The travel over the next few days was a weight Greg could only barely manage to keep from crushing him. First, they’d traveled through the area of their initial fight with Kael. The murmox had little issue maneuvering through the toppled trees or the carrion that feasted on leftover corpses. To no one’s surprise, the portal was nowhere to be found. The Rillon’s had likely decommissioned it once they’d found their warehouse turned upside down…or Kael reported back to them.

  As if a beacon had been placed down, Greg found the spot Maeve had collapsed after the bastard dosed her. A perfect little patch of ground that seemed absolutely undisturbed by the carnage that had fallen around it. He didn’t stop Gerty as they passed, just followed it with his eyes…then turned his head…then his body to keep watching it.

  Nobody said anything, even though he knew all three of his companions noticed. He was thankful for that. He didn’t need fussing over. That wouldn’t benefit him or Maeve. He just needed to get this done.

  Once they’d cleared that area, a different heaviness came over him. He’d only ever felt Isabella’s emotions once before. The first time she’d seen Brannoc after her fragments had been put back together. She’d been able to put that away fast enough he didn’t make an utter fool of himself, but this time her attempts were ground down by the attrition of travel.

  With every mile, the place of her death grew closer, and that cloud that she was desperately trying to blow away got stronger. Thankfully, Autumn gave them regular breaks out of the chat channel. He’d taken to taking short walks on his late night watch. Not far, just enough to get him out of earshot of their little camp so he and Isabella could speak. For once, he felt like she was leaning on him more than the other way around.

  “We should get there tomorrow.” Greg whispered into the darkness, his voice the only sound save the occasional hum or chirp of a bug or wind through the branches above him. “Are you ready?”

  “I appreciate the concern, but I’m not a child, Greg. You don’t need to continually check in on me,” Isabella huffed from within his mind.

  “Being hesitant about revisiting the place you died isn’t childish.” Greg glanced down at the two little stumps on his left hand. “I don’t know how many people can say they’ve ever done that, but it can’t be many.”

  “Ghosts and ghouls do it all the time.” Isabella countered.

  “Not exactly the same situation. As much as being attached to me might feel like torture, you chose this.” Greg said with a slight grin.

  She let out a quiet sigh and didn’t speak for a long time before replying. “I am a bit concerned. I’ll keep it together, though. Nothing to worry about.”

  “I’m not worried about you keeping it together, Isabella. I’m just trying to be there for my friend.”

  For the longest time, Greg had thought the sounds she made were performative. She had no lungs to sigh, no tongue to click, no lips to hum…the sound of a choked sob felt anything but performative. He swallowed hard, finding a lump forming in his own throat as her quick, quiet, crying breaths filled his mind.

  With first light they were off again. He’d gotten a couple of hours of sleep, but nothing substantial. Isabella’s worry bled through to his psyche, and he spent most of the early morning doing his best to mentally reinforce himself and his piggyback soul.

  Yekharl’s Tower’s influence bled into the woods for miles around it. Trees that should have kept their needles year round stood bare and twisted away from it. No grass grew. All sound from the rattle of antlers to the buzz of the smallest insect stopped, leaving only the footsteps of their mounts who were not enthralled with the place themselves. Even with the sun high in the sky, an almost imperceptible shadow blanketed the area.

  The looming black and gray tower spiraled to a point at least a hundred feet in the air. The approach to the circular wall of thick wooden spikes revealed further oddities in the towers architecture. Staircases jutted out the sides at seemingly random intervals, some of them leading back into the structure, but others to nothing but open air. Windows of asymmetrical sizes dotted the floors, some of them blown out, but others appeared to lead to illuminated rooms within.

  “To be clear…” Greg spoke through the chat channel as they passed through a portion of the outer log wall that had long been toppled. “This place is supposed to be abandoned, right?”

  “Supposed to be,” Seraphae confirmed. “Don’t let the lights fool you. The place is full of dark magic. If you see something confusing or concerning, speak up. It’s likely not real, but if it is, we need to know.”

  “I’m not a big historian, but this place was cleared out decades ago, wasn’t it? Why would the magic still persist?” Autumn said as she stroked the feathered head of the temple beast, doing what she could to calm it.

  “The gods don’t deal in necromancy. The power that was used here infected everything around it. Clearing that taint would take an act directly from a divine being, which would require consecrated ground.” Seraphae answered the next question before it could be asked, her tone expressing something that felt close to guilt. “Consecrated ground only forms when divine blood is spilled.”

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  Greg’s eyes narrowed slightly as he looked in her direction. “That’s why the gods can’t just show up anywhere? So any proper temple is some place where divine blood’s been spilled?”

  “Exactly.”

  Isabella’s emotional state shifted suddenly from a visceral melancholy to a sudden surge of determination. It didn’t take a mind like hers to figure out what she was thinking, and he immediately did all he could to hamper that feeling. His horizons had certainly expanded since arriving on Etheon, but there were still lines he would not cross.

  They quickly reached a point where the murmox refused to go any closer to the tower. They rode them back to the entrance and left them far enough off that whatever aura it was radiating wouldn’t immediately spook them off before finishing the distance on foot.

  The first few times the soft snapping sounded underfoot, Greg had hardly registered it. It wasn’t until Autumn glanced down when it happened to her that he actually took a look. What he’d assumed were rocks or sticks were the remains of a legion of undead, eradicated more than half a century ago. Split skulls and half buried femurs rose from the dirt like roots breaking through soil. His steps slowed as he took in the sheer number of little bleached white lumps.

  “Lets keep moving…” Seraphae’s voice echoed back to him as if they were in a tunnel.

  “You guys see the bones, right?” Greg spoke into the communication channel as he caught up to them.

  “There must be thousands of bodies,” Autumn added.

  “Unchecked necromancy.” Seraphae pursed her lips before jerking her head to the tower. “Come on.”

  Approaching the tower only increased the density of remains, staining the very earth to the point it looked like they walked through chalk rather than dirt. Isabella had regained control of her emotions, letting him filter everything he was seeing through his own lens. Still not great, but probably better than how she saw it.

  The building itself looked to be constructed from rough shale, bits crumbling off of it as Autumn reached out with no hesitation to pull open the warped wooden door. The doorway opened into a short hallway and a spiral staircase at the end. He followed Seraphae in, Autumn filing in behind him.

  The air was thick and cold, like walking through a stagnant, half-frozen bog. Mist expelling from their mouths with every breath, Greg took a step into the first chamber. It felt too big to fit in the relatively thin spire. The stairs opened into a circular chamber at least as wide and tall as a high school gymnasium. Thick wires ran from open windows in lazy arcs to thin iron poles placed haphazardly around the room. Each pole held up a wooden table equipped with five straps positioned to secure the head, arms, and legs of a person.

  He’d not seen the inside of a science lab since Chemistry 101, but it immediately struck him just how disorderly the place was. Why was that what his mind was stuck on in the wake of the carnage outside and the inhumane acts that must have occurred within the walls. Careful not to disturb anything, he stepped between tables strewn with knocked over vials, long dried out herbs, and various tools of the necromancer's trade.

  “Found something.” He spoke silently into their minds as he stepped up to the only angled table he’d crossed that wasn’t covered in dust. He knelt and scooped up a handful of white hair coating the floor beneath the device like snow. It was thick and curly, maybe eight to ten inches long, but attempting to manipulate it resulted in it falling apart between his fingers.

  “He was here,” Seraphae said, swiping her hand along the nearby supply table. Its content had been cleared off, neatly stacked just below.

  “Not still here though?” Autumn asked. “Any way to tell how far ahead of us he is?”

  Seraphae let out an audible grunt of affirmation before pulling out a pinch of ash from a pouch on her belt. While she was drawing out some sort of ritual in ash, Greg went back to the hair. It didn’t look cut. Seemed like it all fell out.

  He’d turned someone here.

  The same thing he’d done to Maeve. Only no one was here to help them before they changed. He glanced back at the two of them as the table sizzled and a thin line of smoke rose from it.

  “A couple of days.” Seraphae blew on the table, the remainder of the ash dispersing through the air. “He’s definitely going to Wyrm’s Gap.”

  Greg’s head snapped to the nearest window at the hawk-like screech.

  “Reggie!” Autumn lept over the table and then several more, disappearing down the stairs before he could even react.

  “You heard it too, right?” Greg asked, already heading for the stairs.

  “Yeah, let’s go.”

  “REGGIE!” Autumn’s call was closer to an owner yelling at her rowdy dog than concern for it’s safety. It was a flying lion-bird-thing though, so unless there was a dragon or that creepy butterfly, he wasn’t certain what it couldn’t get away from.

  They burst through the door behind her where she was looking up at the temple-beast. It was in the air, making wide sweeping circles about five hundred feet out. Right about where they’d left the murmox…

  He found the center of the circle, and his gaze dropped. Two large gray bodies blocked the gap they entered through, a figure sitting on top of each limp form. The temple-beast let out another shriek. One of them climbed to their feet, a spear coalesced out of thin air, and they hucked it into the air. It soared high enough to hit Reggie, but was nowhere near close.

  That did not stop Autumn from breaking into a full sprint.

  Greg had never felt a connection with animals the way a lot of people did. He liked them well enough. They’d always had dogs when he was a kid, and he would take them out for walks and play fetch. All the normal pet stuff. They were never more than pets, though. He’d known Gerty for a handful of days, but seeing her body slumped on its side, periodically twitching, had him running right behind Autumn. When the titanbloods sitting atop them were close enough for him to make out, his blood boiled.

  He’d never learned Goon One’s name, but killing Goon Two a second time wasn’t something he was going to lose any sleep over. Miles Rillon pushed himself up to his feet and snarled at him as Greg closed the distance.

  “You stole my fucking…”

  Greg appeared suddenly behind the man and drove Light Drinker into his back and up through the center of his chest, feeling ribs crack on the other side.

  “Axe…” He croaked out as plumes of blue mist filled the air in front of him.