The scree fields of Hakarth were renowned for their brutal summers. Nothing grew in the bare rock, which littered miles of the mountainside outside of the city. In the heat of the day, the sun soaked into the rocks until they radiated a heat that disfigured the air around them. Thick with iron, patches of scree grew so bright they could blind a man who looked at them wrong. They grew so hot that touching them without gloves often resulted in burns. The landscape changed constantly, as rock continued to slide from higher up in the mountains down over the fields; a single false step could lead to a cascade like the one that had killed a survey team only a year before. If it was possible for them to be even more inhospitable, their denizens did so. Venomous snakes and lizards riddled the shaded gaps within the scree, apparently immune to its everchanging nature.

Merigold stood on the road that demarcated the beginning of the scree fields, shading her eyes with one hand while the other plucked at the brass rings of her bag. She could see for miles. The scree appeared to be a never-ending mass of shattered stone. There was no sound from it but the occasional grate of stone or raining hiss as the scree shifted. Ilf’s unit ranged around her, checking bootstraps and securing loose clothing or hair for the trek across the scree. They were joined today by the three promised members of the survey team; a waifish blonde earth elemental named Ilda, a bespectacled, stocky psychometer by the name of Gregory, and a wiry old man who went by Zip. Zip was an organic, which simply meant his abilities pertained to organic, living things. Derek, also an organic, was a healer. Zip did not strike her as such. Ilf seemed to take him in stride, so Merigold suspected they had met before.

At the moment, Zip and Ilf stood in muted conversation, pointing at various areas of the scree and taking turns with a brass telescope. Zip held a large map in one hand, and the periodic sound of the paper flexing as he smacked at some new set of ink lines echoed out over the scree.

“Do you think we’ll find much out there?” Garret asked, seemingly of no one. He sat on the rocky earth, rolling an ice marble between his fingers. Alecia was nearby, eyeing a stack of cards she had added her runes to as she waited. There were probably a few for each of them, Merigold thought, but Alecia would have to activate them for them to work, and they would have a time limit. It would be better for all of them if she waited to hand them out.

Surprisingly, it was Derek who answered. He came over to sit next to Garret, looking curiously at the marble.

“A large number of snakes,” Derek said matter-of-factly. “Lucky for us, there is no better man to treat any poison than old Zip. As for whether we’ll find traces of the erowist, it depends a little on whether we know what we’re looking for. Ilf asked me to make sure you do. So,” he looked between the three of them, “I imagine that, unlike Adarak and Nihil, you’ve never seen one of the erowist before. Tell me what you know.”

Alecia smirked.

“The physiology of the erowist is poorly understood. They are considered denizens of the Astral plane, creatures capable of interdimensional travel. In practice, the erowist is a creature with a malleable form, of which only one part – the core – does not change in size or mass. They are able to ‘blink’ in and out of existence, moving rapidly from place to place. They can be killed only through destruction of the core.”

Merigold recognized that Alecia was quoting one of their textbooks. The ability to do so was one of her many quirks.

“A reasonable, if pedantic, definition of them,” Derek agreed. “What about you, Merigold?”

Envisioning the same textbook – but not in so much detail – Merigold added, “The erowist have qualities that make controlling them difficult. They are immune to most physical attacks, unless their core is exposed. Psychics are able to entrap them, but are, like everyone else, unable to communicate with them. The erowist don’t seem to need to eat or drink, but they are affected by temperature – at low temperatures, they move very slowly if at all, and at high ones, blink in and out of existence nearly consistently. They also seem to have an insatiable lust for killing.”

Derek nodded, gesturing at Garret.

“it’s difficult or impossible to predict the trajectory of their attack. It’s also difficult to gauge their strength based on appearances,” Garret said. “The only traces they leave behind are the dead and dying, ripped apart, and a unique radiation that can be detected with certain types of instruments.”

“All around, you seem to have the textbook understanding of the erowist down,” Derek said agreeably. “Now we need to put it into practice. The survey team has an instrument that can detect traces of the erowist. If we encounter one of the them, Ilf will immediately take action with the sole goal of trapping in place. As you know, a psychic barrier prevents the movement of anything in or out, which means we’ll be unable to attack the erowist while she has it captured. Luckily, the survey team has a specially prepared container for just such a purpose. Ilf will have to shrink the size of her barrier down match the creature’s core, and then the survey team will nab it for further study.”

“That sort of barrier manipulation takes incredible focus,” Merigold observed.

“Exactly. Which is why she was hoping Alecia could provide some focus runes,” Derek aid, looking pointedly at Alecia, who smiled and flipped a card over to display the rune on the front, “and why the rest of us will need to do everything in our power to keep her from getting distracted while she works.”

“The plan will only work if there is only one erowist,” Garret said.

Again, Derek nodded.

“If we can bring one back for study, along with any notes we have about the others, this survey will be a success,” he said. “So our goals are to 1) find one of the erowist, or traces of them, 2) capture it, and 3) return with everyone alive. If there is more than one of the creatures, our job as a unit is to keep all but one occupied long enough for Ilf and the survey team to capture it, and then to escape.”

“Wow. Sounds easy,” Alecia said with a hint of sarcasm.

Derek smiled slightly.

“Nothing’s easy in life. But, this is what we’re paid to do,” he said. After a moment, he looked in Merigold’s direction, seeming thoughtful.

“Ilf asked me how to make the best use of you as a necromancer, Merigold. I suggested that, among all of us, you would be the only one able to sense the erowists’ victims, possibly before the survey team can find it with their instruments. If you want to be of use to this unit, you’ll need to start honing your sense of death.”

“Luckily, she’s been practicing,” Alecia said, stowing her cards and standing up to dust her pants off. Merigold looked at her friend in some surprise – she had not told anyone that she had spent her supposed bed rest carefully practicing the symbols and circles needed for necromancy, and scouring texts for something that might come in useful.

“I’m an Illuminator. I can sense the runes you have on whatever is in your bag,” Alecia said by way of explanation.

“You have a corpse with you?” Garret asked, eyebrows raised.

“Just…” Merigold adjusted the loose fitting leather she wore, again, around her arms.

“The necromancer brought something dead with her this time?” Nihil asked, clearly having overheard them. “Another salamander, maybe?”

“A rat,” Merigold said coldly, pulling a small cardboard box out of her bag. She propped the lid open as Nihil, Alecia, and Garret came over to peer inside. It was a near-perfect corpse, a snowy white creature that had belonged to someone in the city, and had lived its natural lifespan before being dropped off at the crematorium where she had gone to get her necromancer license the day before. Oh, the beautiful contracts they had asked her to sign – absolutely flawless.

“You drew the circle on its back,” Alecia asked. “I thought they were better applied to the forehead.”

“For a humanoid corpse, that would be true,” Merigold said, slowly closing the lid, “and that’s what most of the texts at the academy focus on because it is the most common type of corpse used in the mines. But if you look for more obscure sources, you’ll find that the art is more nuanced than it appears. Runes and circles used on different body parts, and in different combinations, can provide more control. Humanoid corpses follow more rudimentary instructions better than simpler creatures like this, which rely heavily on instinct.”

Nihil actually looked impressed. So did Alecia.

“Seems like you’re finally getting a little interested in necromancy, Meri,” Garret observed.

Merigold frowned reactively, putting the box away. “I wouldn’t say that,” she said a bit petulantly. “But I can see how it’s like Drafting. There are rules, and technicalities, and the fewer loopholes you leave in your control of a corpse, the fewer surprises there will be when you put it into motion. Fewer loopholes means more precise placement of runes and circles, and an exacting choice of the corpse in question.”

“This is getting a little morbid for me,” Nihil said, backing away slightly.

“Technical precision is never morbid,” Alecia said, looking at him with a haughty smile. “But if you subscribed to that belief, you wouldn’t throw your fire around like you were a human blowtorch.”

“I don’t remember asking for advice from an Intern,” Nihil said as his expression darkened. He left, and Derek looked like he intended to say something, but Ilf called them to attention at that moment. He settled for shaking his head at her as they returned to the edge of the scree fields, lined up, and began to pick their way slowly over the rough terrain.

It was difficult work.

The sun beat down on them at an ever more acute angle as morning faded into afternoon. A few indigo clouds cast patches of faded shade down the mountainside, but they were too few and too thin to provide any real relief. Loose rock crumbled away beneath their feet frequently, leaving multiple members of the unit with scraped and bruised shins and knees, which Derek determined were mostly not worth treating when bigger threats yet loomed ahead of them. He only had so much magic, after all.

Zip, at least, provided adept at routing them around the venomous inhabitants of the scree. Just behind him, Ilda carried some sort of radio with a crooked antennae that let out a low and continuous hum. Occasionally, it beeped once or twice, as if weary if its own incessant humming, and they all stiffened and squinted around the scree, before returning to the monotony.

“Let’s pause here for a moment,” Ilda said after nearly four hours spent out on the scree fields. “I’d like Gregory to feel around the area. These readings…they’re bothering me.”

“I agree,” Zip said with a cough. “It feels like we’re circling something.”

“Or something’s circling us,” Ilf muttered, peering speculatively up the mountainside. “Either way, root in and take a drink. Keep your hands out of the rock, whatever you do.”

“Solid advice,” Zip agreed cheerfully. “There are hundreds of snakes in these hot rocks.”

Alecia looked down in disgust as they all hunkered down where they stood, pulling out water bottles. “If you use that rat here, it will probably get eaten,” she said. “Then all that work would go to waste.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Merigold agreed, taking a long swig of water. “Let’s see what Zip and Ilda think.”

She stood up, leaving her friends to pick her way to the front of the unit. Zip saw her coming, and patted a sun-bleached rock beside him. Up close, he was a scraggly mean. His crooked teeth made his smile look something like the scree fields, and his sparse stubble did little to hide the sunspots darkening his wrinkled skin. Unlike the members of the members of the Radvik Guild, neither he nor the rest of the survey team wore armor of any kind. He wore a simple leather vest with a multitude of pockets, loose cotton pants, and thick work boots that rose nearly to his knee. A broad hat shaded his squinted eyes from the sun.

“What brings you here?” he asked openly.

“Well, I’m—”

“Wait, let me guess,” he held up a hand, looking between her and Ilda, who sat directly across from them. She was similarly attired to Zip, except that everything she wore was a darker shade of brown. She looked back at him, swishing the water in her water bottle as he thought. “Ilda would have said something if you were an earth elemental like her. You wouldn’t be seating so much if you were a fire elemental. A psychic, then?”

“No,” Merigold said a bit coldly. Zip laughed.

“Wrong, am I? What are you then.”

“A necromancer.”

That gave him pause. Zip leaned back a little, nodding soberly. “That’s unexpected, I must admit. What’s a necromancer doing in a Combat Guild. Actually,” he again forestalled her words with a look, “it doesn’t matter. What brings you here?”

“I have a rat that I could send around to do…reconnaissance. But as you said, there’re a lot of snakes here. What do you think? Would they eat it?” Merigold asked.

Zip stared at her for a moment, seeming surprised by the question. He looked at Ilda, who shrugged.

“I have no idea, miss…”

“Merigold.”

“Merigold, I don’t see that you using your magic would do any harm. Snakes are a good deal smarter than the people of Hakarth give them credit for,” he said. When she nodded and started to rise, he added, “I’ve never seen a necromancer work their magic before, Merigold. If it was a human corpse you were animating, I’d be happy to let you on your way, but a rat…that’s interesting, and my old stomach could handle it. What about you, Ilda? Would you like to see?”

Ilda shrugged again, but she looked a bit curious now.

“I didn’t think necromancers ever worked with anything but human corpses, down in the mines,” she said.

Merigold was carefully taking the box out of her bag, balancing it on one of the hot rocks. Since she had already added all the runes and circles she required to the rat, she had simply to hold her hand over it for a few minutes, focusing. She wondered if she would get faster, in time. Maybe. She knew she had succeeded, anyway, when the box wobbled, and the rat slowly peeked its head out over the top.

“Still creepy,” Ilda stated. “But also fascinating.”

“It looks almost like it’s alive,” Zip agreed. “Look, it even twitches it’s whiskers like a living rat.”

“Instinct,” Merigold said, directing the rat to leave the box and shoot off into the rocks. “Since the soul is gone and the corpse is in full control of the necromancer, we must make full use of the body’s natural instincts. That’s why most necromancers only work with human corpses…our knowledge of how animals function is limited.”

Both Zip and Ilda were nodding slowly.

“We might be able to fix that,” Zip said thoughtfully. “We do study the fauna of Hakarth. Anatomy is a part of that study. You should come to our lab, Merigold. See our work.”

“Maybe help with it,” Ilda said pointedly. Zip clearly agreed, by his expression.

“Zip,” Ilf said, climbing over the rocks to reach them and peering curiously at Merigold, “Gregory just told me it’s here. He saw afterimages of the erowist moving through the rocks as early as this morning.”

“Just one?” Ilda clarified.

“Just one,” Ilf agreed. “But large. The size of a mountain cat, he said.”

“Not the best news,” Zip said, pulling his hat a little lower on his face to block out the shifting sun. “I-d—”

“Zip, did you feel that?” Ilda interrupted him, setting her water bottle abruptly on the stone.

“Feel what?” he asked.

“There it is again,” Ilda said, paling. She gripped her water bottle so hard her knuckles whitened. “This is bad, Zip. The rocks are shifting. We’re—”

Ilda’s words cut off at the sound of a shout behind them. Merigold looked up in time to see lightning shoot from Adarak’s hands, slamming into something behind them on the scree field. Alecia scrambled up behind Ilf, pressing something in her direction.

“The erowist is here,” Alecia growled. She was paler than Merigold had expected. Merigold, however, was looking past them all, at a faint haze hovering over the rocks. Unfortunately, she was sure, that faint haze looked back, with twin pricks of blinding light that might have been eyes.

She was distracted by a sound. A roaring like the train through the streets of Hakarth. It was coming from above them. It was a second before she began to feel the rocks beneath them tremble as well.

“Gods,” Ilf said, looking up. Merigold could see what Ilf saw now – a great cloud of dust rising up from the mountainside. Stone rolled ahead of it, a liquid ripple barely visible through the dust.

“We need a barrier,” Ilda shouted, standing up and throwing her hands out in front of her at the same time as Ilf. A psychic’s barrier was invisible, but the stone that began to form thick wall ahead of them was not. Merigold forced herself up on shaking legs, the rat she had sent scurrying through the rocks all but forgotten. She could hear the grating rumble of rocks slamming into Ilda’s stone barrier. A choking dust cloud sent her into a coughing fit as she tried to keep her balance on the shivering earth.

She wondered briefly if she was the first to see the cracks form in Ilda’s wall. By the way Ilf shouted, maybe not. Ilda was on her knees, shaking and sobbing. Zip tried to steady her. Rock blew through the wall, one of them catching him in the shoulder and sending him careening back as if he weighed nothing at all. Merigold had no chance to reach for him. She was hit as well, tumbling backwards. Like a ragdoll, she rolled, dragged by gravity and gravel relentlessly down the mountainside.

If anyone saw what had happened, she could not hear them cry out over the unearthly thunder of the collapsing scree.