Defending the Athenaeum

The scepter that held the dark at bay had been drawn from its socket, and the dark came in at once. They fought to set it back — and before it was done, a woman had taken a god's shard into her chest, and a hunter had grown wings.

With Casper tol-Otheidas and Therion Calanthe dead and the Runt God uneasily quieted, The Enduring Lesser Lights took stock in the Celsian Athenaeum — and learned the worst of it: the scepter Draz carried was the very thing that fed the settlement's Sacred Pyre, and pulling it had left the whole compound naked to the Umbra. Heyou had stripped the unconscious Dean Therion Calanthe of a dozen rings, a stave, and a heavy quartz-and-bead pendant that proved not dead weight but a suppressor of magic, both ways at once — a thing he would slowly learn to cast through. Inola knew the circlet on Draz's brow for the crown of God-King Otheidas's heir, and marveled that neither crown nor Beast had refused him — it is in your bloodline too — and Draz, lost in lights only he could see, had no answer to give her.

With the scepter gone the bulwark had failed, and monsters came in out of the dark, and screams rose beyond the walls. Casper tol-Otheidas stood up again as an Umbral undead; and Dean Therion Calanthe began to stir, something burning behind his eyes. The party broke three ways — Draz, Jamal, and Inola for the pyre-tower; Dagga for the vaulted Stacks; Heyou and Sylvie to the risen dead.

Heyou and Sylvie cut the undead Casper tol-Otheidas down and threw him into the Runt God, which drank him up through a proboscis and ended him for good. Then Sylvie set her siphon on the possessed Dean Therion Calanthe and let the pull run all the way — drained him dead, and drew the raging thing out of him and into herself: a Godshard, a fragment of a god, angry and confused, that left her fear keener and more dangerous than before.

Running to hold the vault, Sylvie tore the Umbral corruption out of a crowd of transformed students like so much black smoke — cleansing them where she might have killed them, a thing none of them had seen in her. Dagga named The Stacks for what they were: the Athenaeum's hoard of lost knowledge and relics, a hedge against a dying world. And Heyou, his suppressor-pendant swallowing the deadly wards, went down into them — eight or nine levels of statues and tomes and half-mended relics, almost all of it humming with Splendor — and filled a bag with draughts and arcane shards and a parchment that copied what it touched, and more.

To reach the pyre-tower and set the scepter, Draz had to clamber up onto a rooftop and then across to the tower itself — and flaming skulls and umbral creatures came at him the whole way, a lightning-wreathed albatross wheeling among them. He drove through them single-mindedly and jammed the scepter home in its slot — took the bird's lightning through his body, and woke the Sacred Pyre. Then the Runt God burst out of the building and came for the tower, and Draz flung himself off the top of it to reach the creature; it struck him with a mote of its power as Sylvie's push turned his fall aside — and Draz came apart into the shape of a great bird, and caught the air for the first time in his life. The Runt God tore the albatross to pieces and cut the legs out from under the tower; Jamal caught Inola and bore her onto a rooftop as the span between came down; and Draz, winged now, fanned the guttering fire where it had fallen into the rubble. Dean Therion Calanthe was dead and his shard lodged in Sylvie; Casper tol-Otheidas was gone past all return; the tower lay toppled with its pyre sputtering in the plaza instead of blazing overhead; and a god was loose in the ruins of the Athenaeum.