The difficulty was that we didn't know whom to trust. Either the Stone Wardens were inhuman pieces of rock. Or the Rock Slug was possibly on our side?

  Either way, we were screwed. The city was on a doomsday timer, and we were running out of options.

  Ironically, it helped that no one was going to listen to us anyway.

  For all that the [Archmage] insisted that Tandy was the future of magic, he was so enraptured with the return of his wife and the Stone Wardens that the rest of us might as well have been fish food.

  Even Argin had suffered. She went from being the only [Legendary] Stone Warden in the city, to the most junior member of the group.

  Slugs were undervalued all the time. Richard and I were used to it.

  What the Stone Wardens didn't account for was that their decision to bring down the city relied on Ash's bomb-making capabilities.

  Pops had a fiery spell or two, but none of it could rival the sheer force Ash could bring to bear. So this meant that we, and I'm using a royal we here because it was all Ash, had control of the explosions… and, more to the point, the timing of them.

  "Have you set the last charge?" the impassive Stone Warden with ribs of ceramic armor asked. The longer the Stone Wardens were alive, the less human they sounded. It was as though the toll of being inanimate statues for so many years was finally crushing the last bits of their humanity.

  "This is the last one, we just need to connect all the triggers to the detonator and it'll be ready." Ash was doing a good job lying as he busied himself with the wires.

  "And this will allow us to set off the explosives all at the same time?"

  "Yes, how many times do I have to repeat myself?" Ash had mastered the harried genius act.

  The Stone Warden impassively nodded, as if it had temporarily assuaged its curiosity.

  Ash, Richard, and I were on duty babysitting the Stone Warden's plans, while Tandy, Meredeath and Briyain were investigating an alternative.

  Richard had insisted that he was only going to hinder any efforts to talk to Raif. Although he had a fairly high opinion of the Rock Slug, he didn't seem to think the feeling was mutual. It was incredible just how many people Richard had pissed off throughout the years.

  It shocked that he had any respect for anyone. I'd seen him talk down to a [Lich] and the [System] that controlled the very fabric of our lives. Raif was special.

  "You're just going to bear with me for a second; the wire's gotten tangled." Ash said calmly as the Stone Warden loomed. The cords of wire were easy to tangle, I’d created a proverbial rat’s nest over the last one I touched. The real key, as the Stone Warden bent to help, was adding a bit of Richard’s slime to the mix.

  I leaned over the wire, pretending to help untangle it as he dribbled more slime onto the theoretical knot. We'd dosed the wire as it unrolled, here and there. Couldn't be careful enough with the fate of the entire city in our hands.

  He had a skill called [Anti-Magic Slime]. He was positive it'd disrupt the maganical pulse that was needed to trigger the detonations, but we hadn't been able to test it before the Stone Wardens had collected us for this part of their plan.

  Richard was adding extra slime, hoping it'd be a nice failsafe.

  No one had caught on to Ash stalling yet.

  "What's the deal with the guy with the wolf? Why'd the wolf turn to stone too? It's not a Warden, is it?" I asked the woman who guarded us while we worked.

  My question had the intended effect. Her eyes shifted from watching Ash to studying my face.

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  "You're talking about Tuen and his dire wolf Yuwl?" Of course the fucking wolf was a dire wolf. Richard picked up on my irritation and chuckled.

  "I guess? He's the only one with a stone wolf, right?" I refused to call it a dire wolf.

  "They were companions. You know of this with you and your sentient banana, yes?"

  What?!

  "Yes, I am a companion to the banana." Was I enjoying this a little too much? Probably. Did I care? Absolutely not.

  "These bonds are sacred. Many [Adventurers] do not understand that to have a [Companion] is to share a soul, share a will, a singular focus and mind. This is how Tuen and Yuwl are. Of course they shared fates, and as the [Stone Fate] met Tuen, Yuwl joined him." She spoke the words with a blunt honesty, not worried about how someone bonded to a sentient banana might feel about sharing fate with fruit.

  I didn't really know how to respond. I could feel my shoulders creep higher as I thought about sharing fate with the asshole on my shoulders.

  There wasn't much I could do about it now. She made it sound almost nice, like Tuen and Yuwl were so close their paths in life couldn't diverge. That the magical fate that governed their kind couldn't differentiate between their souls.

  That sounded amazing except for one slight problem.

  I was bonded to Richard, and he was an absolute dick.

  For a second we stood there staring at each other as Richard's cool slime evaporated off my back. Ash was quiet for once in his damn life. Could the man not babble when I needed him to?

  The Stone Warden looked like she was going to return to watching Ash work, so I reached for a question.

  "Does that mean I'm [Immortal]? My sentient banana claims such a fate."

  The Stone Warden turned her eyes back to us. Check that, her eyes drifted to the right of my head, looking at Richard as he reached out a fang to nibble on my ear.

  "It is possible that you already walk that path." Her words brought little comfort. Richard had told me as much when I'd chosen [Dead Wrong] that it was one path to [Immortality].

  The thing was, [Immortality] hadn't seemed to have solved any of Richard's problems. He wasn't happy because he was [Immortal], nor did he seem to be all-powerful. What was the point in living for an eternity if you were effectively helpless against the crush of the world?

  He hadn't stopped the cataclysm, and he didn't seem terribly effective against [Corruption]. How much would that suck? It took me a minute of introspection before I realized she was still talking. "—I think that the two of you have a long way to go before your bond is half as strong as Teun and Yuwl's. It is one thing to be bonded. It is another to share a fate."

  "Well, that's a relief." Richard's tooth bit hard into my ear. "No offense, you slimeball, but I'm not sure we want to be stuck with each other for eternity."

  Eternity isn't as long as you'd expect. He let go of my ear, but I could feel a trickle of blood down my earlobe. I hated when he drew blood. It's almost like he had some sort of anti-conguagulate in his saliva. Even [Combat Medic] insisted the bites were beyond my ability to heal. I guess that's what you get when you bond to an [Immortal].

  "You were the second Stone Warden in the city, right, Warden Betula? You've been stone for a long time, huh?" Ash was still fumbling with the cord, but I was running out of topics to stall with.

  The undead statue looked at me with glassy marble eyes.

  "Yes."

  She was so done with this conversation. I pushed on anyway.

  "So what's that like? Weren't you bored? Seems like an awfully long time to watch your family. I've always wondered that about ghosts: what compels them to stay around and haunt people?" I tried channeling Ash. "Sure, I'd want to know what happened to Tandy, Leo, Meredeath and Ash... and maybe follow around my sister and her kids. But eventually, who cares?"

  The Stone Warden sighed. It was the sigh a parent gives a particularly stupid child, as though the answer was sitting in front of me and I was too dumb to look.

  "[Immortality] in any form will take those you love, but it does not take the reason you love. I am a guardian of Cersapil, a founder of a city built on the hope of safety at the end of the cataclysm. I sacrificed myself for that hope. That conviction didn't die when my friends and family perished."

  Must be nice to live in a dream all those years. Richard's words were just for me.

  Seemed like the experience of [Immortality] wasn't singular. The Stone Warden and the slug, the [System] and the [Lich], the Fire Wyrm and the Rock Slug had all failed at holding onto their sanity. None of them could objectively view their actions in a world full of mortality.

  I bowed my head to the wisdom of Betula. With a faint smile, she returned to monitoring Ash, the lesson learned. She'd taught me something else, however, and I had to talk to Tandy.

  "Ash, uh, you got this? I need to go."

  I dashed off before my friend could object. It didn't matter how long we stalled the Stone Wardens, the collapse of Cersapil was inevitable. As my feet sped me towards the [Archmage's] headquarters, I knew what we had to do.

  "Richard, can you tell me about Raif again? What was he like before he was set to guard the Fire Wyrm."

  My sentient banana sighed, as though I was the dumbest mortal he'd ever encountered.

  Maybe I was.

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