“Callindra stop picking on the locals.” Cronos’s voice came from the doorway.  Even though he was younger than her, he had grown a lot in the last year and looked several years her senior.  He wasn’t wearing his twin bastard swords and looked strange without them.

“What can I get for you sir?” The barkeep was bravely attempting to do his job, and Cronos looked slightly more normal.  Especially since the sleeves of his shirt covered the tattoos that proclaimed him a powerful mage.

“Fruit juice, or water if you don’t have juice and some bread.  Callindra isn’t it a little early for the hard stuff?  Why not just have an ale, save the falling off your chair for later.”  His voice sounded harsh, but she could hear the concern.

“You must be Cronos?”  One of the strangers was still standing uncertainly, holding his glass of whisky and looking at him with a confused expression on his face.

“These gentlemen are looking for The Brotherhood of Steel.” Vilhylm said, “I have invited them to return on the morrow to discuss whatever business they wish.”

“I’ve told them they have to drink to the memory of things lost.”  Said Callindra.  She pulled a withered and dried crown of woven plant stems from her hair.  It did not come loose easily, but she disregarded the pain, tearing hair from her scalp without flinching.

“I waited a for her.”  Tears began coursing down her cheeks, “I wanted so badly to believe that a Goddess was truly immortal.  She showed me the power of putting others before yourself and inspired me like only one other has.  Then she died.  Because of me.  Just like Glarian did.  Just like Tryst did.  Because I’m too weak.”

“Stop the whining, since when did my sister become a sniveling little girl?”  Cronos said, “I don’t remember you asking anyone for help.  You are cheapening the sacrifices of those who CHOSE to make them because THEY believed you would pick up the torch of their cause.”

“This has gone on long enough Callindra.” Vilhylm said, “It’s time to let go of your sorrow and move forward.  There is work to be done.”

“I don’t care.”  She said, picking up her glass again.  Vilhylm knocked it from her hand with a lightning fast maneuver that she hadn’t anticipated.

“I’m not going to let you do this to yourself anymore.  It has been months since I saw you practice.”  He towered over her, rage burning behind his eyes.  “You’re less than useless like this, you disgrace the memory of your master!”

“You want to trust me?”  Callindra’s voice rose, “You want to rely on ME?  After what’s happened you want ME watching your back?”  Unnoticed by her, the winds began to blow about the room for the first time in a year.  “I am not strong enough to watch your back brother, find someone else.”

“There is no one else.”  Vilhylm looked at the floor, a grimace on his face.  “Even if there was, I they couldn’t replace you.”

“What are you going to do?  Beat it out of me?”  She grabbed the bottle and took a drink.

“If I must.”  Vilhylm took her by surprise, grabbing her by the shirt and bodily throwing her out the door of the tavern.  Shadowsliver’s chain rattled after, finally reaching its limit and jerking the sword through the air toward her.

Callindra tumbled into the street, staggering to her feet just in time for Shadowsliver’s edge to cut deep into her shoulder.  A whirlwind began to form around her as the pent-up rage at her loved ones for dying, at her inability to do anything to stop it and the world for allowing her to survive was released in an uncontrolled torrent as she pulled the sword from the deep wound it had carved into her body.

“What do you want from me?”  She shouted at the sky, at the world, “WHAT MORE CAN YOU ASK OF ME?” Thunder rumbled in the distance, her hair began to stand on end from the static charge in the air.  “What more can I POSSIBLY give to you?”

The hair that once had Brightstar flowers twining through it showing the blessings of Jorda now tangled around her as the wind began to pick up.  “Gods curse it!”  Callindra had been so proud of that hair, but now like everything else it was getting in her way.  She held her hair in a lose bundle with one hand and cut it off with one smooth stroke of her sword.

Outside of town, coruscating bolts of lightning struck the earth and overhead dark clouds billowed.  Wind whirled around her, rattling the shutters of nearby buildings and picking up plumes of dust.  Cronos stepped outside, Vilhylm close behind him.

“Callindra you need to stop this, it’s dangerous!” Cronos said, looking nervously at the sky.

“YOU are the ones who wanted this.  YOU trusted me, this is on YOUR heads!”  Callindra said, “I wanted to GIVE UP but you are forcing me, FORCING ME back into the world.  You want me to use the power again?”  She raised Shadowsliver above her head.  “FINE I’ll turn it loose.”

A bolt of incandescent electricity lanced from the heavens, slammed into the tip of her sword and ran through her into the ground.  The crack of thunder shattered windows and knocked her brothers off their feet.  Callindra stood in the center of the madness, lightning swarming around her like a mass of serpents while a whirlwind kicked up dust and debris.

“You want to trust THIS to watch your back?”  She shouted in a voice that made the lightning strike sound like a whisper.

Vilhylm had picked himself up and walked unsteadily through the chaos towards her.  Without hesitation, he folded his sister into a crushing embrace, disregarding the electricity that scorched his flesh.    “Callindra, I’ve already lost one of my brothers.  I refuse to lose my sister too.  Yes.  More than anything else I want you to be by my side for this fight.”

The lightning scattered and she burst into tears, leaning on his shoulder and crying like a child who had lost everything.  With those tears, rain began to fall.  The first rain that had fallen here in almost a year.  Even after the storm had passed, breezes once again began to blow.  Something had changed.  It was something small, but nothing comes into the world large.

On the outskirts of town, a dry brittle circlet of vines fell from the whirling winds above.  A seed pod fell, the rain beating it into the soil.  A bright green sprout sprang up as though it had been waiting for this moment.  Curiously enough, the plant that began to grow looked more like a tree than a vine; its small trefoil leaves waved defiantly against the wind.  Despite all the destruction that had been visited on the land, life refused to be defeated.

Callindra could not believe it.  The battle that raged around her was nearly beyond comprehension.  Glarian; no Luftin danced the Korumn with Sakar a living extension of his limbs.  The winds themselves answered his call.  Storms sang his fury.  Lightning struck where he pointed.  His siblings were no less amazing as they commanded the very elements to destroy their enemies.

What was unbelievable is that it was not enough.  It was nowhere near enough.  The hordes of Abyssal spawn seemed unending and worse yet, the great Black Dragon seemed impervious to all their attacks.  The green fog that dripped from its mouth corroded anything it touched, whether that be flesh or stone or the Weave itself.

Despite everything, Callindra laughed in exultation.  She was fighting by her Master’s side at last and they moved perfectly together.  When he struck a sweeping blow, she knew exactly how far to lower her head and her follow up thrust would inevitably finish off the dying monster before it could counterattack.  They leaped and spun, twisted and slid only to spring back to their feet borne by the lightness of the winds themselves.

When they had carved a space for themselves on the battlefield, Callindra paused to look for her brothers.  Vil was doing surprisingly well paired with Ild and Cronos seemed to be watching Vandis’s back.  The sting of a dozen or more cuts made her wince, she hadn’t noticed them while the fight was raging.

“Callindra, you fight well.”  Luftin said with a madcap grin.  “I’m afraid you can’t follow me this time though.  I have an old score to settle and that bedamned beast is too much even for your new talents.”

“You can’t be trying to face it on your own?”  She panted, looking high above where the Black Dragon still circled.  It seemed to be waiting for them to be worn down by legions of Spawn before it attacked.

“No, Ild and Vandis will give me a head start.”  He said, “You get out of here, I’ll catch you up.”

“I won’t leave you!”  She said fiercely, reaching out for him.  “I searched for so long.  I lost so much.”

He wasn’t paying attention to her. Crouching low, he summoned a spell from Sakar and sprang into the sky.  As he rose, ice began raining down in jagged shards, cutting into the dragon’s wings while a wave of flame roared up from below, obscuring him until the last minute.  His sword hacked into the dragon’s throat and black blood poured from the wound.

Callindra’s shout of victory died in her throat as the monster swiped Luftin out of the air with a clawed hand and swallowed him whole.  The Dragon roared in triumph and breathed acidic fog down upon them.  While Ild and Vandis were momentarily distracted deflecting the caustic substance with a wave of flame and a deluge of water the Dragon traced a series of runes in the air.  The symbols flashed, and Cerioth the Black, Destroyer of Farenholm, Bane of Ignitum dove through the portal that opened between them.

While her brothers winced at her words, they also nodded in grim determination.  They had followed her here for the same reason she had led them here.  Tryst was dead, killed helping them escape from Count Adbar’s citadel and he had been working with Dergeras.  All the pieces had fallen into place; Adbar had been collecting the Artifacts of the Original as well.  He had been bent on thwarting them from the beginning and when he lured them in they had taken the bait.  It had cost them Tryst, their mission and likely the world.

If the world was going to burn anyway, at least she would take Dergeras down in the flames.  She set out at a steady trot, her brothers flanking her, and in a few minutes they had arrived at the back of the keep wall.  Here it was still mostly sound and reached nearly thirty feet into the air.  Callindra incanted another spell and leaped into the air with the Winds gathering beneath her.  Landing on the top of the wall in a crouch, she made certain she hadn’t been spotted and then took a rope from her pack and secured it to a crenellation that was still solid before tossing the other end down for them to climb.

They brought the rope up after them and tossed it down the inside of the wall, each scrape of boot on stone muffled by the spell Callindra had wrought around them.  Cronos pointed to a broken window in the crumbling keep and they crept through it without attracting the attention of any of the monsters outside.

The building was thick with dust and decay, but the sound of unceasing chanting came faintly to their ears as they made their way into the depths of the keep.  A feeling of foreboding settled over them a feeling accentuated the Winds fled as they got closer.  The sound of their footsteps began to echo off the moldering stone walls as Callindra’s magic faded, muffled only slightly by the dust that coated everything.

“This feels wrong.  Worse than I thought it would.  Worse than I thought possible.”  Callindra said, shivering.  “The air is dead here.”

“Everything feels dead here.”  Vilhylm said, looking at the dust choked walls and floor.

They found a doorway with stairs leading down.  More importantly, there were many tracks here.  The dust had been mashed nearly into nothing from the passage of many feet.  The chanting came from below.  It stopped the second Callindra’s foot touched the top stair.

“I don’t like this.”  She and Cronos said simultaneously.  For once they didn’t glare at each other.  Clutching their weapons, the three made their way down the stairs.  Callindra idly thought that being a leader unfortunately also meant going first into certain death.  Of course, she didn’t care if she died now, as long as she got her revenge.  As long as they got their revenge.

At the bottom of the stairs the hallway widened into a single large room.  Two dozen or more corpses lay on the floor, bloody knives in their hands.  Callindra shuddered in revulsion, they had killed themselves and spilled their lifeblood on symbols roughly carved on the floor in some dreadful ritual.

Stepping around the corpses they moved into the room itself and saw a dark figure cloaked in rags standing before an altar with a figure assembled from clay pieces laying upon it.  The mold of the original mortal.

“Dergeras!”  Callindra called out, her voice ringing throughout the room, “You have taken my brother from me, you have betrayed the living and made dark contracts with the Abyss.  You will die for your crimes here and now on my blade.”

She sprang forward, Shadowsliver a living extension of her arm and sank his twin tips into the figure’s heart, pinning him to the clay figure on the altar.  Dark blood flowed from his body and dripped onto the Mold.

“You have … completed.”  He gasped, a beatific smile on his face as his life flowed out onto the altar.

A rent tore in reality and something forced its way into the world using the Mold of the Original Mortal as its vessel.  It sat up, moving smoothly and easily; flexing limbs that shed the clay of the shell that allowed it to take mortal form.

“THIS IS A STRANGE WAY TO ENTER THE PRIME.” It said in a voice with the power of a glacier.  “I, MORDE FIND MYSELF FEELING BENEVOLENT.”

Callindra hacked at it with desperate force, her sword slicing through one of its arms at the wrist as it stretched and sat up.  Vilhylm thrust his spear through its torso and Cronos unleashed a torrent of flame that nearly blinded them all with its intensity.

It pointed at Cronos with a finger that flickered with blackness.  “DIE.” It said, and he fell to the ground motionless.

Callindra swung her sword in a vicious arc, hacking deep into the Morde’s chest but he simply grabbed the chain, pulled her forward and slammed her into a wall with bone shattering force.  She tumbled to the floor in a broken bleeding mass.

“Great Goddess of life I call upon thee in my time of need!  Jorda, I invoke the boon you bestowed upon us, come now and save us from this unholy monster!”

Vines and growing plants arose from the ground at his feet, some wrapped around Callindra and Cronos but most of them grew into the figure rising from the altar, ripping into its substance and pulling it apart; the work of a hundred years of growth happening in a few moments.

Jorda rose from the mass of vines, her eyes glinting in sunlit rage as she attacked, “You are not of this world!”  Her voice was the clarion call of the charging bull and the scream of a red tailed hawk.  “Your kind is not welcome here!”

“AND YET NEICE I AM HERE AND I SHALL NOT BE DENIED” Morde responded, the terrible grating of his words unmaking her where she stood.  “I WILL LEAVE YOUR PUNY MORTALS HERE TO BEAR WITNESS TO YOUR DESTRUCTION.”

Jorda looked at Vilhylm and her face contorted in pain as blackness ran up the vines that grew through the man shaped thing that stepped from the altar.  “Run.” She whispered, and her body burst into blisters of dissolving ash.

That brought a laugh and the girl scampered out promising again to get everything she was sent for.  Callindra went to the common room, belting her tunic at the waist and deciding it was long enough for the demands of modesty.  She walked up to the bar, set Shadowsliver next to her and tossed a silver piece at the bartender.  He caught it and walked over.  She ordered an ale and a meal and gave him an extra gold piece to cover her meal.

She listened to the chatter in the room as she ate but didn’t learn anything new.  Eventually Cronos and Vilhylm entered as she was enjoying a pipe and an after dinner ale.  They were clean as was their clothing, which explained the duration of their absence.

“Little urchin brought us a meal while we waited for him to wash our gear.”  Vilhylm said with a grin, “Charged the moon for it but I say it was worth it.”

Cronos grumbled a bit but sat and ordered a mug of mead.  “Tryst went off to see about things.”  He said after his first sweet sip, “I’m guessing what we’re looking for is going to be in the keep but we didn’t want to sign up for this contest before being sure.”

“Weren’t you all just saying we should stick together?”  Callindra asked mock innocently, “Have we changed our minds?”

“Well, we had already sent our clothes off to be washed so we couldn’t go with him.”  Cronos said.

“The deadline to apply for the contests is tomorrow morning so we had to be sure before we committed to it.”  Vilhylm added.

“Ah.  Because we couldn’t just wait a candlemark because that would be too long?”  She asked, exhaling twin streams of smoke from her nostrils.  “I see.  At least I have the fortitude to admit when I’m wrong boys.  You should probably work on that.”

Tryst strode in a few moments later, a grim expression on his almost pretty face.  “We have trouble.”  He said in a low tone.  “Finish your drinks and we’ll discuss it in our room.”

“An ale for my brother.”  Callindra said, tossing the bartender another coin.  When he moved away to pull the pint, she gave him an admonishing look.  “You can’t just show up and then we leave like that Tryst, it’ll look suspicious.  Sit and have an ale with us before we retire.”

Callindra saw her would be laundress slip up the stairs with a bundle in her arms and excused herself.  Returning to their room, she dressed properly and thanked the girl sending her on her way with another silver coin.  The clothes were simple, yet well made and her armor was cleaned and polished perfectly.  She was smiling to herself and changing into a fresh tunic to sleep in when her brothers came in one by one.

When they were all together and the door was closed again they all say around the small table and Tryst took out the Hand.  He set it on the table and it pointed directly at the keep.  As it pointed it moved backward and forward ever so slightly as though tracking the movement of a pacing animal.

“I believe the next piece is in the Keep, but I also believe there may be more than one.”  He said, and as he spoke it abruptly pointed in a slightly different direction almost as if it was illustrating his point.  “At least one of the pieces appears to be on the Count’s person, or someone inside the keep.”

“So we have to enter this contest then?”  Callindra said, not really asking a question, and the others nodded.

“Yes, however this isn’t a city of refugees being led by a man only gifted because he has a silver tongue from the gods.”  Tryst said, his tone serious, “This is a man who has built a city that is a stronghold from the Abyss from all we have seen so far, and built it well.  From what I’ve seen thus far, there can’t be more than one or two pieces left and if the Count has two of them, we may be putting ourselves and our entire mission in danger.”

“There is also the fact that this place seems to be free of the Abyss.”  Vilhylm said, his voice low and sounding a bit worried.  “If we remove the things that are keeping it at bay what will happen to all these folk?”

“Can we afford to worry about one city when the fate of the world is at stake?”  Callindra asked, “I do not wish to visit the horrors we have seen on this city; however we have a mission we cannot afford to abandon.”

“I believe we must attempt to gain an audience with the Count of Adbar.”  Tryst said, “If he is a wise leader he will see the necessity of our quest.”

“If he isn’t we’ll be in serious trouble.”  Cronos said, before Callindra could voice the same thought.  “He has a city of devoted and capable warriors at his command.  Even if he is a wise leader, it is a rare man indeed who would trust a band of adventurers to take artifacts that keep his people safe from the terrible destruction that they will surely face once that protection is gone.”

“What is to stop him from seizing what we have gathered ourselves?”  Vilhylm asked, “We cannot afford to leave them here and to separate ourselves is folly.”

“We have to trust that we are the ones sent here to complete this task.”  Callindra said, feeling surprised by the conviction behind her words.  “Jorda herself sent us on this quest and we cannot and will not fail her.”  Her brothers looked at her, the grim determination she felt mirrored on their faces.

“In this, we are agreed.”  Tryst said.  “I have signed us up for this contest.  We will go there, meet Adbar’s challenge and gain an audience with him.  It is the only way we can complete the journey the gods themselves have set us to walk.”