Shon leaned back in a large, cushioned armchair, pulled the hood of his cloak over his head, and began to wrap his father’s miraculous wire back around its spool. His fingers were numb where he had held prolonged contact with the wire, and his head was swimming from the pure stimulation overload of the last six hours, but despite all of that, Shon felt amazing.

“Tarun and Seth met up with the messengers I sent to them, and now they’re on their way here,” Shon said. He stretched and rolled his shoulders, then took a sip of the mint tea that had gone cold while he was concentrating on listening to the thoughts of his friends a few miles away. It wasn’t the farthest distance his magic had been able to reach that night. His maximum reach so far was when he had managed to contact Aluanna and her satyrs. They had been over two leagues away by Shon’s estimate. And although the connection had been hazy and left him feeling strained, there was no denying they had gotten his message, and he had been able to hear their response.

“Are you sure the delay was absolutely necessary?” asked the large minotaur necromancer sitting on a comically small wooden stool next to Shon. Vdekshi had offered his own enormous chair to Shon as a sign of respect and as well as an attempt to make amends for his mistreatment in the dungeon. Shon didn’t dare refuse him at the time, but the longer the two of them sat in their respective seats, the more ridiculous he was convinced they must look.

“It was important they receive all the information they could, directly from the source,” replied Shon. “There has already been enough grief caused among us due to misinformation and half-truths. I may not be able to command undead armies, but at least I can use my magic to finally get to the bottom of things here. Has it always been this dysfunctional between you and your underlings?”

“Allowing my servants to retain some degree of freedom while still assuring their obedience has always been a…” Vdekshi took in a deep breath as he searched for the right words. “…a test in patience and balance. It’s a test I fear I failed far more than I ever realized.”

“Well, I won’t say you’re wrong about that,” said Shon. “But I doubt it would be fair to put all the blame on you. It seems like everyone who works for you has been secretly serving Gravine all these years.” At the mention of the name, there was an angry hiss from the crystal in Vdekshi’s staff, and the minotaur gave it a hard thump on the floor to silence it.

“Do we really want to have that thing in here with us?” Shon asked. “There are lots of things I’d like to tell you, but I don’t dare share too much with Old Green and Nasty listening in. Couldn’t we have left it down in the dungeon?”

“That would be far more dangerous than you realize,” Vdekshi replied. “Especially considering what you’ve told me about how eager my servants are to betray me. If one of them willingly wielded the power of Gravine, they would be all but unstoppable. And I promise you that none of them would show the kind of restraint that I’ve exercised these past decades. Any one of them could use a mere fraction of his power to bring ruin and destruction on this whole land, and all my self-sacrifice these many years would be for nothing in the end.”

“Well hopefully once my friends arrive, there won’t have to be any more sacrifice,” Shon said, “of yourself or anyone else.”

“I hardly dare to hope,” said Vdekshi, his weight making the wooden stool creak. “What you say seems to confirm what my sources reported. Your friend Tarun was poisoned by the dragon and yet somehow lived. That alone gives me more hope than I’ve had in decades. Yet even now I fear that some other sinister joke of fate will prevent your friends from arriving, even as they’re finally so close.”

“You know even when I’m not trying to listen to your thoughts, you broadcast them quite loudly,” Shon said. “I know you’re feeling frustrated and nervous that I sent Tarun and Seth on that detour. I know that you wish they were here already. But I need you to trust me that I believe it really was necessary before they arrived here.”

Vdekshi let out a snort from his great nostrils, and Shon suspected there may have been the sound of a small chuckle mixed in with the great outgoing air. “Honestly I had forgotten for a moment that you could read my mind,” said Vdekshi. “It’s refreshing to speak with someone who isn’t trying to manipulate me, beg for their life, or mock me. It’s as if my ears had forgotten what true honesty sounded like.” Vdekshi stood up from the wooden stool, which seemed to quietly groan in relief. “I do believe you Shon, and I thank you for helping to facilitate this meeting.”

“Don’t be too quick to thank me,” said Shon. “They’re not here yet, and I’d rather wait until they are before we go brewing another kettle of tea. You may have ordered all of your forces back here to the stronghold, but the thoughts I’m picking up around here are incredibly angry and looking for any excuse to tear me and my friends from soul to sternum.”

“I’m afraid that’s nothing new,” Vdekshi replied. “Every one of my servants has wanted to do the same to me all along. But don’t worry. This room isn’t simply a parlor. It’s my personal sanctuary. I’ve laid down runes and built wards to make it the safest room in the entire stronghold. Even if I were to lose my concentration and my control over Gravine were to slip, there’s nothing that could threaten us from outside these walls, or from within.”

Shon tried to relax as he sat back in the oversized chair and took another large drink of the tea. He had swallowed half the mouthful when he was suddenly aware of a presence that made his blood run cold and knocked all the air from his lungs. He tried to cry out in alarm, but instead merely dribbled the rest of the tea down his chin and onto his clothes.

Even without the sound of a scream, Vdekshi had no trouble recognizing Shon’s expression of terror. The color had drained out of his face, and the wet spot on the young wizard’s lap seemed to indicate that he had either spilled his tea in alarm, or perhaps even wet himself. Either way, something had obviously shaken him. “What’s the matter?” Vdekshi asked.

Shon shook his head slowly and then looked at Vdekshi with wide eyes. He didn’t say anything, not even with his mind. He simply raised a finger to his lips to indicate the need for quiet. Then he pulled the hood of his cloak over his head and slumped to the floor.

Somehow, an old nightmare had followed Shon, even while he was wide awake.

***

Gravine fumed and cursed within his emerald prison, when suddenly he heard the deafening sound of a crack. In the moment of silence that followed, Gravine felt the first genuine fear he had experienced in nearly a century.

As much as he loathed his prison, he was far more afraid of anything powerful enough to penetrate it. In the thousands of years it had held him, it had only cracked once. Gravine hoped desperately that the source of this one wouldn’t be the same as the first. The moment the silence was broken, he knew he had hoped in vain.

“I am displeased with the current situation,” said a voice. Though the source of voice was clearly far away, once it entered through the crack, it began to echo off the endless facets of walls within the crystal prison, so it seemed to come at Gravine from every direction, including from within his own center. “And I am disappointed in you.”

The audacity of this last statement was enough to rouse the pride in Gravine to overcome his fear. “Disappointed?” Gravine hissed. “That’s a rather odd complaint considering the last time we spoke you said we were enemies. Why should I care if I’ve disappointed an enemy?”

There was a harsh, hard, booming laugh, and the hairline crack in the prison seemed for a brief moment to spread out in a thousand directions at once. “You were never worthy to be my enemy. It was the ox I was grooming for my war. You were merely to be his tool. And yet you even managed to fail at that.”

“A tool?!” Gravine shrieked. “How dare you? Do you have any idea who I am?”

“You are Gravine Korbrim, of the Third Age,” replied the voice. Though the volume was still deafening, the tone was now bored. “You were mediocre for your time, as far as necromancer tyrants go, but you had a decent run. Compared to your contemporaries, the most remarkable thing about you is that you managed to be just noteworthy enough to merit magical imprisonment, and yet so laughably forgettable that no one ever bothered to go on a quest to either free you or finish you off before that age of legends faded away. You’re a muddy little catfish who managed to outlive the extinction of all the barracudas and sturgeons of the world. And with your betters all gone, you now feel like a mighty monster among the minnows of this current age.”

“So yes,” said the voice with relish, “I’m well aware of who you are.” The hatred Gravine felt for this interloper seethed and boiled, but he could not think of a single retort. It seemed that any response at all would merely make him seem petulant and small. The words had cut him deep, and not one of them had been false.

“I’m also the only one who knows the truth about your current situation, little scavenger. That for all of your relative power, you would have remained little more than a sad and forgotten relic if I hadn’t orchestrated the means of your escape from that monastery. I was quite generous to you that day. In one simple master stroke, I provided you with more freedom than you’d enjoyed in centuries, not to mention a young protege to carry on your legacy and make you important for once. And for all that, I only wanted one thing in return.”

“You expected me to be the servant of a stinking minotaur child,” muttered Gravine.

“I expected you to do as you were told!” roared the voice. “I told you to make yourself indispensable to the ox. I told you to keep him alive and give him intoxicating amounts of power. I told you to sink your hooks into him so deeply that he feared he would die without your help. I told you to make him the mightiest necromancer of this age, while ever dependent on you. And you squandered it all with pointless scheming and intrigue.”

Gravine quailed as the fissures in his prison multiplied a hundredfold during the chastisement. All remaining pride that had fueled his defiance up to that point seemed to shatter in an instant. “No, you don’t understand! I was trying to do even more than you asked,” groveled Gravine. “My machinations and plans have been to find someone even more worthy to be your enemy. At this very moment I have a candidate I’ve been grooming for years to be my new successor. He is a hundred times more qualified than that fat, hairy, dimwitted yokel from the middle of-”

“I am not interested in sycophants or lackeys,” the voice interrupted. “Nor do I have any intention of wasting my time and energy explaining my decisions to the likes of you. The effort required to breach your imprisonment is an effort, even for me, and I am weary of this exchange. I sensed that things had gone awry here, and I came to see if the situation could still be salvaged from this mess. It is clear that due to your incompetence, and perhaps some outside influence as well, that all my carefully laid plans for the ox have been wasted. You cannot fathom how much this angers me. He was to be one of the chief among my most significant enemies. One of only a very few who I have foreseen with the potential to sufficiently contend with me through a thousand years of war. And you threw all that away to play with your puppets.”

“You disgust me, little parasite. And I am done with you. I will not even waste the time and energy to destroy you, because it’s clear you will soon do that yourself. And besides, I now have other plans that need to be accelerated.”

“Wait!” Gravine begged. “Please, Lord Creed let me explain-” But Gravine’s words were cut off as he felt pain for the first time since losing his body. It stabbed into his very center, and it felt as if something broke inside his soul.

“You,” said the voice in a tone as cold as ice and sharp as obsidian, “are not allowed to say my name.” The cracks in the prison were now spreading in weblike patterns under the weight of Creed’s fury. “Of all the oaths you made to me, that was the first, and most important. It was the foundation of every oath you made since. You have now broken every oath to me. Your word and your name mean nothing. As such, every oath made in your name from that day to this is now null and void.” And then the voice was gone.

***

Vdekshi watched dumbfounded as the impossible seemed to be happening all around him. The unbreakable crystal in his staff was cracking. The eternal oaths that bound his servants to his will were unravelling. The magical energies that had sustained his life for so long were bleeding out of him. Outside, he could hear the moaning and raging of the undead who were no longer under his control. On the other side of the door, he heard the pounding of a dozen relentless fists.

“Shon, what’s going on?” Vdekshi asked when the wizard finally started to move again. “This rune I inscribed on the floor should have been potent enough to ward off a demon, and it just burned away like parchment.”

When Shon looked up, Vdekshi could see that not only had the color returned to his face, it had been replaced by a red nearly deep enough to match his robe. Shon didn’t move his lips, but he heard Shon’s words burn in his mind.

“Who is Creed?”