Fragmaroginog was hovering about, bodiless, after having been torched from Kurventhor by the dragon’s exceedingly violent wife. The Dragon Queen was as relentless as her reputation depicted and, quite frankly, Fragmaroginog was rather glad to have gotten out alive. That is, if you could call aimless flotation living. Vexed, the wizard travelled in the wind, giving the water beneath him a subtle but definite ripple as he approached the end of the Icy Mountains and the entrance to Reshauwenath.

When he found himself in this predicament before, he had a way out. Kurventhor was a being Fragmaroginog had possessed previously, way back when he needed to take control of someone powerful enough to break Albreton’s outer wall. Because of this, when Fragmaroginog’s toad body was destroyed—and he would pay the princess back in kind for that one—his soul zapped back into a body he had already learned how to inhabit. Unfortunately, there was no such body to take control of now. A phoenix heart was a curious artifact (or Element as most other wizards called them), in that once ingested it would provide life eternal. However, naturally, there was a catch. For one thing, the affect cannot be reversed, which for anyone willing to live forever is inconsequential, but the other problem was the one Fragmaroginog presently faced: phoenix longevity encompasses the soul but not the body.

A wizard cannot do much sans a physical body and Fragmaroginog was no different, no matter how powerful he had become over these long, gathering years. So it was that he drifted, sensing the world around him in the soul’s manner: of emotions, of energies, but not of physicality. Fragmaroginog was blind now, and deaf, and likewise he could no longer feel the things he brushed against any more than whatever spiritual impact they gave off. Ice was rigid in its energies yet invigorating, tree trunks were porous against his soul and water became a presence both effluent and surging. Stone encompassed its space in the way animal tracks dip into earth; they were, to Fragmaroginog, rough energies that merely interrupted the negative space that had become his world since he was forced out of Kurventhor.

Mentality was another matter. Devoid of sensory stimulus, Fragmaroginog became himself an entity of thoughts. And one thought prevailed over all else: Would he, the greatest wizard ever to live, face insanity out here, forever trapped in solitude? When nothing else can be felt, those fleeting inferences transform into impossibly definite outcomes in one’s mind. They seem the only things perceivable in such a derived state.

So, when Fragmaroginog spontaneously found himself inside the body of a cat, he was entirely surprised. His vision returned, as did the warmth that bodied things take for granted, and he wiggled the cat’s whiskers. Smell returned next, the scent of mist and pine needles and water-polished bedrock entering into Fragmaroginog’s new, pinkish nose. His hearing was sharper than before, allowing for perception of far higher frequencies than dragons or humans.

There was a whistle in his head. Pawing around, kneading the dirt under his claws, it took Fragmaroginog a good few minutes before he realized just who he it was he was inhabiting. This wasn’t any common alley cat—this was his former apprentice’s familiar. Something sinister shone in his newly black, pebbly eyes and he willingly returned the call in a yawning feline cry. He would meet Lindargra and use this unforeseen opportunity to do something he had been meaning to ever since she betrayed him: to kill her. Or, barring that, rid her to some other dimension, just as he had intended for Prince Albert when he handed the naïve boy that first vile of bewitched ink.

Another whistle, a Singer’s magical song, slipped into the cat’s mind. Immediately, Fragmaroginog knew the way. He ruffled his fur involuntarily, not yet accustomed to such a body. But the song in his mind had revealed something he had been wondering about for some time now. So that was how Lindargra kept such a close watch on him, how she knew to thwart every plan he had come up with thus far. Lindargra’s home, and all of Nevramere, was beyond—underneath, in a way—Castle Albreton’s mote.

When Fragmaroginog first placed the spell on Castle Albreton, he had cursed the mote surrounding it so that anyone intending to reveal his double-crossing nature to the King would be swept into its current and morph into a voiceless, unsightly creature such as an eel or a gulping, floundering fish. He remembered clearly the artifact he had used to cast that spell, an iridescent fishy thing nearly two meters long that pronged into two bits and flared at one end, the other side a stubbly, bloody plateau where he had cut it from its owner. Mermaid tails were as rare as they were potent, and illusions were their specialty. He wondered what other magic a mermaid’s tail might carry, considering the mote had subsequently morphed into an inter-kingdom portal without any specific intention on Fragmaroginog’s behalf.

There was still much the wizard did not know about artifacts, never mind the fact that he was the most powerful, influential being ever to walk the Earth. It was one of the reasons he hunted them so voraciously.

He would hunt Lindargra voraciously, too. The little twat had caused him enough trouble. From informing the Dragon Queen about his first possession of Kurventhor to outright warning the King of Myriad’s advisor about his upcoming betrayal—not that the warning was heeded, Fragmaroginog thought to himself smugly—Lindargra had been interrupting every aspect of his plan from the very beginning, from when she had first broken out of his company and taken the baby dragon they had been hunting together along with her. She needed to learn her place. She was only a peasant woman, an orphan he had pulled off the streets of his crumbled home kingdom near the swamps back before he discovered wizardry. She should act like what she was, a throwaway.

Honestly, Fragmaroginog couldn’t think of a better time to exact his revenge, being stuck in the body of Lindargra’s familiar. And once she was out of the way, he could charge through the rest of his plan, find the key to the lands beyond the swamps and unleash enough monsters to provide artifacts for every citizen of every kingdom, and then some. He would hunt their hides and hoard them like dragons. He would pillage their dens for magical gems. He would rip the hearts out of the most desirable prey and display them on a mantelpiece guarded with root magic.

That was another thing he would do well to remember. He had still not found the true heart of Castle Albreton, the center of the maze in its dungeon, past the Hall of Truth where he had kept Enkaiein enslaved. A vine, it was said, rested somewhere inside the castle, morphing the corridors in its eternal protection, but the only thing resembling vines were the curious blue markings inside the Hall of Truth, and when Fragmaroginog had first examined the room, all they did was swirl away from his touch and nothing more. They didn’t give off any thicker magical energy than a common winged pixie, not nearly enough to bend an entire castle around an intruder.

But that was a task for another day, one after he had taken care of his most prevalent adversary. So Fragmaroginog went, through the Icy Mountains, across the plains before the castle and into the mote, directly. With soggy, lopping fur he found himself clawing up from the milky white water and onto a mound of blackish dirt. He shivered, groveled and stretched. He felt like a rag, soaked and limp, but a devilish sneer crossed his features when he laid his eyes upon the crow.

“Cat!” It squawked, launching from its nest, a small tumble made of grey straw, and into the air to circle above. “Cat! Cat! Cat!” Its voice shrieked against the open air.

At first Fragmaroginog thought it was cawing a warning or an alarm, but then a dark cloud rippled through the sky like charcoal and out from it Lindargra descended.

She landed on the ground dressed in the wisps of the cloud and said, “Hello, Cat.”

“Hello Lindargra,” bit Fragmaroginog. He couldn’t help the spite in his voice. It tasted too much like a welcome curse and he reveled in it. His whiskers twitched.

The witch scrunched her thin eyebrows, monochrome eyes curdling gray. She pointed, “Get out of my familiar.” The black nail she extended was long enough to be a knife, or an arrow.

“I refuse,” said Fragmaroginog, shaking the water off as best he could. It stuck disgustingly to his fur and the curious urge to lick it off might have overcome him if not for Lindargra’s violent approach. She flitted through the air like a waterfront wind, her cloud hovering overhead, following her movement as if she were tethered to it. She picked Fragmaroginog up by the scruff. Hatred singed her eyes.

“What are you up to this time,” Lindargra demanded.

“Would you dare harm your own familiar to find out?”

Lindargra sneered, clawed farther into the top of his neck, but hesitated the very moment she would have applied enough pressure to draw blood. The crows were circling above like vultures, cawing malice in throaty trills.

“I didn’t think so,” said Fragmaroginog, “That’s always been your problem, Lindargra. Even if you have the talent, you never had the guts to use it.” Lindargra lowered her eyes, which would have seemed like a submissive gesture if not for the smile that cracked her face. Her teeth were white as chalk, the skin around them just grey enough to accentuate the contrast. She turned her black eyes on him, a patronizing wrath.

“Your problem is your greed,” she snarled, “You’re so small a thing you have to resort to twisting others to your purpose, but I know you for what you really are.”

“And what is that?”

“A coward hiding behind his narcissism.” She laughed then, truly a witch in the timbre of her cackle, “Did you really think it would be that easy to catch me off guard? And in my own kingdom, no less! Look around you, Fragmaroginog! See the birds as they whirl above? My warriors awaiting the order to descend!” She brandished an artifact, stuffed it close enough to Fragmaroginog’s face that its stink drifted directly up his nostrils. It was a raven’s foot, mummified and rank, smelling of balm and old dust. When she thumbed its center it sprang to life, twitching and quaky. She held the black talons to the cat’s neck.

“Even if you banish me from this body, you cannot kill me. I am immortal.”

Lindargra crinkled her nose and the space between her eyebrows, her lips stretching into a sneer, and she curled the raven’s foot around Fragmaroginog’s neck and she wrenched his essence out of the cat. No blood spilled. Now a flicker of orange-red flame twisted and curled against the raven foot’s palm. Lindargra set the cat down, gently, courteously, the raven’s foot dangling, pinched between her nails. But then the flame inside flared bright and painful and she hissed, dropping it onto the murky black of the soil. Water lapped against the island, milky white like cooked eggs. The crows fell from the sky like darts, all plunging towards the growing flames, flames that spread across the island until it was nearly swallowed up, flames that left only a circlet of untouched dirt where Lindargra was standing so that she was surrounded entirely. The beaks pounded down like hail, but none pierced Fragmaroginog. None could. He bent his spirit around the raven’s foot, making it hover into the air as the birds cawed and launched again off the ground.

“Thank you, Lindargra,” said Fragmaroginog, taking possession of one of the crows that had nearly pecked through him. He held the raven’s foot, shriveled and twitching and grayish, a sketchy doppelganger of one of his own new appendages, in his new body’s talons. And he flapped to the sky swiftly, used to flying from inhabiting dragons. The crow he was inside, enveloped with his fiery spirit, glowed red now all the way up to its beady black eyes, a twinge of orange tinting its pupils, its beak red-hot like metal being forged into a sword. Lindargra whirled up into her cloud in a wisp of smoky black, standing atop it, instantly above Fragmaroginog as he flew higher in the sky. She zipped down to meet him, summoning rain and lightning that stabbed out of her cloud and her cloud alone and struck down the crow he was possessing.

“You cannot win, Fragmaroginog!” But as she said this she felt the cloud beneath her spasm and shake. It curled into a devilish face, a grin swirling its jagged teeth around her ankles. The cloud tumbled red-orange like ashen coals. With no other choice, Lindargra leapt from her cloud back down into the dirt, landing hard on one knee, half on the island and half in the water that lapped against her shins. Without the cloud’s cover she wore nothing, naked as a reptile, pale as the milky water. Fragmaroginog swirled inside the cloud, bending it to his will. He formed a smirk and catty eyes and faced them towards Lindargra.

“Know your place, peasant. I was always the greater sorcerer!” In one burst of lightning he jolted the birds from the sky. They jerked and dropped down, falling like hail onto the island, like stones into the water. Lindargra clenched the soil. She had nothing left, only dread, no artifacts to save her.

“By Olden I shall see you perish,” Lindargra sang in Singer’s tongue, a curse as old as Enkaiein, “The swamps shall part and the land shall dry and the Veins shall split your spirit!”

“Fancy, meaningless words,” chuckled Fragmaroginog. He summoned lightning, jagged and blinding as it erupted from the cloud. He boomed, “You have no artifact to invoke that spell!” But as the lightning struck and electrified her, Lindargra was smiling wide. Her eyes remained open as her body fell, sprawled dead and sizzling, skinless. “Rot like your land, you pitiful girl. I still have kingdoms to conquer.” Hovering inside his new stormy body, Fragmaroginog scoffed at her corpse. Then he puffed, turned white and glided across the sky, testing how fast he could float.

He did not see it as he drifted away, a nymph’s wooden finger kept under Lindargra’s now frizzy hair, glowing and warping with magic. A luminescent vine twirled out of the artifact like a lure, waving back and forth, first blue then red then green and then purple, pulsating colors in rapid succession, a beacon to guide her final spell. And in the swamps and Kingdom Albreton and Myriad both, tree limbs bent without wind but with yearning.