A magical dagger sprung to Sylph’s hand and she flicked it, sending the weapon tumbling end over end before it buried itself in Drew’s throat. He let out a gargle, pulling it free and staring at the dark blade with uncomprehending eyes.

Blood bubbled to his lips and poured down his chest from the hole in his throat. His mouth moved, trying to make words, but all that escaped was a gargle. Drew fell forward, hitting the ground with a muted thud.

Neither Damien nor Sylph said anything for nearly a minute. Damien’s thundering heart slowly returned to its normal speed and he wiped the sweat from his brow, glancing uneasily around the room.

He walked over to the broken staff and knelt beside it. The knotted wood rested partially within a fading pool of acid, undamaged by the green liquid. A strange sense of melancholy washed over him as he touched it.

“What just happened?” Damien asked, breaking the silence.

“I was hoping you could answer that,” Sylph replied. “It doesn’t seem like Second is dead, though. Moon seemed to know you. Who was he?”

“The person that taught me direct casting, the new spellcasting technique I mentioned to you before the tournament,” Damien said. Something tugged in his memory and he strained to figure out what was bothering him. “He’s like Second, I think. Outside of the Cycle.”

“Outside of the Cycle?” Sylph repeated, a frown crossing her face. “What does that mean? Isn’t everything in the Cycle?”

Damien’s shadow peeled away from him and rose, forming into Henry.

“Not exactly,” Henry said. “The Void is outside of it, and the Corruption rests within the Void. This Moon character is – or was – probably hiding somewhere within the Void as well. It’s an enormous place, so it’s not hard to escape detection.”

“So what does he want with us?” Sylph asked. “Is he working for the Void?”

“No,” Henry said. “He isn’t working for the Void or the Corruption, as far as I could tell. He’s got his own goals. I couldn’t get any sort of read on him while he was fighting Second. It was like he was just a blank space.”

“So we’ve got more questions and still not a single answer,” Sylph said with a weary sigh.

“No, we got at least one answer,” Damien said, glancing at Henry for confirmation. The eldritch creature nodded.

“We’ve come to the same conclusion,” Henry agreed. “The tendrils that Moon used to fight – those were the ones that modified your rune circle when you summoned me, weren’t they?”

“They were,” Damien confirmed. “Is it some sort of Dark or Space spell?”

“There are some that could emulate it, but that wasn’t one of them,” Henry replied. “It wasn’t a spell at all, actually. The tendrils were more like part of his body. They didn’t draw any Ether from the environment.”

“So he’s been manipulating things for a while,” Sylph said, rubbing her chin. “Working against both the Void and the Corruption. But what is he going to get from that?”

“He wanted to stop the Cycle,” Damien said. “But not by smashing all the planes together like the Corruption want to.”

“Then how?”

“Unfortunately, he didn’t tell me that much,” Damien said with a helpless shrug. “Henry, did you see what happened between Moon and Second before they disappeared?”

“Use your mental energy,” Henry said, gesturing out to the room. “If you can, that is.”

Damien blinked and cast out his net of mental energy. The room remained the same. No lines of Ether appeared in his vision. Sylph’s baffled expression showed that she’d had similar results.

“What happened?” Sylph asked, a note of fear creeping into her voice. “Did they somehow damage our connection to the Ether?”

“Nothing like that,” Henry said, holding up a hand to stop her. “Your magic is fine. Moon ripped all the Ether out of the room and detonated it. If he survived, he’s not going to be in good shape. Second blocked the attack with whatever that staff is. I’m pretty sure he escaped with minor injuries, but the lack of Ether in the room was doing more damage to him than anything else. He almost turned to stone before he managed to slip away.”

Sylph let out a relieved sigh.

“Then we’ve got at least a little time,” Damien said, stepping over Drew’s body and walking up to the black door. It was pockmarked from acid damage, but it still stood strong. The gem at its center twinkled invitingly. He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, forcing the worry to the back of his mind. “Let’s get the artifact that everyone seems so interested in and then get out of here before the Crypt realizes that the Great One isn’t here anymore.”

Sylph walked up beside him and pushed on the door. It didn’t budge. She pursed her lips and took a step back. “Do we try to brute force it open? Or can you or Henry somehow get to the other side and open it?”

“I need to see where I’m going to use Warp Step. What about you, Henry?” Damien asked.

“I should be able to slip past it,” Henry said. “I’d be willing to bet it’s trapped, though. It would be stupid to just have a powerful artifact protected only by a fancy door. Give me a few minutes and I’ll have it open or destroyed.”

He thinned, flattening back into a shadow and slipping through a miniscule gap at the bottom of the door. Damien turned away, pulling on his mental energy to look around again. A tiny strand of gold light appeared at the far corner of his vision, nestled in the room’s corner.

“Looks like the Ether is regenerating a little,” Damien said, squinting at it.

“That’s a relief. I don’t want to imagine what would happen Ether didn’t replenish after Second or Moon used it,” Sylph said. “It’s moving pretty damn slow though. It’ll probably take weeks before the room is back to its normal state.”

Damien started to nod, but he froze as stone clattered above them. Elania’s face appeared in the hole in the ceiling. She peered into the room, her eyes widening when she spotted Bartholomew and Drew’s bodies lying on the ground behind Damien and Sylph.

Before Damien could say anything, Elania gave him a small nod and rose, steeling her face.

“There’s nothing here,” Elania called. “Just some dead rats.”

“We’ll go through the other path then,” Viv’s voice called. Elania vanished, her footfalls fading away.

A click rang out and the black door ground open reluctantly, revealing a short hallway that led up to a cubical room with a statue of a priestess in the center. She was entirely stone aside from a golden rune covered necklace that hung around her neck.

Smoke curled up from Henry’s shoulders and he cocked his head. “What are you waiting for?”

“Nothing,” Damien replied, heading into the room. Henry slipped back into his shadow as he passed.

When he reached the foot of the statue, Damien stopped and examined it closely. He scanned the area to see if the Ether was connected to anything that might set off a trap, but it looked unprotected.

“All this trouble just for this?” Sylph asked. “It certainly doesn’t look very impressive. Do you know the runes?”

“Some of them,” Damien said, moving to try and get a look at the backside of the necklace without touching it. He still wasn’t convinced that there weren’t any traps on the statue. “I think it’s some sort of storage device. Can’t imagine what it’s storing, though.”

“Information,” Henry said within his mind. “I checked the runes already. There’s some sort of written information saved in that necklace, and it’ll be imprinted into the wearer’s mind. It wipes your memory of the information once you take it off, though. Interesting little piece of work.”

Damien relayed Henry’s words to Sylph.

“So is it safe to take it?” Sylph asked. “It would be pretty ironic if we got killed by a trap after surviving Second.”

“I’m going to try to break the statue,” Damien said. “If it’s runed, the runes will be damaged when the statue falls and any traps would be less likely to go off.”

“Wouldn’t whoever made the statue have put in some form of trigger if you use a spell on it?”

“Probably,” Damien admitted. “But I won’t be using any sort of spell that they’d have seen.”

He drew a steadying breath and sent a tendril of mental energy into the ring of runes floating in his mind. The runes hummed in response, establishing connection.

“Crush,” Damien said, focusing on the statue. Air warped around the statue as if it were obscured in a haze. A crack ran across the stone woman’s chest, starting from her shoulder and traveling down to a foot.

The statue withstood his power for a few more seconds before shattering to pieces and crumbling to the ground, sending a large cloud of dust into the air. Damien coughed, waving the stale air away from his nose and taking a step back. He tried to release his command, but the Ether didn’t stop. It continued flowing, crushing the statue to powder. A creak escaped the necklace.

Mercifully, the magic finally let up before it crushed the artifact into powder. Damien and Sylph scanned the room, but nothing happened.

“That was your new casting method, wasn’t it?” Sylph asked. “The one you were hiding during the tournament.”

“Yup,” Damien replied, kneeling beside the necklace. He chewed his lower lip and shuffled around in his pockets, pulling out a broken piece of chalk wrapped in a handkerchief. Tossing the chalk to the side, Damien picked the necklace up using the handkerchief and stuffed it into his coat pocket.

“How does it work? I thought I had a decent understanding of the Space magic you know, but I didn’t feel you using any Ether at all,” Sylph said with a frown.

“I’ll tell you if you tell me how your new anti-magic works,” Damien offered.

“Deal,” Sylph said. “I figured it out after thinking about how the Corruption works. They draw the Ether out of the natural world and use it to keep themselves alive, right?”

Damien nodded.

“So I thought I’d tweak that a bit. I’ve got a bunch of Corruption in me, so I realized I could do the same thing. It was a lot harder than I thought, and I can only do it on elements I can control.”

“I think I see where you’re going,” Damien said. “You’re drawing the Ether right out of the spells – or maybe me – while I cast them, aren’t you?”

“Exactly,” Sylph said.

“Hold on. You said you could only draw Ether from elements you know, which makes sense. I didn’t see you using any Space magic – did you learn it but just not use it?”

“No,” Sylph admitted. “My companion gave me Wind magic, as you’ve probably figured out. You’re actually an exception. I practiced with Delph and wasn’t able to stop any of his spells other than the Dark ones. I think Henry left enough of himself behind when he saved me that I indirectly became attuned to you. Your magic feels natural to me, even though I can’t actually see most of the Ether you work with.”

“You’ve literally got anti-me magic?” Damien asked, aghast.

Sylph smirked and flicked him on the forehead. “Too late to regret having Henry save me now. Your turn to fess up – what’s your new magic do?”

“It lets me directly command the Ether without actually drawing it into myself,” Damien replied, shaking his head. “I can barely control it, but it’s really strong when it works.”

Sylph stared at him. “You just… command the Ether? What?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Doesn’t that mean your Magical Energy doesn’t even matter? You can cast indefinitely.”

“Until I accidentally crush myself,” Damien said. “And the Ether doesn’t respond to long commands. If I’m not careful, it’ll end up doing something I don’t want.”

Sylph shook her head in disbelief. “That is so unfair. What’s the range on it?”

“I’ve kept things close to me for the time being,” Damien admitted. “I wasn’t sure what would happen if I lost control of a long range spell.”

“And you don’t know the maximum amount of damage it can do either, can you?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“You’re a monster,” Sylph said, rubbing her forehead. “I was hoping I’d finally get ahead of you for once.”

“Hey, you won the tournament,” Damien pointed out.

“If you’d used that, you’d have broken every bone in my body. I wouldn’t have known what was coming until it was too late since you don’t draw on the Ether to do it,” Sylph replied. “I had to use just about everything I had to win, but you kept your strongest spell back.”

“That doesn’t make me feel that much better about getting the snot beat out of me.”

Sylph laughed. “Keep whining and I’ll add an extra hour to our training sessions. You shouldn’t be getting your ass handed to you by a girl half your weight.”

“You’re hardly half–” Damien paused, cutting his sentence off midway before narrowing his eyes. “You know what, we should probably get out of here. Who knows how long Second will be licking his wounds, and I don’t think I’m up to spelunking around the Crypt and waiting for that thing in the hole to get testy.”

“After you,” Sylph said, gesturing toward the hall with a smirk.