The Archmage's consciousness split three ways.

  The first thread maintained the barrier around the ritual site—a golden dome that now strained against the descending spirits. The second thread sustained the projection enhancement across now seventy-odd soldiers.

  The third thread—the most demanding—held the dreamscape together.

  Sweat traced lines down Velthan's temples. His fingers, wrapped around his staff, had gone white at the knuckles. In seventy years of practicing the arcane arts, he had never attempted anything of this magnitude.

  An entire fabricated reality. A perfect reconstruction of the Sunless City, complete with buildings, streets, sky, and—most importantly—carefully placed breadcrumbs leading to a very specific conclusion.

  He couldn't have an omniscience inside the dreamscape. That would have required a fourth thread, and even his legendary concentration had limits. But he could see inside the dream with the eyes of the people he put in there.

  Specifically, eight pair of eyes. Every thing the young lord did—all of it fed back to the Archmage through the eight illusory Talons.

  Multiple presences, all guiding Eirik to the paths he had laid for him.

  Good. Good.

  "ARCHMAGE!"

  Caelum's voice cracked with strain.

  Velthan's eyes flickered open—just for a moment, just enough to see what was happening in the physical world.

  The pig-creature had grown.

  Not in size, to be precise. The tumor-flesh that bulged through its cracked skull had spread, now covering most of its head in a mass of pulsing tissue and mismatched eyes.

  Caelum fought it alone.

  The Duke's son teleported from position to position, leaving trails of crystalline light in its wake.

  But that wasn't what drew Velthan's attention.

  It was that the boy's left eye was twitching violently now—a sustained tremor that pulled at the corner of his mouth. His teleportation, normally precise to the inch, was off. He appeared three feet to the left of where he'd clearly intended, stumbled, and barely dodged a swipe that would have taken his head.

  "VELTHAN!" Caelum screamed again. "I CAN'T—I NEED—"

  "Hold," the Archmage said calmly. "Just a little longer."

  Velthan felt it through his third thread. Eirik had found the charcoal burner's shop.

  Yes. Follow the breadcrumbs. Trust what I've shown you.

  Around him, the battle raged.

  The spectral army had descended in earnest now. Thousands ghostly warriors, their translucent forms cutting through like waterfall.

  The projections helped. Each soldier's three-times-enlarged avatar blocked strikes that would have overwhelmed any normal formation. But the spirits were relentless—and endless. For every one that dissipated under a projection's blade, three more took its place.

  "SHIELD WALL!" Ser Konrad's voice boomed across the chaos. "MAINTAIN THE LINE!"

  The old knight was everywhere at once, it seemed. Rallying soldiers who faltered. Cutting down spirits that breached the perimeter. Plugging gaps in the formation with the precision of a master tactician.

  Good man, Velthan thought absently. A pity.

  The dreamscape shifted again.

  Velthan's breath caught. The moment was significant—Eirik was performing the ritual.

  Finally.

  He reached deeper into the fabrication, straining to sense what was happening. The blood touched the stone. Words were spoken—the incantation he had designed specifically for this moment.

  And then—

  Through the eyes of everyone their, clear as crystal, he saw it:

  Lord Stormcrow holding the clay bowl. The knife plunging into his palm. Blood—dark and thick—welling from the wound and falling into the vessel.

  Got you.

  His third thread snapped back into his consciousness like a released bowstring. The effort of maintaining the dreamscape vanished, leaving him momentarily lighter.

  The blood of Abercrombie. Finally.

  Velthan allowed himself a thin smile.

  He looked down. Empty mana crystals—three dozen of them—lay scattered across the cobblestones. Their surfaces had gone from luminous blue to dull gray, completely drained. He hadn't even noticed consuming them, so focused had he been on the fabrication.

  A small price, he thought, for what I've gained.

  The pig-creature screamed.

  Velthan's head snapped up. Caelum had driven his blade through the thing's shoulder, pinning it momentarily to the ground. Ice spread from the wound in jagged fractals, freezing the corrupted flesh in place.

  The Duke's son stumbled backward, his breath coming in ragged gasps. His left eye was twitching so violently now that it was barely open.

  "Is it done?" Caelum's voice was barely recognizable. "Tell me it's done."

  "Almost," Velthan said. "One more step."

  He reached into his robes and withdrew the shard of black crystal.

  Malakor's prison.

  The thing pulsed against his palm, eager and hungry. Even shielded by layers of protective magic, Velthan could feel the entity within pressing against its bonds—testing, probing, searching for weakness.

  Patience, Lord, he thought. Your vessel approaches.

  The blood he had extracted from the dreamscape materialized in a small vial—the precise contents poured from the clay bowl, captured in the moment of the fabrication's collapse. Velthan turned it over in his fingers.

  Dark. Thick. Carrying the unmistakable resonance of ancient lineage.

  Though the hour of preparation was... unusual.

  A flicker of doubt.

  Lord Stormcrow had asked for time alone before the ritual. An hour to prepare, he'd claimed. For what? The ritual itself required nothing but blood and words.

  Or perhaps—

  No. The Archmage had seen the blood fall with his own eyes. Eight pair of eyes, watching every detail of the moment. He cut his hand, blood dripped inside the bowl, and he poured blood from it. There could be no deception about it at all.

  He dismissed the doubt.

  "Caelum," Velthan said. "Prepare yourself. Our strongest ally arrives shortly."

  The Duke's son didn't respond. He was leaning against a broken pillar, his entire body wracked with tremors. The ice that had pinned the creature was cracking faster now, great fissures spreading through the frozen flesh.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Velthan turned his attention to the black crystal.

  "Lord of the First Hunger," he intoned. "We have prepared for you a vessel worthy of your return."

  He uncorked the vial.

  The blood seemed to shimmer as it caught the light—eager, almost, to fulfill its purpose. Velthan tilted the vial slowly, letting a single drop fall onto the crystal's surface.

  The shard drank it instantly.

  "Through blood we bind you. Through sacrifice we summon you. Through the vessel of Abercrombie's line, we offer you passage into this world."

  Another drop. And another.

  The crystal was pulsing now. The darkness within seemed to writhe, pressing against its prison walls with renewed force.

  "Rise, Lord Malakor. Rise and claim what we have prepared."

  Velthan spoke the final words of power.

  And cast the crystal into the blood pool.

  One second.

  The pool's surface rippled. The blood—still thick and dark from the earlier ritual—began to churn.

  Two seconds.

  Something was moving beneath the surface. A shape, forming from the crimson depths.

  Three seconds.

  Velthan gestured to Caelum. "Be ready. Our ally comes."

  The darkness within erupted.

  For one glorious moment, Velthan felt the presence expand—felt Malakor's joy at finally receiving the key to its freedom. The crystal grew warm in his hand, then hot, then—

  The warmth turned cold. The joy became confusion, then rage.

  This is not—THIS IS NOT—

  Velthan's eyes widened.

  The blood on the crystal's surface began to bubble. To hiss. To transform into something that looked less like blood and more like—

  Pig.

  The word formed in Velthan's mind before he could stop it.

  No no no no no—

  That's impossible. He watched through eight pairs of eyes. He saw the knife enter his palm. He saw the blood fall. He saw—

  ———

  Velthan found himself standing in darkness, standing at the edge of a pit.

  It stretched before him in a vast spiral. The walls were carved from something that might have been flesh. And along those walls, carved into terraces that wound downward forever, were people.

  No. What remained of people.

  The first terrace held skeletal figures huddled in clusters. They wept without tears—their bodies had nothing left to give.

  The second terrace was worse.

  Here, the starving had found food.

  Velthan watched a woman tear strips of flesh from a body that might have been her husband. She ate without chewing, without tasting, her movements mechanical and desperate. Around her, others did the same. Parents feeding on children. Children feeding on parents. The wet sounds of consumption echoed up from the depths.

  The third terrace showed what came after.

  Those who had eaten their fill had begun to change. Their bodies swelled with stolen meat—lumps forming in places where no lumps should be. They screamed.

  Deeper still.

  The fourth terrace. The fifth. The sixth.

  Each level showed a new horror. Those who had eaten too much, their bodies splitting open to reveal new mouths that demanded more. Those who had been eaten but refused to die, their partial forms crawling across the stone in search of their missing pieces. Those who had become nothing but appetite—shapeless masses of hunger that consumed everything they touched, including each other.

  And at the very bottom of the pit, in darkness so absolute—

  Two red eyes opened.

  VELTHAN.

  The voice bypassed his ears entirely, manifesting directly in the space behind his thoughts.

  Velthan's knees buckled.

  He tried to speak, but his throat had forgotten how to work. The red eyes held him in place, pinning him like an insect on a collector's board.

  TWICE.

  Images flooded Velthan's mind.

  He saw the pig-creature as it truly was—not a random corruption, but a deliberate redirection. Malakor had recognized the tainted blood and shunted the summoning sideways, catching a lesser demon in the net instead of himself.

  The pig-thing that Caelum had been fighting. That explained why the Duke's son couldn't defeat it—he wasn't fighting a mere corruption.

  He was fighting a god's castoff.

  TWICE...

  Velthan felt the truth of what he just did slam into his consciousness. In the instant before Malakor recognized the deception, the corrupted essence had begun to seep into its being. Another heartbeat, and the First Hunger would have been tainted beyond recognition.

  A god, corrupted by swine.

  The humiliation alone was enough to warrant annihilation.

  "My Lord—" Velthan's voice emerged as a croak, pathetic and small. "I watched him. I saw his blood fall. I don't understand how—"

  EXCUSES.

  Pain.

  Raw and immediate. Velthan felt his consciousness being peeled back layer by layer, each memory examined and discarded like pages torn from a book.

  "Please—" The word came out as a gasp. "If not for the requirement—the law of willing blood—I would have bled the boy dry a thousand times over. The moment he set foot in Frostfall, I could have—"

  The red eyes descended.

  Velthan realized, with mounting horror, that Malakor was rising from the bottom of the pit.

  YOU SPEAK TO ME OF LAWS?

  Velthan felt his body lift from the ground and dangled in the void.

  A tendril brushed against Velthan's face. Where it touched, he felt his skin begin to dissolve.

  THE LAWS ARE THE ARCHITECTURE OF EXISTENCE. AND YOU SUGGEST THAT I SHOULD HAVE LET YOU CIRCUMVENT IT?

  The tendril pressed deeper. Velthan screamed as layers of himself began to peel away.

  The red eyes blazed.

  BRING ME WHAT I REQUIRE, VELTHAN.

  ———

  Velthan gasped back to consciousness.

  He was on his knees in the plaza, his staff lying forgotten beside him. For a moment, he couldn't remember where he was or why.

  Something cold pressed against his palm.

  The black crystal. It had returned to him somehow.

  Last chance.

  Malakor had spared him—not out of mercy, but out of necessity. The First Hunger still needed a conduit in this world, and Velthan was the only tool at hand.

  A sound pulled his attention upward.

  The pig-creature had changed.

  Where before it had stood perhaps eight feet at the shoulder, now it towered nearly thirty.

  Extra limbs sprouted from its torso at random intervals. Its spine had curved and split, creating a ridge of bone spurs that jutted through the skin like a mountain range.

  From the creature's belly, something was trying to be born.

  A shape, pressed against the distended flesh from within: a face, contorted in terror. As he watched, the skin finally tore, and an arm emerged—a human arm, reaching toward the sky before the wound sealed shut around it, dragging it back inside.

  Caelum was no longer fighting.

  The Duke's son appeared and vanished in rapid succession, dodging for his dear life. His movements had lost all grace.

  "VELTHAN! HELP ME! HELP—"

  The creature's arm-cluster swept through the space where Caelum had been a heartbeat before. The Duke's son appeared on a broken pillar twenty feet away, gasping.

  On the other side of the plaza, the situation had deteriorated just as catastrophically.

  The spectral army had reorganized.

  They spirits attacked from three directions against the shield wall. Each time Konrad shifted men to reinforce one flank, the opposite flank buckled. Each time a gap was sealed, two more opened.

  "ROTATE!" Konrad's voice was hoarse from shouting. "SECOND RANK, FILL THE—"

  A spirit cavalry charge slammed into the western edge of the formation. Three soldiers went down instantly.

  Velthan took a long breath.

  In seventy years of service to powers both mortal and otherwise, he had never—not once—encountered a situation quite this comprehensively fucked.

  He reached into his robes.

  Six mana crystals remained—his absolute reserve. He crushed all of them at once, feeling the power flood through his channels.

  His staff rose.

  The golden dome that had protected the ritual site began to change.

  What had been a barrier of light became a shell of crystallized force. The spirits that had been pressing against its surface found themselves suddenly repelled.

  Velthan's free hand moved through the air, tracing patterns that left trails of silver fire in their wake. Three symbols.

  The pig-creature's movement slowed to a crawl.

  It was subtle at first—a fractional delay in the swinging arm-clusters. But within seconds, the effect became unmistakable. The creature moved as if pushing through honey.

  The faces fused to its head opened their mouths to scream, but the sound emerged as a distorted moan that seemed to last forever.

  "CAELUM!"

  The Duke's son looked up from where he'd collapsed against the pillar.

  "NOW! THE POOL! GO!"

  Caelum's face contorted—half from the spasms, half from confusion. "What? We can't—the men—"

  "THE POOL, BOY! BEFORE THE BINDING FAILS!"

  "But our soldiers!" Caelum gestured wildly at the formation of elite guards. "We can't just—"

  "What we will accomplish here means more than the lives of these men." Velthan's voice was ice. "Their very purpose—their reason for existence—is to give their lives for moments precisely like this one."

  "That's not—" Caelum's protest died as another spasm wracked his body. "Father wouldn't—"

  "Your father and I have worked our entire lives for a chance like this." Velthan seized Caelum's arm. "Think, boy. The entire North. The power to stand as equals with the gods themselves. All of it, ripe for the taking, with just one more complication to overcome."

  He pulled Caelum toward the blood pool.

  "Now is not the time for womanly sentimentalities. Let these men die, and live to accomplish your purpose."

  On the plaza's edge, the elite guards were beginning to notice.

  Ser Konrad had been the first to see it—the way Velthan had stopped maintaining their projections the moment the crystallized dome formed. The three-times-enlarged avatars that had been their only advantage against the spectral army were dimming with each passing second.

  "ARCHMAGE!" Konrad's voice boomed across the chaos. "THE PROJECTIONS ARE FAILING! WE NEED—"

  Velthan didn't even glance in his direction.

  "ARCHMAGE!"

  Nothing.

  The old knight's face went pale as understanding dawned.

  "They're leaving us." The words came from somewhere in the formation. "They're actually leaving us."

  "HOLD THE LINE!" Konrad roared, but even he couldn't keep the despair from his voice. "MAINTAIN FORMATION!"

  Cracks appeared in the crystallized dome.

  The spectral army had adapted. They no longer charged mindlessly against the barrier. Instead, they concentrated their forces at specific points, hammering at the same locations again and again. Each impact sent fractures spreading through the amber surface.

  One crack. Then three. Then a dozen.

  "ARCHMAGE! FOR THE LOVE OF THE FROST MOTHER—"

  Velthan reached the edge of the blood pool.

  He had underestimated Eirik Stormcrow.

  The elaborate dreamscape had failed precisely because most of it had been invented. The young lord had smelled the falseness. Doubt had simmered, and doubt was poison to willing sacrifice.

  Next time, I will give him truth.

  The crystallized dome shattered.

  The spectral army poured through the breach in a tide of pale light. Soldiers screamed as ghostly blades found their marks. Konrad's voice rose one final time—a wordless roar of defiance—before it was swallowed by the chaos.

  Velthan didn't look back.

  He grabbed Caelum by the collar and threw them both into the blood pool.

  The crimson waters closed over their heads.