Chapter 1
Thistle felt a foreign spell change the magic of his dungeon like a harp string being plucked behind his eyes. He didn’t know what the source was, but he knew it was unacceptable.
It took far too long for him to find the source of the disturbance. As Thistle examined the neat lines of dried blood that made up the magic circle, his frown deepened. Someone had the gall to piggyback on the magic of his lord’s dungeon to resurrect someone? Appalling! It was a disgrace that he had allowed it to happen. He was going to fix it. He would erase whoever was responsible.
Luckily, it did not take long to find the mage that insulted his lord. There was only one party of humans on the whole floor, and they were sleeping nearby. They were sleeping far too peacefully. Thistle knew the perfect punishment.
It took less than a minute for him to magically isolate their building from the rest of the dungeon, and only slightly over three to write out the magic that would be their end. When he was done, he could sense that one of the mages had woken up and noticed something was wrong, but it was too late for them to stop him. A stanza from his grimoire had the building folding in on itself in dimensions both physical and metaphysical. The walls twisted grotesquely, glowing in colors that could not be understood by the human brain. Thistle squinted his eyes against the light show. Contrary to his own expectations, the process was a silent one; the only sound to be heard was the screaming of the building’s occupants, and some useless frantic chanting. At least, that was the only sound until Thistle started laughing, and boy did he laugh.
Exacting revenge on those who dared to disrespect his lord was his favorite hobby, and wasn’t sending unfortunate souls to suffer in the unknown void between worlds where one could neither live nor die just fascinating on a theoretical level? Thistle always believed that the best revenge was both severe and theoretically fascinating. He continued his day with a smile on his lips, picturing the poor souls writhing for eternity in a space in which one could experience neither time nor space.
A shrinking, twisting mass could be observed where the building had been for some hours, but by the time the next party came through, there was nothing but an ominous magic circle surrounding a crater
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The space between worlds made Marcille’s brain feel like a small stone on a beach, washed to and fro. She had no control, and every moment scraped. Minutes stretched into years, or were they only seconds? She didn’t know. There was no way for her to know. Sometimes (or was it always? Was it never?) she remembered that she was casting a protective spell around herself and Falin. Marcille thought she was holding Falin protectively in her arms, but that was only if Falin existed, and if there was still such a thing as arms. A bubble of thought popped in her brain: was she losing her sanity, or had she already lost it decades ago? She pondered this for an eternity, or perhaps less than a second.
Without warning, Marcille was spit out into chaos.
The first thing that her scrambled brain registered was the fighting. The magic being thrown around was intense. There was some kind of giant monster? The second thing Marcille registered was the absolutely terrifying ghost. It was slowly eating the soul of a living man.
Marcille cast an explosion at the ghost. It was an instinctual reaction; the fact that explosions don’t touch ghosts an afterthought. When the first explosion didn’t work, she cast another explosion, and then another and another. She only stopped when she noticed Falin casting some kind of bright light that enveloped the spirit and the soul it was consuming. Watching Falin in awe, the spinning record of Marcille’s thoughts skipped, and she remembered that she was far better in battle against physical beings than against spirits.
She turned toward the rest of the fight around her. She cast an explosion at the giant monster destroying everything, because duh, but then she noticed the people writing magic on a baby. If the giant fox monster was trying to prevent a child sacrifice, she really ought to be fighting on its side instead.
She tried to walk toward the baby to figure out what was going on, only to realize that her feet weren’t on the ground. Marcille looked down: she still had feet. She looked at her hands: they were opaque. She didn’t feel like a ghost, and she could obviously still cast magic, but there was definitely something a smidge strange about the world around her. It felt more distant than usual, as if there was a film between her and all of everything. Marcille decided not to let that stop her, though, making haphazard swimming motions and very firmly willing herself toward the baby until she actually moved. As she got closer, she quickly realised that she could not read the script on the baby at all. It seemed vaguely Eastern to her, but it wasn’t quite. Eastern magic had never been her specialty, but she was pretty sure the spiral thing on the child was breaking a lot of their very rigid system’s rules.
“The fuck is this supposed to be,” she asked the blond man doing the writing, not even trying to sound polite, given the probability he was a child-sacrificing monster.
Was he sacrificing the child to stop the giant fox? Even the thought made Marcille’s skin crawl. Unwilling sacrifices were notoriously likely to fail due to the dying spirit resisting its fate, and that baby did not look willing in the slightest. Surely he'd be able to find someone willing to be sacrificed, given the dire situation?
The blond man did not answer, too focused on writing on the baby, or unable to hear her over the giant fox’s rampage and the child’s screams. Or perhaps he wasn’t able to hear her due to the distance between Marcille and the world. Either way, it didn’t matter. Marcille was increasingly sure she had to get the child out of there or something very bad would happen to it.
Quickly, so that no one could stop her, she took a spiritual “step” toward the baby, and attempted to lift it into her arms.
At that moment, many things happened at once. Marcille’s perception, however, was limited to surprise at her hand traveling straight through the baby instead of picking it up, and the sudden, strange sensation of being sucked through a straw. The very moment after her brain registered the feeling, the world around her abruptly cut off.