A rain began to fall, light and pattering, striking the rooftops and the surface of the lake. The clouds above were gathering, turning dark…

---

Monsters poured from the woods, leaping over the rooftops, sliding through the alleyways. They were the children of a hundred worlds; they had wicked shapes meant for killing.

They howled and they roared with bloodlust.

But when they arrived at the center of Winterhome, they found they could not advance.

A killing field of a hundred feet surrounded the Totem; that was where the dhampir had drawn their line. Every brave soul who had tried to cross that ground had perished. The human forces were held back at the edge of the invisible line, huddled together, seething…

But after the first few deaths- deaths that had been made gruesome, so they could serve as examples- they didn’t dare advance.

Once you passed that line you stepped beneath the shadow of a great oak that grew around the Totem, curling it’s roots around the town’s heart. The tree itself was only an illusion, see-through like smoke, but the leaves that shed from its branches were as real and as sharp as cold steel; they swirled through the air like a thousand razor-blades.

Make it past that first barrier, and you’d be pitted against the two guards that stood side-by-side. One brutish, with a metal-clad face and hulking arms. The other lithe and mean with a strange elegance to her movements.

And finally…

Crossing every hurdle, you’d be stopped by a simple wall of energy, covering the Totem in a dome of red in which dark runes flowed and pulsed like squirming clots of blood.

The humans had pushed against these barriers, and paid the price. Bodies lay under the dancing leaves, cut and flayed so neatly that their skin unfolded like flowers of gore. The one who’d made it through alive had been crushed underfoot by the brute.

Not a single scratch had been laid against that final barrier.

Now a massive bear with plates of red bronze growing from its belly and forearms shouldered through the crowd of humans. It roared, spittle flying from its black muzzle.

The beasts roared with it.

With lumbering, slow steps, it plunged into the storm of bladed leaves. One danced light across its shoulder, barely seeming to brush the flesh, and left behind a hair-thin laceration that reached to the bone. The bear grunted, taking another step-

Leaves brushed its face and cleaved away its eye, tore at its legs, its hide, everything not protected by its armor.

And still it advanced, lunging through in a final push that left the air full of red ribbons of blood; it came crashing down towards the brute, dropping to all fours as one massive paw struck him against his crossed arms and sent him skidding back.

The dhampir woman was on him in that same moment, cutting low, cleaving away the inside muscle of the beast’s wounded leg.

The bear was doomed- the dhampir brute retorted with a brutal haymaker, knocking teeth loose from its jaw. Before it could muster the breath to respond, those huge, spine-covered arms were looped around its throat, and the brute twisted, rolling it over onto its back.

The woman darted across its belly, cutting it down until organs slithered free.

But it was too late.

The floodgates had opened. Monsters poured in through the shadow the bear had cut between the leaves.

A wolf leaped for the woman’s leg, trying to tear her to the ground. She responded with an electric-quick turn, her crescent staff sweeping a blade across the ground to behead the mutt- and an arrow blossomed from her chest.

A human archer’s shot had crossed through the gap.

An instant later a massive falcon with plumes of living water smashed down through the leaf-wall, its wings exploding to gore on either side of it as its talons plunged into her eyes. She was dragged down; more beasts pushed through the closing breach and fell upon her, devouring her whole.

The brute made a split second decision. A massive panther was slashing at him, trying to hook its claws into his flesh and gain control of his ponderous weight, to pull him down like his sister-in-arms. A serpent had spat a needle of poison crystal into his flesh.

Soon he too would be overwhelmed.

With a desperate battle cry, he refused that fate. His body swole up to twice its size, bones creaking, back bent to avoid the top of the leaf-wall where it curved overhead into a dome. With huge, sweeping blows he smashed the jaguar to gory paste, he reached out and seized the snake to twists its coiling body between massive fingers until it all broke apart; with each motion the tops of his arms would brush the dancing leaves, raining down blood.

He was dying. Something black was spreading beneath his skin, rotting it to a pulp. Huge liquid droplets of decaying flesh peeled from his bones.

But before the warrior died, he pressed back the tide of beasts. Every brave soul that had ventured through the flurry of leaves met its death by his hands.

Those outside the barriers could only watch as he sank to one knee, his face dripping and peeling away until only a petrified skeleton remained, giant in size and warped in every feature. It stood beneath the dancing leaves and the shadow of the oak, gazing out at Winterhome.

---

Melville felt a tightness in his chest that threatened to make him faint. A dim fuzz seethed at the edge of his vision as he breathed slowly in and out, in and out…

He wasn’t made for this.

He was exactly the kind of quiet, unassuming, small person who deserved to be named after the author Melville; his favorite story by his namesake wasn’t even Moby Dick.

It was Bartleby.

He crouched in an alleyway, electric threads hopping between his fingertips as he tried to think, but his head was all wrong. Each thought seemed to stretch into infinity, taking eternities to crawl through his panicked brain.

“Hiding from the fight, eh?” A voice intruded. It was vaguely familiar…

Melville’s bleary, tired eyes looked up to see Bernel and Raughlins standing over him, perched against the wall at the opposite side of the alley. Bernel was picking his teeth.

“I’m not.” He whispered.

“Can’t blame ya.”

“I’m not.” He insisted. “I just, I need to think…” He clutched his fingers over his sweating face.

“Think ‘bout what, then?” Bernel leaned down, staring at him curiously.

“I need to get the city higher. Sofia could do it, but-”

“But she’s dead, my friend.” Raughlins finally spoke up, drawling out each word.

“She’s not dead. And anyway. Winterhome… he could control the city by touching the totem. But to get to the totem, we’ve got to get through…”

All of that. All the killing, all the violence.

“Nah.”

Melville peered at them from through his fingers. “Nah?”

“Nah,” Bernel said, echoing his friend. “See, the totem goes down underwater. Underneath all that business, see?”

They looked between each other.

Raughlins asked, “How important is getting us higher?”

Melville could just barely croak out a laugh. “The most important.”

They exchanged another looked, and shrugged.

“Then we’ll do it.”

---

Nic had reached the boundary of something hidden beneath the bloodline sea.

Beneath him was a darkness he refused to approach, a space that, from the primordial guts of his being, he knew would swallow him up if he dared enter. A boundary beyond which nothing returned. It was a dark and infinite plane that stretched out in all directions, an abyssal chasm lurking beneath the sea.

And the water seethed all around him…

Trying to pull him down…

Somewhere far, far below that wall of silent midnight, there was an alien will, an unseen goliath staring out at him with hungry eyes.

Nic fought. He pushed upwards, struggling with all the will and determination of his angry little spark of a soul. It was hard. His limbs felt like they were locked by iron weights, and here in the bloodline sea, where the rules of flesh were revoked, he couldn’t use his cultivation to strengthen himself.

He could feel a burn in his chest, all the sparks of different paths fighting one another, slowly fusing under the mark of the Aleph.

He drew on that strength to push himself upwards, to remember which way was up.

It was nothing like his first visit to the sea; his excitement and exhilaration and the brutal struggle to capture his first spark had been child’s play compared to this. His body felt like it was tearing apart, too drunk on power to retain its own shape.

But if he gave in…

If he let the transformation begin now…

He would be pulled under.

So there was no choice, really. Even once his soul-form ached and felt like it would shatter. Even once his will had been exhausted, Nic kept struggling upwards…

A tiny speck of soul fighting to rise from under endless water.

Moment dragged into moment. Time seemed to stand still. With his cultivation he wove a cage around the conflicting sparks, holding them down; it bought him the time to climb above the sheer wall of darkness and into the lighter, less turbulent waters above.

The spheres of light that illuminated the paths of evolution were dimming, fading into the waters.

His time here was at an end.

Reluctantly, Nic turned and looked down. He almost expected to see that he’d made no progress, that the dark abyss was as close as ever, waiting for him to fall…

There was nothing. It was gone.

With a mumbled prayer, Nic undid the cage of cultivation holding back the transforming spark he’d captured. It wasn’t at all like his first journey here…

Fighting to absorb a single fragment of the sea’s power.

Now, he had all the power he could ask for, and more; the question was what that power would do with him.