Over the protests of several more spineless parts of his brain, Xigbar followed the strange man who gave off nothing but bad vibes.

There were lightstone fixtures in the slaughterhouse, but they were dingy, and covered in years of untouched grime, leaving the place poorly lit and cast in a sickly pallor. The hooded man led him past rows of empty cages and bloodstained tables, walls of blades, dangling meat hooks, before finally coming to a cleared out storage space at the back, where another person was waiting.

He assumed it was person, anyway. There wasn't much to see in detail, only black robe that hung straight on the figure's body, and a black hood identical to the one worn by Xigbar's guide.

"The courier has arrived," the guide said.

"And would like to be—hey!"

The bag at Xigbar's side unclasped itself, and the prize from the shop's safe flew out and into the cloaked figure's waiting hand.

Resting in the cloaked figures distressingly gnarled fingers was an obsidian black skull with no eye sockets. A formless, sourceless whisper washed through the room once, leaving total stillness in its wake, and Xigbar shuddered.

When he'd first found that skull, the interior of the safe had been blackened and cracked, as if the skull had been slowly eroding the safe away from the inside. Even now, he could see the skin on the cloaked figures hand growing steadily drier and paler.

"The last piece," the cloaked figure said, his voice full of religious awe.

Every alarm bell Xigbar had told him this whole set up was Bad News, and he very nearly turned and ran until the cloaked figure fixed his eyes on him. The bright, manic eyes that stared at Xigbar through the holes in that hood rooted him to the spot with pure fear.

"You are to be rewarded," the cloaked figure said, "for your service."

Xigbar didn't like the way the man used the word "rewarded" instead of "paid," but as he took a step back, the other hooded man moved to step behind him.

The alarm bells changed their tune now. This was no longer just Bad News. This was about to be a fight.

Just before Xigbar could draw his blade, an angry, shrill voiced echoed through the slaughterhouse.

"SNAKE!"

From the doors at the far end of the slaughterhouse, Emerald and Soris stormed in, both of them fuming with rage. And they weren't alone, as they'd brought half a dozen other Pavers with them.

Xigbar had never been so glad to see people who wanted him dead.

While the two hooded men were distracted by the sudden arrival of the thieves, Xigbar sprang into action. He kicked the hooded figure behind him, threw his knife to knock the skull from the cloaked one's hand, and then booked it. It was time to wash his hands of this whole mess.

Unfortunately, the Pavers had other ideas.

Soris raised both their hands as angry, jagged runes appeared in circles around their wrists, and bars of lightning spread from floor to ceiling in a wall in front of Xigbar, cutting him off from the closest exits. Several Pavers, including Emerald, leveled crossbows, and he had to dive behind a butchering counter for cover as bolts came flying.

"We need to leave," the hooded figure dressed in finery said.

"No!" the cloaked one snarled. "Time is short, and we have waited long enough! We do this now. Let them provide us what we need."

Xigbar darted from table to bench to waste cart, evading a hail of crossbolts and the wall of lightning that raked after him like a pursuing serpent, always snaking around to cut off his retreat. Every time he threw a knife in retaliation, he struck another Paver, but so far he hadn't killed any of them, and as he speared his third target just below the collar bone, he ran out of knives.

He really didn't want to have to turn into a snake just to get away from certain death again, because losing all his stuff was not something he wanted to turn into a habit, but if he didn't find a way to turn the situation around, he wasn't going to have a choice.

He let his armband transform instead, sending it off in one direction while he sprinted in the other. A glowing white crossbolt sizzled through the air after him, punching a hole straight through the wall just behind his head. He thanked whatever saint was listening that Emerald was such a bad shot with that thing, or he'd already be dead.

As far as he could tell, hers was the only Old World crossbow here, which meant it was the only one he wouldn't be safe from behind cover. The others could only harass him, and half of them had already stopped, either out of ammunition or too frustrated to bother.

Xigbar reached the first Paver who had opted to charge into melee at the same time that his armband found an archer at the opposite end of the room. In a fluid motion, Xigbar avoided a stab meant for his guts, grabbed the man's wrist, and used it to drive the man's knife into his own eye. At the same time that he died, the archer across the way screamed, and dropped to the floor.

"Watch your ankles!" Emerald shouted in warning. "He's got a pet!"

"He's got a knife!" Xigbar said, taking the one from the fallen Paver's eye and immediately hurling it at her.

She ducked, and it instead went through the forehead of another Paver standing at her side. Emerald loose another bolt just as Xigbar ducked behind a support pillar, grazing him on the arm.

Searing pain erupted across Xigbar's arm as the bolt burned a channel through his flesh, and he grabbed the still-hot wound in reflex to apply pressure.

Fucking hells, those things hurt.

"You're a dead man, Xigbar!" Emerald shouted. "You didn't just cross Arthur! You crossed the guild! And after tonight, every Paver in Xykesh is going to be gunning for your head. Larian's going to mount your pet cobra on his fucking wall."

Xigbar knew what she was doing. Keep him talking and distracted while the others moved into position for the kill. But a breather was a breather.

"First off: it's an adder," Xigbar said as he worked to undo his belt. "Second off: fuck you, and fuck the guild! I didn't cross Arty, he bungled the job halfway to hell just to blame and bury me, and the rest of you can all rot for believing him!"

"Arthur's guild! Family! You know what you are."

Xigbar grit his teeth, because he did know who he was. He'd learned it in the back alleys of Her Lady's City, fighting and stealing for every scrap of food he ever ate. He'd learned it in the city's jails, making friends with scoundrels and enemies out of the law. He'd learned it in vaults of every wealthy idiot in the drop as he cleaned them out to make something of himself.

Every friend he'd buried, every enemy he'd killed, every sucker he'd conned and client he'd served, they'd all made him what he was.

He was a real thief. These bastards just played at it on stage.

"Yeah," Xigbar said. He wound the ends of his belt around each of his fists. "I do."

He leapt out from behind his cover just before Soris's lightning struck his position, and he wound his belt around a Paver's throat like a garrote. With a shift, he used the strangling woman as a human shield to block a stab from another Paver and a bolt from Emerald.

He ditched the corpse, but not before stealing a blade off her belt and using it to open the throat of the man who'd helped kill her.

He threw the knife at Soris, who knocked it out of the air with an arc of lightning from her hands. Emerald loosed another shot at him, but he was already diving out of the way. The last Paver besides the two of them took aim, but never got a chance to take his shot, as a pair of snake fangs sank into his calf, and fiery pain spread up through his leg and into the rest of his body.

Soris let out a shout more akin to a roar, and the dragonblood turned their lightning on a stack of empty holding pens for animals. The thin, shoddily constructed cages creaked and groaned as they were lifted into the air on tendril of power, and hurled straight at Xigbar in an avalanche of iron.

He ducked, rolled, and leaped over each of them, closing the gap with every move. Emerald tried to shoot him, but it was impossible to get a shot through the storm of metal.

When he finally got close enough to make Soris nervous, they tried to unleash another torrent of lightning, this time straight at him from their palm. Xigbar had already started moving in anticipation of the attack, and by the time Soris brought their power to bear, Xigbar had reached to his belt, dug into a pouch, and hurled the biggest handful of scales he could into the air in front of him.

The coinage took the lightning and dispersed it—not completely, and they were reduced to molten slag, but enough that he was able to continue his advance with only loss of feeling in his extremities and a painful tingling in his jaw instead of being fried to a crisp.

His fist connected with the dragonblood's throat, and the runes circling her hands sputtered in time with her own gasps for breath. Xigbar ducked underneath the crossbolt from Emerald he didn't have to see to know was coming, and he followed up his punched with a kick to Soris's knee and an elbow to her snout.

They went down, delirious.

Xigbar panted, waiting to hear the sound of Emerald screaming in pain from a snake bite.

Instead, he was met with the tink tink tink of a jade armband bouncing across the floor before slowly rolling to a stop at his feet. When he turned, he found a still standing Emerald greeting him from across the slaughterhouse, Old Wold crossbow aimed straight for his chest. Too far to close the gap against. No tricks left in his arsenal.

"Shit," he muttered.

"Yeah," Emerald agreed. "It's over, Snake."

"It is over!" a manic voice shouted

Both thieves turned to the cloaked black figure as he stepped forward, his whole body trembling. He cradled the black skull in both hands, holding it out in front of him. His hands were substantially more withered than they'd been when Xigbar had first met the man.

"It is over for all of you," he said.

A sickening crunch came from one of the bodies of the fallen Pavers as it folded in half at the waist—backward. Nearby, another body twisted like a corkscrew. Another arched its back as its limbs splayed out beneath it.

"Witness, thieves, in your final moments!" the cloaked man shouted. "Witness the return of Xykesh's true—"

Xigbar grabbed a knife off of Soris and threw it at the same time that Emerald loosed a bolt. Both of their attacks struck the man dead in the chest, and he crumpled to the floor, forever silenced.

The skull remained floating in the air.

"Shit," Xigbar repeated.

The air went from still to stagnant to putrid in the span of a breath, and everybody still breathing wretched. Paint on the walls began to peel, and Xigbar suddenly felt unsteady on his feet. The whole world felt sick and unsteady. Like everything all around was slowly, dazedly unraveling. His nostrils burned, and his hair curled at the ends.

The bodies that had been convulsing on the ground burst into green flames, and as each of them did, a flaming eye blazed to life on the skull itself. All at once, every corpse in the room flew toward it, as if pulled by invisible strings.

One last word escaped Xigbar before the slaughterhouse was consumed in an explosion of green fire.

"SHIT!"

An old gnome walked to his window as a racket drew him from his sleep, and his short legs got him there just in time to see a column of green flames part the clouds.

On a hunch he checked over his shoulder, and saw through the walls of his home to see that, in fact, the safe had been opened.

The gnome sniffed once, and grunted.

“Welp. That’s probably my fault,” he reasoned. He paused for a moment to reflect on that and swallow his own spit. “I’ll worry about it tomorrow.”

In the hills not far outside of Shadefall, a blindman riding a lame horse urged his mount to a stop as he turned to face the horizon to the north. He could feel it, even from here. A presence he had not felt in centuries. And the twisted darkness that had clung to.

For a fraction of a moment, an echo of the man he had once been rose to the surface, and his heart broke.

"Oh Kethlin," the blind prophet whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

When Xigbar regained consciousness, his skin felt like it was crawling with ants. Ants made out of poisonous fire. The inside of his mouth tasted like bile, and was dry as bone. His head throbbed, and his vision blurred in and out of focus.

The roof was gone, and night sky hung overhead. Just seeing it filled Xigbar with a sense of freshness so stark he almost cried with relief. Whatever that skull had done, it had been the antithesis of life, being trapped in the same building on it had been suffocating. Now, in open air, he could breathe.

That was, until his head tilted forty five degrees, and he saw was waiting in the center of the slaughterhouse's ruins.

A withered, black skeletal frame of a person stood amidst the destruction, three eyes of green flame blazing in its head, and a haze of death radiating from it. It was easily twelve feet tall, with an unnaturally warped ribcage that contorted like spider’s legs to grip a small, glow green gemstone. Tendrils of ink black smoke curled off its skin, and it swept its fiery gaze at the city.

“Finally.”

The thing did not move its jaw, and yet Xigbar felt its voice like oiled being poured down his spine. Looking at it, Xigbar felt a touch of what he’d had before, when he’d been stuck inside with the skull as it…did whatever it had.

“So much to do. And now, so much time.”

Just like that, the thing vanished.

Xigbar spent a few minutes catching his breath, enjoying the rapidly freshening air and the fact that he was still alive. He couldn’t see Soris, Emerald, or any of the other Pavers. Vaporized or escaped, he wondered.

He didn’t get much chance to think about it, as the time he’d sat up, he found himself surrounded by city peacekeepers, urks, and an entire squad of elites. And all of their eyes were trained on him.

“Don’t move!” one of the elites shouted

Xigbar sighed, and slowly raised his hands in surrender. This was just his luck.

Happy fucking Threshart to me, I guess.