Dean looked away from the veiled body, his x-ray scanner having already completed its purpose. He held his wrist out in front, projecting a 3D recreation of...Dean swallowed.

How? he thought to himself, face expressionless, hands clammy. He instinctively looked behind, his eyes searching for Eyrin. He isn't here, Dean chided internally, shaking his head.

To say that verdora and humans looked different was an understatement. While apparently that made verdora almost anomalies compared to most sapient species, Dean found their inhuman appearance almost...reassuring. He found the verdora naturally less unsettling than Lepochim.

Maybe that's just because Lepochim's, well...Lepochim, Dean thought. Maybe meeting any other human-like sapient would feel like meeting a normal human on Earth. Maybe. He couldn't explain why, but he doubted that this would be the case.

He continued to stare at the x-ray projection. What's the difference between this entity....and any of us? He looked back again, this time to take in the tens of humans inspecting the cavernous tomb. As he swiveled his head, he took in the number of deceased. At least a hundred, he thought.

Dean sighed, his breath coming out unevenly. He reached forward, his fingers caressing the sheer piece of fabric separating the body in front of him from the open air. As his lips creased into a line, he plucked the sheet off. I can't believe it didn't turn to dust, he thought, surprised by the resilience of the paper-thin fabric.

The skeletal figure in front of him was young. At least as far as Dean could tell. The x-ray projection had only given him the sense that the body was, at least skeletally, indistinguishable from a human. Flipping off the sheet, however, made a few differences clear.

The figure was wrapped in a colorful robe, reminding Dean of a tie-dyed summer dress. It had long hair that was tied into an elaborate, Celtic-style knot around its neck, a few strands continuing down and resting over its chest. The figure wore tiny little shoes, each barely half a foot in length.

Dean closed his eyes, letting the sheet fall haphazardly over the body.

---

"Show me the person responsible." He remembered saying the words, remembered that they felt hollow. He remembered that he didn't want to see the person responsible. He didn't know what he would do if he was left alone in a room with the kind of monster that could...

Dean saw the vivid color of the corpses, their headscarves seared into his memory. They were all beautiful, clearly added posthumously. They all lacked the brown stain of blood.

The scarves also partially hid their mottled, tortured faces. The scarf of the lipless girl lay around the girl's neck where Grey had pushed it down.

"Come with me," Grey said.

Barkhad hesitated. "How do you know where this person is?"

Grey smiled. "It's not that hard. She's rotten to the core, her mind a disturbed reflection of her techniques."

Dean suppressed an involuntary shiver. "Let's just make this quick," he said, his voice low. "I-uh, I um...I think we should get, um, moving. We're not helping much staying, um, here." I still can't get the right words out, he thought, berating himself. Even with director boons helping improve my speech...

As Grey walked past him, the kursi put his hand on Dean's shoulder. He didn't say anything for a solid five seconds. Then, he removed his hand and walked on toward the hole leading to the surface.

Dean didn't pay much attention to what happened after that. He remembered mechanically following Grey through the city. And then he remembered being there, in a relatively opulent dwelling.

"She's in the room straight ahead," Grey said. Straight ahead meant no more than ten feet forward. Dean felt his stomach lurch. The person who tortured all those women...is just beyond the door? He found the prospect distracting, so much so that even with his memory enhanced by boons, he couldn't later recall anything about the house. He only remembered the woman and her room.

As they walked through the door, Dean barely noticed that Grey had effortlessly broken through its lock. The woman was sitting on her bed, gazing into a mirror as she fixed her makeup. She jumped as they entered the threshold, dropping the mirror onto the floor. She said something quickly in a language similar-sounding, but different, from Arabic. Not that it would matter, Dean thought. Even if she were speaking Arabic, I'd be lucky to understand a quarter of her words.

Barkhad gave Dean a knowing look, shaking his head slightly and shrugging. Grey, however, gazed intently at the woman, a shark's grin on his face. His smile revealed the whites of his teeth, stark against the weathered tan of his skin. Grey's lips covered the tips of his teeth; based on the man's expression alone, Dean wouldn't be surprised to find that they were filed to points.

He replied to the woman, speaking slowly, his smile widening, the expression even reaching his eyes.

She began to shake. Then, she stood, flicking a curved knife from the sleeve of her gown. Grey didn't even try to dodge as the knife struck a glancing blow across his chest, cutting through his tabard but not piercing his skin. The woman bared her teeth, her eyes manic.

"She said that they deserved it," Grey said calmly, "for taking power from the devil."

Dean felt himself at a loss. On one hand, I see where she's coming from, he thought. Bath...he even appears as a dragon, a leviathan. While Dean wasn't an expert on the Quran, he knew that Bath did closely parallel biblical descriptions of the devil. Even so...

"Is that all she had to say?" Barkhad asked, his arms crossed over his chest. Kisserin hissed, as though to give his words emphasis.

"No. She said that we'll never be able to usurp God's work."

Dean blinked. God's work?

Seeing his confusion, Grey clarified. "We'll never destroy humanity."

Dean recognized where the woman was coming from. None of us are truly human anymore, he sighed internally. He'd wrestled with the question of humanity a great deal, especially at the outset of COTD. Now? It's all moot point: almost the entire global population has received a boon of some kind. If humanity were limited only to unchanged people like this woman, humanity was on its deathbed. There was nothing anyone could do about.

The woman remained in the room, huffing like a feral animal, her eyes narrowed. Grey reached for the knife on the ground. As he did so, the woman moved, darting toward the exit of the bedroom.

I can't let her go, Dean thought. As the woman passed him by, he stopped her with his arm, grabbing her dress. She shrieked, the sound reminiscent of a devilbat's scream. He reacted to the woman's outburst by whipping her into the floor. The wind exploded out of her lungs and the shriek morphed into a dry croak.

As she looked at him, he felt the full extent of her hatred. It genuinely shocked him how much rancor the woman could fit in her thin, brown eyes. Dean recalled the kind of casual hate he'd felt in the past. Sometimes it was because of his race. He recalled the fight at Alens: Back then, he'd retaliated by almost killing one of the assailants and smashing a wall to smithereens.

It all felt so long ago. Moreover, it the scorn he had reacted to back then felt trivial juxtaposed with the seething, inhuman hatred in her eyes.

How could someone...hate me so much? He glanced at Grey. He's like Lisa...he can sense emotions. What does he sense from her? Is she like this all the time? Is that how he found her?

The woman on the floor didn't give him time to think. Instead, she barreled forward, snapping at him with her teeth and nails. Dean's constitution was such that he didn't need to fear her attacks--they wouldn't be able to hurt him. Even so, he stepped back under the force of her assault, perplexed by her single-minded ferocity.

"She's rabid," Barkhad said.

"Put her down," Kisserin continued. Dean noted the disgust in their eyes.

Virigard, poking out of his sweatshirt pocket, had a determined expression. That was all that Dean needed to see.

As the woman struggled out of her robe, tearing at his hand, Dean reacted by backhanding her against her right cheek. The blow sent her into the wall several feet away, her form streaking past Barkhad and Kisserin. Based on the force Dean had put behind the strike, and the crack that he'd heard, he knew that he'd broken her neck.

She didn't get up.

"That was quick," Grey remarked. "A cleaner death than she deserved."

Dean felt almost disembodied as he stood. He'd just killed this woman. She was defenseless, unarmed (she'd lost her dagger, after all), without boons. Dean figured that she had to be mentally ill...nobody could feel that much hatred and be sane, he was certain.

Virigard jumped out of the pouch, scaling his tabard and perching on his left shoulder. She was slightly too big to perch comfortably, her claws digging into his shoulder as she worked to keep her balance.

She nuzzled her face against his cheek, thumping her tail against his right shoulder as a counterbalance. "At least there's no blood," Virigard remarked. "If I'd have killed her, there'd have been a slash of blood through her neck. Then I'd have her blood on me." Virigard shuddered in disgust. "Did you see how much she hated us?" she murmured.

Dean absentmindedly stroked her head.

Kisserin directed her eyes toward Grey. "What was wrong with her?"

Grey's expression was uncharacteristically serious. Dean thought he detected a hint of sadness in his eyes, but he could've been mistaken.

"She was a person," Grey said simply. "Let's go."

And so they went.

---

Eyrin and Clarissa dove into the water, the rough waves seemingly unaffected by their entrance. Eyrin opened his eyes, finding himself nearly blind in the surrounding murk. The surface danced above him, casting light and shadow over his form. He swam over to Clarissa, forming a dragonleaf tether between them.

Clarissa, he transmitted.

Eyrin, she replied. This is new.

He nodded. I've only used it on nonverbal quasi-sapients, he noted. It's part of the training for the land-shaper boon.

Clarissa transmitted a feeling of understanding. Then, she began to use her echolocation.

I thought it didn't work on water?

It works now that I'm underwater, she explained. The water-surface interface messed up my echolocation before.

The two were silent for a minute. Eyrin held onto Clarissa's hind leg as she swam forward, her leathery wings serving as fins.

Can you try to show me what you're picking up with echolocation?

Clarissa didn't reply. However, soon, Eyrin saw a noisy image in his mind. Over the next few seconds, the image cleared up. Even in the dark of the water, he could see that the images in his mind overlaid with a castle-like form in the distance.

They reached said form in the next thirty seconds. Eyrin used his chip reader to project light, illuminating the space immediately ahead. He and Clarissa began to explore the ruin.

It's been horrendously corroded, Eyrin transmitted. Close up, this looks like a sheer underwater cliff. It clearly wasn't, given that it stuck up hundreds of rods out of the surrounding area. It was the only landmark for hundreds of broads.

They followed part of the structure downward. Even though the chip reader could only illuminate a few rods ahead, Clarissa's echolocation painted a clearer picture of the structure as they continued down. The two noted how the structure Eyrin had originally picked out from Clarissa's back was only one spire jutting out from a much larger base. Smaller spires, each stretching for around fifteen rods, studded a ten-rod high perimeter that formed a square. Following the tall spire downward eventually placed them at the center of this square.

There's no way this is natural, Clarissa observed. What do you think happened here?

Eyrin shook his head, his eye ridges raising. I'm unsure, he admitted. This...castle...it's submerged at least one broad under water.

Clarissa transmitted annoyance. Broad?

Eyrin gave Clarissa a sense of the distance, showing a broad-length race track.

Oh, she replied. Around half a mile.

But as for how long it's been here...I lack the knowledge necessary to make a guess.

Same, Clarissa sighed. Well, we do have the vanguard humans with us. I'm sure at least a few of them will have some idea.

Eyrin blinked. Then until we rendez-vous with the Knight, we should see if we can find any relics left behind by whatever erected this building.

Clarissa signaled her agreement by cutting forward through the water, towing Eyrin toward the central spire's base.