”

  He stared up at the rocky ceiling of the cavern. He wasn’t sure what was worse—the screaming pain in his leg, or the breathless feeling in his lungs. He felt as if all the blood left in his body would’ve barely filled a cup.

  “Can you honestly tell me he’s changed for the better?”

  She poked through the patches of green poultice, checking the wound beneath.

  “You certain, beyond doubt, that he’s not got some trap in there, waiting for you?”

  There was a single rusted door leading into the building. He saw only darkness through the holes. Around the sides, the glass windows were thick with dust. It was impossible to see what was inside.

  “What’s to say he hasn’t been actin’ nice just to make you drop your guard? Would you really put it past him?”

  She retrieved more bandaging. After gently easing him into bending his knee, she began to wrap the white fabric around his thigh. The burn was wide and long. Keeping it from festering was going to take most of the supplies the students had given them.

  “Fuck the treasure,” Zaria said. “Was always a long shot, for me, and there’s no way we’re pinching more than some handfuls.”

  The bandaging was tied off with a knot. She stood up, offered a hand, and lifted him with ease. The effort of standing left him breathless again.

  “Let’s go. It’s the least bit of justice to leave him here, I think.”

  He watched the rusted door. He hadn’t heard a sound. Not the slightest movement through the glass windows. There was not a single sign of life.

  He stepped forward, but she blocked his path, holding out a hand.

  “Isaac. You’re not thinking of giving him your body, are you?”

  “No.”

  “It’s the only way he’s gettin’ out of here.”

  “I’m well aware of that.”

  “Then what are you hoping for, exactly?”

  He looked back. In the distance, he could see the scattered bones of the colossus. The ruins of the necropolis. Sunlight and rock and a sea of ossein.

  “I just want to hear his voice,” Isaac said. “I want to see him from outside a story.” He took as deep of a breath as he could. “I want to say goodbye.”

  He took another step forward, and, again, Zaria blocked his path.

  “You don’t want that,” she said. “Trust me.”

  He looked up at her.

  “I wish my father hadn’t tried to save me,” Zaria said. “When I was in the crates, being loaded up, I had no idea of what he’d done. Just thought it was wrong place, wrong time. Could’ve gone my whole life thinking that way. Still holding him dear in my heart, thinking he’d be out there and I’d find him some day.

  “But he did show up, and, even then, I wish he’d been mean. Spat in my face, told me he was glad for the coin. I could’ve hated him, then. Could’ve cursed his name and not thought twice. Even then, that’d have been nicer.”

  Her eye drifted down to the concrete.

  “But he tried to save me, and he was crying his eyes out, and it was plain to see it was the worst thing he’d ever done, and he would’ve given anything to take it back. ‘Cause of that, it wasn’t simple. It’s something I’ll always be able to recall, clear as day. Every last detail cutting like a knife. There’s no way to settle it. Not anymore.”

  Isaac stared at the building. It was small, plain and ugly. It was nothing like he had imagined.

  None of this had been like he’d imagined.

  “It wasn’t what happened to me that hurt the worst,” Zaria said. “It was who did it, and why. Even now, wise as I am, I still wish he hadn’t come around. I wish I didn’t know better. It’s not the kind of knowledge that makes me stronger. It just. . . .” She fell silent. “It just hurts. It’s always gonna hurt.”

  He was tired. His wounds were aching, his future was lost, and he was tired.

  “Let’s go.” She gestured with the cutlass. “There’s nothing here worth turning over. Never was. It’s best you go on thinking that way.”

  He swallowed what little saliva he had, took a deep breath, and looked up at her. “Zaria?”

  She perked her ears.

  “Fuck off.”

  She watched him for a moment, then snorted. “Right, then. Perfectly said. ‘Scuse me.” She stepped to the side, beckoning him on. “Still gonna start chopping at the first sign of treachery.”

  Isaac stepped towards the rusty door, straightening his posture as much as he could. His robes were bloody and tattered. His hair was long and wild, his beard resembled something pulled from a bathtub drain, and he was so gaunt and thin that he did not look much different than the thralls Berith had left behind. He doubted anyone from his old life would recognize him now.

  Zaria gave him one last look. He returned it with something like appreciation. Then, he pushed open the rusty door and walked inside.

  His first impression of the room was dust. It was so thick in the air that he might’ve chewed it after a breath—when a stream of wind came rushing out from the doorway, he had to wipe his eyes and brush his cheeks. There was such a dense matting of dust on the windows that he might’ve confused them for hanging carpets. The next impression of the room was fire. Small torches of green flame were ringing the walls, the same kind they had seen far above in the chapel. The green firelight was only barely sufficient enough for someone to navigate around the furniture, as if the person who had needed it was sensitive to bright lights.

  The building had obviously been modified from its original purpose. What that original purpose had been, Isaac could not say, but its new purpose was a laboratory. One of the walls was lined with lab benches that had clearly been dragged here from the research stations around the pelvis. There were scattered bones on the benches, dissected and placed in cross-section, and petri dishes full of ossein that had seemingly grown like a cultured fungus. There were shelves of chemical reagents, skeletons on display that bared the residue marks of resurrection, a bellows with old coals and a rotted fan, manual tools for centrifuging and distillation. Aside from the bones, the laboratory in Berith’s tower had not looked much different.

  At one of the research benches, a skeleton laid slumped across a chair. It was human, and it had clearly died from a concentrated lance of fire—the bottom ribs and thoracic vertebrae were charred black, and the skull was twisted open in a cry of pain. Judging from the shape of the pelvis, it had been a woman.

  Isaac realized that this was the necromancer. The sorceress. The last survivor of an ancient empire, so old that her name, title and bloodline had long since disappeared in the endless tides of history. She was so old that she had watched the capital of her empire slowly fill with dust, watched the region around her change from a dry scrubland to miles and miles of dunes. He struggled to imagine the perspective of someone who had lived on the same timescale as the landscape around her.

  This room was her abode. Her final tomb. It did not look ostentatious in the slightest. Aside from the lab equipment, there was no other furniture. No decoration, no teeming hordes of wealth. There were side rooms here and there, but it was obvious that the function of this building had only been practical for her. It had been a work station, through and through.

  Isaac stared down at the half-charred skeleton, still wearing a white lab coat that bared the stripes and stars symbol on the lapel, and he wondered what had driven her to survive for millennia. What purpose had she been trying to achieve in this room? How had she come to be the last of her empire? What difference had it made, in the end? He saw no signs of a breakthrough, no signs of some miracle that would save her civilization. There was only a small, improvised laboratory, buried beneath tons of rock and sand. He could imagine her toiling away the centuries here, alone in the dark, repeating the same endless experiments. For the first time in his life, he became truly aware that, someday, he would die, and, no matter how famous or loved he had been, there would come a time where no one remembered his name.

  He looked down at the remains of the enemy he had prepared to face for all his life, and, despite himself, he felt some odd measure of kinship with her.

  “Isaac?”

  The voice was quiet, thin, and ethereal. The same sort of energetic tone he had heard from the souls in the obelisk. It took him a moment to find the source.

  On a small dais over in a dusty corner, there sat a metal device. It was no larger than a cuirass would be if sitting unworn in an armory. Some of the same pipework he had seen in the obelisk had been crudely soldered up through the floor and shunted into the device. There were loose wires and what looked like advanced transmission receivers. At the top of the device, a small purple cloud shined through the dust and gloom, seeming to shimmer inside an invisible barrier.

  Isaac stumbled his way over. The dais was at such a height that he needed to kneel in order to bring himself face to face with the soul. When he did, he felt his skin glowing with the purple light. He could almost make out a face, if he looked hard enough.

  “Father?” he asked.

  “In the flesh,” said the purple cloud.

  Isaac could only stare back.

  “Sorry,” Cain said, his wisps shaking as he chuckled. “I’ve been saving that one.”

  He looked down at the device. There were knobs and dials, some mechanical gauges that were showing barometric pressure and containment integrity. His voice appeared to be coming from a tiny rectangular hole at the top, as if the device was filtering and amplifying his voice. Many of the displays seemed to be indicating a drop in energy—the little needles were slowly moving down to a flat position, like the shadow on a sundial.

  In the center of the device, there was one large button. Its function was unmarked, but its placement and size could only suggest that it held some great importance.

  Above the device, Cain shifted himself over like a cloud being blown in a thermal. “Zaria, right?”

  She was leaning against one of the research stations on the other side of the room. The cutlass was on the bench at her side, at a point where it would still be in easy reach. “Just keeping the peace. Don’t mind me.”

  “How can I not?” Cain replied. “You’re the reason my son’s not feeding the wyrms.”

  Zaria shrugged. “That goes both ways, to be fair.”

  “Of course, of course. But, hey—thank you. Truly.”

  She nodded, glanced at Isaac, and looked away.

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  Cain drifted back over to the center. “So, Isaac, how’d you and the lovely lady meet?”

  He blinked, shifting back on his knees. “Uh—”

  “Like ‘em large and in charge, do you? I mean, a pirate, of all things?”

  After a few moments of stammering, Isaac held his palm out and shrugged, as if he didn’t know, either.

  “Can’t say I haven’t done the same.” A face was almost visible in the cloud. It was more of a suggestion than anything. “You get sent off an expedition, you find an inn for the night, you meet some sellsword taking up space at the bar. If they got fur, I mean, so what? It’s a Diet rite of passage. Back before all this, a lot more of my scars came from a bed than the dead, let me tell you.”

  Isaac made a sound that might’ve been a laugh.

  “Hey,” Cain said, glowing a bit brighter. “She seems nice.”

  “Sure. I mean. . . .” He glanced back at her. “Sometimes.”

  The cloud drifted closer to his face. If Isaac looked closely, he could see some of the dust glinting inside, absorbing and detaching.

  “Gods,” Cain said, “I still cannot believe how big you are. You’re so tall! The terror of every doorway! How old are you, anyway?”

  “I . . . do you not . . . ?”

  “No, sorry. Hard to keep track of time in the dark. The range of this little box is just around the catacombs. Couldn’t even see the sun, you know?”

  He cleared his throat. “I’m twenty two.”

  “Twenty two! By Oerin, you’re still just a babe. Is that beard fake? Are you putting me on?”

  He held up his uninjured hand. “You got me. Never even learned the casts. I’ve just been waving my arms and tossing firecrackers.”

  The purple cloud coiled and puffed with laughter. “Sarah and I met that way, as a point of fact. Did Berith ever tell you that? I’d do this trick in taverns, right, where I’d shoot a flame lance with those little poppers in my hand. Add a scroll up the sleeve, and it was a meteor shower on demand. I’d get free drinks all night—and arson charges, occasionally.” The cloud rolled and tumbled over itself. “She was a scribe on one of the expeditions. Saw my little trick and called me out in front of the crowd. I challenged her to do better, knowing she only had evocations, and, would you believe it, she enchanted her ale to talk! It was practically dancing out of the—”

  Cain stopped, condensing back together. Isaac had the feeling that something was showing on his face.

  “You never met her, did you?”

  Isaac shook his head.

  “Sarah was. . . .” The wispy mouth twisted. It could’ve been a smile. “She was fiery. Diligent. Smart as a crow. Heading right for a director post in the collegium. Sometimes, every once in a while, she’d let me have fun with her.” He drifted along the edge of the device, rubbing against the barrier. “She was so excited to have you. Reminding her that I was the father just seemed to make her happier, for some reason. She picked your name, she picked the village where we’d build the tower—last time I saw her, she was drafting your study lessons while rubbing her belly.” The face inside the cloud seemed to stare at him. “You don’t look much like her. I’d hoped you would. Might help me remember her face.”

  Isaac watched the green fire burn above the dais, hoping his voice would sound steady.

  “Sorry,” Cain said. “I don’t mean to go on like this. I had these—I had hundreds of speeches planned. Every possible apology, every answer planned down to the syllable. Then, of course, the second you actually walk in, I just. . . .”

  For a moment, the cloud grew brighter.

  “It’s good to see you, Isaac. You don’t know. It’s been. . . .” The face inside began to solidify, as if trying its hardest to do so. “You’re so big! A man grown, already. You couldn’t have saved some of that height for me to see, could you?”

  Isaac looked everywhere but the device in front of him—the torches, the dusty windows, the lab equipment. There were words fighting to come out of him, but none of them felt right. He wanted things to feel right. After all this time, after all his training, things needed to be perfect.

  But none of this had been like he’d imagined.

  “Right,” Cain said. “Let’s get the important stuff, first. That rumbling got a lot worse before it stopped.”

  “It’s over,” Isaac said. “The power grid is destroyed, and all the souls are gone. There’s still the skeleton, but it’s in pieces.”

  “Berith?”

  “He’s dead.”

  The cloud shifted to the side, as if trying to peer through the dusty windows. For all his time in here, they must’ve been pitch black. Now, with a good portion of the cavern ceiling smashed open, the glass was a dull grey, letting in small specks of light.

  “I almost didn’t recognize his voice when he called. Like a bitter old man.” The cloud drifted back. “Told me exactly what had happened to you, and what he would do to me. The way he talked about your training. . . .”

  Isaac didn’t answer.

  “Well,” Cain said, “I’d still like you to break those bones, but smashing that old metal is good enough. The Diet can’t resurrect it otherwise—even if they try, the kingdom regulators will catch on, and they’ll demand the research halted. Hopefully. That’s what should happen, but I get the feeling that much has changed while I’ve been gone.”

  His knees were aching from kneeling at the dais. The pain from his wounds was still clawing his thoughts, scattering all the words.

  “Isaac.”

  He looked at the soul.

  It drifted to the front of the device, condensing into a ball. “See that button down there? The big one? It’s a release catch. It’ll drop the barrier. That’s the only thing keeping me together. I’ll just . . . drift away. Nothing else.”

  The button was a large, chipped circle on the front of the cylinder. Around it, all the gauges were still slowly drifting down. Some of the labels translated to words like pressure, integrity, and reserve. The loss of power seemed to be accelerating.

  “If you want to,” Cain said. “If you want to ask me anything, go ahead. If you want to . . . tell me anything, then feel free. Anything you want.”

  Isaac began to gesture, but the sling stopped the arm. “What am I supposed to say?”

  “I don’t know. That’s . . . up to you.”

  “Are you not even going to apologize?”

  “Would it make you feel better?”

  Isaac looked away, blinking until his vision was clear.

  “If it would,” Cain said, “then I’ll do it until the sun burns dry. I just . . . didn’t think you’d want me to. This isn’t about me.”

  “It’s not about you?”

  The cloud rose above the device, the face inside climbing towards his eyes.

  “You know,” Isaac said, “I never had a speech planned. Mostly, I imagined you would be talking. Telling me how glad you were to see me, and how long you’d been down here, and how proud you were that I’d made it this far. I never wanted to say anything, really. I just wanted to hear you speak.

  “I was afraid, walking in here. I was afraid that you’d be like him. Like Berith. Every time I’ve ever spoken, every time I’ve done anything that wasn’t an order, I’ve been scared. Scared that I’ll be struck, scared that someone will be angry, scared that anything I ever try to do on my own will just get me punished. Even now—you tell me I can say anything, and I still don’t want to. Because I’m scared it’ll be wrong.”

  He shifted on his knees, wincing at his burned thigh. The pain only made him clench his fists.

  “It’s never been about what I want. Never. I had to train to save you, I had to study for the journeyman exams, I had to do chores to earn my keep. Every moment of my life has been about serving others. I don’t even know how to do what I want. It’s a foreign concept to me, even thinking that I can. Like every instinct I have is telling me to stop and turn around and fall back in line again. And now you’re telling me that I’m free to do anything? You’re telling me I can kill you if it’d make me feel better?”

  Dust curled in the air, smelling faintly of death.

  “Do you know what I want?” Isaac asked. “I want to leave. I want to turn around and walk away and never think about this tomb again. I want to see the places I’ve only read about in books. I want to feel the moments I’ve only seen in dreams. I want to wake up and walk outside and watch the sunrise and not be terrified that I’ll be struck for doing so. I want—I want—I—”

  His vision blurred, and he lowered his chin to his chest, and, more than anything, he hated that his only concern was the others seeing him cry.

  “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

  His wounds still ached. His clothes were filthy, and his pack was heavy, and he missed the softness of his bed, the warmth of a cooked meal, the feel of old, musty paper on his fingertips, and his tears only came harder when he remembered all the things he would never see again.

  “Do you know what I’ve wanted, Isaac?”

  The soul had drifted forward, close enough to his face that the light left spots in his vision. Wisps were leaking from the invisible field around the device, as if holes were forming in the barrier. Once the little tendrils detached, they were gone, drifting out through the air and joining the dust.

  “I wanted to save myself,” Cain said. “I just pressed a button. I had journeyed for days, I had watched all my teammates die around me, I had just killed a necromancer who was older than most bloodlines, and I was walking around this little shack, looking at all the trinkets and lab reports, and I pressed that big button down there, just a quick little moment of curiosity, and it destroyed my body. It took a second of carelessness, and I was trapped.

  “I panicked. I think anyone would. It was weeks before the Diet tried to contact me. I spent those weeks in the dark, alone and afraid, coming to terms with my only choices. It was you or me. That was it. I had to put my soul in your body. Kill my son to save myself. I was still struggling with it when they called, and when they asked what could be done . . . I made my choice. I thought Sarah might understand. I thought the Diet would acquiesce if I kept the obelisk hostage. I thought I wanted to live more than anything.”

  The purple cloud was spreading out. Light boiled inside.

  “But then I was alone again. For years, I was alone. I practiced with the bones, I learned this city’s language and history, I explored every inch I could wriggle a finger inside of, and it still wasn’t enough. There’s no way to tell time in the dark. I couldn’t even sleep to pass the days. In the end, thinking was the only thing I could do to occupy myself. And I did a lot of it.”

  Roiling. Shifting. The vague tendrils of a face.

  “I thought about you. I thought about how much you might resemble me. I thought about your first steps, your first word, your first spell. I thought about all the training you would have to do before you could be sent. I thought about the Archons, all the ways they would keep this a secret from the guild regulators, and, slowly, I realized what I’d done. I realized what they would have to do to Sarah. I realized what they would have to do to you, just so it would all stay a secret. And I realized that my fate was likely sealed, no matter what.”

  Below, some of the gauges had reached zero. Lights were beginning to die.

  “I wanted to save you,” Cain said. “But there was nothing I could do. The Diet did not contact me again, and the reach of this little box only went so far. Surprisingly enough, not a single person entered the tomb surrounded by dragons and pirates. My only hope—the only thing that kept me sane through the years—was that, someday, you would arrive here, and I would get the chance to speak with you, and I would tell you to run far away and forget all about me and to live your life on your own terms. I practiced for it. Tried to teach those old bones to talk. All I ever managed to say was your name.”

  Isaac remembered the grinding voice of the bones. It was incredibly impressive he had managed to speak the name at all.

  “After an eternity, after I’d almost lost all hope at all, I was called again. And it was Berith who spoke to me. And he. . . .”

  The cloud shuddered, as if a gust of wind had pierced it.

  “He told me everything. Your entire life. There was not much to tell, from the sound of things. Just training and lessons and a cracking whip. And after all that time and effort, after he had spent decades of his life meeting my demands . . . he’d been forced to kill you. In a few days, you would swallowed by the desert, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. He asked me if I was proud of myself, and told me just how long he’d been waiting to say that I was no brother of his anymore, and that I should’ve just accepted my death all those years ago, instead of forcing him to give it to me now.”

  More wisps leaked from the invisible barrier. They twisted in the air, spreading out into dust.

  “I lost my mind,” Cain said. “That’s the only way to put it. Snapped the last strand. I gathered every bone I could find and, when he entered the catacombs, I threw everything I had at him. Of course, it was useless. They had sent Berith the Bone Hunter with an army of thralls, and there I was, just a self-taught novice that was too blind with fury to try any tactics. I knew my fate was sealed—the only motivation I had left was spite. When you showed up, I thought you were his reinforcements, or some wandering scavengers, and if I hadn’t been concentrating most of my mass on Berith, I would’ve slaughtered you without a second thought. It was only afterward, when I was listening, that I realized. . . .”

  A high-pitched whine began to ring from the device. Most of the gauges had died. The soul inside was beginning to drift apart, growing thin and transparent.

  “Oh,” Cain said, quietly. “I wondered how this would feel.”

  Isaac clutched the device, running his hands over the dials and switches. “What’s happening?”

  “It’s out of energy. The obelisk. . . .” A warbling sigh came from the speaker. “I think I’m losing the memories. . . .”

  “Wait, wait.” Isaac leaned forward, tugging at the pipes that fed into the device. “Is there another energy source? Can it transmutate, like a scroll?”

  “Isaac—”

  “If I cast some fire, I can—there should be some transfer—”

  “Isaac,” Cain said. “I’ve accepted this. You should, too.”

  The whining was only growing louder. Something was venting from the top of a device, coming out in a hiss. It made the soul inside tumble and churn.

  “I want you to forget about me,” Cain said. “I want you to leave this tomb and never return. I want—”

  “Why didn’t you warn me?” Isaac slapped at the buttons. None of them worked. “I could’ve tried to save some of the energy. I could’ve done something!”

  “Listen. You have to leave. The Diet will send assassins after you. The treasure is below. Take as much as you can. Use it to start a new life.”

  “No! No! I can still—” He rattled the metal cylinder back and forth. “You could’ve just let the Diet in from the start. They could’ve studied this thing. They could’ve saved you!”

  “Isaac, if there was another way, none of this would’ve happened.”

  The soul had turned from a gaseous ball into a long, spreading shape, like a cloud drifting through the sky. The air glinted with dust and energy.

  “Press the button,” Cain said. “Please. I’m losing it all, and I want to remember. You and her.”

  It was a large, red circle in the center of the device. Through the layers of dust, he could see a faint oval, like a fingerprint from decades before.

  For a moment, Isaac uncurled his fingers, reaching out. He stopped halfway, finding his hand shaking.

  The high-pitched whining filled his ears. On the interface below, all the lights had died. There were only dead instruments left. Ancient metal.

  “I heard you talking in the tomb,” Cain said, his voice faint and warbling. “Follow your dreams. Travel the world.”

  Streams of purple light drifted out from the device, spreading through the air in a glittering wave.

  “Don’t let any of us keep you waiting. Not anymore.”

  He laid his finger on the button. It was cold and riddled with dust. He could feel the mechanism already start to give.

  “I’m so proud of you, Isaac.”

  His vision blurred. His hand trembled.

  “Live your life. Be happy.”

  “Goodbye, father,” Isaac said, and pressed the button.

  There was a mechanical shunt. All at once, the purple cloud came spilling forward, tendrils rubbing against his robes like a fine mist, and, for a moment, he almost felt like he was wrapped in a hug made of fog and light. Then it began to dissipate, breaking apart into streams and wisps, vanishing into the dust. He found himself clutching desperately at the last little strands, failing to grasp even a single one. In a few seconds, nothing remained. There was only dust, swirling in the air.

  For a moment, he looked down at his empty hands. Then, the last of his strength fell away, and he cried.

  He felt himself falling forward, his head leaning against the cold metal of the necromancer’s device, and his injuries screamed at him, and his stomach ached from hunger, and he was filthy and tired and weak, and he cried until all his pains and wants became one large, gaping wound.

  Zaria came up behind him. She didn’t say anything. She only kneeled down, wrapped him in her arms, and held him tight.

  He cried until the tears were streaming down his face. He cried until he was heaving and gasping for air. He cried until the noises that came from his throat were more guttural and wretched than any he had ever made before. All the pain he had held inside of him, all the pain and aches and misery that had been beaten deep inside since the first day of his life—he cried until it all was flooding out, raw and livid and endless, and he did not stop until he was sure that there was nothing left inside.

  Hours might’ve passed. It didn’t matter. The world was far away, and his home was gone. Through it all, the arms that wrapped around him were the only thing that gave him comfort. They were all he had left.

  When he finally regained himself, the green torchlight still burned above the dais. There was still lab equipment on the benches, chemical vials on the shelves, skeletons on the testing rigs. Dust still swirled in the air. The skeleton of the necromancer still reclined in her chair, her lab coat scoured by fire, her skull gaping in shock towards the ceiling, as if she could not believe that her time had truly come.

  The only thing that had changed in the room was the necromancer’s device. It was no bigger than a steel cuirass. Empty and unpowered. He found it incredible that everything around him had remained just as it was. His entire world had just changed forever, and, yet, almost nothing about the world itself had changed with it. It seemed outrageously unfair that everything could continue to exist as it was, after what had just happened.

  Behind him, Zaria loosened her arms. It took a moment for the words to come. “Glad you were there for him.”

  Isaac rubbed his fingers along the device. The metal was cold.

  “You gave him peace. That’s all he needed.”

  The dust curled in the air. It seemed to twist with a life of its own.

  “Treasure’s nearby,” she said, beginning to stand. “Gonna look. Shout if you need something.”

  He might’ve nodded back. She squeezed his shoulder and walked through the closest door. Only silence was left behind. There was a feeling of weight coming from the walls, the heavy pressure of rock and dust and time.

  He stared at the corpse of the necromancer. After a while, he found the strength to limp over to her. He ran his fingers along the rotting fabric of her lab coat. He scratched a nail at the scorch marks on her rib cage. He peered into her empty eyes, wondering what her name had been.

  She had been dead all along. All his life—all the training sessions, all the studying, all the preparations and plans and tactics. All along, she had been dead. He had spent his entire life training to kill someone who had died before he was even born.

  Isaac stared into the necromancer’s face, rubbing the stripes and stars symbol on her lapel, and he tried to bring himself to feel some emotion. Anger, sadness, even laughter. Nothing came. He looked into the empty sockets of his nemesis, and he felt nothing but a dull ache, deep inside.

  “Isaac! You’ll want to see this!”

  Her voice sounded far away, deep beneath the earth. It managed to faintly echo.

  He looked over the lab equipment. The sorceress had written in a journal, and the relative lack of rot on the paper suggested it had been just before she died. As near as Isaac could translate by hand, she had been expressing regret. He didn’t fully understand the sentences, but there were words that roughly translated to gold, pillage, slaughter and worship. The words for remorse and sacrifice frequently appeared together. Occasionally, the word for gold would be next to another word that he could only translate as lightning or energy.

  “Isaac!”

  There was a small apparatus hanging above the bench. It took him a moment to recognize it as the model of a solar system. The sun was the same, but the number of planets was wrong—the sorceress had placed nine around the star. On the third one, there were fingerprints mingling with the dust, suggesting that she had often palmed the little metal ball, as if the planet held some special meaning for her.

  She had written a word on the planet. It translated to dirt. Earth.

  For a moment, Isaac looked at the small metal ball, feeling strangely wistful. Then, with no ceremony, he released his grip on the necromancer and walked away, leaving only a small cloud of dust behind.