“I’m glad you’re here, Thael,” Verena said as the three trekked down the valley.

“Can’t you use your craft to speed our journey?” Thael asked.

“Orders are all mages conserve their craft until the mission. I powered myself before we left,” Verena answered, flashing a smile. “Those were the days, weren’t they, Thael?”

He thought back to her lithe body, no doubt not having changed after all those decades. Mages weren’t immortal, they bled and died just the same, but they could live on past any mortalborn. How long was anyone’s guess. The longer you lived, Thael had realized long ago, the more time you had to make enemies.

All mages were connected to a specific conduit of power; a secret most kept to their deaths, even from others within their orders. Sunlight was Verena's conduit; he remembered the stinging sunburn from the roofless chamber where they had spent whole days in bed.

The wind was Verena’s craft, the element she was able to control at will. Other mages had different conduits and crafts of varying strength, but Verena could suck the air from an entire room of soldiers, provided she had been empowered with enough daylight, as Thael had witnessed more than once.

“I remember,” Thael said, cutting the conversation short. “Bring me up to speed with the mission.”

“Prince Arrin had smuggled himself outside the capital with his Crown Guard,” Verena explained. The Crown Guard, men who supposedly trained their whole lives to protect their charge. “He wanted to explore the yearly Tent Market of all things, and that was where all his guard were slaughtered – quick, quiet work too. Easy enough to do in such a place. That’s when a wrynn landed right in the market square, ferrying the Wraiths with the prince to Dres Laneith."

"They knew the prince would be in the Tent Market, or else their wrynn would have been seen beforehand."

"His Crown Guard perhaps, but they were all killed before his abduction. Servants, spies in the capital, it could have been anyone that informed them of the prince's whereabouts, but it was certainly… premeditated."

"So Krystos does not know whom to trust, and what better person than his first pawn?”

“You got out, Thael. The arch king let you have that at least. Others didn’t have a choice to escape this life. A fresh start. What you chose to do with it was of your own free will.”

“Free will?” Thael scoffed. “You would have drawn out the very air I breathed until I agreed to join this suicide mission. The arch king, the monarchy, had become everything we had fought against before I had even left.”

“You don’t believe that,” Verena said with a sudden fierceness. “After everything we’ve done, you know more than anyone what the world would have been like had Lyssa remained arch queen. I know you still blame Krystos. I know you blame us all. We did what we could in an unwinnable war. What would you suggest we do? Give up because you no longer had the stomach for it?”

Before Verena could blink, Thael drew out a dagger and pressed it against her throat, his teeth bared. “You think I gave up? I chose to leave. I should have joined the rebellion to burn down the monarchy instead, and piss on its ashes!”

Ircham lurched towards Thael but Verena raised a swift hand, stilling him.

“You know why you didn’t,” she said, voice quiet. “Because then you would have become everything that he had fought against.”

There was a calmness in that moment; birds chirping, water trickling, the wind whistling through the evergreen trees. Thael withdrew his blade, sheathing it in a whisper of steel.

Verena let out a sharp breath. “It’s good to see you haven’t lost your edge, Thael. Can I continue with the mission details?”

“Aye,” he grunted.

They renewed their journey down the long, sloping terrain.

“As the arch king said, the prince was taken to Dres Laneith, still the very heart of the rebellion.”

“Hagen,” Thael said. “Still calling for justice for the common folk?”

“Hagen decided to give his position as minister to his son, Ambrose, and live a quiet life.”

“No doubt the quiet life found him then, alongside your blade.”

“That too. Unfortunately, Ambrose is more of an extremist compared to his father. He was a prelate of the Faith, but was also learning as much as he could of the Mythic.”

“Which was when he grew interested in the prophecy.”

“Yes. Ambrose an obsession with becoming a mage, promising his followers the same reward. He has gained quite the support of the other ministers. They call themselves the Unsworn.”

“Has he made many enemies?”

“All that stood against him have been replaced or are too afraid to oppose him. Our spies within the city have not contacted us since the prince was taken.”

“What of the legions?”.

“The nearest outpost is the Oxenfort, several leagues from Dres Laneith, in no man’s land. The garrison has already begun their march to the city, but they are only a thousand compared to the Unsworn who outnumber them ten to one, alongside their citizens. The garrison will arrived in a week’s time, the legion’s taking even longer.”

“So we’re to infiltrate the center of the rebellion, acting as if it were under siege, with an army of zealots guarding the prince, without the support of the legion. Add to that the fact that half of order Wraith order that have already been captured or killed. What of the Wraith ward on permanent assignment to the prince?”

“There had been an aerial skirmish between the two wrynn. Our own were found crashed and all dead over the Highlands.”

“Their wrynn must be injured at the very least, not fully able to fly,” Thael noted. “Unless they have more wrynn near Dres.”

“Of that we do not know. But we do know of the ballistae scattered throughout the city’s walls. Wrynn extraction would be near impossible, if not making us helpless targets."

“Is the monarchy still in good standing with Clan Hross?”

“The oaths have not been broken, not yet at least. The labyrinth remains open to us. The Unsworn still does not know of its existence.”

“You could have started with that, Verena.”

“Keeping you on your toes, Thael. Don’t like it when you’re the one backstepping? I am commander of this mission. Where you… stopped, I continued in the civil war. Before you get your head filled with any notions that would endanger this squad, we operate as one unit. Should I recite the Wraith creed in case have forgotten it?”

“No,” Thael batted her question aside. “I see you never lost your zeal.”

“I believe in the Empire, Thael. It was not so long ago you believed in it as well.”

“Empires ruled by one man are only as strong as that one man. Krystos lacked the strength to quell the rebellion before, and his weakness is the reason why his son was taken from his own kingdom." Thael skirted past a knee high boulder. "You’ve let the foxes into the henhouse Verena.”

“What then does that make us?”

“Five wolves to ten thousand foxes, in their own den.”

Verena grinned, “We’ve faced worse odds.”

“What of our support?”

“The surviving order has established a base of operations outside the range of the ballistae, nearly all wrynn and their squads ready to reinforce us. Most of the rebel host has settled outside the city’s walls.”

“I see Krystos has taken no half measures," Thael murmured. "Willing to sacrifice the entire order for should it come to it.”

“The Grey Cloaks are still stationed in headquarters should all Wraiths perish in this mission.”

They reached a meadow where a wrynn rested, a shadowed figure inspecting a folded wing of the great creature. In the darkening indigo sky, the wrynn’s equally dark blue plumage seemed to bleed into the verdant meadow and the buzzing swarms of glow flies. The night breeze was rich with the fragrance of the surrounding blue and purple flowers and the sharp scent of pine.

The figure turned out to be a rather unassuming, stout man, looking more like a monk with his half bald pate than a fellow Wraith.

“This is Oslo,” Verena said. Oslo turned and bowed as low as he could, given the wooden peg that sprouted from one knee. “Best flyer I know.”

“The Kingmaker?” Oslo asked. “Thought he’d be… well, taller.”

“You do not have to be tall to be a killer,” a honeyed voice lilted in the darkness behind them. “Or to be the greatest killer.” She drew back her hood, pointed ears above a smooth hairless head covered in dark swirling tattoos. Her skin was a lush green, small pitch-black pupils at the center of her catlike amber eyes.

“You never said you would have a sylvan in the cadre,” Thael scowled. “Is this going to be a problem?”

“I am called Nireih,” the sylvan said. “I am well versed in your deeds, Eilraz. You have killed many of my kind, but they were all exiled from my tribe, having forgotten the Path. I would be honored to fight alongside you, reaper of many.”

“Now that all the introductions have been said,” Verena said. “Let’s discuss the mission.”

She squatted down and unshouldered her pack, unrolling a map of Dres Laneith onto the ground. “Ircham, the lamp.”

The man produced a lamp from his pack and with a snap of his fingers a flame ignited.

"The city of Dres Laneith is separated into three districts of descending order. We will start at the top most district, at the center of it all, the Minister’s Hold. Oslo will fly us low to the rising ground to remain unseen. We will enter the labyrinth roughly a mile away from the city. Though we have lost contact with our spies in Dres, we still have our dwarven allies stationed inside the city and the labyrinth. One such dwarf denizen will lead us from the labyrinth to the Hold and wherever else if need be.”

“If need be?” Thael questioned. “What of the prince’s blood bond, how have you not pinpointed his location yet?”

“The prince is indeed bound by flesh craft to a mage whose identity is only known to the mage order and the arch king himself. It has been concluded that there is at least one mage aiding the rebels and hiding the prince’s presence.”

“There are ways to still reveal the prince’s location,” Thael pressed on. “The mage must always stay close to the prince. We don’t operate blind, Verena. This is why half the fucking order is dead. We charge in without a plan and we end up nailed atop their wall as well. So your course of action is to take a leap of faith in searching the royal hold, then scour the lower districts until we find the prince if unsuccessful, all the while remaining undetected in densely populated enemy territory?"

"You're right Thael," Verena answered. "We don't know of the prince's whereabouts. And we're heading right into the jaws of the beast. We don't have a clean path, but we have our dwarven contact, Shercagh, who knows the city like his own skin. We will have more information once we speak with him. Dres Laneith has changed much since you left, and we need all the knowledge we can gather. Unfortunately the prophecy is set to fall in roughly four days. By the time we reach the city we will have less than three days to secure the prince and escape through the labyrinth."

"He could be anywhere in Dres," Thael said. "The royal hold would have been the first and last place the other squads would have searched. We should reconsider our options when we meet your contact."

"Agreed, we will decide our next course of action once we speak with Shercagh."

Verena folded the map back into her pack and presented Thael with a scryer – an artifact of the Mythic, the ones before that had brought down the gods’ wrath, so the Faith proclaimed. Perhaps only a dozen existed, or at least only that amount had been discovered. To be entrusted with a scryer was to be one of the highest ranking Wraiths, and thus one of the highest ranking soldiers in all of Arcadia.

"Welcome back into the order, Wraith."

Once Thael would have been honored. Once he would have cared. Such words brought him to a time past, the air cool as the meadow they stood upon.