There were eleven of them. Twelve, counting Lisa. “Surprise!” she greeted them after two months with a strained smile. “I brought company.”

Garen thrust his arms out and let out a hearty cheer as he hugged the nearest stranger. They crowded the living room, kitchen, and hallway. Fourteen people in total.

Allison quietly panicked on the sidelines.

The first of them was a woman who looked like Lisa if she were thirty years older. It may have been the same body template, Allison thought. “Minn!” Garen called her. Lisa’s mom. She had long brown hair, a scar that stretched up her throat to her cheek, and her thin summer sweater made it obvious she was not wearing a bra.

She smelled earthy and though her expression wasn’t as dead as Lisa’s could sometimes be, she looked drowsy.

A man and a woman hovered behind her, eager to get their hugs in. They were two of three with dark skin and curly red hair, and the man had tied his hair up into a messy bun. He was one of the few among them who wore fashionable clothes. “Aber!?” Garen sounded surprised.

Four more had red hair. One of them was a woman with brown skin, and her hair color looked dyed. Cherry red. The other three were pale, short, and beefy. They looked like a couple with a son in his twenties—the youngest among them in appearance.

Seven gingers. Allison wondered if it was supposed to reflect the color of their scales, but it was only a little over half of them …

Three more had varying tones of brown skin. The oddest among them had hung herself over the small kitchen table, arms and legs dangling off either side. She was a pale stick of a woman with straight black hair that pooled on the kitchen floor.

Tiny monkeys dropped out from the sleeves of her dress to search the cupboards for food to bring to her.

The doors were already open. They weren’t the only ones searching. One of the men snacked on celery while he examined a mustard glass. He elbowed a monkey aside when it tried to climb his shoulder.

The young ginger sniffed the air, signed something at Lisa, and sprinted past Allison to vault out the open window into the courtyard.

She shot to attention. “What? What did he—”

Lisa gave an exasperated groan in passing, “He smelled the wine. Wiggle! Stop showing off. It’s so unfair that you can do that!” Her voice faded as she stepped outside. “Do you know how long I had to practice jumping!?”

They acted strangely but, by their appearance alone, they could have blended in with any crowd. Shapeshifter procedures, then. Bulletins were a bust.

“Your food is bad,” the celery man complained.

“Oh, are you hungry?”

“Starving,” the willowy woman growled with a draconic echo to her voice. It trembled in Allison’s chest.

Garen gestured at his head. “Duh. Of course, you are! We can make something to eat—”

Minn laughed. “You do not have enough food in this house to feed us. Although, I smell cured meat nearby …”

“That’s mine!” Lisa called from outside the window. “Smoker’s empty now, you can use it, but you have to ask before you take any of my jerky!”

“Remind me, do the markets stay open this late in Hadica?” Aber asked.

It was a late summer afternoon when Lisa had returned home. The sun had just begun to set. The bottom half of the courtyard was covered in shadows. The city noise and sounds of the chirping insects filled the air, alongside the banging and clinking of dragons and monkeys in their kitchen.

Allison was sweating. She’d already been sweating from the humidity, but now her clothes clung to her skin. Had it gotten warmer? Was that just her imagination? She supposed any eleven bodies would produce a lot of heat …

Then Garen grinned. “Iunno. We can eat out tonight! My trea—”

She nearly had a heart attack. “NO!”

Ten sets of eyes turned to her. The willowy woman lifted her head to stare at her through a veil of black hair. They flickered from her to Garen and back again. The more expressive among the group grinned, and Lisa’s mother took a step toward her.

“You must be Allison Reed. Lisa has told us so much about you.”

“We’re so rude,” Aber joined in. “We haven’t even introduced ourselves yet. Believe me, it is only because we were excited to see Garen again. We were also dying to meet you.”

She was fifty-four years old. Why did she feel at the same time like a teenager meeting her boyfriend’s parents and like prey who had wandered unto a pack of wolves?

They stood over the storm, then. Great white waves spiraled around the Tower. Pockets of lightning flashed up, and a low rumble drowned out the howls of distant sirens.

Hadica flooded on the other side of that storm.

The city was used to floods. The largest river of their nation flowed through it. And Allison had no doubt that people would level from the experience. [Helpers] and [Firefighters]. It might even be beneficial to the city in the long term …

… but the property damage. Water damage was difficult to fix, even for them. Not everyone would be able to afford the repairs. No doubt, people would be hurt. And what if someone died?

“The storm was coming one way or another,” Lisa’s mother patiently explained to her. “We simply made it a bit louder to offer ourselves a … smokescreen.”

“And in the process, made it more difficult for our spells and Skills to control it.”

“They will learn from the experience,” Aber said. “Your [Weather Mages] in Lighthouse are experts in the field. As are most weather mages in the north who deal with the magical storms that blow in from the coast … east and south.”

Allison chewed on her lip for a moment before she said, “Fair.”

She’d donned her stony exterior halfway through that first night of arrivals and chaos. Outwardly, she sounded curt but on the inside, she had spat the word out.

Who cared about the storms they sent up north?

“Maybe it’ll help bridge the cities,” Garen mused. “Mages heading to Lighthouse to learn from the best after a night like this.”

“You’re all overreacting,” an artificial voice interrupted them. It came from one of the older gingers, a short pale man who was built like a barrel. Faer. He was one of the myconids whom Allison had mistaken for a dragon at first.

“This is but a trickle,” he spoke using a spell to produce sound. His younger counterpart, Wiggle—or Viglif?—briefly glared at him. “Compared to what we are about to do.”

They stood in the sky next to a wall of gray seven hundred meters wide. It punched through the clouds and stretched so far into the upper atmosphere that it began to blur and fade. But that was nothing new.

One of the dragons levitated Garen. Allison had anchored herself to a small hummingbird she had conjured with a summoning crystal.

She hadn’t enjoyed much of this view these last few years. It evoked far more feeling in her than it had in decades, but not excitement or wonder.

Regret.

She missed Marionette. You would approve of this plan. The thought brought her some small comfort. Though not necessarily of my current company.

The eleven dragons and myconids had conjured a layered sphere of nondetection and illusion spells around themselves, a hundred meters in radius. It intersected the Tower and they spread out within it.

“Can we start?” the cherry-haired woman asked, Niva.

She was somewhat more animated than the others, mostly because of the resting smile on her face. She tended to cycle between the same expressions to the point where Allison’s [Predictive Imaging] rarely got any of them wrong.

The same couldn’t be said for her actions—like buying chickens on a whim and growing a chicken coop out of a tree on their lawn.

She held a flicker of a flame in her hand that looked more liquid than gas and looked to Beren, who looked to Minn, who looked to Garen, who looked to Allison.

She swallowed past a lump in her throat and nodded.

She resolved to make a few hefty donations first thing in the morning to soothe her bleeding conscience. And not just because of the flood.

Allison wasn’t religious, but she found herself offering a brief harvest prayer, a relic from the church services of her childhood. It was one of the only prayers she remembered.

Mara, forgive me for the reaping of your Gardens which I am about to abet.

Niva held her hand out and conjured a stereotypical wooden wizard staff. It snapped out like a spring-loaded cane. She attached the flame to its tip and twirled it with a grin. “How did Lisa put it?

Ancient blood and blackened end

grant me aim; hunt and rend

Kobold Flameseekers!”

The staff came to a halt. She blew over it like a jester. Three canons of flame shot out and hit the Tower with all the force of a volcanic eruption.

Allison clenched a fist and drowned a whimper before it could escape her throat.

The other dragons got to work. Two handled the impact site, concentrating the flames for maximum effect and bleeding them away in streams. Faer was one of those two, and Allison dropped any preconceptions she may have had about myconids and pyromancy.

Two others guided those streams away, recycled much of their magic, and neutralized the fallout. Wiggle was one of those two, working under his mentor.

The deafening boom of the attack vanished in an instant. The roar of the erupting flames wasn’t much louder than the rolling thunder below. But only within their warded sphere.

Even if someone were to poke their head out of the storm or scry above it, the dragons assured her, they would find nothing amiss.

Another pair was tasked with making sure it stayed that way. They maintained the sphere and were prepared to defend it against whatever disastrous magics their siblings might unleash—Lisa’s mother was one of those two, which had surprised Allison.

The final four studied the outcome of the attack itself. Allison glimpsed sparks of magic, flashing lines, and glyphs as they cast appraisals, made measurements, conjured lenses through which the fire was invisible, and simulated an illusory model of the attack while it was happening. Aber even warded his hand and reached into the flames to touch the Tower.

Niva leaned forward as she sustained them. She leaned further and further and tightened her grip until she nearly hugged her staff like a snake, lying prone in the sky. The spell intensified, and the roar of the flames couldn’t drown out her own roar of determination.

Until Beren, the celery man, lifted a hand. The spell abruptly cut off. Niva slumped and let out an exhausted groan.

They stared. The Tower was untouched.

Allison released the breath she had been holding.

Viglif signed something and everyone laughed.

“Oh, I’m counting on it,” Niva responded. “What kind of aunt would I be if I ever let her live it down?”

The young man signed something again, and Allison floated over to Garen to nudge him.

“Huh? Oh, he said Lisa would be so embarrassed if she saw that. And now he’s saying we can’t tease her because she doesn’t know we watched her arena match.”

Allison frowned. She needed to learn their sign language, but compared to everything else, it was a secondary concern. “Remember, we are on a time limit here.”

“Precisely,” Purjana hissed and shouldered her sister out of her spot. “It is my turn. Watch me and learn.” She raised a hand and the wide black sleeve of her dress billowed and bulged before a gargantuan purple serpent lunged forward. Like a twisted sash, it expanded from the size of her wrist to the size of a whale and clamped its teeth down on the Tower.

They didn’t pierce the stone. They didn’t even seem to touch the stone, precisely, and instead ground on a hair-thin plane of force that surrounded it.

Allison had ‘known’ the Towers were invulnerable, but she hadn’t actually ever seen anyone test that, or even read an essay on the matter. It had been taught to her the same way the church had taught them everyone ‘knew’ the Towers were deities, offering prosperity and challenges to their chosen people.

Seeing a dragon’s flames fail to singe the stone had been reassuring, but watching the attempts themselves made her feel sick to her stomach.

Shocks of power ran through the serpent, rearranging its form. Its teeth and muscles grew. It flickered as it phased in and out of different planes of existence, then its flesh began to pour into multiple planes at the same time.

Allison felt the power thrum in the air. The sickness in her stomach deepened into nausea as her vision blurred, her eyelids drooped, and her skin reeked like an infection.

Faer waved a hand and a spell swept over her, replacing the smell with that of cold soil. He herded both her and Garen back as they set up a secondary containment field around the serpent.

It had begun to grow secondary jaws. Its teeth rose into its gums and hammered down like pickaxes, and acid, venom, and burning liquids shot from its fangs. They splashed harmlessly off the stone. The others caught the spills before they could drizzle onto the storm.

Then the serpent began to strain itself—it used frosty gasses, created miniature explosions, and transmuted its teeth into various metals and crystals.

It’s evolving in real-time, Allison realized, not to adapt to its surroundings, but to overcome the Tower’s defenses. From what tidbits of information Lisa had shared or let slip over the years, she could guess how: she was pumping it full of divine life essence to the point of leaking. And it was a form of evolution, she knew, because its survival depended on it.

The serpent had eyes. They kept glancing back at its summoner as it tried to gnaw on the stone. It was a beast to rival any of the deep sea horrors of the ocean, but it looked at Purjana with fear.

If it could damage the Tower, it would get to live. If it could just lick the nonexistent dust off of the stone—!

Purjana’s patience ran out.

The serpent’s writhing movements became more and more desperate. Its flesh strained itself to mutate again and again until something snapped. The dragon cut off its supply of magic and the serpent disintegrated on the spot.

Purjana tsked, glaring at the Tower as if it had personally offended her.

Niva slung an arm over her sister’s shoulders and knocked their heads together with a grin. “Don’t let it get you down. We can be disappointments together!”

Purjana glanced at her and tsked again. Dipping down to escape her arm, she floated away.

How much of her stockpile of life essence had she expended for that attempt? Months? Years? Allison couldn’t imagine Lisa doing something like that. She wanted to be grateful—Lisa swore her family was here to help—but watching these strangers, she couldn’t be sure their intentions were pure. For now.

Beren checked their appraisal spells and gave a thumbs-up. “The data was sufficient.”

Even if they were trying to help the League for Lisa’s sake, what would they do with this information in a hundred years? Two hundred? Was Allison selling out the future of her descendants to ensure their survival in the present?

“Jana, could you fill in for me?“ Aber asked. “I guess I’ll go next.” He pointed the palm of his hand at the wall and a glow illuminated it from within. It cast his veins and bones in shades of amber. But those shadows shrank as the light intensified until his entire hand burned like distilled sunlight that shot out in a narrow cone.

Allison conjured a glare shield over her eyes and squinted.

Aber tapped the Tower. The light pulsed once and vanished … Was something supposed to have happened?

He awkwardly scratched his cheek. “Welp, that usually does the trick when I need to smite some baddies. I got nothing. Unless … I could try hurling some Eonian Lightning at—”

“You will not,” Allison snapped. Her own patience ran out. “That either works or it doesn’t and if it does …” She trailed off with an exasperated huff and demanded, “How can you even cast that?”

Eonian Lightning weaponized tears in space to rip through defenses. If the myths were true, it could even tear souls apart. It was only less fearsome than an Eonian Flame by virtue of being rare.

Aber held up a glass marble with a red drop in its center and said simply, “Blood samples.” He, and half the people present, looked mollified by her outburst. It only lasted an instant.

“That reminds me,” Minn chattered away, “I have to ask Lisa where she sourced the hair we used in the construction of her bag of holding.”

“You have a nose, don’t you?” Faer told her with his artificial voice. “Did you bring any of it with you?”

“She implied it was private. I will not sneak around a school to steal locks of hair from children.”

“Why?” Purjana grumbled. “Just make your body look younger.” She wiped a hand over her face and suddenly looked like a teenager. The change began to revert on its own. Like putty.

Viglif frantically signed something at her. Going off of his body language alone, it looked like an insult.

“Yeah,” Garen agreed. “That would be creepy.”

“We are guests here,” Minn added.

“Yes,” Allison agreed with that. “Yes, you are.” She rubbed her temple to combat a growing headache. “You are here to help us save the Towers, not destroy them. You will not use any attacks against or near them that cannot be scaled up or down, am I understood?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Aber was the only one to reply, “though I think we have most of what we came for. Our previous studies hold up. This structure exists across multiple planes of existence simultaneously, much as a God does, and it has extensive defensive wards that distribute force across them. If you wanted to damage it, you would have to attack it on multiple planes, or exert enough force to break through the barriers between planes and damage it as many times over as the number of planes on which it resides, which is, uh … Well, it’s likely to outlive this world.”

There was a note of respect in his voice, and Allison felt a surge of pride at his estimation. However unearned it may have been. She hadn’t built the Towers, but she had looked up at one of them on most of the days of her life.

Then he went on, “If you gave us a couple days of unrestricted access, we could probably put a dent in it. A few weeks? We could probably bring it down.”

Some part of Allison wished she could go back to the days she would spot a distant figure in the clouds and muse on whether or not she could slay a dragon. Drakes were easy to kill after all. How hard could it be to fell their smarter, more magical cousins?

That part of her thought she hadn’t needed to know the truth.

There was no point in lingering on the past. Allison followed Aber’s logic, “So our culprit, whatever entity or organization it is, must have resources on a level similar to your own, and access to one of the Towers on this plane … or another.” That was a pretty glaring security gap.

“Which shrinks our suspect list down from around six million people,” Garen said with a note of pride to be able to join the conversation, “down to, what …? A few dozen?”

“A few dozen,” Allison agreed, “if this isn’t a foreign threat or natural disaster.” She was thinking. They only had a year to investigate and prevent this disaster. No matter how competent Lisa’s family was, they would need help.

“We cannot dismiss the possibility that something will bring the Tower down from within,” Minn said. “If the Dwarf wanted to demolish one, or if someone with access to their inner workings were to sabotage the wards …”

“Uhh,” Niva piped up, “can we continue this discussion elsewhere? We should probably run before the cops get here. I think someone spotted us.” She pointed. Allison didn’t know at what until Minn created a lens in the warding sphere around them. It revealed a scrying spell, a massive thorned eye above the storm, squinting in their general direction.

“That’d be the Archmage of Thorns,” Garen sighed, “or one of her students. Yeah, we have to dip … now.”

“We’ll have to split up,” Beren said. “Two of us to each of the Five Cities. We investigate the local powers, explore the nearest planes, and look for anything that seems out of place. And we keep in contact.”

They sat in Garen’s living room, all thirteen of them. Boxes and binders full of files lay strewn around the couches, floors, and furniture. Everything Allison could dig up on the major powers and organizations of the Five Cities on short notice.

Whatever else she may think of them, the dragons were diligent. They read quickly and comprehensively and consulted Allison whenever they needed help with something—elaboration, reiteration, or simply a second opinion. It was more than what she could say for … other people.

Garen lay on the sofa, feet up on the table, head hanging back, and passed the time throwing a bouncy ball at the ceiling.

At Beren’s words, he snapped to attention. The ball bounced off his head and knocked over a stack of papers. “What? You’re leaving? We haven’t even done anything fun yet!”

Minn ignored him. “Whoever goes to Lighthouse can consult with Zest. She has integrated herself into parts of the local community and might know something we do not. Viglif can go where he pleases—”

He signed something. Allison didn’t know the exact meanings of the individual hand gestures, but she could guess: I’ll stay.

“—while the rest of us might want to adapt to the local defenders.”

“That may not be necessary,” Allison interjected. “I still believe you should reach out to our authorities, or house Tor at the minimum. Our diviners have already noticed something is amiss and we’ve had the Heswarens spread the word on your behalf, but if you work in secret, there is a chance yours and our own investigations will get in each other’s way.”

If the Tors went looking for a shady group now, the first people they would find would be Lisa’s family.

Minn glanced at the others and leaned over where she sat on the floor to ruffled through her travel satchel. “We have discussed that among ourselves, actually”—she withdrew a thin folder and levitated it toward her—”and we are open to the idea. However, we want certain assurances and legal immunities before we reveal ourselves, let alone consider a collaboration.”

“We work best alone,” Purjana mumbled idled while she read, hunched over a folder where she lay curled up in a ball on the other sofa. “We are used to investigating foreign cultures in secret, and you would only slow us down.”

“That’s not necessarily true,” Minn argued. “While we have not revealed ourselves, none of our pairs will be able to take risks without consulting—” She stopped. “Someone is at the door.”

Everyone perked up. Silent. Waiting. There came a shaky knock. It was past midnight. Allison could count on one hand the number of times someone had knocked on Garen’s door this late in the last three years.

After a second, Minn broke into a relaxed smile. “It’s Lisa. And some of her friends.”

Allison took in the mess of confidential files and illegal activity and decided, “I’ll get it.” She navigated the maze of boxes and cracked the front door.

Lisa was rolling around on the ground, cursing and wrestling with … something. Sam, she thought at first, but it had wings and looked more bestial. The remnants of some sort of cocoon or shell clung to one of its hind legs and it fluttered its wings.

Was that … a drake? Was it one of her siblings?

“Get— Stop— Argh!”

“Lisa!” Ryan called, because of course the boy was there, too. He was holding down one beast and pointed at where another lay with its neck clamped in Sam’s jaw. It thrashed against the Teacup Salamander, cutting into its scales.

Niva’s chickens bawked as they fluttered around the furthest corner of the property, trying to get away from them. Whatever the monsters were, they were struggling to get into the fenced-off coop.

Anne was there, too. She’d thrown herself over a writhing loot bag, and Allison could guess at its contents.

Finally, Lisa managed to haul the beast down and trapped it under her knee. She heaved with exhaustion, followed Ryan’s finger to her bleeding familiar, and noticed Allison standing in the doorway. “Oh.”

“What,” Allison summed up her thoughts.

“Sorry to bother you this late, Ms. Reed!” Anne called. “We just got out of— Hrn. Go back to sleep! Go back to sleep!” She started whacking two drakes that were trying to tear their way through the cloth.

“Surprise?” Lisa said. “We brought, uh … We need some help.”

Allison reached up, pinched the bridge of her nose, and let out a long-suffering sigh.

Another mess to deal with. At least, she felt, she was closer to leveling up again.