"Sierra?" Alarion asked, his breath barely above a whisper, as though worried the wind from his lips might blow her away. "How?"

The answer was on the tip of his tongue before he even finished voicing the question. The Vitrian. They had been collecting bodies of low-level Awakened for years, and they'd been paying someone to steal from the Vitrian homeland. Why wouldn't she have been among the dead?

She looked almost as he remembered her. Her black hair was messier than she'd kept it, with stray strands tickling her cheeks as they fell loose from her ponytail. She wore dark leathers with sheathed Vitrian steel; her cloak the violet and teal of the House of Hunger. Her face was pale, the sickly pallor of the reanimated dead, but her lips were a sharp crimson, as though freshly painted or wet with blood.

That last thought made him ill. He remembered her head turned sharply to one side, the trickle of blood at the corner of her lip. Her dead eyes stared at nothing. Accusing him.

"I am happy to see you," she said at last.

"I..." he stammered, keeping his mace between them.

She was dead. A revenant. After months of training under ZEKE and Elena, the lessons taught during his basic training had been remedial at best, but he'd learned one thing from them. The dead were dead. It didn't matter if it wore the face of your comrade; it was dead. It existed to kill you, to kill everyone. The kindest mercy that could be offered came at the point of a blade.

"I understand," she said, looking down mournfully at her gloved hands. "I know what I am. I know why you are afra-"

"I am sorry!" Alarion blurted out. The words were desperate, filled with years of self-loathing and regret. Whatever came next, these were things he had to say. "I am sorry for everything. For not leaving with you, for being stubborn, for being unable to change your mind. For…"

"For killing me?"

His eyes stung, and he wanted to look away, to hide his shame. But he couldn't. If she killed him... well, she more than anyone had the right. But she wouldn't stop at him. Bergman would be next, and that he couldn't abide.

"Yes. I never wanted to. I did not want to hurt you at all, let alone..."

"Say it."

"I did not want to kill you then, and I do not want to now." His heart thudded in his chest as he tipped his chin toward the way she'd entered. "Go. Hide. I will try to..."

And what? Convince the Auxilia to let her go? To smuggle her out? The idea was absurd, and they both knew it. That thin smile on her lips spoke volumes. He'd seen it before, every time he suggested something stupid, every time he didn't know the way the world really worked.

"I think you broke something when you killed it," she said. "It feels like I was not supposed to be reborn yet, that I was not finished. I feel... I feel like I am empty inside. No desire to kill, to feed the infestation, or to do anything else."

Alarion's skepticism was plain, but something about the way she carried herself stopped him from challenging the claim outright. Revenants could engage in deception, but they were bloodthirsty to their core. Even Lamesh, a revenant who had chosen to go against his base instincts, had visibly struggled against his desire for violence.

Sierra just looked like herself.

"I understand."

"You can not possibly," she scolded. "Do not patronize me."

"I am not!" Alarion protested. "When you died-"

"When you killed me," Sierra said sharply.

"When I killed you, I had nothing," he said, the light draining from his eyes as he thought back on those dark days. "Neither obligation nor ambition. I did what I was told, but I was nowhere inside. Not for a long time."

"What changed?"

His cheeks flushed at the question. He knew the answer, the thing that had set him on the path to recovery. It had started when he'd bound Kotone as a familiar, but to admit it?

"Alarion?" she asked, her head tilted to one side, ice-blue eyes trying to peer past the veil of flesh and bone to the thoughts and emotions beneath. "They are going to destroy me when they find me. I deserve to know. Tell me."

"I can show you," he said, glancing over his shoulder at Bergman's unconscious body. "But not here."

"I understand. I would not trust me either," she motioned back the way she'd come. "Will out here do?"

He nodded, and she started back down the corridor without a word. For the walking dead, she was surprisingly reasonable.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

Alarion checked on Bergman. He moved the young mage further back in the chamber and fed him a potion, helping him swallow it with a hand on his throat. Judging by the damage, he'd be conscious in a few minutes. Enough for Alarion to settle his business with Sierra.

She had to be destroyed. As much as he wanted to believe that the woman he knew could be saved, it wasn't true. Miracles weren't real. The idea that she'd been gestating just as he arrived to destroy the boil, that somehow it had deprogrammed her, was absurd. He had an unreasonable amount of LUK for his rank, but history had proven he was nowhere near that lucky.

It was a trap; she just hadn't sprung it yet.

But that didn't matter. He owed her this. As long as she acted like the living, he would treat her that way. Even to his detriment.

It was the least he could do.

Part of the purple flesh covering the walls of the outer chamber had been torn away during his absence, as though someone had torn their way free. It gave credence to her story, as did the casual way she was sitting, waiting for his arrival. She didn't act like a revenant who had a compulsion to kill him and feed his body to an eldritch horror.

"So, what did you want to show me?"

"Kotone, my set-up, please."

"Yes, Miss! Yes, Miss!" his familiar chimed in as it popped in and out of reality. First came a chair, then a small brass stand. A set of notes came next, and he saw Sierra's eyes go wide.

"Do not get your hopes up," Alarion told her quickly, as Kotone appeared, her wings vibrating madly as she tried to stay aloft while carrying the weight of a cello.

"Is that-"

"One of yours. I guess you kept spares," he said. The words were meant to be lighthearted, but the smile on her face faltered somewhat as he said them. Her original instrument was probably still on that jagged outcrop, broken amidst the remains of her spectral orchestra. "I am sorry."

"Stop apologizing," she said bitterly. "I would have killed you if you had not killed me. It is not your fault; it is Vitria. It is what we are, what we do."

Alarion didn't know what to say, so he said nothing. Kotone came back with one final chair, and they sat across from one another, a reversal of their traditional roles. He, with an instrument in his hands, had her as his rapt audience, waiting to be impressed.

"I am not very good," he said.

"Neither was I when I started. I will not judge," Sierra smiled, before adding, "harshly."

The words were nowhere near reassuring. He'd practiced every day for the better part of a year, but he knew he was nowhere near good enough. These were her songs; no one else could ever do them justice.

His bow sang across the cello's strings, filling the terrible place with the sound of love and life. She hadn't named the song in her notes, but he'd called it 'Strings of Magic', a tribute to the first time she'd played it for him on the peak of the Trinity Isles, and the insight it had inspired.

He made mistakes. Sometimes he played too fast, and at other times, too slow. He missed some notes and played others too sharply. But she didn't seem to mind. She watched him with rapt attention, her body swaying with both the music he was playing and the notes that she knew were coming. With her eyes closed and her body relaxed, it was easy to forget what she was.

Which was strange. Like most people, he felt an intense sense of disgust when looking upon a revenant, a desire to destroy them. Looking at her, he felt no such thing. She looked different, unwell to be sure, but she looked like Sierra. Nothing more.

She was smiling as he played through to the end of the song, her gloved hands coming together for a polite bout of applause. "For a beginner, that was excellent."

"I have been practicing for a year," he protested. She might be something new, something different from a traditional revenant, but that smile at least was infectious. "Hardly a beginner."

"I practiced since I was a toddler. That makes you a beginner," she insisted. "Play me another?"

And so he did. Then another. And another. He played songs he had mastered and songs that he'd barely learned. Some were incomplete, missing the backing of her orchestra, but neither of them seemed to mind. It was the thought that was important, the artistry, and the drive.

"Beautiful," she told him after what must have been an hour. "We should play together. Kotone!"

"I think-"

"Yes, Miss! Yes, Miss!" the familiar said, happily buzzing about her. Sierra made her requests, and the familiar began to cycle through existence, returning with item after item as Sierra requested them.

Alarion could only stare, a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

"Is something wrong, Alarion?"

"How did you summon her?" he asked.

"The same way as always? She is my familiar."

The words made sense, almost bypassing his discomfort. Except he knew she wasn't. Not anymore.

Kotone was Thoughtborn, a living creature, if one with an unusual life cycle. It was bound to him by sympathy and contract, and both were difficult to break. There could be other familiars like Kotone, creatures that fulfilled the same function or even looked similar, but it was as unique a creature as he was. So why had he felt nothing when Sierra summoned it, no ties of sympathy, nor the extremely loose mental connection they shared?

More to the point, how had Sierra summoned it?

And where was Bergman? Or the rest of the 13th? He'd been playing for over an hour. Surely someone should have-

"Are you alright?" Sierra asked. "You look like I have done something wrong."

"Are you real?"

"Of course I am," she scoffed. "Why would you ask that?"

Rather than answer her, he reached out with his [Introverted Mana Sense]. What he saw made his blood run cold. He was drowning in mana, a twisted sea of conflicting affinities, as if every sight and sound were boiling over with arcane energy.

"Stop," Sierra told him harshly, bringing him back to the moment. "Stop looking, stop thinking. Stay here. With me. With the music."

"Sierra-"

"We can be together," she told him, her voice pleading now. "Just like I said. Things are different here. It can be just us. No Vitrians, no fiends, no death or suffering. Just music. Forever."

"I do not know how to play this," Alarion said, looking at the instrument in his hands with sudden horror. It had indeed been stored within Kotone when she'd come to him, along with several of Sierra's most private possessions. He'd taken it out once, hoping to find some solace in the music. But he'd never so much as touched bow to cello. He'd been too ashamed to try.

The more he looked, the faster the fiction crumbled. He'd had his doubts, but its power had been clouding his thoughts, smoothing them over. It had made him compliant, and everything seemed almost reasonable. It would never have lasted, but it didn't have to. A quick look at his status revealed the truth.

HP – -192/2621 [-0.186/sec]

It was delaying him, waiting for the Miasma to do what it no longer could.

"I am going to enjoy killing you," Alarion told it.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.