Pact: Restore the Silvervein and Riverwatch, Lay the dead to rest, remove the corruption.

  Pact difficulty: Extremely Hard.

  Pact Value: 105 Glimmer (Magnitude of Pact – 50, Clever Bargaining – 20, Ensuring Long-Term Consequences for a Mortal – 15, Gained a unique power – 10, Included Hidden costs – 10.)

  Glimmer Advance: 30.

  Dahlia read the System notification again, and again, and then a third time to be sure she had read it correctly. She hadn’t read it wrong at all.

  “Oh, for the love of Nyxaria’s shadowed wings…” Dahlia cursed. She should be thrilled—she had tricked a mortal into giving up a fragment of the sun! This was an accomplishment worthy of legends, of ballads, of whispered warnings among the Seelie and Unseelie alike.

  She would be a hero!

  But…. It wasn’t what she had planned.

  “Stupid mortal,” she muttered and glared at Tarik. The dangerous look in her eyes verged close to belying a fond exasperation, and Dahlia hated that too. None of this was supposed to have happened. She wanted to kick him. Hard. Really, really, really hard. With boots on.

  Dahlia’s dreams of a crimson tide, a butchered army of Inquisitors, a nightmare of blood and terror that would leave Riverguard Keep abandoned by the Inquisition for generations to come would never be realized now. Instead, she’d made a pact with an idiot who gave away part of the sun without hesitation.

  Why had such a moron possessed a fragment of the sun? Surely, as a druid, he had understood the potency of such a thing. Who gifted it to the Druid? Ra? Horus? Hathor? Sekhmet? It didn’t matter which god had given the mortal something beyond his understanding of, only that he had traded it away without a second thought—for what? Some clean water and restoration of a town without a population?

  Idiot!

  And now, a strange warmth flourished inside her. It crept beneath her skin like a spreading blight through a field, only it was sunlight intermixing with twilight. The two forces were playing together inside her body. She stilled and placed a hand against her collarbone to feel the echoes of old friends reunited within her.

  It wasn’t painful, and it wasn’t wrong, but it was alien.

  Racial Feature gained!

  Sun-Touched Fey

  A fey who has a sliver of the sun, merging twilight magic with celestial power. This fusion grants great power, but at a cost yet unknown.

  Effects:

  ΘSolar Necromancy—Your undead that typically weaken in sunlight are now unaffected by sunlight.

  ΘEclipsing Duality—More than ever, your magic straddles the realm of radiant and necrotic energy. You may modify your spells and abilities to become Radiant or Necrotic if they are not already.

  ΘAnomaly Among Fey—Fey creatures recognize something unnatural about you. Some will revere you as something ascended; others will reject you as unnatural, threatening the old ways.

  ΘLiminal Presence—Spells that identify Celestials or Fey will identify you as both. You gain an advantage when resisting Celestial Magic and abilities.

  Dahlia’s magic had always been incredible, ephemeral, and sharp—like the glow of a distant moon, the hush of dusk, or the piercing chill of a midnight breeze. But now? Now there was something else, and it wasn’t just a damned Divine Ring on her finger forged from the bones of a damnable material world, it was part of her.

  When Dahlia clenched her fist, golden-violet light flickered between her fingers. It twisted and shimmered, played and frolicked. She could practically hear the laughter of the spirits, too enthralled to be appropriately horrified like she was. Her violet lips curled.

  “Tch,” she hissed. Dahlia didn’t like this. Not because it was weak—oh, no, she could already feel the power thrumming beneath her skin, whispering in her bones, marinading in her marrow. She disliked it because it shouldn’t have happened this way, it shouldn’t have happened at all. A stupid, idiot, moronic, oaf of a man had given her a fragment of the sun, and instead of becoming a nice little weapon to wield against Deborah or other necromancers, it made her into something more.

  Something that other Fey would question. Something that the Celestials might notice. She’d become something even more dangerous than the heir of Lyrindris, something more damning than being the singular Soulshaper in existence. But… she couldn’t, entirely, put a finger on what.

  Light and shadow flickered around Dahlia unnaturally—golden hues bled into the twilight purples before fading.

  “Fine,” Dahlia growled. Her black nails tapped against her arms, irritation still filled her heart to bursting, but the corners of her lips twitched.

  If she couldn’t drown the Inquisition in a crimson tide, then she’d simply have to march into Riverguard Keep and kill them all herself.

  And now? Well, now she could do it in broad daylight. A slow, wicked grin spread across her face.

  “Maybe,” Dahlia mumbled, “there’s a bright side after all.” Pulses of golden magic hummed beneath her black nails.

  “What was that?” Tarik asked, frowning. He seemed to come out of a trance.

  “Time to finish our pact,” Dahlia said. She didn’t feel like talking to the exasperating druid.

  Dahlia kicked her boots off and wriggled her toes in the air before stepping onto the land. The cobbles of the courtyard were rough but pleasant against her skin. Cool, but not cold. The only unpleasant part of being barefoot was the blood, but that wasn’t a problem for her.

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  Tarik looked confused, but the druid was no doubt contending with the cost of his payment and not focused upon Dahlia. She coughed once, then again, so that he paid attention to her work. One should always witness what one pays for.

  Dahlia gazed at the unfinished work of the Scarlet Benediction. Malzareth’s twisted ritual lingered even in failure—a stain upon the land, a whisper of cruelty that tainted the air. The blood-soaked cobbles pulsed with divine remnants, a sickly red glow that flickered like the heartbeat of something which refused to die.

  It was not merely magic; it was judgment, branded into the soil and air, carved into the fabric of the world by a god who had looked down upon this place and deemed it unworthy. How hard had Horus even bothered to look beyond recognizing that his murderous thugs were calling for his wrath?

  If he had even looked at all.

  Dahlia’s lips curled aggressively, and her eyes narrowed. Her bare feet pressed against the cobbles, and the blood beneath her shuddered and squirmed as it sensed something not meant to be here—something not mortal, not divine, not anything that the ritual itself understood.

  Dahlia laughed and reached out—not with her hands, but with her indomitable will—and took hold of the ritual’s fraying edges. The magic tried to fight her at first. It writhed, hissed, tried to squirm out of her mental hands, it did everything it could to resist the touch of a being that had no place in Horus’ design. It recognized multiple ancient enemies in Dahlia—a fey’s trickery, a necromancer’s hunger, a thing too liminal, too in-between, too wrong.

  Dahlia’s smile widened.

  She pulled. The ritual screamed. A shockwave of crimson light rippled outward, distorting the air. The air spasmed with scents of iron and copper, honey and bitter melon.

  Tarik staggered back and raised a hand to shield his eyes as the very bones of Riverwatch—no, the bones of Nantes itself—trembled.

  The Scarlet Benediction wailed and thrashed like a wounded animal. It had been meant to stain, corrupt, and cause agony for hundreds of years. But Dahlia didn’t break the ritual; she unraveled it. Her black nails severed the knotted cruelty, teased apart the divine threads, and reduced its latticework into individual threads that had no power or purpose on their own. The paths of suffering, lines of pain and desecration, led her back to the source, the anchor of the ritual.

  Lord Graystone’s corpse.

  Even in death, the old man’s body held the weight of rulership, and that is why the inquisition had used his flesh as a conduit for divine retribution, his soul dragged into service as an unwilling martyr by the Inquisition. The Scarlet Benediction had fed upon him: on his blood, name, and soul's weight. He was the anchor.

  Dahlia clicked her tongue in annoyance.

  “What a waste,” she said. He had been kind. Had he not traded in the suffering of dryads, she would have felt genuine pity for him. But he had.

  The fairy’s bare feet pressed against the damp cobbles while she stepped up to his corpse and pressed two fingertips against his cold forehead. Divine power clung to him, but like the rest of the ritual, it frayed at the edges—like a flag too long in the wind.

  The Scarlet Benediction shuddered at her touch. It attempted to grasp another vessel, reaching for nearby corpses, but Dahlia’s fingers contemptuously pushed it back into Lord Graystone's vessel, and she pushed. She extended coils of twilight energy into the ritual and the corpse.

  The frayed and unwoven Scarlet Benediction could not contend with the merciless fey. It snapped. The ritual collapsed in on itself, threads of red light unraveling into nothing, divine power devoured by the unnatural fusion of fey trickery and gifted sunfire.

  The air boiled with the sound of prayers turned to ash.

  Silence ruled over the land for precious seconds.

  Nantes exhaled.

  The Silvervein’s waters, once tainted crimson, shuddered and ran clear. The courtyard’s stone and soil, stained by divine wrath, settled into peace. The smell of blood and rot thinned, leaving behind only the cold scent of a clean death.

  Dahlia sighed, and rolled her shoulders.

  “There, that’s done,” Dahlia said. She flexed her fingers and watched the last wisps of crimson magic dissolve into motes of gold and violet, consumed by light. The warmth in her chest remained, alien and unsettling, a reminder that she had not just unmade a ritual—she had taken something from it.

  Something important.

  Something that would not go unnoticed.

  “You look like you’re going to be sick,” Dahlia said to Tarik.

  Tarik didn’t answer right away. Instead, he stared at Graystone’s body, at the faintest shimmer of magic that still clung to the corpse. Tarik’s expression was tight, his jaws clenched, fingers twitching towards his belt as if he had to hold something, but he didn’t know what.

  “You didn’t just undo it,” Tarik accused. His voice was low, wary.

  Dahlia tilted her head, and a brief look of innocence crossed her face. “No?” She asked.

  “You stole from it,” Tarik’s eyes—once golden, now brown—flicked to regard her.

  “Oh Tarik, of course I did. I’m Fey.” Dahlia’s lips slowly crept into a smile. She didn’t even have time to revel in her victory before Tarik’s voice cut through the silence like a blade.

  “What did you take?” The druid demanded answers, but offered nothing in return.

  The warmth inside Dahlia twisted, not out of guilt, but because she was annoyed that Tarik, the moron who had put all of this into motion, had caught on so quickly. With deliberate slowness, Dahlia turned her gaze back to Tarik. The violet eyes now held flecks of gold, and an internal light was particularly noticeable in the darkness. She watched him, studied his rigid stance and bristling emotions.

  “I’ve taken quite a lot today,” Dahlia answered.

  Tarik’s hands clenched at his sides, but he kept his voice level, steady, measured—a man who had seen too much of the world to be shaken easily but was disturbed by what stood before him. Disturbed and intrigued. He couldn’t keep his eyes off her. Mortal men, Dahlia scoffed in her mind.

  “You didn’t just undo the ritual; you stole from it. So what did you steal?” Tarik asked again. His brown eyes shifted towards the corpse of Lord Graystone. The sight of Dahlia was too overwhelming.

  Dahlia chuckled.

  “Technically, I unmade it. And well, if something was left behind when it unraveled, what, would you have had me leave it and let it go to waste?” Dahlia gestured vaguely towards her chest, where the lingering warmth of the stolen sunfire pulsed beneath her skin. Coincidentally, this also illuminated her cleavage, much to Dahlia’s annoyance.

  Tarik’s jaw tightened. “You didn’t, did you?”

  Dahlia considered her options. Fey never lied—but a half-truth, something to placate the righteous little druid so he stopped alternating between ogling and judging her, might be what the situation called for. But then she thought of Nyxaria. She considered why she had been sent here, to this wretched world filled with god-touched humans. She mused how easy it had been to get Tarik to give her a piece of the sun.

  Most of all, though, she considered how much she hated being questioned.

  Dahlia’s smile faltered and faded, and when she spoke next, her voice was slightly chill and touch flat, without any exasperated fondness left.

  “Magic doesn’t just disappear. Rituals like this? Grand, divine workings? They have to go somewhere. They need a vessel, a direction, a purpose. So, I became that vessel.”

  Tarik blinked, but his voice lowered. “What does that mean?”

  “You…. Took the judgment of Horus,” Tarik said when the silence between them stretched too far. Tarik’s eyes widened, his heart beat madly, and he looked at the sky as if expecting a comet to strike them both dead at any minute.