The world began ending two hundred years ago.

  This slow, inevitable end began at the center and stretched to the edges, like a drop of blood in a puddle. A puddle that was dirty with life, language, magic, and worst of all, politics. To the northeast, the arid deserts of Barrid. To the southeast, the wetlands and marshes of Prisnidine. To the southwest, the steppes and plains of Adalaant. To the northwest, the forested realm of Ecliptica and its many fragments. All were a few horizons away from extinction.

  The Fade was a towering wall of hungry mist. A violet, seething organism made of smoke, gradually crawling across the world and absorbing everything in its radial path. It consumed less like a great monster which opens and shuts its jaw, and more like a slime that slowly envelopes its meal, digesting it from the outside. This mist left nothing behind but bones; the bones of people, the ribcages of cities, and the skeletons of civilizations. The ruins sat as if there'd never had color or life in them. They were the only decorations in the bare, rolling deserts of the misty world remaining within the Fade, battered by rains of fire, blood, and jagged rocks.

  The Fade was not unlike a reanimated corpse that holds its head in its hands instead of on its shoulders: it used something detached from itself to think, talk, and see. The Fadewraith, servant of the Fade. A repurposed human body and mind, which hosted the Fade’s strategy, ruthlessness, and, on the occasions when it had them, thoughts. Like a notebook that bleeds and wields an axe. Disembodied intelligence.

  One hundred and ninety-seven years after the Fade surged into existence, the modern fadewraith was a woman who was younger than she looked. Life had aged her quickly even before being taken into service like this. Under the blackened and purple-stained patches all over her clothes and body, she had the distinctive bright bronze skin of the narubati people. Holes and tears covered her clothing, revealing the blackest sections of her flesh, the largest of which was at the center of her back, but the darkest of which ran across her throat. Her eyes were the same purple as the Fade around her, but they were easily the most saturated surfaces in the entire realm of decay.

  The Fadewraith strode down a limestone corridor of what had once been a library. A hiding eavesdropper might have assumed she was using a cane from the footstep pattern echoing ominously in the air. Perhaps a very heavy cane, they’d amend, until they snuck a peek and saw the enormous, double-bladed axe the woman effortlessly walked in one hand.

  Purple clouds drizzled fire, blood, and stone onto the roof and through the various leaks into the corridor. The fadewraith held out a hand under a hole in the roof, and gritted her teeth as shards of rock and flame struck her, and the blood mixed with her own blackened ichor. She grinned, exposing teeth the color of her darkened lips.

  The Fade didn’t have a voice of its own, but it certainly had feelings and thoughts of its own. It needed a vessel to organize them properly and to speak them in a way ordinary people could hear. The vessel, however, had the privilege of experiencing the feelings and thoughts of the Fade directly. The Fade did not use words. It didn’t need to.

  The Fadewraith clenched her teeth in pain only when she had withdrawn her hand from the hellish rain. The Fade was making itself clear between her ears that that behavior was not acceptable. As her hand regenerated, a little blacker than before, the Fade told her that it wouldn’t keep fixing her like this forever.

  “I know that,” she snarled to the empty corridor. The Fade replied that it didn’t matter, unless the Fadewraith started to care.

  “We both know how I got here,” the Fadewraith said. “What did you expect? I didn’t want to be alive before this.”

  The Fade told her it had an answer waiting for her a few flights down.

  She hauled the axe forward down the haul, away from the pockmarked section of the roof. The Fade forced her to keep her feet out of the rain, overriding instructions she sent to her muscles that it didn’t like. She marched down a flight of pitch-black stairs, guided by the eerie glow of her conjured weapon and a rugged hand tracing the stone beside her head. Down, down, down she went, further down than any other ruin this far into the belly of the Fade. Everywhere else, the levels this deep had already collapsed, their stone withered away and gnawed down to an unstable skeleton that couldn’t keep the very earth from crushing it in.

  ***

  The Fadewraith raised her axe to smash through the heavy wood door. The stupid thing was too clean, too neat, too undisturbed in a world of rot and erosion. The weapon transitioned from one of the Fade’s elements to another, shifting from smoke to stone, gaining weight and edge. But it froze in her arms just as she threw her body into the swing. Her muscles were forced to stop in mid-motion, the axe over her shoulder.

  The Fade sternly reminded her that she was not to damage this place. She could thrash and trample and obliterate anywhere else within its vast reach, but not here.

  “What is this place?” the Fadewraith asked, still straining from how the Fade was forcing her to hold the weapon.

  The Fade told her to let it go. She did, and the weapon dissipated into mist that washed over her muscles.

  More mist coiled out of the Fadewraith, unbidden by her, and slid through the crack in the door, effortlessly opening it in a slow, ponderous pair of motions. She stepped inside, unhalted by the pitch blackness without her glowing weapon.

  The Fade informed its wraith that this was a crypt.

  “Big deal,” she blew her hair out of her eye in the dark. “You are a crypt. Everything inside your big, hissing nightmare barriers is full of dead people.”

  The Fade corrected her; it was not a crypt. The Fade was a stomach. The perfect stomach, the kind that didn’t leave anything to waste.

  “So why do you have a crypt inside you?” the Fadewraith asked impatiently. She raised her arms, and violet fires glowed in her palms, illuminating a bare, clean cube of a room around her. Laid into the opposite wall was a large wooden box, its size a hint to what it contained.

  The Fade asked if she remembered her question. It was about to say what it expected of her.

  “You want me to stay in a box?”

  The Fade said no. The Fade said that none of its Fadewraiths received a second burial. To become a Fadewraith meant you had already died, by your own hand, right when the Fade needed a replacement. Replacing a Servant of the Fade necessitated a window of release. Instead of getting it drunk to ignore the pain, the Fade gave its former servant a terrifying few minutes of sobriety and clarity with which to experience its end.

  None of the Fadewraihs receive a second burial, the Fade repeated, except for this one. Deledrim, the lady who came right before the current Fadewraith. Because she was a better Fadewraith than Kriisti.

  “You sound just like my arrogant wife did,” Kriisti replied. “At least this time, the bitch you’re comparing me to is already gone.”

  Kriisti’s vision filled with memories from the late Fadewraith’s perspective. They looked a lot like her own, and as often happened when under the control of the Fade, the line between Kriisti and all its other disembodied minds blurred behind her eyes.

  The Fade’s previous servant had been among its best, not because she was terrible and vicious, or even obedient, but because she was patient. The Fade needed to consume the entire world, but it didn’t need to do it in a decade. It had thousands of years, possibly more, to accomplish its goal. Deledrim had lasted three entire decades before being retired, and why? Because she almost never fought. She almost never left the Fade at all. She hardly expanded its borders. She rarely exerted herself. She did the bare minimum to satisfy the Fade’s hunger, and then did nothing more.

  At first, the Fade hated this. At first, it had tried to force her to hunt promising targets that drew too near it. The Fade tried to make Deledrim lash out like all the other wraiths did, to spring the traps it set with all the treasures it sprouted just beyond its deadly veil.

  But then, people stopped fearing the Fade. The world slowed down. People had always traveled and worked close to it, so they could access the unique resources it provided to lure them in such as nadderfruit and zukern metal, but in Deledrim’s service as the Fadewraith, they settled close to it. They called themselves “fogcrawlers”. They put down, harvested, and then when the Fade got too close, they knocked down and set up again a little further away.

  Just when the world had been fooled into thinking it could coexist with the Fade, Deledrim’s aging reanimated body finally ran out of durability. She had to be laid to rest. Then Kriisti came along, and went right back to how Fadewraiths usually operated. Councils of powerful mages were gathering to threaten the Fade, combining their heads to figure out if they could contain it. They all saw it as a threat. The fogcrawlers hadn’t all packed up and left yet, but there certainly weren’t any new ones. Decades of progress slowly raising the temperature, so the frog in the pot didn’t notice, only for Kriisti to reach down and slap the amphibian awake.

  “Are you done?” Kriisti said, finally surfacing enough to snap.

  The Fade continued on, trying to get Kriisti to understand that every Fadewraith had a different need it could satisfy in return for prolonging their life in servitude. One was a supremacist who did what he was told as long as he was allowed to hunt people from a particular country. One was a maniac who’d take the same deal, but without any borders in mind. Kriisti wanted revenge on one person in particular.

  And then there was Deledrim. Deledrim, who had been an outlier in many ways from the Fade’s servants. A wealthy humanitarian in life, she had ended herself in a failed attempt at self-starvation as a form of protest. The Fade soon found itself with a competent stateswoman holding a huge axe. An axe that she held like every other weapon she wielded before: ceremonially.

  “‘Why can’t you be more like her?’” Kriisti said in a mocking tone. “You do realize that I died the way I did so I didn’t have to hear that shit all the time?”

  The door slammed shut behind her. Startled, Kriisti dropped her fire spell illuminating the chamber, plunging herself into pitch blackness. An excruciating sensation filled her back where the hole in her shirt was. She screamed as four tentacles burst out and threw her to the floor. They were half-mist, half-flesh, just as her axe was half stone, and their grip was inescapable. She would know; it was one of her greatest weapons.

  The Fade told Kriisti that she was extremely fortunate. If the circumstances were ever so slightly different, it would have her replacement push the door open right now to put her down for good, and take her place. She would never be able to put her still-living wife or her daughter in their places, even in undeath.

  Kriisti muffled screams through the stone floor, trying to get free, filled with a strange will to live she wasn’t used to. She hadn’t seen this coming. This didn’t happen. She was supposed to be reluctantly alive, but the thought of being cast aside while her wife still walked the continent made her grip on her axe handle as strong as the Fade’s appendages holding her down.

  The Fade continued by saying that, luckily for Kriisti, the circumstances were not slightly different. Kriisti had one more mission left before the Fade replaced her.

  Kriisti stopped struggling. She breathed heavily, but she was paying close attention to what the Fade said next. In life, Kriisti had spoken to a creature like the Fade. A smaller one, but one that spoke in the same strange, non-articulate way. Things like the Fade struggled to say names. Names were not words; they carried no meaning to a construct. Instead, Kriisti had to decipher the sequence of feelings the Fade gave her to indicate who it was talking about, who was her final target. It was like watching someone who doesn’t speak your language try to get their meaning across using vague hand signs and pointing at things.

  Kriisti understood anyway. There was no way she wouldn’t.

  It was a damn good thing her wife was one of those powerful mages that scared the Fade so much. And that she was about to meet with another person who scared the Fade, right up close to the eastern edge of the mists.

  ***

  Sand padded gently beneath Liilia's feet, unable to ride the wind out of her way. She was already out of the harshest part of the Barridian deserts. The Thirsting Wastes made up most of the Vimovarv Province. When it first sprung up, the Fade gobbled up the mountains from which the rivers in Vimovarv flowed. The skeletons of villages lined the dry riverbeds. Liilia steered well clear of them. The Other Liilia had a nasty tendency to flare up when it saw corpses. A town without people was as dead as a human without blood. Liilia would rather stray closer to the Fade and the fogcrawler towns than pass one of those husks of civilization. She’d only been attacked twice in her time in Barrid, and so far she was in great shape.

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  That horrible wall of gas loomed into the sky off to her left side as she strode north. Wind couldn’t blow from that direction. She was almost to her destination, a relatively large village at the top of an incline, up which sand gradually transitioned into dirt, and from dirt into grass.

  Liilia was a tall woman with a sharp face. Her age was impossible to tell. Her brown eyes made strangers flinch as though she were brandishing a knife. Her hair trailed on the ground behind her in a protective sheath, not because she was a royal but because she damn well liked long hair, and it was one of the only things she could get the other Liilia in her head to agree on. No one else's opinion mattered. Especially since most of the time they were trying to manipulate or kill her, or paying someone else to give it a go.

  Occasionally, Liilia held a hand to her temple, and breathed slowly as she walked. A touch of pink magic would flow from her fingers into her head. Deserts were brutal places where it was always either scorching or freezing. For a person living on a world that spent half its year between two suns, it was bitter indeed. Combined with the chill within, Liilia needed to use her magic as a pick-me-up or she’d collapse or scream or both until something else came and finished her.

  Liilia's hands were shaking at her sides. Again. Nights like these made Liilia grateful she had the sense to get rid of her daughter, all those years ago. Whatever her life was like now, it had to be better than around the two Liilias. If Liilia listened carefully, she could hear the other Liilia’s shrill screams bouncing off the sand dunes, landing nowhere except her own ears.

  Liilia’s moon had only risen a few hours ago. She still had plenty of time before it set again, and the other Liilia took control. By that point she and her target had to be well away from town.

  Finally, there were the voices of the townsfolk who were still awake. Liilia shivered; going somewhere with any noise made her feel like she’d just stepped out of a cavern. It felt the opposite when she entered peace and quiet, like she was stepping into the shade. She calmed herself with another touch of pink magic, and pressed on to the town known as Pilgrim’s Swindle.

  She was here, but she had to move quickly. The Fade looming over the town was already starting to seethe more than it usually did, but you had to be paying attention to notice it. For now. Ignoring the stares, and missing the chatter, Liilia strode into the unwalled village and headed straight for the home of the person she’d been seeking for quite some time. She didn’t know who it was, but she knew what they were. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be drawn to them like she was through her moon’s power.

  A mix of Barridian and Prisnidine design decorated the buildings and people around her. Many of those in the street were green-skinned Prisnidines starting their Pilgrimage of the Mists. This was near the edge of their homeland, and this village would be one of their first stops. One of their first opportunities to purchase a trinket to prove they had circled the entire Fade before returning home. The Prisnidines paid special attention to Liilia; moons like the one bonded to her were sacred to them.

  Nobody stopped her on her way to the door. It was the largest building in the town, doubling as a store for a scriptomancer. She couldn’t read the sign in the evening light, and she didn’t try. She tried the handle, but it was locked. She knocked on the door, then remembered where she was and kicked at it instead.

  “Come in! Come in!” came a voice from inside. “Sorry, my hands are full and I can’t get it myself.”

  Liilia took a deep breath, and applied another dash of pink-colored magic to her head. Liilia tried the handle, and for some reason it worked this time. One of those door handles.

  “You have to come with me,” Liilia announced before she even took in the lit room she now stood in.

  “You will wait your turn,” the shopkeeper replied evenly.

  A Prisnidine stood at the counter, passing some bean-shaped objects to a well-dressed Barridian man wearing an expression of surprise in Liilia’s direction. The Prisnidine glanced at her before hurrying out holding something small that Liilia didn’t see.

  Right away, Liilia noticed a good sign: on the hand he was using to count the beans he’d been paid, the scriptomancer had an extra finger. The same went for his other hand, which he used to inscribe something on a plain, smooth stone the Prisnidine held out for him. His extra forefinger wrote on the rock, leaving behind a glowing grey word of written magic. scriptomancy. The kind that didn’t need a moon-shard, the tool most scriptomancers needed to do their work. All around the room, Liilia now saw the engrams this man had crafted for display. Importantly, almost every object was made of stone. Liilia had found her target. She raised a hand, and made her eyes glow pink to reveal herself.

  “You,” she pointed. “Stone mage. You’re coming with me. The Fade knows what you are, and it wants you dead. This village is doomed.”

  The scriptomancer raised an eyebrow at her. “You’re ... a mind lunomancer, aren’t you? Glad to make your acquaintance. Please, sit down. You’ve clearly had a very long - “

  It was time for more mind magic. Not the calming kind. The emphasizing kind. Liilia strode across the room and grabbed the man’s wrist. A narrow surge of pink magic leapt into his head before he could shout. In a moment, all the fear he felt for this witch invading his home was redirected to the Fade she was trying to warn him was coming. His six-fingered hands tightened, and he pulled himself away from her.

  “What did you do to me?” he demanded. “You must know who I am. You must know my body doesn’t mix well with your kind of magic.”

  “I know exactly who you are,” Liilia said, “and so does the Fade. You need to leave, now, with me.”

  “You led it here!” the scriptomancer accused, though he was hurriedly stuffing things into a bag he’d pulled from under the table. “You showed it where I was! I knew I shouldn’t have settled here, pilgrims or not! Bad enough it started getting closer again. Didn’t need you showing up and making sure it knew I was here.”

  “It would have found you sooner or later,” she replied harshly. “There’s been a change of Fadewraiths. I’m honestly surprised the demon didn’t find you sooner. What’s your name, man?”

  “Call me Ben,” said Ben gruffly, hauling up his second bag before the screaming started outside.

  “Come on, Ben,” Liilia said, pushing open the door and waving for him to follow. Outside, she could see a pillar of mist touching down in the center of town like a twister. She could already see the base turning into two legs. Villagers and pilgrims screamed and ran like a disturbed anthill.

  “Hurry!” she shouted. She turned, only to see the scriptomancer disappearing out a backdoor. She cursed under her breath, and dashed back inside after him through the same portal.

  ***

  Liilia stopped walking, and Ben stopped beside her, looking anxiously over his shoulder at the screaming village. The twister was gone, but its spawn could be heard even at this distance, destroying doors and slaying anyone that got in its way or who looked at it wrong. People fled the town in every direction except toward the Fade, but none of them were close enough to hear Liilia or Ben.

  “You have to get to Album,” Liilia said, gesturing for the man to hurry up. He wasn’t as fat as most scriptomancers in this region, but he certainly wasn’t in peak condition. He hadn’t thought of that when packing in a rush.

  “You mean that rich lady’s magic club gathering?” Ben replied as he plodded forward in the sand. “Blow that. I know how groups like that think. First thing they’ll try is opening me up like a frog. And don’t even think of touching my head again, witch. It won’t work a second time.”

  Liilia couldn’t fault him for the concern. It was why she’d taken so long to get off her ass and find him for the other witches in Album. Discovering this alternative way to imprison the Fade had not been without its ugly connotations. But as soon as a few particular witches weren’t involved anymore, she returned to the gathering herself with a purpose. And that meant she needed to collect people like Ben.

  Before Liilia could say that, there was a whirling hiss of smoke in the air above and behind the pair. Liilia whirled around just in time to block a vicious downward axe blow with a hastily summoned shield. Liilia came face to face with someone whose eyes glowed a dim purple, the same color as the Fade.

  “Hello, Kriisti,” Liilia snarled.

  Liilia knew this face. She knew it better than any other. It was a face she'd seen the Fadewraith wear before.

  “Hello again, Liily!” the Fadewraith greeted as it swung its axe again. It slammed into Liilia’s conjured shield and made a crack. Liilia rolled away with the blow. Lunoplasm was a durable material, but Fade miststone could make it look pathetic when it wanted to.

  Liilia saw a small igloo of stone where Ben had been standing. He hid himself like a turtle. It would have to do. Liilia dashed between it and the Fadewraith, and blocked another blow. In the sky, Liilia could see her moon Hepa, the source of her power, glowing pink. To everyone else, it didn’t stand out, but when she drew on its power to materialize her weapons and to exert her influnce over minds, it hummed to her in her head and in the heavens.

  Some people, when faced by the resurrected corpse of their deceased spouse, would try to convince themselves it wasn’t that person anymore so they could fight it. They’d say things like, “that isn’t her, that’s just a monster wearing her face”.

  Not Liilia. Liilia fought her wife better than she fought anyone else, so that’s just what she did now.

  The Fade housed its thinking in the Fadewraith, Liilia knew. Her mind magic was far from alien to it. It could hold intelligence in its hands, examine it, put its thumbs in the eyes, and push. Liilia wouldn't let it.

  But being a mind witch, Liilia had a special ability to hold that same intelligence up and examine it in the light. She could read its fears. She could look into the eyes of the end of the world, and see what it desperately hoped wouldn’t happen. That was why she was here, and it was why Ben had to make it back to Album.

  Liilia backed away from Ben’s shell and transformed the shield into a spear.When she spoke, her voice was hoarse. Probably from what the Other Liilia screamed when she was in command.

  “Trying to kill me this time?” she said.

  “I try to kill you every time,” Kriisti snarled.

  “I couldn’t tell,” Liilia replied. They circled one another in the sand, watched over by Hepa and the Fade, both stealing glances at Ben’s little enclosure. Liilia’s lunoplasm spear was dull in its pink color but not in its edge. The smaller volume of Liilia’s weapon granted her room to summon another, smaller tool if she needed. Most of Liilia's more unique arsenal of lunomantic spells would be useless against a creature like this. Illusion magic didn't work on a being literally made of smoke and mirrors.

  The Fadewraith’s grin grew. “Maybe you’ll notice after the third or fourth time I slay you. Did you know, Liily, that the Fade wants to experiment with us? It wants to see if it can have two servants at once. Want to try it?”

  The two looked at each other for a moment, then burst out laughing.

  “That’s what I thought,” Kriisti went on as they circled once more. “We couldn’t even stand being married. What kind of idiot would make us coworkers like that?”

  The Fadewraith charged forward, and the two crossed weapons. The axe head caught between the buckler shield and spear in a bind. The weapons sparked on contact as if they were still in the midst of heat treatment, spraying sparks of pink and purple. Liilia slid the weapon away and spun out of its path.

  The Fadewraith’s larger axe prevailed in all head-on collisions, which was why there were none. Only deflections off of hastily summoned bucklers from Liilia. The shields dissipated and reappeared with necessity. She kept her spear ready in her dominant hand, occasionally going for a thrust to exert what zone of control she could.

  Liilia fought like water. Her attacker fought like a puppet stuffed with boulders, hanging from control bars made of rage. Light flashed and shone all around them. Sand sprayed up and blew about in the chaos. Hepa pushed to support her partner with her lunar power, lending her focus and strength. Since her moon was in the sky, Liilia didn’t need to dip into her stored power reserves. She still needed to make sure not to overexert her magic and make herself vulnerable, but with her moon in the sky, energy was not a limiting factor.

  The axe nearly glanced the wrong way, right into Liilia's face. She caught it with her spear shaft, binding the heavy weapon between both of hers. It trembled with the tension, inches from her nose. Her blood rushed. Her muscles were taut. The primal thrill of a fight to the death filled her bones. It made the other Liilia stir like almost nothing else, especially in the presence of this demon Liilia knew so well. The other Liilia wanted out so badly, but now was not the time. Luckily, with Hepa in the sky, it was easier to control her.

  “How many times do I have to kill you before you lose my trail?” the lunomancer shouted. “Why do you still bother with me? Why do you keep wearing this face, Fade? Do I scare you that much?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Liily,” the Fadewraith said with a dark smile. It pushed its axe closer. “I’m not afraid of you. I wasn’t afraid even when I was alive. But the Fade is afraid of you and your little stone mage, so I suppose you’ve got that going for you. Means I get sent to do what I wanted to you anyway.”

  With an angry yell, Liilia ducked to the side, avoiding the blade pushing through her defenses. She disintegrated her buckler, and the axe slammed into the ground with a sudden lack of resistance. Liilia re-summoned her buckler and struck the off-kilter Fadewraith across its face. While it recoiled from the blow, she plunged her spear into its gut. While it was stuck there, she transformed the spear into a sword. Liilia bashed her buckler against the blade, forcing it out the Fadewraith's side and spraying black fluid across the kicked-up sand. The Fade’s poor recreation of blood sizzled and evaporated like water on a stove. There was a stench as black as it looked.

  For most, inflicting that injury on the Fadewraith would have accomplished very little. Even other lunomancers would still have a lot of work to do if they wanted to get away. But not Liilia. Hepa and the Fade had a kind of relationship not unlike Kriisti and Liilia’s: when they cut each other, they cut deep. Right through the scar tissue, even when scar tissue was all there was left.

  The Fadewraith made no sounds of pain or anguish at the half-bisection of its torso. Not to say it had the decency to be silent as it teetered and collapsed on its side in the moonlit sand, its axe crashing beside it and dissipating into mist. Instead, it laughed the whole way down. Its manic eyes met Liilia’s as they both stopped flaring their magic and their eyes returned to the closest thing they had to normal.

  “You’re alone with yourself,” the Fadewraith said smugly. It started to dissipate, further staining the sand an ugly black color. “See you soon. You weren’t enough for me when I was alive, and you won’t be enough when I’m back. Maybe next time you can lead me to our little shit of a daughter, instead of some rock mage, and I can clean you both up. And by the way, your little mutant is long gone.”

  Liilia leaned on her spear, breathing heavily. The wraith stared up at her, slowly nodding as its features dissolved into the ground. It would be back, with more scar tissue to cut through, but Liilia didn’t plan to face her again, as nice as it was to put that bitch in her place.

  Leaving the black, evaporating puddle, and making her weapons vanish into pink mist, Liilia strode over to the rock egg. Sure enough, there was a hole in the far side, with footprints leading to a distant figure at full sprint. To Liilia’s surprise, a streak of violet stains marred the stone barrier, but didn’t pierce it. She didn’t notice Kriisti lashing out at their quarry, but apparently Ben knew something about protecting himself, and his magic could stop a Fadewraith’s off-hand bow.

  Liilia squinted at the ground: written in the sand with a hasty hand was:

  Gonna drag the Fadewraith through everywhere I run, witch?

  With Kriisti banished, and Ben taking flight, Liilia was once again alone with her least favorite person.

  She’d just fought for her life. Her heart was already pounding. Liilia broke into a run after the stone scriptomancer anyway.