Apparently the troll was named Tarfur. He came from the forested north, where a rogue Magister had slaughtered his tribe and fashioned their iron-thick hides into patchwork abominations of undeath. For two years he staged a single-man resistance. He hid within the trees and fashioned axes from flint while he prepared to take his vengeance. This necromancer’s scalp was now his, but he looked back upon his homeland and found only death and destruction. He swore from then-on that all things unholy and unliving would be destroyed by his hand, so that his family would never be forgotten.

All this was coaxed from him in single word grunts over the course of their overland travel.

“And what is the best way to kill that which no longer lives, my friend?” Absalon said. They had stopped beneath the blaring sun to rest for a moment.

“Crush fingers,” Tarfur said. “Remove arms. Smash head and knees. No longer matters if undead or realive.”

Absalon considered this. “Why fingers?”

The troll leaned in. “Otherwise, hand crawl like spider. Grab you. Kill you.”

“Say no more and hand me a hammer,” Rook said.

“Or run screaming the other way,” Jason said.

“I see,” Absalon said. “You are wise, Tarfur. I am grateful to have your axe at my side.”

Tarfur only growled. He was a reclusive thing. Absalon took more after Rook; he always wanted to be talking. Eris found it exhausting, but without night there was never the opportunity to slink away into solitude as there had been in the past. She was forced to stay near the party.

The way to Arqa was all uphill. Jason said it was hardly twenty miles, and without the movement of the sun it was impossible to say how much time had passed. But it felt much farther. They stopped to rest every third or fourth eternity, all sleeping only once. The villagers had given them pack agama which now carried their weapons—the dwarves’ hammers, Absalon’s spear, Astera’s bow and arrows—as well as some supplies, but they were not for riding.

Eris would have refused to climb onto one’s back even if they were. They were disturbing animals. Horses, except covered in scales, green, with long tails that flicked lizard-like across the ground. Their eyes were dark and bugged and they were squatted low to the ground.

She did her best to stay far-off.

As they climbed the hills that surrounded the valley and prepared to cut through the mountain’s pass, Eris was furious. Her mouth was full of dust. Her hair was disgusting and dirty. She felt revolting. Even the heat was not so bad as the sheer sense of squalor, as the feeling that she needed a bath—and to look around and see nothing but dryness for miles in all directions.

She was not alone in her attitude. Astera and Rook stayed solemn and far apart while walking. He was mostly healed by now and, in brief moments, showed hints of his old joviality—the poem-reading boy she had at first found so charming. Since their reunion he had been much graver, and as Arqa drew nearer, and as the prospect of Aletheia’s return dawned, he withdrew ever more.

“May I ask a question of you?” Absalon asked. Eris lifted one leg up a steep incline and watched as a torrent of pebbles trickled down the hill.

She stopped. Glancing back up toward the party—she had fallen behind. Then behind herself, at the tanned mercenary.

“If ‘tis not to ask whether or not you may carry me the rest of the way, I would rather you did not.”

He smiled, as if she were joking. With his help she finished scaling this part of the hill. They were near the canyon pass now.

“There are many advantages of a tall woman,” he said, “but one disadvantage is that they are challenging to hold.”

She hesitated to take a drink from her waterskin. She looked him over. “Speak your mind quickly, then.”

“This blond man who fancies himself the company’s captain. Am I correct to believe the two of you have shared intimacy in the past?”

Eris frowned her deepest frown. “And what has given you this impression?”

“The way a woman looks at a man, and the way a man looks at a woman, after they have made love—they are opposites. Rook looks at you the way only a man who has had you can; and you look at him the way only a woman who has had him will.”

She rolled her eyes. “Is that so?”

“Indeed.” They started forward again. “Beauty is a terrible curse, Eris, for men will only treat you how they truly perceive you after you have taken them to bed.”

“Is there some point to this?” Eris said.

“I am merely explaining my reasoning for why I came to ask the question.”

“Perhaps you should have asked Rook instead.”

“Handsome as he is, he is not the one my eye has caught. You, on the other hand…”

Eris regarded him again with a scowl. He was fit, and handsome enough, yet until that very moment she had always regarded sexual intimacy as something engaged in strictly at her own discretion. She did it for pleasure’s sake, yes, but mostly to fulfill an animal instinct, and for the joy of passion. To have a man come to her in pursuit of his own desires—that made her sick.

Eris also realized then that she preferred men much larger than herself.

She leaned in closer to him. A puff of dust left her lungs as she spoke.

“I would sooner fellate the troll than lay with you,” she said, although it wasn’t strictly true, and she picked up her pace to return to the rest of the party.

In fact Eris may well have slept with him, in the right combination of circumstances. She felt no monogamistic devotion toward Rook or any other man, nor would she ever, and she possessed no regard for feminine virtue. But if she did, it would be her idea. Not his.

A staircase was carved into rock. It twisted between narrow walls of basalt and black earth. Spires of stone shaded the high noon sun. The agama squeezed through the confines, until at once they emerged on the edge of a precipice, and before them they saw Arqa Valley.

Stormclouds hung from one mountain to the next like a cloak of blankets draped over a child’s furniture fort. Dark black, stationary, low; a perfect lid for the valley, so that they might be impossible to see from a distance, from the other side of the mountains.

Here there was no mistaking it. They had entered into the land of death.

All stared in silent awe.

“Consider the good news,” Rook said. “At least we’ll have the sun off our backs.”

“We should leave our agama here,” Astera said. “Time is on our side. They will slow us down.”

Rook agreed, so they unpacked their things and prepared to descend. The way down was long and slow, but Rook had been right: the clouds kept the sun off Eris’ skin, and here everything was much cooler. Now, she thought, if only it could rain…

Down in the valley, the white cactuses and pale trees were dead. Not a single animal was to be seen.

“We go directly to Arqa #2,” Rook said. “There’s no time to waste.”

“Arqa #2?” said one of the dwarves.

“It’s a long story,” Jason said.

On the side of the dusty path from the mountains they found carrion. An animal like a coyote, its intestines spilled across the desert. Eris paid it no mind at first. She stepped past it—

The creature’s head bit at her.

Its canine mouth opened and hissed to reveal a forked tongue and two slitted, serpentine eyes. One paw batted in her direction. She gasped and jumped aside, stumbling into the troll, who leaped to action. He raised his axe and sliced at the creature seven times. But still it writhed, hissed, and lurched toward the party.

Eris straightened her skirt. “Charming,” she said.

“Damn monsters!” a dwarf said. “The evil runs everywhere in this place!”

“Lord Arqa conquers the sun itself, Darom’s greatest adversary—and its eternal protector. I hope you are prepared,” Absalon said.

“No one is ever prepared for an enemy like this,” Astera said.

Some distance farther down the path they saw encountered a saguaro in bloom. The white cactus sprouted pestilent green flowers from its arms which glowed with the luminescence of manaserum, but in a shade darker, sicker.

Eris stopped to investigate.

“He spreads his corruption to the very plants,” Astera said. “It will take centuries before this land heals again.”

“Perhaps,” Eris said. “Or perhaps he does not control the expenditures of his Essence as well as he should.”

She took the pedals of the flower and sealed them in her herbalist’s pouch.

Arqa Valley was huge. From a distance it seemed a place where civilizations flourished, yet on the ground it seemed more like a desert jungle, a wild and untamed place devoid of any society or human cultivation. They had miles to travel before they reached this ‘Arqa #2.’

Rook led them into the desert. Far off the path, where they might not be spotted. “We should rest here. We may not have another chance.”

“Finally!” a dwarf said. “It ain’t as dark as a proper underground home, but it’ll do! No one should ever be made to sleep in the sun!”

His brothers cheered in agreement. Eris found herself inclined to agree as well.

That ‘night’ she and Jason discussed the ritual of banishment. She had reviewed most of his notes already on the journey, whenever she found the time, on the ship above all. They were up talking long after the rest of their party had gone to sleep.

The process Jason described involved not just an expenditure of pure mana, but a true spell to make the vampire vulnerable. It was possible to teach another magician how to use a true spell, of course—but to do it through writings on a page, translated by a non-magician…

“So,” he said. “Can you do it?”

“…I have never cast a spell without first reading it in a book. Very few magicians would attempt to do so.”

“I promise, I did as good a job as I could making my notes—everything you need is there—this took months—”

“I do not doubt your notes,” she said. “This time. But spells are contained in books with special ink. They are not just described, but contained within the pages. ‘Tis the difference between parchment with ink and the carvings on a stone arch. One can be seen, but the other can be felt.”

“So you’re saying you’re blind.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

She began looking everything over again. Yet she knew the procedure by now. She knew what the words said—or what Jason said they said. But she would not know whether or not it worked until she tried it in the field. That was the unfortunate reality of much of spellcasting.

Jason fell asleep soon after, and she nodded off as she reviewed the lines once more. Thinking hard. Imagining how it might feel. Envisioning their battle. And she was almost asleep, mere seconds from unconsciousness, when she heard Astera’s voice:

“Aletheia!”

Eris’ eyes shot open. With a fluttering of papers she righted herself, spinning, and then she saw in the gloomy light of the perpetual storm overhead Astera, in her elven armor, staring off into the dim desert.

And in the dim desert stood a little girl with dirty blonde hair. She wore a white dress, ripped at the legs, and she stared back at the party with golden eyes.

“Astera,” she said. “You came back for me.”