Annabelle came out the other side of the portal and flew through the small cavern out to the surface.

She flew out into a night sky, illuminated by the light reflected from Garnoth's large moon. She looked back to the ground, and saw that they had emerged into the middle of a desert, though she also saw some trees on one edge of the horizon.

That would be the second time I've escaped a prison only to end up in the middle of the desert. And, as before, we'll probably need some help to get rescued.

But first, she aimed Shadebreaker into the cave and fired several shots at the cavern's walls, triggering a collapse. It probably wouldn't stop the Shades for long, but it would at least buy a few minutes.

Darius was already attempting to contact Sanctuary. Hopefully, his arcane communications device would still work. If it didn't, Annabelle would have to figure out how to transport hundreds across this desert.

At the same time, Lorso was attempting to care for Silence, or at least what was left of him. Healing fire coursed through Silence's head, which was apparently enough to keep him conscious. But he wouldn't last for very long, not without Lunima's help. If she was even willing to help Silence, given his nature as a rogue anti-divine warrior.

Okay, I have good news and bad news, Darius told Annabelle and the rest of the group. The good news, I was able to contact Sanctuary. The bad news, Daraken's breached Sanctuary's defenses.

Tell then that if they can last long enough to open a portal, Daraken will cease to be a concern.

They've guessed as much. But a portal will take five minutes to open. Sanctuary might not last long enough.

**********

Julia and her elite team stormed through the tower. With the healing power of her and the rest of her priests, the apprentices and the tower's traps were simply unable to do much more than slow them down.

The apprentices made one last defiant stand at the midpoint of the tower, accompanied by an army of skeletons. However, after Julia coordinated with several of her priests to release a healing wave that disrupted the animation of those skeletons, they easily took them all down one last time.

Now, to finish the job. As members of the Resistance laid out explosive charges, and Bouldos prepared an earthbreaker spell to obliterate any unprotected rock in the area, Julia focused on a two-part effort to make sure everyone survived this.

First, she consecrated the area, strengthening the pull of the afterlife. It any sort of soul-capturing devices were in use, this would hopefully override them.

Then, she focused the rest of her efforts on protecting herself, giving her enough strength to hopefully withstand the tower's collapse.

If this worked, she would probably have to spend the next week performing bodyless resurrections for the rest of her team. But if it worked, they would eliminate Daraken's base of operations.

"I am ready. Destroy this place."

Everyone stepped away from the walls (a pointless measure given that they were about to drop half a tower on themselves), and then they pulled the trigger, just as Bouldos unleashed his spell.

As they had planned, the explosives combined with Bouldos's magic to obliterate the stone at this level. All around them, they saw a ring of empty space.

But nothing collapsed.

"What just happened?"

"You triggered our trap," a voice said, the voice of one of the apprentices.

Suddenly, a field of energy sprung up all around them, covering the floor, walls, and ceiling. A Resistance member immediately tried to flee down the stairs, but an energy field blocked him.

"Somehow, he managed to levitate his entire tower," Julia muttered. "This plan never stood a chance."

Now, all Julia could do was hope for some sort of miracle. With Helios unable to intervene without breaking some sort of divine law, there was only one possible source for such an intervention.

**********

"Raiks, I know that killing you here won't end the Resistance," Daraken said, his magically-amplified voice booming through Sanctuary, almost deafening to Raiks' ears. "It will end its threat to my rule, but it won't stop your deployed agents from continuing to be a nuisance. An irrelevant nuisance, but a nuisance nonetheless."

"So, I'm offering a simple proposal: surrender now. Order your Resistance to stand down. It's over for you."

Raiks looked around, and saw a handful of the Resistance's noncombatants watching from what they probably saw as safe distances.

"We cannot surrender. Not when the fate of the divine realms is at stake."

Raiks said nothing. He needed to think of something, some way to stall Daraken, to buy more time for Julia's team to complete their mission.

"I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that Julia's still going to pull through for you."

Daraken didn't explicitly say that they were doomed to failure, but his current actions showed that he considered them to be no threat. Maybe Daraken had taken a quick detour to wipe them out before breaching here.

Well, he could still be wrong. It would have to be a very big oversight for his intelligence, but it was possible.

"Sanctuary, come in." That voice- was it-

"Darius?" Raiks replied, looking down and whispering to try to prevent Daraken from noticing.

"We escaped Daraken's banishment, alongside a large group of refugees. Can Sanctuary get us out?"

Well, that was almost certainly something Daraken wasn't accounting for.

Raiks cut communications for a bit and spoke to Daraken, hoping to delay him. "Are they already dead?"

"No," Daraken replied, with a bit of a laugh. "But their mission will not succeed."

While Daraken spoke, Raiks replied to Darius. "Daraken's here. Attempting to open a portal."

Then, he whispered an order to the Resistance's portal operator to target Darius's signal and open a portal to it. Unfortunately, with the delay on portal creation, it would take too long to arrive.

"Ah, it seems that they've reached their target. Let's see how they perform, shall we?"

Daraken channeled something through his staff, and projected an image of a floor of his tower. Judging by the internal damage, he was showing the fiftieth floor, where Julia planned to bring it down.

But then, he was blindsided. Saphus rushed him with lightning speed, ramming straight through the projected image and slamming into Daraken's defenses. He swung his staff to try to smash her away, but she kicked off, propelled herself with another burst of magic, and landed back on the ground. The projected image faded away.

"Come on, asshole. Kill me."

If you have something that can take him down, use it now, Saphus told Raiks with a telepathic message.

Daraken didn't seem to react much to his agent betraying him. "Your betrayal was part of my plan." He turned to Raiks. "I must say, killing yourself to support an agent was a pretty good trick. Shame it wasn't quite good enough."

Saphus leaped at Daraken again, but this time Daraken was ready, swatting her out of the air, blasting her away with an explosive impact. Saphus still managed to land on her feet, but she was a bit slow to recover.

Why wasn't Daraken killing her with the same magical kill-switch he had used to terminate his other agents? Maybe he hadn't been able to install the kill-switch in Saphus yet.

"I would reconsider this action, Raiks."

Saphus leaped forward for a third attack, and Raiks supported her by firing a dispelling bolt from his Arcane Bolter, timed to hit Daraken just before Saphus would.

Daraken attempted to shoot down Saphus with a blast from his staff, but the dispelling bolt disrupted his shot. However, it didn't do enough to his arcane shields to allow Saphus's follow-up to cause any damage.

Then, instead of landing back on the ground, Saphus instead took to the air, flying above Daraken. Daraken aimed his staff at her, but didn't make any attacks.

"That's right. You can't kill me, because if you did, I'd come back inside your base, in prime position to wreck it."

Daraken laughed. "That's what you think."

Daraken simply fired a red bolt from his staff, hitting Saphus straight-on. She dropped out of the sky and hit the ground hard, but Raiks didn't see any blood coming from the impact.

Probably a derivative of his stasis/sleep curse, Raiks guessed.

"I gave you a chance to surrender," Daraken said behind the illusionary image. "You should have taken it." The tip of his staff began to crackle with black energy.

At the same time, Julia's voice sprang up on the Resistance's communications channel. "Raiks! It was a trap. We blew the tower, but failed to cause it to collapse."

Raiks had one last idea. He told Darius to relay a message to Annabelle. Maybe, it would give her the inspiration she would need to get back to Sanctuary.

Then, he used the last stalling method he had left.

"Wait!" Raiks called out, just before Daraken was to blast him. "I surrender."

Daraken hesitated. "I sense trickery. You're stalling for something, aren't you?"

Raiks sent out a message to everyone in the Resistance at once. "STAND DOWN! We have established a cease-fire, duration of one day."

"This is a surrender, not a cease-fire."

"It will be extended into a surrender when you cease your hostilities." Raiks bargained.

"You're not in a position to not trust me. Order a permanent surrender, now!" His staff charged up again.

Then, a shockwave shook Sanctuary.

**********

They wouldn't make it in time. In five minutes, Daraken would be able to kill everyone in Sanctuary and escape before Annabelle could kill him.

There has to be a way to get there faster.

Unfortunately, there wasn't. Even if she knew where it was exactly, she couldn't cross hundreds of kilometers that fast. She briefly pondered an alternate route involving going high into the stratosphere, but it still required knowledge of the island's location, and it still wouldn't be fast enough.

And, further, it seemed that whatever she had done to give herself a second wind wouldn't hold for long. The exertion headache had briefly faded, but now it was coming back with a vengeance.

Why do these stupid portal devices have a delay on them? We're all going to die because a stupid portal generator can't deploy fast enough.

The original design was created by Daraken, Darius explained. Aurim copied his work as part of the creation of Sanctuary, and couldn't find a way to improve it.

So it is likely that the design is intentionally flawed.

Opening a portal across a long distance requires a tremendous amount of energy to carve a path, Varos replied. He likely wasn't able to get them to go any faster without significantly increasing the amount of magical energy that would be needed in each generator.

Still, Sanctuary was going to die because of that, and they would be next.

Annabelle, Raiks wants you to create a portal, Darius said, relaying a message he probably got from Raiks.

I can't do that. Annabelle immediately replied.

We're here because you teleported us here, Omega countered.

That was true. She had ripped the information straight out of an Elder's squid-like head, in fact. It seemed to involve punching a hole into space-time with an intense focused force, and then ripping outwards to open a portal. Based on what she knew now about wormholes and portals, it probably breached some fourth spatial dimension to do so.

Wait. If that technique rips open space to create a portal, how would you even control the destination?

Omega raised a point that Annabelle probably should have thought of when she attempted to use it the first time. The information she had gained from the Elder said that the user's desires would specify the endpoint, but she had likely mis-translated the information and missed the part where she would define the destination. That was probably the difficult part, in fact.

End result, we ended up here after something hijacked our teleportation, Annabelle thought.

Theory: If that technique doesn't specify an endpoint, then the endpoint would be defined by whatever other effect is manipulating fourth-dimensional boundaries nearby. Omega's theory made a bit of sense, but it was just that, a theory.

So, if I did it right now-

If this is correct, you'd teleport to the portal generator's location in Sanctuary, potentially forcing the portal open in the process.

Was she willing to risk everything to test that? She might get a premonition if she was about to take an action that would kill her (or that would result in her desiring suicide to warn her past self), but if it was anything like her previous experience, the teleportation might take too long for her to have a chance to warn herself before it went wrong.

Proposal: instead of teleporting ourself directly, we center the portal somewhere nearby, and hope it provides enough energy to open a portal that the generator's magic will stabilize and keep open.

Well, it was as good of an idea as any. Annabelle performed the technique, breaching the fourth-dimensional wall and then blasting through it with a surge of energy. There was a bright flash of purple and the crack of a whip as air molecules were sucked through a brief portal, but nothing happened.

Well, that didn't work. And, we don't know where those air molecules ended up-

Then, the portal surged into existence at that exact location. On the other end was Sanctuary.

Annabelle didn't hesitate. She flew through the portal, and straight through the antechamber's null-magic field. Her flight was briefly suppressed, but she easily made up the difference with a telekinetic surge, hurling herself through and out the other end. L

Wait five minutes before following me. We can't let any civilians get in range of this monster.

She took to the air, and quickly spotted her target, hovering above the ruins of Sanctuary's headquarters. He was currently talking to a defeated Raiks. Well, Raiks probably wouldn't be feeling defeated for much longer.

Annabelle switched Shadebreaker to 100% power, aimed it at Daraken's face, and pulled the trigger. But despite the sheer power of the blast, it didn't smash through Daraken's wards.

It did, however, draw Daraken's attention. He manifested a cloud of darkness around himself, an attempt to disrupt her aim.

She could utilize a Starsight field to track Daraken, but it would require moving closer into range.

Does Daraken know I have limited range on this, is he guessing, or does he not even know about this power? Maybe Nyxl gave him some hints.

Either way, she moved in, focusing her Starsight on the darkness cloud in an attempt to track Daraken and hit him again.

Then, her wards were slammed by a kinetic impact from the side, barely withstanding the blast. She refocused her Starsight, and quickly detected an invisible Daraken. At some point, he must have either flown or teleported to a flanking position, and had attempted to take her down with his own high energy shot.

Annabelle initiated telepathic contact with Daraken, partly to threaten his mind and partly to use her psychic aura as a tracking device. As she expected, she encountered a mental barrier.

Instead of wasting time fighting that defense, she instead fired a distortion beam at him. Somehow, it had no effect.

She followed up with a second blast from her railgun, which was again blocked by his wards.

How did you survive? Daraken asked that question to Annabelle through his own mental barrier, which was a bit of surprise for her. Her only response was a third shot from Shadebreaker, which the wards again withstood.

He retaliated with a bolt of black lightning, an attack that Annabelle could not evade. But her response was to aim Shadebreaker in such a way that the lightning bolt would impact the conductive armature of the weapon.

The lightning coursed through the weapon, before eventually being absorbed. A technological weapon would likely be rendered inoperable by a massive current, but with a weapon that was based around a magical power source, the rules were different.

Annabelle aimed the weapon directly at Daraken, and pulled the trigger.

The weapon exploded in her hands. Her remaining wards blocked most of the impact, but a large piece of shrapnel ripped into her abdomen.

However, it still managed to fire a projectile, fast enough that the projectile seemed to ignite the air. The shot obliterated Daraken's wards, and then the projectile and superheated gas obliterated Daraken's chest, shattering his invisibility. His arms, legs, and head each fell to the ground in separate pieces, along with a pile of gore.

Annabelle wasn't sure how he would transform now, but her question was answered when Daraken's draconic transformation began at his head and worked downwards, a dragon body and limbs growing outward from his neck.

Annabelle's first reaction was to penetrate Daraken's mental defenses, taking advantage of a brief gap in them to penetrate through and reach his mind. The barriers reformed after the dragon's head formed, but they couldn't push Annabelle out once she was got past them.

Her second reaction was to drop a vortex directly on Daraken's forming body, ripping it apart even as it formed.

But it wouldn't be enough to just destroy his body. If Annabelle wanted to make sure she never came back, she would have to rip his mind apart as well.

Somehow, despite being in the middle of a chaotic field of spatial distortion, Daraken's body managed to form enough to allow him to move. He dragged himself forwards, attempting to get out of the radius of destruction.

But at the same time, Annabelle began to dig into Daraken's mind.

Daraken made some effort to resist, but his defense was sluggish and half-hearted. In his mind, he kept echoing a single question: How did you survive?

Annabelle decided to reply. I engineered this weapon and organized a resistance to strike back against your patron's tyranny.

Wait, what? Daraken was acting confused, probably faking it.

And, I wrecked his infrastructure in the process.

We are working on incompatible information. Daraken claimed.

As they exchanged that information, Daraken had another surge of motion, pulling himself closer to the edge of the vortex.

I fail to see how this is incompatible information. You banished me to a hellscape ruled by a god of torture, and then you later banished several members of the Church of Helios as well. There is no other explanation.

No. That's not right. The spell I used to sabotage the portals was intended to sabotage the return path and result in instant death for anyone unfortunate enough to go through it. No torture realm was supposed to be involved.

Then what about your divine patron? Annabelle inquired.

I work alone. I have not been given any offer of allegiance by any divine entity. And I would refuse an offer from a 'god of torture'.

That's doubtful, Annabelle replied.

Wait. He's right. Omega interjected.

How so?

Nyxl sent an agent to help the Resistance defeat Daraken. Nyxl has also claimed that this world only became a viable invasion target after Daraken's apparent death. If Daraken was working with Nyxl, there would be no need for him to do that.

Wait. Omega was right. And Nyxl was lying, at least about that part of his claims.

Also, the Shades gain many of their victims from teleportation mishaps, the sort that normally result in fatalities. Daraken's deliberate sabotage was likely exactly the same.

One question, Annabelle asked Daraken. Is this what you meant by banishment, banishing me to nothingness?

No. The sabotage of your portal was different from the banishment I would have done for you, had you chosen to retreat.

Annabelle wasn't sure if he was lying, though. But, she would most likely need his help against the Shades.

Daraken made one last push to escape, before his body gave out and collapsed.

Well, it appears that you're right. Now, I'm still going to have to kill you, but I'll let you resurrect yourself again. You are capable of doing that, right?

Yes, Daraken said. Wait. Why are you letting me live?

I'm going to need your help. Annabelle gave him a massive dump of information, everything she had on Nyxl and his Shades. She also gave him her memories of the area around the cave, in hopes that Daraken would be able to use his deduction skills to figure out where the cave was and prepare an ambush once the Shades cleared away the rubble.

I will… prepare, Daraken replied, his consciousness faltering due to the damage he had sustained. I will open… communications… when you next leave… Sanctuary.

A moment after he finished that mental message, his consciousness winked out, as the damage he sustained from the vortex overwhelmed him. Daraken collapsed, lifeless.

Then, Annabelle descended to meet Raiks. Raiks said something, but Annabelle, still deafened from Shadebreaker's explosion, couldn't make it out. She quickly realized her mistake, switching to telepathy.

I attempted to finish Daraken off for good, Annabelle claimed. I attempted to destroy his mind to prevent him from resurrecting, but he was able to resist that attempt, and died before I could cause any significant mental damage. He will return.

What the hell happened to you?

Daraken's magic banished me to a hellscape ruled by Nyxl, an evil God. I managed to escape, and I even gathered new allies in the process, but I've also drawn the attention of a new enemy: the Shades.

Why are you using-

My ears were damaged by a point-blank explosion. Probably needs a healer to fix. Anyways, I've got info on a new threat.

Annabelle slowly gave him all of the information she knew about the Shades. Raiks wasn't sure what to make of it.

Too much has happened today. You stopped Daraken from wiping out the Resistance entirely, but he managed to capture Julia and many of her high-ranking church members in the process. Even with your help, we likely won't be able to stop him. And if we're also dealing with a new threat at the same time…

Annabelle had her own worries, but for a different reason. With the arrival of the Shades, she wasn't sure which side she was truly on.

And there's one more threat, an outside-context problem for a medieval society. They seemed like they were on her side, but maybe they didn't truly have her best interests in mind.