The kind of mind control that was at play functioned like a short term unwilling contract, and it was most effective when it caught you off guard. Katrin was smart, she'd have thrown it off without any help soon enough, but being given the extra shove of the 'deadshell' keyword let her take some action even if she was still partially restricted. Ideally she would have blasted that one asshole right out of his robe, but attacking a spot between a few of them - a spot that could have hypothetically contained a hiding deadshell and therefore wasn't a hostile action against those people - was good enough to cause some chaos.

Errod went right for the Knights of the Storm, and I was about to wreck some fuckers from the Brotherhood of the Ebon Maw when a force wall blocked me. I was so used to Katrin tossing shields around that I thought it was hers at first, but my mind that was on overwatch duty in Ematse picked out the one responsible. There was really nothing better than being able to watch a fight in slow motion while also participating in it in real time, but in this case it didn't help much. The shield blocked my ghost as well as my physical person, and there wasn't really room for me to get past Errod since his fight with the knights was already taking up that section of hallway. I could have turned and gone after the Empire soldiers, but it looked like Katrin had started acting on her own and blocked them off in the same way I myself had been blocked.

This was a good thing, of course - I didn't want to start murdering Empire soldiers if they weren't already out to kill me on sight - but it left me in an odd position. I settled for yanking Katrin to her feet, and then we both stood there awkwardly for what was probably about a second but felt much, much longer. Time really moved differently when you were watching helplessly as your brother fought one on three against armored knights. The problem, I decided, was that we needed to not be in a fight at all. The hallway, while nice and wide by most standards, just wasn't a good battlefield for this many people.

"Fighting retreat!" I yelled, and Errod nodded. Katrin dropped her shield and did her concussive blast thing at the Empire guys, knocking one right on his ass and forcing the others to stagger back a step - then we pushed past them as she re-established her shield on the other side of Errod. It didn't last long, with the lead knight shattering it in two swings, but it was enough to get us moving away. I knocked one of the Empire soldiers out cold with a punch - holy shit did it feel good to be so strong now - and the last one standing actually stepped out of our way to let us pass as he continued to whisper into his shoulder. That was the one that had been arguing for everyone to let him call Hammersmith, which meant she now knew we were in the palace.

Katrin squeaked in alarm as I pulled her to me and scooped her up in a sort of bear hug, but she quickly wrapped her legs around my waist and started casting spells over my shoulder as we ran. Errod and I ran as fast as we could, and with explosions and shin-high shields turning the hallway into an obstacle course behind us we quickly left our enemies behind. As the hallway curved we came to a large staircase that we took upwards, for no better reason than the fact that the 'up' stairs were slightly closer than the ones leading down. I had to drop Katrin as we climbed; I was strong enough to run with her, but stairs were fucking me up a little.

The next floor up had a huge hallway cutting right through it, and we hurried down towards enormous double doors. Errod made it first and it wouldn't open for him, which was actually a great sign - if it would let me in but not him, then we would presumably be safe in there. I skidded to a stop as I heard the clanking of armor on the stairs we'd come from, and thankfully the doors opened no problem at my touch. We all ran in, and as I turned to close the door I flipped off our pursuers.

"Okay," I panted, "please tell me this isn't a dead... oh."

We were in the throne room. The Crystal Throne sat there on a raised dais, and - like the rest of the palace - it was nothing like how I had pictured it. Where I had been expecting it to look like something out of nature, the throne was actually a complex clockwork device made of transparent materials. Whatever it had been meant to do, it had long since stopped functioning thanks to the sword that had been thrust through it - skewering its occupant on the way.

The corpse of the queen was relatively well preserved, if desiccated. She was slumped forward with one hand draped over the blade, and her crown - the strange blue and green wire-like construct from the portrait we'd found - was snapped into three pieces on the floor next to her. Her gown still shimmered and threw little rainbows across the room as the light struck it, and the obviously enchanted jewelry she wore still glowed faintly.

The rest of the room showed some signs of violence; there was a dead knight on the ground, armor bearing the Van Halen logo of the Savior of Brinkmar's personal team, and scorch marks marred the floor. A candelabra - or whatever you called the equivalent for holding glowing crystals - had been cut in half, and some fancy manacles were discarded near the throne. Somehow, a battle had broken out in the middle of the throne room and claimed the life of the queen. That... had not been in the books. Had it? No. No, I would have remembered that.

I stared at the crown on the floor. Jake Ross and the Shattered Crown had been the name of that final book, but... I was sure the queen helped him return to Earth at the end. It was like in the Narnia books - or the movies, at least, since I hadn't read the actual books - where the kids returned to their original age and no time had passed. The queen had... she had offered to step down and let him be king of Brinkmar, and instead he had asked to return home after defeating Thanatos. So what was the title in reference to?

I walked over to the dead knight, suddenly wondering if Jake Ross had never made it out of the room. Was this him? Is this where the real story ended? If so, who had told the tale to someone on Earth? I tried to open the helmet and the mummified body inside cracked, making me wince. Still, I had to know. Being as gentle as possible, I managed to open the visor - the face inside was in bad shape and wouldn't have meant much to me anyway, but at the very least I was pretty sure I didn't see the birth mark from the portrait. Just as I was about to move on, I noticed a small name etched into the right shoulder of the armor - Dorin.

He'd been one of Jake Ross' companions, the most stereotypical knight of the bunch. Lots of talk about honor and stuff, which I'd - not surprisingly - turned my nose up at. "He was in the books," I said to the others, "and I'm pretty sure he lived through everything in the version I knew. The queen did, too. Fuck, this is so strange. What happened here? It doesn't look like the palace as a whole was under attack."

Errod stepped up to the throne, transfixed by the sword. He grabbed it by the handle, but after standing there for a second he released it without pulling it free. He grimaced. "I thought... we should lay her to rest, right?"

"Does it matter?" I asked. "This whole place is a tomb. Not just the palace, but the entire plane."

He licked his lips nervously. "Calliope. I... do you think it's disrespectful to..."

"Fucking take it, Errod. You think she cares? Take the sword. You never liked the one you've been using anyway, and this one is probably really good if someone was able to stab it through the throne like that."

He hesitated. "It's just... I don't know if..."

"Oh my god, Errod. We've gone over this. Nothing here matters." I pushed past him and got a good grip on the sword, yanking it free - it slid right out, and felt ridiculously light. The mummified queen continued to sit exactly as she had, but the hand that had rested on the sword fell to the ground. Ignoring that morbid detail, I flipped the sword around to point the hilt at Errod. "There, you're not a grave robber. This sword is mine now, and I'm giving it to you. Okay?"

He reached for it, but his fingers didn't close around it yet. "I'm going to do it, you know. I'm going to figure out what my code is, what I stand for. You were right, before - I don't really know yet."

Of course. Even if this was, most likely, the sword of an enemy of Brinkmar it was still the closest he'd get to being knighted here. We were in the throne room, he was being given a sword... this was probably a big deal for him, even if I thought it was stupid. Fuck it. Resolving to keep sarcasm out of my voice, I pulled the sword away from him. "Kneel."

He did.

Stolen story; please report.

"Errod Runelighter. You're the bravest, best person I know. You've saved my life multiple times, and welcomed me into your family, and risked everything to follow me to the ends of the world. Despite what I said before, I trust you to be the voice of morality for our team, the same way I trust Katrin to be the voice of reason, and the same way I'm sure you both trust me to be the voice of utter chaos. You may not have figured out a code yet, but you give a shit. That's what matters. Do you promise to... just do your best, and keep being you?"

He nodded, eyes still focused on the sword.

"My shitty family probably stole security access to this place as part of some messed up bargain with someone they kidnapped or something. But, lacking any better authority," I glanced at the corpse of the queen, "I hereby declare that you are an official knight of Brinkmar."

He reached for the handle, but his fingers stopped short. "Calliope, I need... I need to be honest with you. I think... that someone from my glove has held this sword before."

"Did they kill the queen? No, that would have happened while the glove was in that vault, right? So someone else had it after them. Whatever. That's all the more reason for you to have it. Wait, that means it's super old, right?"

He nodded. "Very, very old."

"This isn't the fucking Sword of Destiny, is it?"

"I still don't know what that is. Calliope, I... you should just keep it."

I rolled my eyes. "Yesrin's tits, Errod. You're the one that uses swords. Besides, what am I going to do with it? Hang it on a wall? Sell it? No. You're the knight of Brinkmar now, right? Take the sword."

He still looked nervous. "You're the one that..."

"Take it. You think it should belong to me? Well, you're my brother. What's mine is yours. I'm officially giving you this sword. Take the fucking thing, you're ruining the moment."

Hmm. I toggled my threadsight on, and sure enough there was a fate thread running from the sword to Errod. Okay, so this was for sure something important. I thought about telling him to not touch it yet - not all fates were good - but as I considered it he finally took the sword from me and I saw the thread snap and disappear. Well. That... probably meant something. "Hey Errod? You've... got one less fate thread now. So... that sword was absolutely meant to be yours."

Katrin's eyes went wide. She'd always thought his belief that he would be a knight of Brinkmar was mostly delusion, so processing the fact that this exchange had been somehow fated was probably going to take her a moment. Errod, meanwhile, was staring at the sword like it had promised him a blowjob and a steak. Honestly, I was feeling a bit jealous. It wasn't that I didn't mean what I'd said - I wanted him to have this moment, and I didn't really have a use for a sword, but... well, it was easy to forget that Errod was a bigger Brinkmar nerd than me. I'd been so deeply into those books for a while there, and standing in the throne room I had this feeling that I was suddenly not the main character of the story like I wanted to be. This was about Errod, and some petty part of me was annoyed. One of those dim memories nagged at me, a conversation with Tony about whether or not I was protagonist material.

Knowing that I wasn't going to be able to spend any more time patting his back over it, I instead started checking the other doors. We'd already been standing around for a bit, so clearly nobody could barge in on us, but we'd need to leave eventually. I popped my ghost through each door in turn, and what I saw wasn't great. In addition to the doors we'd come through one other led to a hallway, and it was camped out by soldiers. Another door led to what looked like a teleportation circle, which I had no way to activate or control, one led to a large preparatory area with a bathroom - I was for sure going to take a shit on the queen's other throne before we left - and one led to what looked like a shitty little servants' quarters.

The final door was tucked away in a corner, and went to a strange room. There was no other exit, but I still wanted to get a closer look. Errod had moved on from gazing at his new weapon and was talking to Katrin - they were looking at another one of those strange person-shaped indentations on the wall like we'd seen in the subway stations - and so I left them to it and went to examine the device I'd found. The room had some sort of large spools along the walls, and a platform with some levers that reached all the way from the ground up to my shoulders. This would have been strange enough, but I still had my threadsight on and as I entered the room I saw something baffling.

There were fate threads coiled around the spools, and draped across the floor. I'd never seen them not pulled tight, but here they were - threads that were hanging loose across the ground, even though no part of that made sense. They should have fallen through the floor, right? And if they weren't attached to anything they should have just vanished. The platform had some strange socket built into it, but was missing whatever went there. Another section off to one side had a sort of cabinet, and when I opened it I found a very familiar shape - there was an indentation where Yesrin's Loom would have perfectly fit.

What the fuck was I looking at?

This was, maybe, the device - or part of the device - that Halenvar had been wanting to use. But that was in Trallanar, right? Maybe there was more than one, or this was one of the parts he was missing? I wasn't aware of anything else that used Yesrin's Loom. I searched the room and found a book filled with gibberish, it looked like it was maybe technical notes. Was it safer to leave it here? If I took the book out, would someone get a hold of it and cause more problems like Ulren? Just to be safe, I grabbed a copy via divination and left the original where it was.

I compared notes with Katrin and Errod, but they hadn't found anything particularly interesting. With the hallways occupied by soldiers, we took some time to relax and catch our breath - the bathroom turned out to have clean water, and we all took turns bathing and washing our clothes - Katrin dried them with magic, and I was delighted to find that simple uses like that could still fascinate me. I really needed to learn to cast spells at some point.

As nice as it was to be clean, we were all seeing the beginnings of damage from the curse. Our skin was red and irritated, and some spots were threatening to turn into actual sores. There had to be ways to delay or prevent the damage if people had been here for a year or longer, but until we could figure it out we were on a tight schedule. After getting some sleep I checked the exits again, and shockingly one of the hallways had only five guards. It felt like a trap.

"Is it more of a trap than where we are right now?" Katrin asked, and I wasn't sure how to answer.

We couldn't stay forever, that was certain. My divination didn't see anyone out in the hallway, but its range was limited. We could be spiteful and go the other way, into the hallway packed with soldiers, but trying to avoid a possible trap by charging into an obvious fight wasn't my best plan. "I don't know. We don't have a lot of food, but we have water. We could wait a long time here if we wanted, and maybe they'd eventually leave. But... it's possible they've decided we can't get out this way, or that the door doesn't lead to us at all. They might think they don't need to guard that route."

We settled on just watching for a while, and we saw the guards change out with fresh soldiers every six hours. Each time there was a gap, ten minutes where nobody was watching. If anything that made it feel more like a trap, because I couldn't think of a reason that they wouldn't wait for the new people to be in place before leaving. I had a very bad feeling, but we still hadn't thought of any better options. Finally, after a lot of time spent grumbling about how much we didn't like the feel of the situation, we decided to just go for it.

It was, in fact, a trap.

I made it forty feet before my head felt like it wanted to explode, that awful sensation of hateful iron burning into me. They'd spiked the hallway. This didn't do anything to Katrin and Errod of course, but as soon as I collapsed to the ground soldiers swarmed out of every nook and cranny. Unwilling to leave me behind and unable to fight that many people, Errod and Katrin were quickly surrounded. I fought through the blinding headache to look up and saw the crowd parting as Hammersmith calmly walked forward.

"Calliope," she said, "I wish this could have gone differently. I understand you attempted to murder Commander Klinec, and then laid siege to Storm's Keep. I'm both disappointed and impressed."

"Attempted?" I muttered, "I was sure I'd succeeded. Give me another chance, I'll do the job right this time."

She sighed. "He's been relieved from his position. His administrative assistant sent a... very thorough... report through to me, and I strongly disagree with how he handled things. That being said, with the damage you've caused I can't protect you and your friends from the repercussions. I'm afraid the Knights of the Storm will be collecting the Runelighters, while you accompany me to Trallanar to open a very important door."

Two Knights of the Storm stepped forward to stand on either side of Hammersmith. "We want her, too," one said.

"I told you, I still need her cooperation and you've left me nothing to bargain with save for her life."

"You think I'm going to cooperate with you?" I asked. "After you hand my brother and sister over to be slaughtered? Are you fucking crazy?"

She raised an eyebrow at me referring to them as my brother and sister, but didn't seem bothered. "You have no choice, Calliope. This is the situation you have engineered. This is all the result of your own choices. You've left me no way to bargain for your... siblings... but you can still make it out of here alive. I'm sure they would want that for you."

Errod raised his sword, and then placed it against my neck. "And I'm sure that Calliope would rather die than help you."

Hammersmith sighed, sounding mildly annoyed, and then seemed to suddenly focus on Errod's sword. "Okay. Okay. I... " she turned to the Knights of the Storm, looking flustered. "The deal is off. They're under my protection."

The knights began screaming over each other, overlapping yells of outrage and demands for justice. More knights pushed forward through the Empire soldiers, and finally one of them decided they'd had enough and pushed right past, striding towards us to just do the job himself. Hammersmith grabbed him by the shoulder, yanked him back, and drove her fist clean through his helmet - metaphorically clean, that is. The actual maneuver was shockingly gory, even for me. For a moment everything was silent, and then the hallway erupted into combat.

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