Terreia Kalister had no idea how many Cursed to expect.

She had to admit she knew next to nothing about the current situation in the Free City. How many had died and how many still lived? How many Cursed remained in the city, how many had left to seek food elsewhere? Where could the highest populations of Cursed be concentrated? The Mayor's residence and the Pantheon were located right in the city's center; did that make it a high-risk area? Or had the Cursed mostly gone to the harbour, where dock workers, sailors, taverns and whorehouses had thrived? Surely the Cursed could find meals there.

She hoped there wouldn't be a horde of the beasts waiting outside once she and Audren got to opening the door.

"We need a plan," the lord had said when they'd locked the bandits up like they'd said they would. "If there are Cursed outside, it'll be impossible for us to get to the Pantheon's entrance unseen. The building doesn't have a door we can close, so we'd undoubtedly be followed inside. I think we can agree it would be highly inconvenient to request our favour from the Sun God while also fending off the undead."

Terry had thought as much. She mentally cursed the City Council for choosing an open temple entrance and never installing a proper door. She understood the reasoning behind it; that the way to the Gods could never be closed to anybody. Admirable, but not a useful ideology when it came to curses seeking to bring about the end of humanity.

"We could split up," she suggested. "I can use my magic to keep the Cursed out to the best of my ability. Meanwhile, you can make your plea to Solmar. It shouldn't take long, right?"

Audren frowned. "Do you think you can handle that?"

Terry raised a single eyebrow in reply. Her friends had told her it made her look intimidating. Judging from Audren's reaction, they'd been right.

"Not that I'm doubting your skills," the nobleman added quickly. "It's just… There might be many, and, well… You did say using magic takes a toll on you. What if you simply get overwhelmed?"

He had a point. If there were too many cursed, a very real possibility, she could only hold them off for so long. The situation could get ugly quite fast. Still, Terry was confident in her abilities and certain she could keep going a while longer. The magic she'd performed today hadn't been of the most complex kind and hadn't taken up too much energy. The real work was still to begin.

Besides, it wasn't like she'd truly be fighting alone.

"Do you have a better idea?" she asked. "If you do, I'd love to hear it. But in all honesty, unless you have another secret passage you can conjure up, I doubt we have another choice."

Audren still looked uncomfortable at the idea. "It doesn't feel right to leave anyone alone with the Cursed. There has to be a way for me to help you deal with them, and then we can go to Solmar's shrine together."

Terry sighed. Sometimes kind people were much more difficult to deal with than assholes. "I don't need any saving as of yet, Lord Audren, but your people do. So save them. Go to the shrine as fast as you can without waiting for me. I don't plan to die, so just trust me, the way I trusted you when you led us to the Mayor's Crypt."

That did the trick. While the lord didn't look pleased, he evidently saw sense her words. He nodded after a pause. "If you put it like that, I suppose… Fine."

Mayor Gilvertos' front door had been boarded up. To get outside, they had to break through. Terry saved her strength for later and let Audren take care of it. Using the mace he'd taken from the bandit leaders, the lord destroyed the planks that had been used to seal the inhabitants of the house inside and keep the undead out. When he was done, he dropped the weapon in disgust; it had killed his friend.

"Okay," he said, sounding not at all eager to go. "We need to be as fast as we can. I'm ready when you are."

Terry took a deep breath, overcame her own nerves. "I'm ready. Open it."

They stepped outside quietly. At once, the mage knew she wouldn't have an easy job. There was a group of Cursed roaming about the square the Mayor's Residence and the Pantheon lay next to. She estimated there were thirty, at the very least.

And already some had spotted the two humans who'd appeared before them.

"Run," Terry hissed at Audren, before quickly starting to utter the words of a spell; the one for fire this time. While Audren dashed off to his right, to the Pantheon, she focused on a brewery at the opposite end of the square. Far away, but it had to be doable. Alcohol burned. Precision wasn't of the essence now.

The flames she conjured up licked at Terry's insides; though she knew magic couldn't affect her physically, it didn't mean she couldn't feel her spells within her soul. The fire spell burned with the same intensity as the fire she created and was among the types of magic that hurt. So different from the water spell, with its rippling waves that could be gentle or full of rage.

The best mage, Terry reminded herself, is the mage who makes magic look painless.

But this wasn't the worst she'd experienced and she knew her limits. Setting the brewery aflame still lay within her capabilities. She watched as fire began to consume the building, spreading rapidly; the light and the noise it caused distracted most of the Cursed, if only briefly. They stumbled in the fire's direction like moths to a giant candle.

It bought her time. She didn't know for how long, but she intended to make use of every second she'd gained.

Terry sprinted to the Pantheon as fast as she could.

Audren had already disappeared inside, making for the Sun God's shrine. It fell to her to keep the Cursed off his back, to defend the temple's entrance. She knew just what to do, but hoped it would be enough.

It had to be enough.

She raced past the entrance instead of stopping there. It was the building's left side she needed to get to; she just needed to make sure she got back to the entrance before the Cursed could get to Audren. Speed, she realised, was key now.

The time to put her speciality to good use had come.

The Cemetery of Sacred Souls lay next to the Pantheon, where the truly dead could rest in the comforting presence of the Gods. Terry planned to disturb that rest and didn't waste a second. Vaulting over the low stone wall encircling the burial ground, she let her eyes roam over the many headstones to be found there. Unless her information was outdated, the people buried in this cemetery hadn't been exhumed and placed in the Caves, all thanks to a fear of angering the deities watching over them.

That meant there was more than enough material to work with. There wasn't enough time to try and find the best candidates for the job among the many corpses, though. All she knew was that it was best to fight the dead with the dead, any dead; grave situations called for grave solutions. Her gaze fell on a tall, worn gravestone, void of decorations.

It would do.

Terry ran for the grave, read the fading name on it with some difficulty. Ilarion Felderhof.

"Time to rise and shine, sir," she mumbled before effortlessly slipping into a spell. Not a spell she used often; the Mage's Association of Avondor forbade the use of it for anything but self-defense, which she had to be able to prove in court. But these days, there was no Mage's Association, no court, and she judged her and Audren's situation as warranting the spell's use.

The words came to her far more naturally than those of her simple elemental spells. Terry focused on the grave and the body with all she had; a mistake meant discomfort and the loss of more time. She watched the grave and modest coffin open before her, saw the remains of what had once been a person named Ilarion Felderhof. Old, dirty bones, only rags left for clothes.

Terry fell silent, braced herself. The worst part of the ordeal came now.

She looked into the skull's sockets, where the eyes had been, and, briefly, found herself immersed in the scene of Ilarion's death, seeing through his eyes. She stood in one of the Free City's numerous alleys at night, filled with fear. In a split second, a man, rage visible on his face, lunged at her, driving his dagger's blade flat between her ribs and into her lungs. She tried to scream, but couldn't get a word out; her attacker struck again, this time burying his dagger deep into the back of her neck and yanking it towards her spine.

There was no way she, no, Ilarion, could have survived.

Terry felt it all: the fear and panic that had rushed through the dead man in his last moments, the blood spilling out of him, the hot, stinging pain as it flashed through his body while he lost his ability to breathe and stand. In a moment of sheer agony, she bound the Ilarion Felderhof to herself by experiencing his death exactly as he had, putting her soul through the torture of dying without actually doing so.

The Necromancer's Price, she thought to herself. Raise the dead, die with them.

Those fire mages had it fucking easy compared to her. A little too late for a career switch, though.

"You just had to get murdered, didn't you, Felderhof?" Terry forced out, gasping for breath. Her lungs had never been anything but intact, but she felt like they'd been torn apart where she stood, pain lingering. She didn't realise she'd fallen to her knees until she became aware of her fingers digging into the earth beneath her. "You couldn't simply have died in your sleep and spared me the torture, huh?"

Ilarion Felderhof's corpse didn't reply, couldn't speak. It wasn't even him she saw in front of her; the man's soul still resided in the spirit world, comfortably unaware of his body's resurrection. His remains were simply rags and bones infused with magic, her spell having given it something she could only describe as artificial, a crude mimicry of a soul. The skeletal being before her was an undead soldier and a mindless slave, ready to do whatever she requested.

"That building over there," Terry explained, scrambling to her feet as fast as she could and jabbing her thumb at the Pantheon, "is what you have to defend. Find the entrance and if anything tries to get in, kill it. No mercy."

The corpse hobbled away, still getting used to its ability to move, but Terry knew it would get the hang of it quickly. And it would fight the Cursed until it quite literally fell apart; the soulless being had no desires or a life left to preserve In fact, it had no notion of concepts such as self-preservation at all.

She didn't particularly enjoy raising the dead. It would be so much easier if she could simply control the Cursed. Manipulation of the undead was less painful, less tiring. But Credi, the bastard, had stitched an element repelling necromantic spells into his dastardly, ingenious curse. She'd tried to manipulate the Cursed when on the ferry, but all it had gotten her was a headache splitting her brain like lightning.

Four. She could probably raise four more corpses before she'd need rest. Not quite an army, but it had to be enough to protect the Pantheon's entrance for a while. If Audren hurried up, they could survive, get home alive. She didn't dare believe the Sun God would give them something useful to work with. That kind of optimism wasn't in her nature.

Terry braced herself, focused her attention on a second grave and hoped for the best.