One of the most effective strategies in the great game of intrigue is to prevent the other players from knowing the rules (or, if possible, that they are playing the game at all). Nyoque, a creature to whom such actions were as natural as breathing, greeted the news of its minions' failure to capture Linduin with more excitement than trepidation. It contemplated many plans, but eventually settled for putting three of them into action, and dispatched its thralls telepathically to lay the groundwork.

Among its many other advantages, the rakshasi did not require sleep, could direct its minions invisibly and from large distances, and was capable of shifting into the form of anyone it had consumed; its only real disadvantages were its inability to wield magic, vulnerability to holy energies (not particularly common in Ciel-Upon-The-Sea, which primarily worshipped products and services) and its need to feed rather often. However, Nyoque had discovered the trick of partial feedings very early on; it could sup lightly on a victim's soul to implant unconscious suggestions, feast more heavily to devour their wills and turn them into thralls, or consume them entirely to ingest their knowledge and form. Thus far, it had consumed only a handful of carefully-chosen humans, focusing most of its efforts on building a suitably diverse herd of partially-unsouled servants at its mental command. Its flock, as it termed it, now numbered nearly fifty, and it had sown compulsions and insidious whispers to nearly three times that number; in another few months, it hoped to rule the entire city, and from there extend its reach along the smoothly-oiled channels of the Celi'sa Shipping Company's grasp towards the rest of the human world. Most of the time, its biggest challenge was suppressing laughter at how much fun it was having.

Linduin, for his part, did nothing else effective that evening; he returned in haste to the hotel, cleaned up Cheis, discovered with consternation that his notes had been lost, and spent the remainder of the evening torn between terror of the consequences of what had transpired and a sort of existential dread about what he had done to his own brain. At seven years old, Cheis had had no concept of continuity of consciousness nor any concerns about the uniqueness of identity (although she had them quite thoroughly now, which was one of the reasons she was occasionally somber and/or twitchy), but Linduin was not so lucky. The memory of how he had, essentially, ceded control of his mind to an alien intelligence (his own, but still) gave him palpitations and made him feel itchy and hot with unease, and he tossed and turned for hours before finally taking a hot bath and falling asleep.

His slumber was fitful and harrowed, and he awoke the next morning red-eyed and irritable; Cheis, conversely, awoke with a titanic hangover, did a few desperate hacks on her own blood chemistry, and managed to get herself running at sufficient capacity to make further improvements. Within a half-hour, she was her usual self; while she did notice Linduin's distress, she put it down to him perhaps sampling some of the leftover wine after she'd passed out. If she'd been more concerned about his well-being, or if Linduin had trusted her more, certain later events might have transpired rather differently; but Cheis of Veraleigh was who she was, and Linduin Kayle had likewise been shaped ungently by the circumstances of his upbringing. They mostly brooded together in silence (except for a short trip for ice cream, which they both desperately needed) until the appointed hour of the meeting. When Pellamin arrived to collect them, he found himself similarly reserved, which made the silent trip to the executor's office both more and less awkward than it might otherwise have been.

The meeting itself was perfunctory almost to the point of comedy; the executor, a lawyer named Eldigan Whigst, was almost as unimpressed by Cheis's credentials as she was by his own and was self-important to an almost painful degree about his delegated authority. Cheis, who cared not at all about either him or the powerful traders he represented, limited herself to cutting remarks and logistical questions about areas which had been reporting mysterious disturbances and disappearances and which particular sorts of horrific phenomena they had observed. The entire thing was over in twelve minutes, and Cheis left the meeting with an annotated map while Whigst left it with an apparently mortally punctured ego. Linduin, who would normally have enjoyed the spectacle, was too wrapped up in dread to really notice; and Pellamin was mostly daydreaming about post-Urthodic rune poetry, a garlic-butter cheesesteak, and Umbria, in that order. They might have parted as wordlessly as they had gathered, but at the last moment a memory popped into Pellamin's mind.

"Ah, yes, that's right," he commented, startling everyone else as he shattered the silence. "Umbria wanted to invite the two of you over for dinner tonight."

"That would be wonderful," said Linduin at the exact same time as Cheis said "No, thank you". The two of them glared at each other for a long moment before Cheis rolled her eyes and sighed. "Okay, sure, why not, let's have an uncomfortable dinner. What could possibly go wrong?"

Pellamin bristled a bit, but managed to retain control of his faculties better than most might have. "Cheis, I realize this is... difficult for all of us. But things will go more smoothly if we can get along. If not for me, then for Umbria. It would go a long way towards reassuring her that you're not going to show up in the middle of the night unexpectedly and turn her into a newt." He licked his lips self-consciously, then added, "Please."

Cheis, who had been thoroughly wound up to deliver a verbose account of what she would like to do to Umbria, was in fact quite helpless in the face of Pellamin's plea. She bit her lip, swallowed, and lowered her eyes. "Okay. A short dinner." Linduin, who had been expecting screaming and/or violence, gaped at her in shock.

Pellamin ran a hand over his face, relieved. "Thank you. I'll pick you up at six." He dropped them off at their hotel, waved somewhat gamely, and departed.

Linduin, who had done his absolute best to be silent during the carriage ride, could no longer contain himself. "What was that all about? I thought you were going to zap him!"

Cheis scowled, then shifted into a smirk. "I decided at the last minute that I'd rather watch you drool over Umbria some more. Perhaps you can get close enough to sniff her hair this time."

The two of them argued their way back inside; Nyoque's thrall, posted by the doorway, heard and reported every word.

***

Velinaer hopped down from Meloria's back, landed unsteadily, and managed not to fall over with a herculean effort. As effective as it had been, something within him absolutely rebelled at the thought of riding into battle piggy-back on a zombie; it was, simply speaking, undignified. He picked his way carefully among the detritus and remains of the battlefield until he found a suitably-intact horse; reaching out with his will, he animated it, sloughed off the remaining fleshy bits, and raised it into a satisfactory skeletal steed. It took several tries to mount it, his locomotive predispositions being more targeted towards things such as sitting on thrones and cackling at foolish adventurers, but eventually he resigned himself to the inevitable and had Meloria boost him up, where he managed to get into a sitting position atop its spine with only minimal pathetic wiggling. Meloria, conversely, vaulted up smoothly and gracefully behind him; the combined energies of the jujora made her positively adroit in addition to giving her the strength of ten men and the speed of a striking cobra. Velinaer was a little jealous, but only a little.

Okay. Now he had a cool mount that could cover ground quickly, a minimally ominous outfit, and a powerful minion; he could, he felt, be seen by others without fatal levels of embarrassment. Spurring the skeletal horse (entirely cosmetic, since it was controlled by his will), he rode forward in the direction of the battle.

On the other side, Galar's wedge had been met by increasingly powerful resistance the nearer they had come to the Black Oak; the igg had seen the power of the White Gift and wanted it kept as far away as possible. It employed its minions deftly, engineering waves of living bodies that disrupted its foes' momentum and blunted their advantages in creative ways; it sent a swarm to delay the drill corps, followed up with a squadron of burrowers which created a brief obstacle, and then executed a pincer movement of its heavier troops from all sides. Galar's holy blasts, while devastating to the oakspawn, sapped his strength and could only be applied in one direction at a time. Already they were moving at less than half the speed they'd had at the outset; if things had continued, they might have been beaten back entirely. But when Velinaer finally reached the rear of the igg's forces, the tactical situation took a surprising turn.

Velinaer Dax'taxu was not a soldier, nor was he a heroic archmage. At heart, he was a bit of a man-child, who mostly wanted to play with his toys and be left alone. He was often neither compassionate nor kind; when he remembered other people existed at all, he mostly loathed them for their stupidity, and fell short of being a misanthrope by only the slimmest of margins. Socially, he was primarily motivated by pride and a dim sort of consideration for propriety; and though he rarely wished harm upon others, he was generally more prone to embarrassment than remorse when it occurred. He was a diffident spellcaster, a poor student, and was mostly ignorant of the larger scope in which he acted; he was awkward, uncoordinated, and would have been sexually frustrated if he'd still possessed an endocrine system. But for all his faults, he was a dedicated and talented teledemonics engineer; and teledemonics engineers are very good at building networks, keeping them secure, and cleaning up messes quickly. Velinear booted up his console, ran two diagnostics, and executed his first al-naflgath removal command with a (he thought) safely unambitious coefficient of 15.

The blast of null-phasic power which erupted from the rear of the igg's army took everyone by surprise; the entire back quarter of its forces deanimated instantaneously and collapsed into ash, which was a fairly momentous event considering that its forces still numbered in the thousands and spanned more than a square mile of battlefield. The igg, which had had absolutely no warning or anticipation of any of this, physically stopped moving and turned all of its sensory apparatuses behind it to try to figure out what could have possibly occurred. Galar, seizing his chance, blasted a path directly to the igg itself. The final battle had begun.