Pinwheels of color and sparkles were firing off inside Sam’s brain. Maybe getting those healers to cast those spells on him had been a bad idea. But… No. No, he’d be able to sleep later. Once this was done. In fact, if things turned out like he hoped, he’d actually wind up gaining time even if he slept for twenty hours straight.

Sally led him—begrudgingly, to be sure, but still led him—through the tunnels and out the exit, where he stopped her.

“I promised Cora I’d take guards with me whenever I left the dungeon,” he said as two orcs and a goblin detached themselves from the wall and stepped up to him. “We’ll leave them behind when we get closer to your sister, okay?”

“Sure,” Sally grunted. “But I decide what ‘close’ is. Or we can turn right the fuck around.”

Sam nodded slowly. He knew he was pushing her, and pushing her hard. But he really didn’t have a choice in the matter, not if he was going to get this done. And he needed to get this done. There were just too many handicaps placed on him otherwise. And worse, no one would know what those handicaps were and wouldn’t be able to help him cover them.

The trip to Melloram was walked in silence. Sally was obviously pissed and clearly didn’t feel like talking, and Sam could feel the crash coming. He’d need to get this done as soon as possible, then get back and get one more hit from the healers. He could probably handle one more, right? It was just like Coffee. On steroids. And power-leveled. By a dragon. He could handle a fourth shot of that, right?

They reached the town gate faster than Sam had expected. Or had he blanked out for a moment? He wasn’t sure. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember the details of the trip over. Granted, he had been thinking about the next steps for the warp gate, but…

“Hey boss,” Thesheka, the female half of his orcish bodyguard, tapped him on the shoulder as they passed through the gate. “Didn’t you have an appointment with that Milthorne chick this morning?”

Sam blinked. Crap. He’d forgotten all about that. He glanced up at the sky… Morning, technically. With the sun climbing towards its apogee but still nowhere near it.

“Yeah, uh…” he frowned, trying to think through the sparks. “We’ll see her on our way back out.”

“Good enough. Just figured you didn’t want to get blindsided by it.” The orc hesitated, then stepped closer and lowered her voice. “You look like shit, chief. You need sleep.” Her green nose wrinkled. “And a bath. Maybe two.”

Sam nodded wearily. “I know, I know. And I will. Both. Soon. I just gotta get through the next couple hours, and everything will be better.”

“Y’know, the kobolds mentioned you were like this before in the dungeon, too. Felt like you had to take everything on yourself.”

Sam blinked and turned to stare at the taller woman. “Do I just have a sign pasted on my back that says ‘please offer unsolicited advice’?”

“Yeah, right beneath the one that says ‘kick my ass if I get snooty with my guards,” she said, giving him a grin that showed off her pointed tusks.

Sam winced. “Okay, I deserved that. Sorry. Look, seriously, this is important and I’ve got to get it done. Soon. Because if I wait for later, it might be too late. So just give me my room to work, and afterwards you can take turns with everyone else in the dungeon to kick my behind. Okay?”

That seemed to satisfy the orc. She nodded and fell back into step with her comrades, turning her attention to scanning the buildings and alleyways they passed.

“You really think this is important, huh?” Sally asked as they moved deeper into the town.

“Yeah, Sally, I do,” he sighed. “I wouldn’t have asked otherwise.”

She just nodded and kept floating. They turned off the main street and down an alleyway not far from the town center. The stone walls of the houses around them were tall and blank, and made Sam thing of the dungeon walls except not as sturdy. They came to another intersection in the alley, and Sally turned back to him.

“Okay. Leave the goons here. She’s just up ahead.”

He gave them the signal, and they nodded and spread out, checking the paths and making sure there was no one present before settling down to wait. Sam nodded once, then turned and followed Sally down the alleyway until she stopped in front of heavy oaken doors covering what Sam assumed was some kind of cellar.

“Down there?”

“Yeah. She… She likes it dark. And away from people. Look. Sam.” Sally turned back and looked up at him, and her voice turned almost pleading. “You gotta understand. Being around people hurts her. It’s like, she can receive input from anything; noise, touch, scent, sounds, anything. And if it gets too much, she can’t process it at all. So… So just shut up and let me do most of the talking, okay? I’ll let you know when it’s your turn. Okay? Please?”

Sam blinked, turning to look dubiously at the heavy iron-bound cellar doors. Maybe… Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea—

No, he couldn’t afford to think like that. He’d be as quick as he could, put her in as little discomfort as possible… But this needed to be done.

“Okay,” he said, blowing out a breath. “I promise.”

Sally bobbed up and down in a slow nod. Then she sighed and turned back to the doors. There was a tingling in the air, and the doors slowly raised and opened.

Sam blinked. “You can move things?”

“Yeah. Not, y’know, fast, but it’s something I figured out working for my jackass guardian.” She grumbled, using her term for the revenant who’d held her in sway before Sam had come.

“How come you never mentioned it before now?”

“Paranoia.” She let that single word be her answer as she descended into the cellar. Sam followed right behind her.

The cellar was old and dusty from disuse. Cobwebs hung in the corners, made sinister by the light from Sally’s gemstone eye. Broken barrels, rotten shelves, and strange pieces of what might have once been pottery littered the stone floor.

And there, in the back, floated another core. Like Sally, this one looked to have been one of the opal cores stored back in the sheds of Tolliver’s Dungeoneers, before the earthquake had wiped them from the face of the earth. And like Sally, it now floated off the ground under its own power. Its gemstone, when it turned to face them, was a soft yellow light that seemed to almost flicker like a candle.

“Sister,” The voice that came from the core a moment later was quiet and sounded both ancient and newborn at the same time, somehow. “You have brought someone here. I/we did not think you ever would. Is he safe?”

“Naw,” Sally said gently, floating away from Sam and closer to the other orb. And as she got close, Sam was put in mind of nothing so much as a mother hen gently comforting a chick. “But he’s on our side, and he’s promised to behave.”

“Oh good. I/we like that. What does he want?”

Sally turned to him then and wobbled, like she was gesturing him forward. Sam swallowed and stepped up into the glow of the third sister’s gemstone.

“Hello… Uh… Do you have a name?”

“I/we have been known by many names over the centuries. You may call me/us Persephone. It is an ancient name, and carries with it connotations that we/I find pleasing. Is that all you wanted to know?”

Sam blinked again. “No. Uh. No, I’m here because…” He trailed off, suddenly less sure of his plan. This Persephone had a strange way about her, as though she were here and somewhere far away all at once. And the way she spoke, as though he wasn’t quite in the room with her but might be at some point in the future, was… Off-putting. And concerning. If he bonded to her… Would it do harm to her? To him? The previous bondings hadn’t—

Uh, yeah they did, a voice in his head stopped him. You died the first time. And the second time your blood got set on fire and you wound up in a room with a mad god, and then a maze full of homicidal heifers.

Okay, but they hadn’t done any permanent harm. But this… This felt different. Strange. Almost like a violation, somehow.

Still. It needed to be done. He wrapped himself in that knowledge and took a breath.

“Persephone,” he said quietly, “I’m here to ask you to bond with me.”

The air itself seemed to go still inside the cellar. Persephone’s golden gemstone blinked off and on rapidly, and she turned between him and Sally.

“Do I have to?”

“No,” Sally said at once. “Only if you’re comfortable with it.”

“But it’s really important,” Sam said quickly, ignoring Sally’s sudden whirl and brightening glare. “It… It could help a lot of people.”

“You are going to attempt to force an anomaly by forging a bond with me/us” Persephone said, her voice suddenly toneless. “You are attempting this because—“

“No!” Sam’s shout startled himself almost as much as the others. “Don’t say it,” he said, trying to bring it back down. Lord, he could feel the crash coming. The sparks were crackling through his brain faster now. “If you’ve figured out what I’m doing, you know why. And you know it’s important.”

Persephone bobbled uncertainly, glanced at Cora, then slowly, very slowly came forward. “I/we understand. Place… Place your hand on my gemstone.”

“Are you sure, ‘Seph?” Sally stuck close to her side. “You don’t gotta do this, you know.”

“I/we know.” Persephone said quietly. “But your guardian is correct. Doing this will further the struggle. And the struggle must come first. Place your hand on my gemstone.”

Sam nodded and came forward—too fast. Too eager. Too hurried. He tripped on something unseen at his feet and tumbled forward, reaching out with both hands, catching himself—

On Persephone.

The contact was like grabbing hold of a live wire. Persephone shrieked and twisted under his palms. He lost his balance completely and fell forward, bumping, brushing, pushing the core. It struck the ground, bounced off a wall, still shrieking.

“Hurts!”

“No!” Sally’s voice was panicked. “No, Seph, it’s okay! He’s not gonna hurt you! Just breathe in—No Seph don’t go outside!”

“Too loud! Too much! Hurts!”

But it was too late. The gold-gemmed core bounced against a wall again, bumbled forward, and shot out up the steps and out of the cellar like a shot from a catapult.

“SHIT!”

* * *

Araxes slunk through the morning shadows, doing his level-best to avoid detection. It was… Simpler than it should have been. A long traveler’s cloak, complete with hood, borrowed from one of the dungeon rooms was practically all the disguise he needed. He went from being a tall, regal, skeletal person with a lordly bearing and a genial smile to just another skinny traveler with questionable tastes in footwear.

Speaking of which, he’d borrowed a pair of boots from a snoozing orc, too. They were too big for him, but it wasn’t like he needed to worry about blisters, now did he?

He’d tailed the little entourage Tolliver had built around himself—finally the boy was using his head. What sort of leader went anywhere without some kind of protective detail?—and managed to keep a safe distance. The tall orc woman had looked at him a couple of times, but dismissed him. He was no threat. Even if she recognized him, she would know that. Curse this level-one body. And he hadn’t even been able to kill anything since acquiring the gemstone, either.

Deucedly inconvenient all the way around.

The alleyway proved more difficult to remain hidden, admittedly. He could conceivably skulk down some way before being seen, but in order to get any closer to the action, as it were, he’d have to pass by the guards Tolliver had left behind him. And he just did not see an effective means of bypassing them.

Drat. He’d come all this way for naught, it seemed. Well, at least it had killed a half-hour. Perhaps he could convince Rashun to teach him another one of his board games. Curiously, in all his 400+ years of life, he’d never devoted significant time to the learning and playing of children’s games. Frivolous, yes, but hey, at four centuries old, one took stimulation where one could get it—

The scream from down the alleyway turned every nearby head, including those of the guards. They ran forward, hands going to a variety of weapons, not paying any attention to what might be behind them. Araxes chortled silently at his good fortune and skulked forward even more. Perhaps this afternoon might be salvaged after all. It hadn’t sounded like one of Tolliver’s many pained exclamations, but perhaps he’d simply hit a new octave.

That theory was disproven almost instantly, however. Sally—No, no this core’s gemstone was gold, not red like the offensive core, so this must be the sister—rocketed up from the cellar doors, shrieking like a scalded cat. It bounced off a wall, caromed off of a guard who took a wild grab at it—and missed, of course, there was nothing to grip onto on that smooth surface.

The orb shrilled again and dashed down the alleyway, reminding Araxes curiously of a crazed and panicked wild animal. It seemed to have no destination in mind, save ‘away’.

And it was only after his mind noted this that it also noted a second, very vital point. ‘Away’ for this core also happened to be ‘toward’. As in ‘right toward Araxes’ face.’

The lich yelped and backpedaled, but his heel—cursed blasted low-level form!—caught on the hem of his borrowed robe, and the too-big boot turned just enough under his foot to send him crashing to the ground. The hood came down over his eyes, and he shoved it back with one hand just in time to see the orb shoot towards him.

And stop inches away from his nasal cavity.

“Oh…” The core blinked twice, staring at Araxes, the tone of its voice like wonder. “Oh…You don’t hurt.”

“I assure you my dear,” Araxes said, arching a brow, “I most certainly do. My tailbone, for instance, is very—Eep!”

The core jolted forward those last few inches. Araxes managed to get his free hand up and between it and he, intending to merely push it back and get some space between them. Even an undead monarch, after all, is entitled to his personal space.

His bony hand planted itself right in the center of the core. Right atop the glowing gemstone.

Yes. You don’t hurt.

And for Araxes, the whole world went white.