Draconnic Shennanigans - Episode 22

Chapter 22: Rats! Rats! Twice as Big as Cats!

 Jeremiah had to admit that the dinner was acceptable. Most of the Ash Elves were still as stiff as old boards and closed mouthed but Estella was a reasonable cook and Thorian hadn't been too bad at chopping vegetables. Kaelin had even lent a hand with the peeling and paring of vegetables, with Lady Zilvra showing an interest in learning the technique. Apparently the high and mighty Matriarch of the Ash Elves of the Snake Clan had come to the conclusion that her only skill being how to give orders wasn't going to wash in the surface world and was actually willing to learn how to bow to the changing world, rather than force the world to change to her. Well, wonders never ceased.

Having packed away enough food to make up for at least two of the missed meals he'd been suffering from in the passed few days, Jeremiah excused himself to discover whether he could locate the library. The Ash Elves were suspicion but seemed too busy clearing out the dead from the werewolves' massacre to think about it for long. Granted them seemed to be managing to clean house fairly rapidly but Jeremiah did wonder why they were bothering. From what had been said in the kitchen, Zilvra was considering abandoning her ancestral home so why they were bothering to empty it he didn't know.

 Making his way down an outer corridor in the upper floors, he happened to glance out of a window, his attention captured by a pulsing blue glow.

The kervead's were still massed at the end of the bridge. Between them, geckos and spiders had beaten them back but the scavenging little insects were still swarming like some earth bound horde of locusts and the citadel's animal defenders were beginning to falter, undoubtedly stuffed to the gills and bloated to suffice. It seemed that the Ash Elves were rotating the duty of keeping up the effort to clear out what was baiting the insects and keeping up the powder barrier that was repulsing the insects where predators were failing.

Jeremiah frowned. They even had that Hatchling thing down there, picking out the large specimens of glowing scavenger from the swarm. Jeremiah tilted his head to see his own Ash Elf puppets come marching from the door of the citadel carrying yet farther of the more complete members of the fallen for disposal over the edge of the bridge. He frown again. One of them was carrying the corpse in its arms as if it had some care for the body it held. Now that shouldn't be. Jeremiah drummed his fingers on the window sill. His creatures shouldn't be showing any concern over the fallen and he remembered the song in Michael Azrael's magnum opus when the wizard's creations realized that they were their own creatures and they could chose. He turned his head slightly as he heard the deep thrum of a cello somewhere in the distance. Yes, that one bore watching closely. Maybe he should make sure that it was at the front next time they were involved in some fighting. That way fate and chance could make the decision, without him having to make the call on whether or not it was passed being valuable. Speaking of which...

Jeremiah spotted where his centipede was curled up, the unnatural stillness of it making the clean up crew give it a wide berth. He clicked his fingers and it trundled without wavering across the courtyard and out of the main gates. The Ash Elves cried out and half drew their weapons. Jeremiah smiled at the thought of the fun he could have with them and their little hatchling but then he counted them again. They weren't all there so soon enough he'd have the survivors after him and they knew this warren better than he did.

With a long suffering sigh of disappointment, he concentrated, sending the centipede rattling along the outside of the balustrade, stepping over the geckos and spiders clinging there until it contacted the outer edge of the swarm of the kerveads. The little glow bugs immediately pulsed with interested at this perambulating feast that willingly stepped towards them. When the centipede stepped on to the edge of the precipice leading into the chasm below the bridge the kerveads immediately attacked, latching on to its legs, swarming up on to its armor. Unconcerned by this attack, the centipede began its last march into the depths of the gorge, leading the swarm over the edge even as the kerveads' scissoring jaws began to pick it apart. Cloaked in shifting light, heading the tumbling stream of destruction, the centipede pushed on into the depths, its last journey traced in the ribbon of blue it lead, falling forever into the void.

Jeremiah waited and as he expected, a glowing blue skein of light unraveled up out of the void, unattached and uncontrolled by any mob of mindless bugs. He smiled as the power spilled towards him, slipping through the panes of the window without effort. As if the merely physical could control the magical. He drew a deep breath as the power pooled in his eyes and soaked in, the pleasing warmth spreading throughout his nervous system.

"Ah," he breathed, "That is ever so much better."

He watched the clean up crew settle back into their task, their urgency momentarily relieved by his centipede's death but still hurrying to clean the worst of the mess out of the building. He did understand it, a little. It was possible that, while the citadel smelt of all the dead bodies within it then the kervead's would continue to try and force their way over the bridge, which meant they would not be able to leave. That was an unpleasant consideration and Jeremiah turned away from the window. Now the library, now that was a much more pleasant consideration.

Ulrich helped carry one end of the stretcher down into the vaults below the citadel. Zilvra had chosen only two of her eldest brothers to help with the task, the others joining the rest in the far bigger task of trying to clean out the tangle of bodies that was strewn across the floor of the main hall. They had finally made it that far and Zilvra had taken on the task of finding all the bodies of the Matriarch and her council. Ulrich had found himself helping carry one of the stretchers they had mocked up to carry the dead down to their final resting place. Put of him objected to being just a pack mule but the other half was intrigued to see some where he doubted Top Worlders had ever been allowed to see before. Besides it was either this or find some way for his centipede to be useful. He'd told it to obey Kaelin for the moment and he supposed that was safer than telling it to obey Jeremiah. He wasn't sure he liked the fact that the fat priest had disappeared after dinner but as long as none of the bodies they were hauling away suddenly stood back up he'd be fine with it.

The vaults were actually a main chamber with only a couple of side rooms. They were mostly empty save for the columns that supported the massive weight of the citadel above them. Formed of dark polished stone that gleamed in the light of dim lanterns, the space echoed to their footsteps as, without speaking, they carried the Matriarch and laid her out in state upon the stone bier in the middle of the room.

Ulrich snapped his head sideways, catching someone watching them out of the corner of his eye but it was a relief carving on the walls, the image of a cruelly indifferent woman gazing down her nose at this scene of suffering.

There was a moment of confusion as the Ash Elves faltered, unsure as to where they could lay out the other members of the council that had been killed in the slaughter of their people and in the end Zilvra lowered her end of the stretcher, straightened, went across to the other stretcher and lifted the body off of it. Turning she laid it out on the floor beside the bier and straightened out the limbs, smoothing down the clothes. The two brothers with them looked at each other in confusion, or maybe it was shock, but they didn't say anything as they turned and headed back upstairs to collect the next of the fallen.

It was a long, slow job that was depressing in the extreme, not helped by the reliefs carved into the wall. There were plenty of portraits of Ash Elf Noblewomen and Ulrich suspected that they were passed Matriarchs. All of them were depicted as indifferent, cruel, uncaring and cold. In the glimpses he caught of Lady Zilvra's face he could see her trying to copy that look of disdain but every now and then distress would break through. By the end eleven bodies were laid out in total, five on either side of the bier, with the Matriarch holding the center to make the eleventh. They were silent as they looked upon the head of the Snake Clan laid low. Zilvra's fists were trembling and she was biting her lip that hard she was bleeding, whimpering as she tried to stop the water that shivered down her checks. Ulrich stood beside her, unsure whether he should touch her or whether that would result in her smacking him.

Her brothers went to one of the side rooms and came back with several jars that they opened and started to pour the white powder within over the bodies, the skin of the corpses being to sparkle as the dust settled over them, coating their still forms. They walked back and forth in silence, mixing the dusts, turning the dead pale with the coating of it. All the time they worked Zilvra stood, trying and failing not to cry, trying to live up to the expectations that had been molded on her from birth. At last they placed the last empty jar back in the anti room and came back to Zilvra. One of them handed her a fire stick. She looked at it for a long moment before she could bring herself to lift a hand and take it. Even then she stood for several more minutes before, with a strangle noise in her throat, she struck the fire stick and tossed it on to the bodies.

With a dry bark, the flames engulfed the bodies, bright white and searing, so hot they were near smokeless. There were no words spoken as they witnessed their people consumed down to ash, Lady Zilvra trembling as the flames burnt.

"What was the point?" she whispered.

"Lady Zilvra?" Ulrich asked.

"Just what was the point?" Zilvra asked again, louder this time, but he wasn't sure who she was asking.

"Just what was the point!?!" Zilvra screamed, whirling to face the uncaring faces on the walls, "What was the point of all the pain, all the cruelty? What was the point of telling me that it was necessary to be the strongest, the most powerful? What was the point? What have we gained? The approval of the Begetters? Well where are they? Where were they when you all died? Did they bother to come to save us? Did they care!?!"

Her brothers were backing away from her, while Ulrich stood, numb with shock but something told him that this had been building for a while, possibly for years.

"Just why?" Zilvra continued, "Why if this was the Begetter's will are you all dead? I'm left as Lady of a castle of nothing, a castle of dust and bones and nothing. All the damn promises and they are all nothing! I've given everything I cared about, I gave up my friends, my brother, I gave up what I knew was a better way just to make you proud and this is all I get! Nothing, a great big, steaming heap of nothing. Everything I did for the family, all the times I did what you told me was my duty and this is all it's brought to me! A dead family, a dead clan and a fastness of nothing! Well you can keep you rules, keep your ways and keep your damn, useless gods! I don't care any more! I... I..."

Her voice cracked into choking, screaming sobs and Ulrich caught her as she crumpled, landing on his knees as she shuddered against him in a messy sprawl. There was nothing else he could do as she bawled, great, racking convulsions that twisted through her with the pain of years. All he could do was kneel there and let her ugly cry until there didn't seem there could be any possibility of there being more tears within her and then she cried some more.

Behind them the fire burnt, consuming the head, heart and soul of the Snake Clan, turning to ash all that had been and had been carved as a course for the future, a course that would no longer be followed.

"I don't care. I don't care," she sniffled as exhaustion finally wore her out but Ulrich was fairly sure that she did care and that was the problem. She'd had to wear the mask of indifference for so long that she hadn't realized its weight until it had finally crumpled and cracked. She cared but she wasn't used to being allowed to care. She cared but had buried that part of her so deep that now that its grave had been ripped open she was red raw and bleeding, her soul skinned and flayed open.

A hand landed on his shoulder. He looked up to see her haggard older brother there.

"Let us leave this place," her older brother said.

"Excellent idea, old boy," Ulrich nodded and tried to move his legs. He grunted as the cramp and numbness bit.

"I say, good chap," he grunted, "Could you give us a hand here, I can't feel my feet at all." The Ash Elf looked up and said something in their lilting tongue. After a moment the other one arrived out of the shadows that were growing back as the funeral fire died. By main strength, they got Ulrich and Zilvra on their feet and helped them up the stairs. Once upstairs Zilvra asked if Ceann Mor could be brought to her. The dragon-spider hatchling was yawning fit to split itself when its body guard brought it up from the courtyard and once it had been spilled on to the bed it trampled a depression in the covers with all eight feet before curling up and going to sleep. Ulrich was fairly sure that Zilvra was asleep before her head hit the pillow. Once the door was softly closed behind them, he turned to the body guards of Ceann Mor.

"Would you be willing to stand guard here for a while?" he asked. They frowned at him.

"We," he looked at the two who had been with him in the vaults, "Need to... to clean... to clean the nursery." After a moment the eldest two nodded and one of them said something to the others in their lilting tongue. The guards nodded and took up their positions.

As Ulrich turned away, towards the staircase that he really didn't want to travel, he found himself at the shoulder of the most talkative Ash Elf. 

"Why do you wish to do this?" the Ash Elf asked.

"Don't want to," Ulrich admitted, "But it needs to be done. If we don't we are never getting out of here, those bugs will keep coming and this is not a job I would want to lumber on anyone else. I've already seen what is in there, it won't be a shock."

"But not pleasant all the same," the Ash Elf observed, "You surface people are strange. You would have fought us to the death in the Temple if the Lady Zilvra had not come to an accord with you and yet now you are distressed by the murder of our children."

"They were children," Ulrich stated, "Only the vile and the depraved harm children, any children. Even the Orcs and Orc-crossbreeds leave children alone when they come raiding. Anyone below twelve they leave untouched. Do you know what they say? They say that children are too good to spoil, which in their language means too good to permanently scar. Even orcs and Orc-crossbreeds recognize that children should be protected. Older than that and well, they expect you to be able to defend yourselves, women as well as men."

"That at least is the same as us," the Ash Elf nodded, "Lady Zilvra is good with a blade and I should know, I trained her myself. I do not know why you humans deny your women folk the right to defend themselves."

"Probably because too many men figure that if women could defend themselves then they wouldn't get a look in," Ulrich replied with a smile. There wasn't any smiling when they reached the nursery door. Ulrich stopped and had to stiffen his spine with an effort of will. What had happened here was beyond...

"There are somethings that need to die," he found himself muttering, "Somethings really, really need to die."

"So mote it be," the Ash Elf echoed, "So mote it be."

Ulrich turned and pulled out a thankfully unburdened sheet from where a cupboard had been tipped over.

"Can we take them down to the vaults?" he asked as he spread it out on the floor, "Throwing them... throwing them off the bridge... doesn't seem right."

The one who had been speaking to him, looked at him and after a moment nodded. The other was already wrapping a limp form in what was left of the bed clothes, the tears streaming silently down his cheeks.

It was an awful job and one that would give Ulrich nightmares for months afterwards. The stones of the bier were still warm when they laid the burden of the sheet on top of it, being careful to make sure that nothing rolled out and on to the floor. Part of Ulrich knew that the poor little bundles wouldn't feel anything any more but a great part knew that any such accident would just make it even worse, if that was possible.

The whole time the clan children were burning to ash he wanted to turn, to walk away, to leave and yet he couldn't go. He could only stand and watch as a generation disintegrated into dust and ash and the living learned what it was to cry.

It was only afterwards as they were making the long march up the stairs again that he spoke once more.

"Does the citadel have anything like a medicine area, potions, that sort of thing?"

The Ash Elf looked at him.

"I am going to need something to settle my stomach," Ulrich admitted, "Or that dinner is going to be a waste."

After a long look at the third member of their little troop, who hadn't stopped silently crying since they started in the nursery, the Ash Elf nodded and lead all them to a store room deep in the citadel. Going through the jars, Ulrich found several that were labelled specifically for spider bites. Those he pocketed before accepting the two bottles that the Ash Elf held out, one to calm the roiling in his stomach, the other to induce dreamless sleep.

Ulrich nodded his thanks and turned towards the area of the citadel he was told held the bedroom that were now free. No one had to comment about why they were now free.

Finding a modest one, Ulrich unbuckled his swords and let them drop. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he sipped down the potion to calm his stomach.

"Well here's a pretty kettle of fish," he said out loud to the room but to his father in his head, "You always said I would always run from my responsibilities. Well, here I am, helping clean up the results of a massacre that I didn't help create and teaching a whole people that they don't have to be absolute blackguards to get by in the world. Did any of our glorious ancestors manage that?" He drained the flat bottomed flask and set it down on the floor for want of a bedside table. With a heavy sigh he pulled off his boots.

"This has been a long and horrible day," he said to no one in particular, before he uncorked the second flask and downed the content in a single gulp. He barely got his legs up on to the bed as the darkness closed in on him, someone seemed to have connected lead weighs to his eyelids.

"Hope the others think to ask for some of that stuff," he yawned, "They... going...to... need..." The snore echoed round the room.

The library was as vast as Jeremiah had hoped and feared. Deep in the bowels of the citadel the arches of it had been carved directly into the wall of the cavern, creating a purpose made cave that sprawled in a mess of walkways and stone book shelves, some as a series of nooks for scrolls and some as shelves for books. There were small books and large books, tiny books that looked like private journals and great tomes so big it would have taken two people to lift them from the stone tables on which they rested.

Jeremiah ran a hand along a shelf and rubbed his fingers together. No dust so they had been rigorous in the care of the library but no scholar or mage came out of the shadows to challenge him so he assumed that they had all been killed with the rest of the clan. The mighty brought low, now that was appealing. If only he'd been able to have a hand in it. He wondered if there was any way he could come to his own accord with the beasts. He glanced at his arm. Maybe little Kaelin had out smarted herself. If her bite could be used to slow the beasts down long enough for them to listen to him then maybe he would be able to offer his serves to them. After all, Kaelin's grandfather did seem to have rather grand vision for the future, a vision at odds with the current King.

Jeremiah smiled as he wandered his way further into the maze of dark stone stairways and book cases carved into the walls, his way light by Hat's glow as the Moth rode on his miter.

Ways and means, ways and means. If he could make his own agreement with the werewolves, well then, there were all sorts of ways he could get back at King Tatsuya for sending him on this ridiculous quest, him and everyone else who had ever slighted him, Jeremiah the mighty. Jeremiah's smile widened he knew exactly what he'd offer the pack in return for their services and it would rid him of Kaelin's provoking presence at the same time. After all, it was about time she learnt that she should honor her father and grandfather all the days of her life. He stopped and frowned round at the library. This was going to take too long. Tied as he was to this ridiculous party of misfits he didn't have time to spend in here. They would want to leave, well he would say in the morning but, mornings and nights had little to no meaning down here, were the only light was candles and lanterns. Hat clattered his wings. And the occasional very useful moth, Jeremiah added to himself.

A flock of squeaking, fluttering things whirled passed him, chattering in their high pitched voices, hunting the insects that would have damaged the books if they had a chance. Jeremiah wondered if their were any bat clans among the Ash Elves. Not that it mattered as Kaelin's grandsire seemed set on destroying them all.

Jeremiah paused on a staircase, one hand on the railing, the other hand stroking the spines of the books set in the wall on the other side of the steps. Hat clattered again and Jeremiah smiled, flexing his fingers and beginning to weave the magics together.

The light in Hat's eyes blazed more brightly and he launched himself from Jeremiah's miter, whirling away through the cool air of the library, leaving behind him a glowing blue trail that Jeremiah followed as he huffed and puffed along. Deep in the library he turned a corner to find Hat struggling to haul a regular sized tomb out of the bookcase. Jeremiah grinned, a feral, ghastly grin, as the green covered book fell into his hands.

"Ah there you are," he said to the book, fingers tracing the remains of the embossing on the orc-crossbreed hide cover, "Now I wonder if you were made from one of Thorian's relatives. Wouldn't that be just delightful? A fitting enough punishment for the times he has tried to make me look ridiculous." He turned and looked back the way he had come through the library. "And now I have all three and now we will see what fun we can have."

He took a couple of steps forward and then stopped. Just which way was it to get out of the library?

Kaelin helped lift her own wheelbarrow and then helped lift an Ash Elf's wheelbarrow and tip it over the edge. Thorian wrapped his arms around his own and tipped it over the edge of the balustrade. At least there was no noise when what they were moving fell into the void of the chasm below the bridge. Hearing them strike the bottom would have made it all just so much worse. As it was the glow down there was swirling into bonfire heights, if a bonfire was made of blue flame and utterly silent. Again, something she was grateful for, the blessed silence of not being able to hear the bugs begin their work of breaking down the fallen. She had kept a close eye out for any more of Jeremiah puppets as an Ash Elf had whispered to her of the centipede's weird behavior and the trail of light that had spun up out of the void after it had disappeared into the depths, set on its own death march by a will not its own. Kaelin noticed that smaller members of its species were now come to the feast of kerveads, carefully picked off the light bugs from safe perches. Any other reason they needed to do this job and get away as quickly as possible. The kerveads were the bottom of the food chain so a massing of them like this was going to result in every predator the Underworld had gradually being pulled towards here. First it would be the small predators, like the geckos and young centipedes, probably even rats as well, but then the larger and larger carnivores would scent a meal and come looking, until carnivores large enough to threaten them would show up. Then it would become a horrid spiral of them killing or being killed and their deaths pulling in more kerveads and so the circle of scavenger to predator to prey would go round and round and round. It was possible that this massacre was going to disrupt the food web system down here for years, maybe even decades. 

There were days, she reflected as she lifted another corpse into her wheel barrow, in which she fully understood why just about every living creature hated werewolves. Her kind were chaos makers. Where ever her kind ran, disruption and upheaval came in their wake. They were like magnets for it, or maybe they even caused it, just by existing. No, she decided as she looped her arms under the torso of one of the fallen, while a still living Ash Elf lifted the feet, no just by existing, by hunting, hunting without restraint or care for the balance of the world around them. Hunting with only the fever of more and more and more pulsing in their veins, more prey to chase, more flesh to rend, more blood to spill. Killing more than they could eat, just because they could kill and kill again and again, the moonfever burning in their blood, urging them to...

She lifted the piece of a body and dropped them into the wheel barrow and stopped, staring at nothing.

"What's up Kaelin," Thorian called as he lifted the handles of his own barrow to take it outside to the bridge. He recognized that look on her face. A big think had just struck her and she was working out how to say it.

"It isn't full moon," she said.

"What?" Thorian frowned.

"It isn't full moon," Kaelin stated, looking round at him, "New moon, the time of the black sky, that was only three days ago, so we are no where near the full moon." She grabbed the handles of her wheelbarrow and lifted it, talking ad walking at the same time.

"Yeah," Thorian frown as he trundled along beside her, "And that means... what?"

"That Greely shouldn't have been able to wake the beast," Kaelin stated, "He should have just been a man. And as for the new ones, they definitely shouldn't have been able to make the change."

"But you do," Thorian pushed his lower lip out, "You make the change."

"I know," Kaelin struggled to explain it, "I was born with this curse. I am a born werewolf, I've been changing ever since my first day. I've never had a choice but to be a werewolf, its all I know but because I was born with it, it has affected me in a different way. I can call the wolf up, whenever I need to but I can't fully change. I can't go full on wolf. I'll always be bipedal, even when I've called up the beast and I'm not as infectious as a full werewolf."

"So Jerry isn't going to start howling at the moon?" Thorian asked.

"No, no he won't," Kaelin said regretfully, "He'll just have some very bad hair days. And maybe an urge to bark on occasion."

"Oh," Thorian thought about it for a moment, "Shame."

"So how do these others, these werewolves as you call them, differ from you?" the Ash Elf working with them asked.

"Full on, infected werewolves?" Kaelin replied, "Bigger, stronger, and with less mind than I have when I change. When I've let the beast out of his cage, I can still recognize my friends and allies. Full on werewolf? Not a chance. Particularly the recently changed with just kill and kill again until there is nothing alive in their area and then they'll charge off hunting for more. The only ones safe are fellow werewolves and they'll pack up with people they don't even like when they are human, or what ever they were originally."

"So what has changed?" the Ash Elf asked.

"They shouldn't be changing at this time of the month," Kaelin informed them as they creaked round the spiral leading to the front door, "That was one of the reasons Grandfather wanted to breed as a creature should breed, rather than just increase the pack by infecting new ones. We puca born might be weaker than an infection made werewolf but we can change when ever we like once we're old enough to control the change. Infection made werewolves should only be able to change at the times of the full moon, the high tides." She changed her description. The Ash Elves would have no idea what a full moon was but Ulrich had told them about the fate of the Clan Keep of the Kraken Clan. If there were underground seas, then they would have tides and therefore the tides would be greater at the times of the full moon.

He thought about it for a while.

"I think I see," he spoke at last as they tipped their grizzly burdens over the wall of the bridge. It was probably disrespectful but the mortal mind couldn't keep being locked on to the grief and distress of their current tasks, it had to find a distraction and talking about what Kaelin had worked out was as good as any. "So some how they have found a way of violating even that unnatural order, so they can change when ever they like."

"The very old ones like Grandpa gain that ability as they age," Kaelin informed them as they headed back inside, "But only when they are very old and not many werewolves live that long. If they aren't killed off by normal people then they are killed off by the pack itself. Fighting, well, its a way of life among werewolves."

"That I can understand," the Ash Elf said unexpectedly, "It is much the same among us. For the women it is different but for us, we have to fight for every breath we take and every meal we eat. It is only if we please a woman and have her favor that we are safe. No one wishes to anger a woman by slaying her current favorite."

"Current favorite?" Kaelin asked, "What happens to her old favorites?"

"They are either traded away, given to a sister, becomes one of her guards, or well," he shrugged, "There is always death."

They reached the main hall and started lifting bodies from the piles that were being stacked up at the foot of the stair cases. It was a way of making the task efficient. They used the barrows that had been found while the rest of the Ash Elves scoured the citadel to discover the bodies. The only blessing was that most of them would be near the main hall. The Ash Elves wouldn't have run, they would have clustered and fought, like another pack defending its territory. There was no life outside the pack or clan so they would have fought to the death.

"That's the other thing," Kaelin heaved up one of the battered werewolf corpses, "They should have turned back."

"I do not follow you meaning," the Ash Elf piled his barrow high with loose pieces.

"The werewolves," Kaelin lifted another and dumped it in her barrow, "When they die, they should have turned back into who they were when they were infected, they shouldn't stay wolf."

"And yet these have," the Ash Elf lifted the head of one of them and gazed at it. He lowered it and shuddered as Jeremiah's puppets marched passed him, two of them dragging their burdens, one carrying it with more care.

"How do you stand to be around those things?" he demanded.

"Not out of choice," Kaelin stated, "But this is the clan I've been forced into so I don't have much choice."

He was silent for a while and then spoke as they turned again to take the bodies outside. "That I understand."

Kaelin had no idea how late it was by the time the rest of the Ash Elves reported that  they could find no more bodies in the rest of the citadel but she could tell from their faces that they were angry about something.

"What's going on?" she asked the one she'd built something of a friendship with.

"There are not enough bodies to account for all of our people," his face was set in grim lines, "And we are missing the children."

"The children?" Kaelin frowned, "But the nursery..."

"The babies of our clan have been murdered but the children of our people are missing," his face was forbidding, "As are many of our women folk and our younger warriors. You said that you had just found the village when we were in the barricades, what did you mean by that?"

Part of Kaelin wondered if their accord was about to be broken.

"The numbers of my Grandfather's pack have been increasing beyond what they should have..." she trailed off and swore, "They've changed when they are infectious!"

"What do you mean?" the Ash Elf demanded.

"An infection made werewolf should only be infectious itself at the times of change, at the high tides," she snapped, "They aren't only changing when they shouldn't be, they are infectious when they shouldn't be. Hellfire! This is going to Hell in a hand basket!"

"Your Grandfather has infected our women, our children and our young warriors!?!" the Ash Elves were turning ugly.

"Yes!" Kaelin snapped back, "And I don't like it any more than you do! I thought I'd killed that son of a harlot years ago and I am sick to the back teeth of finding out that I didn't!"

That silenced them.

"You tried to kill your own Grandfather?" the Ash Elf asked after a moment.

"Yes!" Kaelin snarled, "I hate that son of a witch! I hate what he is, I hate who he is, I hate how he treats everyone and everything around him as his playthings! If you wrote the word hate on every stone in this building it would still not be enough to show how much I hate him! I wish he was DEAD!"

The stones rang with the echo of her shout. The Ash Elves stood watching her.

"If that is so," their spokes person said, "Make sure you kill him and we will consider the Blood Feud between our people settled. You have a turning of the tides to make sure it is done."

"Oh it will be," Kaelin's voice was colder than Arctic ice, "It will be."

There was nothing more any of them could say after that so Kaelin went in search of a long, hot bath. She didn't usually bother with getting washed and certainly not with baths but the smell of death was clinging to her like a shroud and besides, it was the principle of the thing. Her grandfather couldn't stand baths, they weren't of the wild, so laying back in the hot water and allowing it to plaster her hair to her scalp was a symbolic flip of the finger to his memory.

Afterwards, she headed up to the kitchen again. Thorian was deep into having supper but Kaelin found that she was still too wound up to eat and went to find a bedroom, preferably one with carpets on the floor, a big fire place, a book or two and the biggest, softest bed possible. She knew it was petty, trying to stick one in the eye of an old mutt that wasn't even there but right now she was feeling petty. She even went digging through the wardrobes to see if she could find a change of clothes. Her old ones were well passed needing a launder and they were wearing thin anyway. She tried on a few of the clothes. They weren't bad, the under shirt and trousers at least. A little long in the arm and leg but a sharp knife and a quick tacking job had that sorted. She looked in the mirror and liked what she saw. Going to close the wardrobe door something caught her eye. She pulled it out. It was a sleeveless, hooded jerkin of black leather with some very interesting designs worked on it in black thread. She liked it. She liked it even more once she'd put it on and buttoned up the front. Smiling she pulled the hood into place.

She let out a very undignified 'Eeep!

Stepping closer to the mirror she waved a hand. An empty room gazed back at her out of the mirror. Looking round she snatched up Haggis and gawped like an idiot, despite the fact she couldn't see how ridiculous she looked.

In the mirror Haggis hung in midair, apparently levitating of his own will.

"Parp pah putt?" Haggis asked.

"I know," Kaelin stated, "This is funky. I wonder..."

She flipped the hood bag and reappeared in the mirror.

"Oh," she grinned and flipped the hood back up. She vanished from the mirror again. She flipped the hood back and appeared again.

"Oh this is fantastic," she grinned.

"Purp," Haggis agreed. Kaelin put her hood back up and vanished again.

"Oh this is going to be fun," she said to no one in particular as she reappeared once more. Still grinning she shut the wardrobe and walked across to the bed. This development opened up all sorts of possibilities.

She stretched out on her side under the covers and yawned. Well, time enough tomorrow to settle her score with her grandfather.

Estella wandered through the halls, her six remaining talisman flitting about her or riding on her shoulder, gradually herding the scattered craftsmen together and towards the kitchen where Thorian sat up to greet them with one of the Ash Elves to try and convince them that Estella wasn't going to eat them anytime soon and that they were free to leave. It would probably be a good idea for them to at least walk with the Ash Elves until they were out on the surface because the wildlife down here was not friendly at the best of times but they were free to leave after that.

Valodrael purred at the memory of some of the wildlife they had come across at the start of their exploration of the Underworld.

"I would have thought that those werewolves would have been more to your taste," Estella observed in her mind, even as another part of her mind listened to what the red finch was chirruping to her.

"Oh yes," Valodrael gurgled, "They were delicious but that basilisk was a new flavor and I like it."

"You are such a glutton," Estella said in the vaults of her mind even as she smiled, apparently at nothing. Her talisman cartwheeled through the air together, happy that their mother was pleased about something.

"Ah but what other pleasures have I to pursue while I am waiting to have another body?" Valodrael bubbled, rippling under her skin, "You know I can't be out for long enough."

Ahead of them someone scuffled in the shadows and bolted, the talisman following them for a little way out of curiosity.

"They are so funny when they do that," Valodrael burbled, meaning the bolting craftsman, "It would be so funny to chase them."

"Aren't we?" Estella asked as she skipped down a corridor, the toad talisman croaking in her ear as it clung to her shoulder.

"Yes but it is so slow to chase them like this," Valodrael churned, "I'm talking to harry and hustle them. To run and sprint and CHASE them!" He rippled again, suppressed instincts fighting against his containment.

"In time," Estella promised him, "As soon as I find a source of talisman wood large enough. Then its just a matter of discovering the right runes to sustain the containment. I'm sure that's what went wrong last time, you're too much of a load for talisman magic to support on its own."

"Just as long as you are sure that this time we will get it right," Valodrael grumbled, "The last time nearly snuffed me out. I haven't survived nigh on five centuries to be ended on the verge of regaining my freedom."

"I don't want you to die either," Estella admitted, "You're the only friend I have."

"Am I?" Valodrael sloshed as they prompted the last craftsman down the necessary corridor for them to reach sanctuary, "I thought that you and Seraphar were friends. After all, she is looking after..."

"You know," Estella nodded at nothing anyone else could see, "You are right, you are my closest friend and I'm not going to let you get hurt trying to cut us free from this very messy dynamic."

She 'borrowed' Valodrael's sense of the area around her. She was fairly sure that all the craftsmen were safely either in the kitchen or heading in that direction. She stretched and turned. She'd seen a very nice looking bedroom back aways and wanted to try out the bed. She should have had an adults bed by now. Even if her time in the nursery hadn't been cut short, she should have had a husband and an adults bed by now. Well, that hadn't happened and wasn't going to happen. What came of being broken merchandise.

Valodrael growled and the talisman clustered closer, sensing all was not well.

"What is it?" Estella crouched, looking round, instantly alert, trying to sense what had Valodrael's hackles up.

"What you were thinking," he snarled in the vaults of her mind, his anger making her heart pound, "If the gods were just I would have been able to eat him as many times over as he had made you cry!"

"Yeah, well the gods aren't just, that's why they are gods," Estella observed, "And speaking of such..." she crouched and peered carefully round the corner. Jeremiah was smiling and humming to himself as he came wandering done the corridor. The talisman squeaked collectively and dived for Estella's satchel. Estella glanced round and saw that there weren't any doors she was going to reach before Jeremiah turned the corner. She didn't like the priest. There was something about him, something that put her in mind of her father's friend and that made her stomach churn. She pressed a hand to her middle to calm the sensation. She straightened and drew a deep slow breath. Taking another she flattened her self calmly against the wall, folded her hands in front of her and took another. Still, quiet, calm, still as shadows, as quite as stone. To stand so still that she was the wall, the wall was her.

Jeremiah was humming a happy tune under his breath as he rounded the corner and wandered along it. Pushing open a door, he smiled and stepped into the room, shutting the door behind himself.

At the corner, a piece of the wall breathed out and became Estella Blackwood again. She glared at the door Jeremiah had gone through. The talismans peered out of the satchel and peeped nervously.

"Are you sure I cannot eat him?" Valodrael growled.

"As much as I think the world would be a cleaner and a safer place without him at the moment I think committing what would be straight up murder wouldn't help our relationship with the others," Estella's mouth was a thin line.

"He smells of blood," Valodrael hissed in her mind, "He smells of murder."

"Maybe but I have heard a little about these King's Specials, none of them tend to be what you would call law abiding people and unfortunately the talismans are only seen as things, not people so the most we could get him for is willful destruction of property," Estella explained, "Not good enough to excuse murder. However, if he lays one finger on me then you can eat him all you want."

She turned and walked away down the corridor. She'd pick a different bedroom, one that was further away from Jeremiah.

"We will have to hope that he does that soon," Valodrael grumbled.

"What?" Estella blinked in shock. There had been times before, especially when she was younger, when they had used her youth to draw all the wrong sort of people to her, just so Valodrael could feed on them and cleanse the world at the same time but it had been a while since Valodrael had suggested that they do such a thing. Estella had thought it was because she was getting older and therefore growing out of being bait for such people.

"The smell of his god is stronger upon him," Valodrael rumbled, "He has a complete collection now. The door creaks, do we want to be there when it opens?"

"Considering I have no idea what you are talking about," she muttered.

"The god thing that the priest makes his offering of suffering and discord to," Valodrael bubbled, "The priest now has all the keys to open the door to his prison and he is eager to escape. I do not think that the priest realizes what he has tied his soul to."

"And you do?" Estella replied without speaking aloud.

"Oh yes," Valodrael purred and growled in the same breath, "My father was there when he was sealed away, he told me the stories. It will fun to see the priest's face when the truth will out."

"But how likely are we to survive?" Estella asked.  As much as Valodrael cared for her in his own way, his idea of fun could sometimes be rather distorted.

"All the more reason to hope that he makes his move soon," Estella felt Valodrael's grin, "If I eat him before the door opens then his god can scream all he likes."

"If you won't possess him because of the smell of his god wouldn't eating him be even worse?"Estella asked as she closed a bedroom door behind herself.

"His god acts through him," Valodrael turned in her mind, "He would fight me for ownership of his puppet. He is stronger than I am but he can't control things outside of his puppet's flesh, only act through him."

"So the puppet can die," Estella nodded as she encouraged the talisman to come out of the bag and explore the room, "And if the puppet is dead..."

"His god has to start all over again," Valodrael grinned, "I wonder how he'd like the taste of failure for a change."

"Indeed," Estella turned to the bed and stretched, wondering if she should warn the rest of the King's Special. Then again she was new to them, they were in two minds about her relationship with Valodrael and more than a little scared of both him and her. That and there was already a far amount of distrust for Jeremiah in the King's Special, if she was reading the room right. Probably best to leave well alone, she decided as she unbuttoned her jacket and laid it on a chair. A sudden squeaking and a clatter made her turn round.

The talismans had pulled something off of a dressing table and were dragging it over the floor towards her. Estella walked over and picked it up. The appeared to be a heavy bracelet made out of gold and set with beautifully cut and polished gems. She smiled and slipped it over her hand so that it hung round her right wrist.

"What do you think?" she asked her little friends. They squeaked and bounced round her feet. She tipped her head listening to their chatter. Frowning at the bracelet she saw what they were talking about. The bracelet had a rotatable middle band that could be turned to change the patterns on the surface. She gave it a turn and the lines of gold around the emeralds shifted into a new position. The gold glowed, warm against her skin, spilling light out from a series of points to make a map of runes round the band.

"What the flip!" Estella squeaked herself and the talismans went into raptures, cavorting round her feet, swooping through the air. Then the bat winged cat smacked into her cheek and tumbled to the floor.

"Ow!" Estella exclaimed, lifting her hand to her face and then dropping to her knee, "Oh you pour dear, you..." she stopped as she realized that she couldn't see her own hands. "What?" she gave the bracelet a frantic twist... And the talismans squeaked again as their mother popped into existence in front of them again.

Estella hummed to herself, ignoring the feeling of Valodrael chuckling at her. She picked up the bat cat, popped it out her lap and twisted the bracelet again. She disappeared and the bat cat wriggled frantically over on to its feet, hissing lustily as it stood apparently on thin air.

"Well that is useful," Estella smiled as she turned the bracelet off again, "Now to bed the lot of us. Long day ahead of us tomorrow." She burrowed under the bed clothes and closed her eyes as the talismans settled around her.

It was hard to know when he woke up. That was something he hated about this underground land Jeremiah decided, he hated the fact that it didn't have proper time. He lay in the bed, listening to the dark. This daft citadel of stone didn't even have the decency to creak and groan like a proper house did. It was just silence, with the barest sighs from the multitude of bugs that still shifted and poured in the chasm outside...

Jeremiah rolled off the bed and came to his feet as the war pick smashed down on the pillow, sending feathers into the air. Through the blizzard of down, he saw something hop on to the bed, chattering in a guttural tongue, its silhouette distorted by two huge bat like ears. Beyond it others moved in the shadows.

Jeremiah barked a series of words that tasted of blood, his fingers flicking through the air.

The things screamed as the stream of white hot sparks engulfed them and rendered them down to the bone. Jeremiah was just beginning to grin when the fourth one bounded out of the corner it had be sulking in and shrieked at him. The sound was more a ripple of force, the air distorting in front of it and rolling towards Jeremiah like a tide.

"Klu'ga-nath!" Jeremiah howled back, spitting blood. The thing reeled as that power filled name bounced it attack back at it. It shook its head hard enough to make its ears flap and then focused again, raising its war pick in a fist. Jeremiah was already there, flicking the bed sheets up and over its head, wrapping the end he had in his fist round it and pulling it tight, entangling the writhing bundle. It yelled with muffled anger.

The thing writhed and wriggled, kicking and screaming. Jeremiah seized his mace of office from the pile of his things, tipping them on to the floor and smacked the flailing heap as hard as he could. It yelled and there was a long sounding rip as the point of a dagger burst through the cloth and tore it open. The thing shook itself free of the cloth and stood up. Jeremiah smacked it again, a fleshy sounding thud.

Else where in the citadel, Kaelin rolled over and sniffed in her sleep. In another bedroom Ulrich slept long and deep, blessedly dreamless. Thorian snored, flat out on his back, sounding like a saw mill in full swing.

Jeremiah yelled as the thing rolled to its feet a second time. Blast it all, where was any help when he needed it? The door was thrown open by his three puppetted Ash Elves. The thing stopped advancing towards Jeremiah, turning to face this new threat, unsure about these Elves with glowing eyes. As one the puppets drew their swords as they marched into the room. The thing howled and leapt.

It batted aside the first sword and the second but the third slammed into its chest that hard it was lifted off its feet. The squirmed for a moment and then hung limp. The Ash Elf tipped it off on to the floor.

Jeremiah stepped towards it. It definitely had something in common with the goblins but the ears were too big, the arms too long, the nose squashed to its face in a folded triangle and it was the wrong color entirely. Jeremiah scratched at his beard and then he smiled. Lifting his hands he began to chant.

Once the little abomination was standing silent and with glowing eyes, he waved them all outside before turning to how they had managed to sneak in. One of the lead glass windows flapped on its hinges. Stamping across to it he went to pull it shut and realized that there were no scratch marks on the window sill. Frowning he peered all round the frame and finally spotted the scratch marks on the lintel of the window. Some how the little creeps had climbed down the outside of the fortress and opened his window from above and very professionally it was done too. They hadn't broken a pane but managed to slide something through the gap to wiggle the catch loose.

Jeremiah banged it closed again and turned back to the bed. The bed. The bed with no pillow and no sheets thanks to the little monsters.

None of Jeremiah's puppets made any change of expression as the door to his bedroom banged open and he stomped down the hall until he found a bedroom on the inner corridor that was both unoccupied and thankfully windowless. Without a sound they took up their stations outside the door as Jeremiah banged it shut.

Ulrich wandered down to the kitchen the following 'morning', if such a thing existed in this place, drawn by the smell but as he came closer to the kitchen his nose wrinkled. There was something most definitely burnt going on. It was a good thing that the long years in his father's house had taught him how to control his expression because other wise, when he looked into the kitchen, he would have burst out laughing.

Lady Zilvra stood at the range prodding at something that was burnt on to the bottom of a pan.

"Good day to you, my lady," Ulrich could help but smile, "What troubles you today?"

She frowned, that delightful pout that made the end of her nose turn up.

"Humans do this... cooking... thing all the time," she pocked the black lump with a wooden spatula again, "It does not do this."

Ulrich didn't trust himself to speak for a moment and before he could rally something that he could say without laughing at her  he felt a prod in the small of his back.

"Step aside," Thorian instructed and walked up to the range, hooking down a frying pan as he did so. Ulrich found himself suitably impressed as the orc crossbreed set to work on the breakfast with a skill and a flair he would never have expected. Slices of meat and bread were soon sizzling in the pan as there didn't seem to be any eggs or bacon. As he found himself putting the ever pouring kettle on the range to heat through Ulrich found himself reflecting on the fact that the Ash Elves might find the change in diet did them good as well. From what Zilvra was saying as she took lessons on cooking, the Ash Elves did have access to things like eggs, cheese and bacon but they were high class trade goods, stolen from the world above and therefore reserved for people like the Matriarch. There were vegetables down here but by the sounds of it they were tough and tasteless.

Kaelin wandered in part way through the breakfast preparations with a face that was ironically hang dog. Without saying a word Ulrich poured her a cup of tea and spooned in a generous bloop of honey.

"Do you have any idea how expensive that is?" Zilvra wasn't overly pleased that it was being dished out freely.

"In the Underworld? I confess I do not," Ulrich admitted, "But on the surface world it is more readily available and for those that do not appreciate having to wake up it is something of a tonic. Here, please try it." He poured out a second cup. Zilvra picked it up and sniffed, unconvinced. She took a sip. She sipped again, trying the flavor more thoroughly.

"It does improve the taste," she admitted.

"There is much to be discovered yet," Ulrich smiled at her.

"Indeed," she agreed and was then distracted by the flock of talismans that flew through the door as Estella walked in and slide on to the end of the bench. The craftsmen who had been steadily joining them, promptly shifted up the benches, as far away from her as they could get. She pretended not to notice and seemed to be keeping Valodrael from giving any one a jump scare.

Kaelin was beginning to look half way human when Jeremiah wandered in, dressed in a new set of trousers so he had been raiding the wardrobes and cupboards of which ever room he'd found for himself. More pressing was the fact that he was trailing something waist high, bandy legged and long armed with huge ears. Zilvra dropped the frying pan she was holding at the sight of its purple and black tiger striped form. Thankful it was an empty frying pan but the clang it made echoed around the kitchen.

"Where did you get that?" she demanded.

"It and its little friends came to pay me a call last night," Jeremiah smiled, "I presume you know what it is then."

"That is a Vigor," Lady Zilvra actually lent over to study its face more closely, "I never thought I could see a real one so close and not be fighting for my life."

"Oh, would you prefer it the other way?" Jeremiah lifted a hand.

"Perhaps it would be a better idea to ask her why she never thought to be this close to a live one and not be in deadly danger," Ulrich suggested, stepping up to Zilvra's shoulder and laying a hand on his sword.

"It is because they are some of the best assassins that were ever created down here," Zilvra answered Ulrich, not giving Jeremiah time to speak, "The Bat Clan created them years ago and where then driven forth from the Underworld for their appalling lack of judgement."

"Lack of judgement? What were they trying to create?" Kaelin's tone was wry as she eyed up the snubbed nosed thing.

"They were supposed to be an improvement upon the base design of the goblins," Lady Zilvra explained, still staring at the Vigor as it stood unmoving, glowing eyes not registering the presence of others in the room, "Smarter, more agile, they were said to be able to see in the dark and their screech is known for knocking their targets insensible. They proved to be too smart, violently intractable and they rebelled from their creator's guidance, much like the lesser species and the traitors did to the Begetters."

There was some shifting among the crowd in the kitchen at that but Ulrich glanced round and shock his head. Yes what Lady Zilvra had just said was insulting but it had been barely a day since she had made the decision to leave behind all the training that she had been undergoing since she was born. Decades of thinking in a single way were not easy to leave behind and she was highly distracted by the presence of the Vigor. He'd had words with her about it later, for the moment he too wanted to know about Jeremiah's new pet.

"What happened after they escaped their bondage?" Ulrich inquired.

"They have been a plague and a pestilence upon the Underworld ever since," Zilvra straightened from her scrutiny of the Vigor, "They are assassins at the beck and call of orcs and goblins, though what is traded for in return for their services we have ever been able to ascertain. They kill from the shadows and fade back there without trace. I have heard stories that say that they ply their trade upon the surface world as well. They are like vermin, we stamp out one nest and think we have completed the task only to have them rear their ugliness else where again, killing the worthy as if it were a sport."

She turned at last to Jeremiah.

"Who did you upset so much that they were willing to crawl down whatever den of filth these things call home to hire their services?"

"I honestly have no idea, my dear," Jeremiah spread his hands wide, "I am as much in the dark as you as to the truth of these matters. Although, saying that, they gained entry to my bedroom via the window, which had been left unlatched  by persons whom shall no doubt remain nameless." He looked at Kaelin and beetled his eyes brows at her. Kaelin ignored him.

"Don't look at me," she said as she shoveled breakfast into her pie hole, "I don't even know if you went to bed before or after me, let alone which room you were in and I wasn't about to start looking. I'm not that desperate."

"I too would believe that the window was securely latch when you sort you repose," Zilvra supported her, "The Vigor are known for being extremely deft with locks and latches of any kind, another reason they earned their creator's our censor. Nothing is safe when they decide that they want to possess it."

"Well then," Jeremiah's eyes gleamed with an unholy joy, "I do believe that in that case I will be keeping my unpleasant little friend here. I believe that he will be extremely useful to me in the future. The only question now being what shall I call him."

"Stabby MacStabface?" Kaelin suggested, taking a swing of her tea. Jeremiah closed his eyes and took a deep breath with the air of one eternally asking for greater strength. Thorian sniggered from where he was standing by the range.

"As much I am sure that there are some members of our team who are immature enough to be amused by your juvenile antics, Kaelin," Jeremiah said, "I and the more intellectual members of the group prefer a name with some measure of sophistication."

"Oh," she swallowed her mouthful, "It's sophistication you want." She sat back.

"Er?" Thorian hesitated, "What's so-fish-tic-cake-tion?"

"Fancy pants ness," Kaelin tossed over her shoulder before folding her arms as she looked at Jeremiah. "If it is fanciness you're after how about Karma."

Jeremiah frowned.

"I'm sorry, my dear, but I am afraid I don't quite follow your logic," he admitted.

"You may remember a certain ally we had made not long after we came up into the mountains in the first place? Short, green, large ears, named after the first place he nearly died?" Kaelin folded her arms.

"No, can't say I recall..." Jeremiah shook his head slowly.

"He held the lantern for you to treat Ulrich's arm after he was bitten by the spiders," Kaelin glared.

"No, still isn't..."

"Blast it all!" Ulrich exclaimed, "She's talking about Stink of the Midden! The goblin you murdered to fuel your pray to whatever god you happen to be praying to."

"I wouldn't say murdered," Jeremiah smiled, "After all, murder only happens if it is a person who is killed, if it is an animal it is a sacrifice."

Kaelin surged to her feet but was stopped by Thorian's hand on her shoulder.

"He ain't worth it," the big orc crossbreed said with a disgusted look at Jeremiah, "He ain't worth it."

"No I'm not worth what ever petty retaliation she can think of, my dear Thorian," Jeremiah agreed, "I'm worth far more than anything her feeble mind can come up with, am I not, my dear? After all, retaliation would only be possible if she could think like a human and not a dog."

Thorian turned away and picked up the cleaver and set about chopping some root vegetables with unnecessary force, while Kaelin sat back down and picked up a knife. She started stabbing it into the table top, digging it into the wood grain, gouging deep cuts into the table top, glaring at Jeremiah all the time.

"Of course you know I am correct my dear," Jeremiah smiled, "After you, you did the last rights for Stink of the Midden yourself. It was a rather touching gesture, though wasted on a beast."

Kaelin stabbed the knife so deep in the table top that it stood there quivering after she let the handle go.

"You didn't get all the goblins," Ulrich said quietly, not sure he could keep his voice level, "Two of Stink of the Midden's friends got away. I'd say you left a loose end dangling there old boy."

"Oh I wouldn't say so," Jeremiah smiled, "After all, that would require goblins to be able to have friends and any proper person knows that is impossible. Their kind can't have friends, they don't know how to. It is probably something to do with their deformity making their brains defective."

There was a resounding crack as the cleaver split the chopping board in half.

"I'm going to check whether the bridge is clear," Thorian muttered as he left the kitchen. Without a word Estella swing her legs over the bench and left as well, Kaelin rising to join her. Ulrich and Lady Zilvra stood up to follow them, so the rest of the Ash Elves copied them out. After a moment the craftsmen strangled out after them.

Jeremiah smiled and sat down to have breakfast all to himself.

As it was he had plenty of time to catch up with them. The craftsmen had to be fitted out with their own packs and the other three of the King's Special explored the rest of the storerooms to fill their packs to over flowing with items. They were not going to be going short on provisions on this leg of the journey, even if some of the food items came from species that they didn't recognize.

Gathering in the courtyard, no one inquired if anyone had told Jeremiah that they were ready to leave so they were both mildly disappointed and unsurprised when the Vigor staggered out through the main doors, weighed down by a pack nearly twice its size with Jeremiah strolling along packless behind it, he three puppeted Ash Elves following after him.

"Should have guessed," Kaelin muttered, "Some stinks like to cling to those that don't deserve it."

"And some people don't like to take a hint," Thorian added, "Even if you say it louder than words."

The Ash Elves were standing with the craftsmen, who looked nervous about traveling with their once captors, especially when the group with the Hatchling came out of the citadel to line up with the others. The Hatchling seemed to have grown from the size of a small house cat to the size of a large house cat overnight and was now riding on its minder's back with its head craning over their shoulder.

"We will head for this place called Nether Wallop," Lady Zilvra was saying to Ulrich as she tucked a white piece of cloth in her pack, "I will speak to my little brother before we go on to this Wizard's Tower and see if he has any knowledge of the upper world that will help us. I also need to tell him the fate of our clan. It is not going to be an easy thing to tell. I..." She faltered.

"I think that your brother will think that you have done the best thing possible for the future of your people," Ulrich took her hand, "I know that the other Matriarch's would not approve of such a decision but they have not been faced with such circumstances as you have been. Traditions only protect a people as long as the standard that created them is maintained. When the circumstances change so must tradition or they become a curse driving their people to extinction."

She smiled at him.

"I feel that I am the most under prepared Matriarch in our history," she admitted, "And the most sorely tried. My mother would have a convulsion to know that I draw strength from the words of a lesser being but I find myself wondering if that is why we are now faced with this. If all we can do is take from others who is really the lesser?"

She looked at the craftsmen with a puzzled frown and Ulrich squeezed her fingers. She would learn, that was the main thing. Yes some of her words and belief systems were insulting but she was willing to question them and learn to change them. Yes, it would take time but she had been in this one track mind set for so long it would take awhile to change it. He frowned when he realized that four of the Ash Elves were standing by Kaelin and Thorian.

"A safe guard," Zilvra dropped her voice as she set a glance in Estella's direction, "Just in case your guide turns out to be less trust worthy than we think she is. All I ask is that you come back to me. My people will be horrified but I wish to see you again."

"In that case, I will do my utmost to return to you my lady," Ulrich smiled and bowed to her, "Until we meet again, adieu."

"I..." Lady Zilvra bit her lip, "Oh Begetters take it!"

"My...?" Ulrich started asking and found himself being most thoroughly kissed, his arms full of Lady Zilvra's trembling form.

The world was being to spin by the time she stopped and Ulrich found himself grinning a little foolishly.

"Just come back," she whispered fiercely before stepping away to cross to where the other Ash Elves were waiting for her and taking Ceann Mor up on to her shoulder. Turning to look at Ulrich once more she then lead the way across the bridge where the animal defenders of the citadel were mopping up the stragglers of the kerveads. Below, in the chasm, the blue light pulsed and followed as the corpses of Snake Clan and werewolf alike were consumed. Lady Zilvra refused to look down.

"Having fun?" Kaelin asked as they crossed the span.

"Oh what?" Ulrich asked, still grinning a little foolishly as he swung up on to the back of Peter the Centipede.

"Oh never mind," Kaelin muttered.

"What?" Ulrich asked again, still grinning and then Estella turned her head to grin at him and he had the uncomfortable feeling that another one was also grinning at him, one that had far more teeth and appetite than was comforting. He shivered, suddenly utterly sober.

Estella laughed and turned back to leading them into the maze that made the Underworld, her little talismans flittering around her.

They seemed to be making better time than they had in the days before, between Estella's guidance and the Ash Elves' knowledge of the dangers of their subterranean home leading them passed many dead ends and some of the move aggressive denizens of the Underworld. The party though was not without their worth as Kaelin remembered the light sticks Risgath had given them. Though the 'lights - regular' didn't burn with the searing bright light Jeremiah had used at Black Randel's cabin, they were more than bright enough to light their way and the Ash Elves took care to not look at them directly, the white glow brighter than they were used to.

It was as they were walking own one tunnel that an Ash Elf put his hand on Kaelin's wrist.

"Douse the light," he commanded and despite Jeremiah's half mutter protest, Kaelin immediately up ended the stick into a patch of dirt immediately smoothing the radiance and clapping the dark of the underground down on them.

Only it wasn't completely dark, a blue-purple glow lighting the way ahead. Cautiously they made their way towards it. As they drew closer and they eyes adjusted to the different light they saw that it was patches of some sort of leafy plant growing out of the damp ways of the branching tunnel, spreading fronds that glowed in a graded shade of blue at the tips of the lacy fern like branches to a lilac purple at the base.

"Tell me, are these pretty things any good for eating?" Jeremiah asked, stretching out his hand towards one.

"Only if you wish to turn your stomach inside out and then throw up your skull," one of the Ash Elves drawled.

"My good sir," Jeremiah smiled but withdrew his hand, "I do not believe that such a thing is possible."

"Really?" the Ash Elf asked with a nasty smile, "Why don't you try it and find out then?" His grin suddenly fell off the front of his head.

"Ah," Jeremiah smiled, "I think in this case I will bow to your greater wisdom." He matched action to words but the Ash Elf didn't pay him any attention.

"Oh this isn't good," Thorian went to draw his sword but then didn't, hitching up his trousers instead.

"My dear Thorian..." Jeremiah started.

"Just shut up," Thorian snapped, goosebumps rising on his arms, "Just shut up and started stamping! These ain't the usual sort of rats!"

"What?" Kaelin asked, staring at the twin swarming tides that were running towards them.

"They only got one eye!" Thorian yelled as he started jumping up and down, trying to aim his boots at the patches of floor covered by wriggling, furry bodies. Kaelin gaped as she saw what Thorian meant. Instead of the two eyes the rats should have had, one on either side of their heads, these rats had one huge eye in the middle of the top of their heads, one great, blood shot eye that popped and goggled. Kaelin yanked Haggis round and blew for all she was worth. The rats screamed, a horrible compound noise, like the shriek of a frightened crowd but they kept coming.

Jeremiah dug frantically through the pack on the back of the Vigor, hunting desperately for something he remembered seeing when he had packed it. With sweaty fingers he found the globes marked 'for rats'. With a yell he threw one and it shattered just before the feet of his Ash Elf puppets. The stink that rose made his eyes water for a moment. He made his Ash Elves march through it and the rats flinched back from the smell but then the vermin tide came on.

Ulrich drew his sword and flourished it, grinning as he realized that his left arm was finally no longer hurting.

"Charge!" he yelled and kneed Peter the Centipede in the... chitin. The Centipede surged forward and Ulrich lent over sideways sweeping the flat of his sword through the swarm on the left, Peter backing it up with his hundreds of legs, stamping hard enough to impale a couple of rats on his many feet, breaking that swarm in two but the shrunken swarms did not run. Instead they swirled and reformed, great arched teeth bared in hissing challenges.

Estella took one look at the swarm coming up on their right and twisted the bracelet, vanishing from sight.

"Looks like our so called guide thought this little blip was above her pay," Jeremiah sneered and then went pale as a liquid sucking noise filled the air.

A black wave of sludge rushed, apparently out of some point by the wall, into the tunnel and heaped up into a quivering, crunching, oozing mass that stretched and twisted and surged with a tendon cracking, splintering noise into the shape of a dragon with a hide made from the dead space between stars and eyes were light went to die, reality bending and straining to contain him.

"I didn't know we were having lunch out," Valodrael swilled, a tongue the shade of nightmare flickering around alabaster fangs.

Jeremiah rolled his eyes. Some people where given to being overly theatrical. The rats on the right flank understood the situation a lot better, seeing an predator that out weighed every cat in existence suddenly in front of them, their fur shifting to white, the terror shaking through them as Valodrael's world ending eyes lighted on them and a sound of hunger rumbled up from his belly.

"Well," Kaelin said tightly, locking her muscles into to place to stop herself from running, "You don't see that every day."

"Oh Mama," Thorian whimpered, fingers flickering in as many gestures to ward off evil as he could remember, his efforts to jump on the swarm momentarily forgotten in the face of Estella's friend. He'd heard what the others had said about Estella hosting a dragon but he hadn't understood what they had meant. It was worse than anything he'd imagined.

"Nice of you to join the party!" Ulrich laughed, high on sheer reckless abandon. Zilvra's Ash Elves hurried around him, stamping with all their might as the rats swirled and squealed. Valodrael chuckled, a slushy, dirty sound.

"Its Thorian time!" Thorian yelled and threw himself in a perfect body slam on top to the right hand swarm. There were some gristly  crunching noises from below him and the swarm broke in two. One half promptly recoiled and crawled over Thorian, making him yelp and yell as it bit and nibbled. The second half coiled in a circle, members falling back and rubbing their snouts, squeaking as the repellent Jeremiah had thrown burnt their noses and singed their fur.

On the left flank there was much yelling and squeaking and waving of arms as rats tried to swarm up the trouser legs of Zilvra's Ash Elves  and Ulrich yelled as one leaped as he swung down and attached itself to his hand by biting clean to his knuckle bone. He swiveled on Peter's back and smashed it against the wall until it let go.

With a roar Thorian surged to his feet and stamped twice, red light growing in his eyes.

"Nasty, horrible, little bitty biting monsters!" he roared, "What we ever do to you? You could have left us alone!" The rats screeched back as he stamped on their tails.

Estella's talismans whirred above the fray, piping and whistling for their owner as Ulrich and his mount missed stamping on any rat below them. At his side, Zilvra's Ash Elves kept the rats from consolidating their efforts, their sharp toed boots kicking rats left and right but the little vermin wouldn't take the hint, driven on by some will beyond that of an ordinary rat, their single eyes popping and goggling until it looked like they would start from their heads.

Valodrael drew a breath that rattled like a freezing gale in the rigging of a doomed ship and then breathed out a wave of black cold that left a layer of dark ice slicked over the stone of the tunnel and froze several rats to the floor, cutting on of the secondary swarms in half, the survivors crying out as they blundered in two smaller swarms, they bulging eyes milky with a darksome cast and they bumped into each other, too stunned by their sudden lose of sight to use their noses.

Thorian jumped and stamped at the swarm milling round his feet, shaking his feet between each jump, trying to dislodge the rats that attached themselves to the boot leather over his toes.

The two swarms on the left flank milled and squawked but couldn't make good on the damage done to Ulrich. Behind him, unseen Jeremiah put himself as far away from Valodrael as he could without leaving the safety of the group. He turned from checking that the dragon hadn't noticed his move to realize that he had been so distracted by its appearence that his puppets had just stood there in a row, like targets at a coconut shy.

"Get back to work!" he ordered, red in the face.

"You call yourselves rats? Ha!" Kaelin barked, trying to distract what ever will was driving the rodents, "I've seen more impressive hamsters!"

Several rats, from different swarms, reared on to their hind legs and shrilled that her mother mother was the hamster and that her father stank of elderberries!

"Well really," Kaelin exclaimed.

Jeremiah fished through the pack on the Vigor's back a tossed another flask of the repellent at the swarm closet to him. It yelled as a single beast and the rats swirled in confusion, choking on the smell coming from each other's fur. Seeing that swarm distracted, Valodrael turned his head and traced a symbol in black ice on the floor. The swarm facing Thorian screamed as the collective paws of the rats froze to the bare stone, skin turning black as the ice rose in beautifully deadly needles over their toes.

"Now I'd try and insult you at this moment," Kaelin called out, "But I'm finding it hard to find the words to describe how utterly useless you are." Unfortunately her attempts to taunt the will behind the swarms upset the talisman instead and they flocked at her, twittering and tugging at her hair. "Ow! Get off! I wasn't talking to you!" Kaelin yelled.

Panting with the effort, Zilvra's Ash Elves kept the swarms by Ulrich reconsolidating.

"How much longer... must we... do this?" one asked.

"You're doing better than Jerry's friends," Ulrich called encouragement, "I don't think his have done anything for the last ten minutes." Jeremiah glared but whether that was in response to Ulrich calling out his puppet's performance or because of the nickname Ulrich had just use, Kaelin couldn't decide.

"Mash them!" Thorian's big boots went to work on the rats frozen to the floor in a series of broken crunches. But he was the only one, the living Ash Elves were tiring fast and their stamps were mistimed and the rats swirled around their feet unharmed. Estella's talismans dived towards her as she reappeared.

"Yes, yes," she reassured, "I love you all too, sorry for scaring you like that. No I not... oh honestly, now is not the time for this." She frowned forbiddingly as they tried to cling to her. "If you want a cuddle get rid of that lot!" She jabbed a finger at the swarm threatening Lady Zilvra's Ash Elves, seeing just how tired they were becoming. She realized that they probably hadn't slept more than a couple of hours the night before and it was taking its toil. With chirrups turned mean and edged the talismans dive bombed the rat swarm, raking with claw and tooth.

With one last toot, Kaelin gave up on trying to magic the swarms. What ever was driving these pests, it was stronger than she could match, even with Haggis' help. She tried to wiggle in to help Ulrich and the living Ash Elves but struggled to find a gap in the leaping, jumping mess.

Valodrael suffered no such hindrance, his greedy gaze falling on the swarm of blind rats he had not frozen to the floor. They had clustered together for reassurance in their suddenly darkened world, the touch of others of their kind bringing comfort as they tried to work out where the fighting was going on. Their noses kept twitching towards Valodrael, his scent of cold, fresh night overwhelming all the other input their scene of smell could pick up. His claws flexed on the cold stone of the tunnel floor as he prowled towards them, savoring the moment as the rat swarm began backing up, nervous of the thing they could smell approaching them but could not see. A tongue, impossibly long for the mouth that contained it flicked out to lick at eager chops.

The rats squeaked and several widdled out of fear.

Valodrael struck, maw gapping impossibly wide to engulf the enter swarm in one go, rats draw into the fang edged jaws by a force, a vacuum they could not fight. They screamed as Valodrael tipped back his head and gulped. Jeremiah shuddered as he watched the wriggling, fighting mass sliding down Valodrael's long throat, his whole neck bulging with the thrashing mass, the rats rippling under the night dark skin like fish inside a pelican's pouch. He was unable to tear his gaze away as one rat swelled under the oil like flesh of the back of Valodrael's head, the surface stretching until it looked fit to split, every detail of the rats agonized, silent scream visible, paws out stretched, scrabbling for a hand hold that didn't exist. Then the rat's skull began crumbling, flesh and bone melting, disintegrating, the sharp details of its out stretched tongue becoming soft and squishy before fading and vanishing directly into the black flesh of its killer. Valodrael rumbled with satisfaction.

Near Thorian's feet a clump of rats turned tail and ran squealing and screaming, the sharp smell of their panic filling the air as they fled. Thorian went to follow them and yelled as a rat bit deep into his calf muscle near the back of his knee, the rodent's teeth grinding together in rage. An Ash Elf also cried out, rats gnawing through their clothes to get at the flesh beneath.

The rats round Ulrich and Peter the centipede struggled to land a solid bite but Ulrich and Peter also struggled to hit the smaller groups of rats left, Peter nearly tangling his legs in the effort.

"Just what does it take to hit these things?" Ulrich demanded, "We had less trouble with the werewolves!"

"I hate little foes!" Thorian bellowed, "I hate, hate, HATE little foes! Give me big foes! Give me foes I can hit with mah sword! Give me a foe I can hit! Not these scrawny, squeaking piddlers!" His boots kicked several rats sending them flying through the air but they bounced on impact and flipped on to their feet, fangs bared in hissing challenges.

Jeremiah fished out yet another globe of rodent repellent from the pack on the Vigor's back. The blue eyed goblinoid silently bent so that its knuckled braced on the floor and with stood the fuss without a murmur. Jeremiah swung his arm and smashed the globe full in the middle of the swarm by Ulrich, some of the rats falling to the floor choking and gasping, eyes bulging as they struggled to breath passed the fumes, some of their fellows fleeing one way and some the other.

"Oh this is ridiculous!" Kaelin snarled as she watched the two groups of rats swirl and turn back to snarl at them all, "This is getting frustrating!"

On the other side of Ulrich and Peter an Ash Elf cried out as his foot slipped out from underneath him and he landed on his backside.

On the other side of the knot of tunnels Valodrael struck out again, snatching up several rats that vanished, squealing, into his maw. He shuddered as their wiggling forms slipped down his throat, purring as his tongue flicked through the air.

Jeremiah twisted his fingers through the air, muttering a pray until he could unleash it on the nearest group of rats he could see. They squeaked, milling in confusion as each squealed that there was either the nicest smell ever or the biggest predator ever coming towards them. Ulrich took advantage of it slapped them with the flat of his blade, confusing them even further but they still didn't run.

"I've had enough of this!" Kaelin screamed, bones crackling and refusing into new configurations. Rats screamed and squealed as she laid into them like a terrier in a rating ring, spines cracking between her teeth, bodies tossed into walls, furry hide parting round her claws.

Thorian glanced round as Valodrael's tail flicked near him and then smiled as he had an idea. He lunged forward, grabbed the end of the tail and yanked, intending to swing the big dragon like a flail. Instead Valodrael's tail tore free at its base with a ripping, gurgling sound.

"You dare touch me!?!" Valodrael hissed but Thorian was carrying on with his initial plan, swinging the tail like a whip, lashing at the last swarms of rats in front of him, the black sinewy length disintegrating in midair, splattering the rat swarms with thick black gloop. The rats howled, a shockingly loud sound, their flesh sloughing off the bone, their cries turning liquid and bubbly before falling silent.

"Oh," Thorian stopped swinging, "I didn't know that it was going to do that." He stared at the puddles of mush where the rats had been moments before. Something hissed near his hand. He looked down and yelled, flicking the last length of the tail away from himself, shaking his hand to make sure that not one drop of acid was left on his skin.

"Ah, ah, ah," he half yelled and half gasped. Something moved near him. Thorian felt himself go cold as Valodrael stalked passed him, the cold of the night sky breathing off his hide. There was a very unimpressed rolled to the dragons shoulders as he paced to the puddles of gunk that had once been his tail plus some very unlucky rats. As he set his feet in the puddles the muck surged up over his claws, crawling up his legs until it could flow over his skin and rebuild his tail from the base up.

"Er," Thorian gulped as Valodrael's eyes of perishing light turn on him, "I'm in trouble, aren't I?"

"Seriously?" Estella asked over her shoulder as she urged her talisman on with their efforts to disrupt the swarms of rats still attacking Kaelin, Ulrich and their allies, "You pull a stunt like that and don't expect to be in trouble?"

"Um?" Thorian mumbled as Valodrael stalked up to him, slamming his snort into Thorian's sternum, making him fall back into the to the wall of the tunnel as Valodrael's tongue uncurled and lapped up the side of his face.

"Oh yuck!" Thorian exclaimed but found his urge to squirm away cut short by Valodrael's claws pushed up against his stomach. Valodrael smacked his lips.

"You taste..." Valodrael paused.

"Um... tasteless?" Thorian guessed hopefully.

"Not worth my time," Valodrael sniggered and pulled his claws away, swinging round to walk up to his favorite girl. Thorian slid down the wall and sat there shaking for a while.

There was a scream as the Ash Elf who had fallen to the floor was swarmed under by rats.

"Oh hell!" Ulrich yelled and pulled Peter the Centipede over side ways in a move very like some dressage moments, causing Peter's many, many feet to trample over the swarm, even while the other Ash Elves struggled to heave their comrade up off the ground. The Ash Elf screamed and writhed and bucked and shrieked and then finally, blessedly fell silent.

"Oh hell!" Ulrich yelled again and then ducked on instinct as something large, hairy and thoroughly peeved off vaulted over his head. Kaelin smashed down on top of the wriggling heap that had once been an Ash Elf and was now merely a pile of blood slicked rats. Said rats screamed under her weight and then screeched again as her arm flung them against the wall. Sweep after sweep threw rats across the tunnel, smashed them into walls and crushed them into the floor.

"You see Thorian," Jeremiah called over, "That is how you are supposed to help a friend, not by sitting there on your butt." He did not mention the fact that he himself was stepping away from the combat and calling up his body guards as Valodrael prowled nearer to him.

"Oh shut up," Thorian muttered, "I did this side didn't I? Even if some of you didn't like the way I did it."

Valodrael turned his head to glare at Thorian and then snatched up a rat that lay writhing with a broken back, flicking it to the back of his throat before he swallowed. Seeing this Jeremiah decided to walk further away from the Void Dragon.

"You know something," he smiled as he walked over to Thorian, "You are right, my dear Thorian and I should apologize. I was being most inconsiderate. Please forgive me."

"Ah shut up," Thorian muttered, rubbing his ears, "I have a head ache coming on."

With one last squeal the last rat perished beneath Kaelin's boot. With a grinding, cracking crunch she forced the beast back into his cage.

"Is he...?" she asked but the Ash Elves were already wrapping their comrade up in a mixed of his tattered cloak and the blanket that had been rolled up in his pack.

"Damn, damn, DAMN!" Kaelin punched the wall and then wished she hadn't as her knuckles started to bleed.

"Such things happen in this realm," one of the other Ash Elves said, "It is the way of our land, though I have to say that this is the first time we have lost a comrade to such small creatures as rats." He bent and picked up a rat that had been flattened.

"It appears that they have been tampered with," he stated, turning it so they could all see the single eye glaring even in death.

"This is not good," Ulrich observed to no one in particular.

Draconnic Shennanigans - Episode 21

 Chapter 21: The Void Likes to Play

 Jeremiah looked round from his assessment of his remaining attributes, watching with an amused smile as Kaelin and Thorian continued their work of disposing of the fallen of the battle along side the handful of elves Zilvra had detailed to the task. He didn't notice that he was scratching at the bandages round his wounded arm while he did so. He glanced down at the now thoroughly deceased werewolf at his feet and considered retrieving his money from where it was lodged in the beast's throat. It was dribbling. Eyes still bulging, locked in its twisted end by asphyxiation, it was none the less drooling all over the floor. Jeremiah stepped back, fighting to keep the look of disgust off his face; the darn thing had nearly dribbled all over his boots and seeing as he had holes in his boots, that meant it had come disgustingly close to soaking his socks. Jeremiah shuddered at the thought and turned away.

Casually as he could manage he wandered out of the main gates and once the Ash Elf disposing of the bodies had headed back inside for yet more of the fallen, he risked a look over the crenelates into the chasm that separated one side of the cavern from the other. Far down in the depths, so far down that Jeremiah felt a moment of dizziness swept over him, a blue glow was building as streams and waterfalls of kerveads poured down into the cliff faces, hunting the smell of carrion through the tunnels of this subterranean world. Jeremiah found it to be most pleasing to the eye, watching the flow and tumble of light through the dark. Then the Ash Elf stepped passed him, more hastily than usual and tossed the hairy body he was dragging over the edge with less care than usual and a lot more hurry.

"My good sir," Jeremiah smiled ingratiatingly, "What ever is the matter?"

The Ash Elf didn't answer but instead pulled a small jar out of a poach and started swinging it back and forth across the bridge, a bright red powder sifting from the open mouth of the pot to settle as a barrier across the span of stone. Jeremiah was about to inquire why such a precaution was necessary when he saw what was coming towards them. He felt his mouth go dry as the torrent of bugs swarmed across the stone, their glow so bright en mass as they were that it hurt the eyes to look at them. His skin crawled as he realized that he could hear them. For the first time ever he could hear them, the buzzing clatter of all their hard exoskeletons rubbing together and the scratch-scrap of their hundreds of thousands of legs scuttling over the stone. There was also a click-clicking as mouth parts snipped and snapped in eager anticipation of the feast they had found. The tidal wave of insects speed towards them... and met the barrier of red dust the Ash Elf had just put down. It halted, the swell of clattering, scissoring horror juddered to a halt and mounted up, buzzing with frustration at the edge of the barrier drawn. Jeremiah stepped back, Hat droning with distress on the top of his mitre and nearly collided with the two Ash Elves that were barreling out of the main gates. Jeremiah only belatedly realized that they hadn't bothered to remove the heads of the fallen elves as the grizzly burdens flopped over the edge. He looked once more at the throbbing mass of bugs and then stepped back inside the courtyard of the citadel, only just avoiding being splashed with something horrible as Thorian thumped passed carrying two of the dead over his shoulders. Even Kaelin had dispensed with her precautions, scurrying around not unlike a bug herself, to collect all the smaller pieces she could find.

Jeremiah watched her bolt out of the gates and watched as she started throwing the pieces with all her strength along the bridge. The horde of insects drew back as it closed in over the offerings she'd give it.

"What are you doing, surface dweller?" one of the Ash Elves demanded, rounding on her.

"These thing can climb walls right?" she didn't stop throwing. The Ash Elf frowned, puzzled by a lower race answering with a question.

"They'll just climb round the powder on the outside of the bridge walls," Kaelin explained, "Unless you can guard every damn window we need to get them off the bridge, all the way off and encourage them to follow all the others down into the chasm or they'll just climb over on the underside of the bridge."

The Ash Elf open his mouth to say something, even while he was lifting a hand to strike her... then Jeremiah saw the moment that the image of what she was saying filtered through to him because it had also struck him. The Ash Elf grabbed the feet of the next corpse that was being brought out and twisted it so that it was thrown over the line of powder. The light surged back a pace to consume it and he was scattering powder down on the revealed stone, even as he was yelling what he'd been told to his comrades in his own language, gesturing with his free hand. They looked unconvinced until they noticed a lone kervead wandering along the balustrade towards them. With shrill yells they scattered powder down in the path of the bug and fled back inside to fetch more of the dead, although Jeremiah was sure that one scampered off inside the citadel. He smiled grimly as he approached his puppets. Every race had their cowards.

"You!" he snapped, pointing at his three blue eyed Ash Elves, "Pugh, Hugh and Dibble! Pick up all the dead pieces of Elf and Werewolf in this castle and throw them over the side of the bridge outside of those gates there." He pointed imperiously to the main gates. The Ash Elves gazed at him silently for a moment and then bent to begin their work.

Smiling to himself Jeremiah turned to the dead that still lay untended in the courtyard. He drew himself up and muttered under his breath, fingers weaving through the air. For a moment he felt his god's attention stir and then it faded away. He sighed in frustration. Apparently, it was too early to call again on his god's favor, or perhaps his god was becoming bored with him doing the same tricks over again. That was not a comfortable thought and he scratched his bandage while he considered it. He stopped as he realized something.

 "Kaelin! You child of a mangy dog! What have you done?" he roared, baring down on her like a pyroclastic flow.

 "You mean other than stopping you from becoming bug lunch?" she asked as she grabbed another body that needed disposing of.

"This!" Jeremiah bellowed, waving his arm about like a conductor's baton, "What filth have you put in me? You illiterate flea bag!"

She turned from feeding the swarm some more, the powder clinging to the soles of her boots. Jeremiah staggered a little as the Ash Elf he'd seen dash inside the main citadel squeezed passed him in the door way, clutching an armful of jars, out of which he started sprinkling the red powder as fast as he could go, covering up the bare patches were peoples footprints showed through the covering of powder. The realization that he had misjudged the Ash Elf's motives did not improve Jeremiah's temper.

"What vile poison have you inflicted on me? You tail wagging cur!" he thundered, making the cavern ring. There was a sharp crack from above followed by a whistling sound and then a sharpened chunk of dripped stone smashed only a hand's breadth from their feet, spraying shrapnel as sharp as razors in all directions.

The silence rang, disturbed only by the rustling of the swarm as it devoured.

Kaelin put a finger up to her face and wiped away a trail of red before turning without a word and heading back inside the courtyard to continue the grizzly clean up procedure.

One of the Ash Elves, senior in age if the look of him was anything to go by, turned to Jeremiah.

"We tolerate your presence, surface dweller, for the sake of the Lady and because you have proven yourself to be useful to the clan," he said coldly, "But you are more ignorant of the realities of life in the Underworld than any living thing has right to be here. Learn to curb your tongue and control your voice before you call down monsters that even your foul magics will find impossible to control."

"Oh I don't know," Jeremiah smiled back, "I think you are underestimating just how powerful I am." He lifted a hand and gestured to where, expressionless and tirelessly his three Ash Elf puppets were emerging from the main gates of the citadel to dispose with some more of the fallen. Several of the Ash Elves on the bridge twisted their fingers in gestures to ward off evil and misfortune as they edged round the blue eyed once members of their race but the older one seemed unmoved.

"Maybe I am," he admitted, "Or maybe I am not. Either way, the question is, do you want to bet, little surface man? Do you want to bet with your life?"

Jeremiah draw himself up and set his face, unwilling to admit that the Ash Elf's stillness was bothering him, then he turned away with a humph and strode back inside the citadel, finding himself a corner where he could nurse his arm in peace. It was tingling under the bandage now, as if dozens of hot ants were running over the surface of his skin round the wound. That wolf girl was going to pay for this, she had no right to inflict her dirty curse on him.

Inside the citadel, Ulrich lifted a hand from Peter the Centipede's chitinous hide and laid it over Lady Zilvra's fingers were they locked together round his chest. He could feel them shaking. She was trying to suppress it but he could still feel them shaking.

"How did they get in?" her whisper was strained, "How, by all the gods under Hestia, did they get in?"

Ulrich looked again at the destruction around him. The main entrance hall of the citadel was not directly connected with the main audience hall of the building, instead it seemed to be composed of many long corridors, joined at right angles at their ends to form a spiraling structure. It appeared at first glance to be funnel shaped, wide at the end with the door but narrowing sharply but that was a trick, each corridor being divided by angled walls that the defenders had cover while providing little to none for the attackers. In short, it was designed to turn each foot of space into a killing field but it seemed to have spectacularly failed, the bodies of Ash Elves sprawled across the stone floors, in some places piled high like snow drifts, their white hair stained red and brown as the liquid sea they were islands in clotted and set.

Ulrich realized that the back of his jacket was becoming wet. What chilled him all the more was that her crying was soundless. Even faced with the total destruction of her home, Zilvra couldn't give voice to her distress and there was something off about the pattern, the way the bodies had fallen. He sat a little straighter as he saw what she had seen.

"They were fighting from the inside out," she said it before he could give it voice.

"Does the citadel have a back door?" he asked, a frown ceasing the space between his eyebrows, wondering if their hairy, unwelcome, uninvited guests could come back with reinforcements for a second try.

"A what?" she shifted her head against his back, snapping out of her wretchedness.

"A back door, an escape tunnel, a second way in that a werewolf could have detected with their nose and forced open?" Ulrich explained as they turned yet another corner. Surely they had to be close now?

"We are not stupid, surface dweller," she snapped, something of her old imperious manner coming back, "We know that such things are a weakness that we cannot afford. If a clan cannot defend itself then it deserves to die." She stuttered to a halt.

"Hard, isn't it? When you have to pass that judgement on your own people," Ulrich asked after a moment, "Just how many clans have died in the last few seasons?"

Her hands trembled against him again and for a moment he thought she wasn't going to answer.

"It started in the time of water," she admitted as they turned into another corner, "When the flood tunnels raged. Patrols started disappearing and not some silly, greenhorned youngsters, old veterans of the Underworld's moods. They would vanish and their packs be found days later, their camp attacked but not in a way we recognized. Or they would be injured and come back to us changed, speaking of a great hunt to come and a natural order in the world. They would leave again, leave without permission and they would turn on us, their own clans, if we tried to stop them. Slaves would be killed as they worked the mushroom caves and the algae farms. We thought it could be the normal predators, maybe driven up from below by unusually high floods but then the predators started turning up dead or malformed and we knew it wasn't that. Then, three time candles back, the fortress of the Kraken clan..."

She coughed on a mouthful of air and Ulrich rubbed her knuckles reassuringly.

"The fortress of the Kraken clan slid into the Undersea with no warning," she cleared her throat and sniffed.

"The fortress collapsed?" Ulrich looked back over his shoulder at her, disbelief in his eyes.

"I was on my way to claim a breeder from them," Zilvra burrowed her face into the back of his jacket, "I saw it with my own eyes. The whole cavern started shaking and there was this noise, like rock tearing and the whole fortress just slide sideways into the Undersea, all... all falling in on itself and splitting apart and then there was just dust and noise and when.... when it was quiet again... nobody came up out of the water." She shivered against him and Ulrich had to fight not to shiver too. He guessed he knew now what had driven the white Kraken out into Lake but what, by Heaven and Hestia, could just knock a whole citadel off its foundations like it was a house of cards? They were dealing with something that was a heck of a lot bigger than they had reckoned for.

"We few, we lucky few," he murmured.

"What?" Zilvra asked.

"Sorry," Ulrich said, "Just reflecting on..." He trailed off. They had found the main audience hall.

It was without doubt a complete and utter disaster. It appeared that some courtly function had been going on when what ever had struck had arrived, long tables flipped over, glasses and food scattered across the floor and the bodies piled high and thick. The Ash Elves had, to give them their due appeared to have fought like demons, at least to begin with, as there were a greater number of werewolf dead among the bodies that had fallen but that defense had obviously come undone at some point, though as to why...

Zilvra threw herself off the back of Peter the Centipede and ran, stumbling through, the bodies. She staggered several times as the space she thought was clear turned out to have an out flung hand or foot in it. She didn't turn or look back as Ulrich called after her, didn't seem to hear as the centipede's multitude of legs rippled over the gory carpet of the slain. She bounded up the steps of the dais and fell to her knees by the body stretched out on its side by the shattered remains of a grand chair.

Ulrich pulled the centipede to a halt as Zilvra's shoulders shook. Now he could hear her, a muffled, wretched whining, like a beaten child.

"Oh no," he breathed, "Is that...?"

"The Matriarch," Zilvra was openly and honestly crying now, "What do I do? What do I do? Nephthys help me, what do I do?"

"Shat," Ulrich breathed. With the Matriarch gone the back bone of the clan had been well and truly broken, especially if... Ulrich turned, swinging down from Peter's back, looked at the bodies. There, an older looking, more superior Ash Elf woman at the bottom of the deeply recessed stairs that lead up into the citadel's left side. And there, another one with status symbols near the doors leading out into the corridor that lead eventually to main doors. One after another he found them as Zilvra cried.

"How many Seniors did your Matriarch have?" he asked, cold with the certainty of what the answer would be.

"We had ten Sisters of the Depths," Zilvra replied, looking round at him. Ulrich realized that she had left the body of the Matriarch and had wandered across the dais. Well, if her mind was already occupying itself then hopefully she wasn't going to panic at any moment.

"I hate to tell you this," he began.

"They are dead," the tears were still streaming down her face but her voice was more level, "Who ever did this thing knew how to hurt us most. Look." Her finger pointed implacably at the dais behind the chair. Frowning Ulrich stepped up beside her and looked were he was commanded.

Parts were obscured by the fallen and the bloody spillage over the floor but the over arching pattern was still plain to see, branded as it has been into the very stones.

"Oh hell!" Ulrich crouched and pressed his fingers to the marks but they remained dormant under his touch, "It's the same ones as that Aft End used to bottle out after we flag stomped him! Shat, this was planned and by someone rocking a lot more power than any werewolf I've ever heard of before." He stood up, looking about distractedly, "Just what the hell is all this for?"

"I don't..." Zilvra stopped, her face turning ashen.

"What..." Ulrich started to reach for her.

She turned and bolted up the steps leading into the right side of the citadel.

"Zilvra?" Ulrich yelled, just as her body guards made it to the main hall. He didn't pay them any attention, whistling to Peter instead. With a rattling surge, Peter flowed over and around the fallen to reach his master's side. Ulrich swung on to Peter's back so fast the centipede didn't break stride as their speed after Zilvra. Even as they charged through the corridors Ulrich noticed something was off about the fallen here to. They had been retreating from the main hall and had then suddenly been ambushed from both sides... except that wasn't it either. The ones from the main hall had been retreating away from that massacre when they had backed into another group retreating from what ever Zilvra was now running towards.

Her break neck speed led them up stairs and down corridors until she ran up to a opening where the door hung askew and cracked across its middle. She stopped there, one hand flung out to catch at the frame of the way. Ulrich pulled Peter to a stop as he heard the dreadfully whinging keening noise that escaped Zilvra's shaking shoulders. Cold with what he thought he was going to see, he swung off Peter's back as Zilvra slid down the door frame, choking on her every breath. He heard her body guard clatter to a stop behind him but he didn't look round, this was too important for distractions. He walked slowly up behind her as she continued to shake and whistle with the grief trying to force its way out passed all her years of training.

"Zilvra?" he crouched slightly behind her slightly to one side, laying a hand on her shoulder. Then he looked in the room. For the rest of time he wished that he hadn't done that, he really wished he hadn't done that. The room had been the nursery for the youngest members of the clan, with the emphasis on the words 'had been'.

"Oh dear Gods," he could find nothing more to say.

Zilvra hissed with in drawn breath and then she threw back her head and screamed!

"What the..." Kaelin jerked round, the newest body slipping from her fingers to crack against the floor, smearing the red powder keeping the kerveads at bay. The scream was a ripping sound that shook the cavern and came laced with blue power. The swarming flood of insects swirled as it rolled over the top of them and then Kaelin saw the forms billowing out of the small smoke holes that dotted the top of the citadel towers. Small, four legged, their scales were a dry rustling as they came, swirling across stone, nearly the same color as the rock beneath them, bright eyes blinking. They congregated at the bridge, following along it and over it, scurrying over the inside of the balustrades and up and over the edge, clambering over the outer face of the bridge walls with no apparent fear of the fathoms deep drop below. Kaelin looked over the edge and swore she saw one slip over the edge, on to the underside of the bridge, as if it was merely walking down a set of steps. The little forms, no longer than the span of a hand paused at the far edge of the red powder, facing down the plague of kerveads as if considering the quality of the buffet before them and then little faces began darting forward. Pin toothed jaws snapped and snapped again on crunchy bodies while great round eyes blinked and blinked. Throats pulsed as mouthfuls were swallowed and then heads darted forward once move. Then Kaelin saw the others that had come to the dinner. Spiders the size of saucers, spiders the size of dinner plates, spiders with bodies the size of cricket balls, picked their way daintily between the lizards, rushing forward to seize bright bodied insects in their grasp and then retreat back with them into the safe zone of the red powder to pierce and suck dry their prey.

"Well that is something new," one of the Ash Elves observed as he straightened and knuckled his back.

"You what?" Kaelin shook her head slightly to snap her attention away from the hypnotic scene in front of her.

"Our pets don't usually leave the Eublepharidae alone like that," he stretched with an audible pop of a joint in his spine, "Usually the lizards are lunch for our pets but I guess the bounty is such...." he trailed off and looked back over his should at the citadel, "Unless, it is worse than I thought. If this is a reaction under extremeness... Oh Gehenna."

"That doesn't sound good," Kaelin hazarded the guess. The Ash Elf took a deep breath and walked back into the citadel to collect another body. The courtyard was just about cleared but the entrance hall was still choked with the dead.

"If our Lady is now the Matriarch," he said quietly as he lifted a body, "Then she could, under extreme circumstances, summon the guarding wards built into the very stones of the citadel. One of those wards is the commanding of the base creatures that live within the citadel to protect our people from invaders."

Kaelin kept pace beside him as she dragged a body of a werewolf behind her.

"If the Matriarchs can summon the creatures to protect you then why were we fighting the werewolves with no help?" she asked as they reached the bridge again. The Ash Elf tossed the body he was carrying over the railing and watched it disappear into the light below.

"Because she was already dead," he said dully and closed his eyes. "Would you... do me... a favor, is that the word?"

"If you want me to do something on the understanding that you'll do me something in return at an unknown future date then yes," Kaelin said cautiously.

"Would you go and discover what has happened to cause the Lady Zilvra's outburst?" he didn't look at her but his knuckles were white where he gripped the railing of the bridge's balustrade, "We will be able to manage the clean up now that we have the creatures of the citadel to aid us."

Kaelin glanced to where the geckos and spiders were still crunching their way through the ever shifting wave of kerveads that ebbed and flowed at the edge of the powder boarder line.

"Sure," she said after a moment and turned to head into the citadel. Thorian clumped out on her way in, dragging the bodies two at a time, Jeremiah's Ash Elves following him. Kaelin felt a stab of uneasy when she noticed that one of the blue eyed puppets wasn't carrying the body like a sack of potatoes to be thrown away but as a body of someone it had cared for. She glanced over to where Jeremiah sat in the shadows of the courtyard, nursing his arm and his bruised ego. Just how sure was he that he had control?

She turned away and pushed the thought from her mind. She had more important things to worry about now, including the stink filling the corridors beyond the main doors. The smell of terror and death, of rage and pain hit her nose like a punch on the snout. Squinting against the acid feeling in her sinuses she walked the spiraling corridor to the main hall. Tracking Ulrich's scent led her to the runic circle. The hair stood up along her arms.

This was where Greely, that shat bag, had got in. His smell made the beast crawl up her throat and snarl, the change bubbling just under the surface. Damn it, he'd been prepared. They'd known just who to hit and damn it, they must have known when. Kaelin doubted if a people so used to scheming and lies as the Ash Elves regularly gathered their whole ruling class together in one place. Shell crack on a dragon egg! They had some how known. They must have had...

Kaelin kicked a battered chair into the wall with a resounding smash. They must have infected someone inside the clan, someone who had been strong enough to resist the early symptoms but weak enough that they're loyalty to the clan could be broken. That or someone who would willingly trade away their clan for their own desires. That book of Ulrich's might say that such a thing was rare to almost be unimaginable but there again so were Ash Elves who were willing to leave not only clan and kin but the Underworld all together and they had met such a one running Nether Wallop for pity's sake. If an Ash Elf could leave then an Ash Elf could turn on clan and kin as well. With Werewolf venom running in their veins, distorting their perceptions and thought patterns even more then, well, the result lay all around her.

Kaelin swore for several minutes. This was where her screwing blackguard of a grandfather was getting his troops and then he was entering arrangements with some of the Ash Elf clans, who were undoubtedly ignorant of the fact that he was the source of all their trouble in the first place, to pull in even more. She didn't doubt that he'd play them along for as long as he could and then turn on them the moment he was sure that he could infect as many as possible.

She kicked another chair. This was what came of not making sure of the job herself. Well, she was well served. The next time she and her sadly unlamented grand sire crossed paths she'd do the damn job herself and this time she'd make sure that he burned.

Argh-gan-gah-gan-argh! Haggis agreed. Kaelin calmed herself down patting him and then turned her attention back to trying to find out were Ulrich and his lady friend had gone. It didn't take her long to follow their scent but she stopped at the sight of the Ash Elf bodyguard standing in the corridor looking confused while someone sobbed uncontrollably. Her mouth thinned to a line, Kaelin pushed through their ranks until she could see Ulrich knelt in a door way, the Lady Zilvra a sobbing, gasping mess in his arms. He looked up as Kaelin drew closer.

"They hit the nursery," he said in quiet, dead sounding voice, "You don't want to look. Trust me on this, you don't want to look."

"It's the end of the clan," one of the Ash Elves said, his thousand mile stare looking through everything before him.

"You what?" Kaelin asked.

"It's the end of the clan," he repeated, not looking round, "They have destroyed the other women and we are all brothers and cousins of Lady Zilvra. Only close family were allowed to go with her to the temple. We are the last of the clan and we cannot breed. The Snake Clan is ended."

Kaelin looked at the rest of the body guard in the corridor but none of them moved to gain say him. Her stomach dropped as she realized that all he had spoken was the complete and utter truth, hence why none moved to chastise him. It was also why Lady Zilvra had gone to complete and utter pieces. She had known the truth the moment she had seen the wreck of the nursery. The werewolves had been out to totally destroy the clan and in all ways that mattered they had succeeded. She turned away, a sour taste in her mouth as she realized that they weren't even bothering to blame her for the disaster and they must all know that she was connected to the pack now; in the face of such a disaster even vengeance was not enough to rouse them. Even vengeance was no longer enough to give life meaning.

Kaelin bit her lip as sympathetic pain pushed water to her eyes. For so damn long she thought no one could relate to all the gruesome ways in which she was damaged, to the ways in which her grandfather had damaged her and now she had finally found them, first her pack and now her family and they were people that others would never forgive for the raids that had been happening on the surface.

"Kaelin," Ulrich called quietly.

"Yes," Kaelin's voice stuck and then she managed to clear it, "Yes?"

"They were fighting from two directions at once," Ulrich explained, "Zilvra said there is no back door into the citadel. I'm sure you saw the runic array in the main hall." He paused while she nodded. "I'm sure there are others some where in the citadel. If we can find them, then perhaps we can tell just who helped them get in because I am sure that no werewolf alone pulled off this stunt."

"You are right there," Kaelin fought not to snarl as Ulrich wasn't the one she was angry with, "Unless grandfather has managed to bite a wizard of some high degree and bring them to heel and I highly doubt that."

"Could you have a quick sniff around and see if you can find it please?" Ulrich looked down at Lady Zilvra, "I think I'm going to be here a while."

"On it," Kaelin nodded and turned back down the corridor. She reached the end and stopped and sniffed. The smells were too mixed up. She looked back at the others.

"I'm going to have to change," she said, "I can't sort all the smells out like this so no need to freak out, I'm not losing control."

The Ash Elf body guards looked at each other, looked at where Lady Zilvra lay crumpled against Ulrich and looked back at her, a guard weariness in their eyes. Kaelin took that as permission and turned her head away as she let the beast rise up. There was a savage sounding crack as her bones reformed and she fought down a growl, telling the beast that they were there to do a job, not start another war. It did not like this idea, it wanted violence and it wanted violence right now but it came to heel.

Kaelin sniffed again and in her mind the corridor light up like a firework display. The smell from the nursery was a stomach churning mixture of gore red, pained brown and black death scent. The scent from the Lady Zilvra and Ash Elves were a depressed mix of sickly blues and yellows over their base natural grey. The werewolves... Kaelin sniffed deeper and sneezed as she tried to deny the evidence her nose was giving her but there it was again. The werewolves were a muddy, musky brown shot through with the reds of rage and fury and hunger but that was a cover coat over what they had originally been. There were a fair number of humans, with their sharp, acrid stink and even a Overworld Elf, if the bright silver of the tarnished scent was anything to go by but what worried Kaelin was the sheer number of werewolves that had a grey undertone to their scent. She had known it at an instinctive level but to have it confirmed... Her grandfather was becoming even more powerful if he could now turn someone against their family so damn quickly. She shivered and rubbed the hair on her arms flat.

Setting off down the corridor, she sniff and snuffled her way back down the trail. It was deeper into the substructure of the citadel than she'd expected but she found it. She snatched her head back, snorting and rubbing at her muzzle. What ever had made this circle of cooling runes was definitely not a werewolf, not by the way it smelt. That was worse than sniffing up a fluff bunny, felting like she'd just sniffed silver filings up her nose. She rubbed harder and shuddered as the beast retreated, her bones cracking as they realigned.

"Right," she looked round at were she was, "The barracks, makes perfect sense. Ow." She rubbed her nose again, sniffed and sneezed, explosively. It took her a few minutes to find a piece of cloth that she was willing to use to clean up her face. "Oh, well that's better, I suppose." She gave her nose a final rub and looked again at the circle. "Bother it, I can't make this out at all." She rolled her eyes as she realized who she was going to need to ask. "Double bugger it." With a final huff she walked out of the room.

Jeremiah was still sat outside in the courtyard even though, by main effort Thorian, the living Ash Elves and Jeremiah's puppets were making good in roads on the mess in the first corridor. Kaelin checked the bridge and between the efforts to clear the bodies and the predation of the citadel's animal inhabitants the harrowing light of the kerveads was being kept at bay. With that worry assured, she turned to the more pressing problem.

"Oh most brilliant and esteemed blubber house," she began, unable to completely swallow her pride, "Most wonderful and intelligent priest of the great nameless god," she also refused to say that name, just thinking of it made her hair try to crawl off of her scalp and the beast whimpered, tucking its metaphorical tale between its legs, "Oh mighty and powerful student of the hidden and unknown arts. Would you fore bare to look down upon us lowly beings and bless us with your knowledge?" There, that ought to do it, she pandered to his pride enough.

"Oh," Jeremiah said, rising to his feet, "Oh, I see how it is. Now that you have a use for me, now that you want something out of me, now you are willing to come and give me the respect I deserve. Well you can go and take a running jump off of that bridge as far as I'm concerned, you and all your vermin ridden kind!"

"And as far as I am concerned I really ought to have bitten you on the face so everyone and anyone who meets you would know you are a back stabbing toady who's crawling to the sort of god any rational person would run a million miles away from," Kaelin replied, folding her arms.

"Oh looks who's talking," Jeremiah's face turned red, "The illegitimate spawn of a werewolf or three or four! Since when did you have the right to be all high and mighty, huh? Seeing as your unholy kind is trying to over run the Underworld, causing all this mayhem in the first place! If it wasn't for you and yours we won't even be here. This is all your fault!"

"So you'd rather the King didn't have a job to send us on?" Kaelin raised an eyebrow, "Now how would that have worked out? Let me see, ho hum. Oh yes, it would have resulted in all of us dancing the hemp fandango about two weeks back now. Didn't think about that, did you?"

"Oh doh!" Jeremiah seemed on the verge of exploding with frustration, "You jumped up, snippety, little fuzz ball!"

"And you're an over weigh pudding pie doll, who's only losing weigh because we're been on the march for so long. Worn the fat off of your feet yet?" Kaelin retorted, almost smiling. Urgency aside, this was almost fun, picking a verbal fight with the disgraced priest. She hadn't had a spat like this in months. In fact the last time she'd had a spat like this had been her litter mate, Dismon. Neither of them had liked their grandfather's way and had found the easiest way to avoid being called out as weak was to have noisy 'fights' with lots of inventive insult yelling and rolling around in the dust. It always seemed to work at keeping Grandpa's attention away. Part of her hoped that Dismon had survived and got away.

"My feet are none of your concern!" Jeremiah roared, "What should be your concern is this!" He began waving his arm around again, looking for all the world like an insane conductor trying to control a orchestra of monkeys.

"What's wrong with your arm?" Kaelin raised her eyebrows, "The way you are waving it about I would presume that it is nearly healed already. I assumed that your god had helped you out again, seeing as you bought his favor with just a minor amount of betrayal."

"That is just it!" Jeremiah thundered, "Klu'ga-nath had no hand in this healing. Just what have you done to me? You mangy, dim witted cur!"

"I bit you," Kaelin rubbed an ear. Really his voice was becoming over penetrating and did he forget what happened the last time he raised his voice. "I bit you as punishment for murdering Stink of the Midden and his friend. I bit you for betraying our allies. I bit you for your treason to the pack. Maybe you should remember that if you hadn't committed murder then I wouldn't have bit you."

"I don't care if you think you had reasons, you impoverished, squalid mongrel! I want to know what you have done to me!" Jeremiah was definitely in danger of bursting something in a moment, "I want to know what I can do to stop this wretched infection! I do not want to be a worthless, dog breathed bimbo!"

Kaelin looked down for a moment as if she was contrite. She was actually biting her lip to not burst out laughing in his face. It would have taken a lot more than her bite to turn him into a bimbo but she could not explain that with a straight face.

"You can rest assured that you will not be a worthless, dog breathed bimbo," she managed to say with a straight face as she lifted her head but she was never sure how she managed that effort. "It would take a power far beyond mine to be able to perform such a feet. The only thing you are likely to need to worry about are the fleas once a month."

"What do you mean by that?" Jeremiah demanded, arm finally lowering.

"Only that roughly once a month you are likely to need a bath and possibly a razor with which to deal with the extra growth of hair," Kaelin observed, "You can however rest assured that you will never need to worry about going bald."

Jeremiah glared, not entirely trusting her.

"Of course, someone of your amazing knowledge and book skill should surely be able to find out if there is any cure for such a condition," Kaelin continued, "Come to think of it I wouldn't mind it myself if someone could find out a way of making the animal a little easier to control. I wouldn't even mind it if it was a case of having to take a potion each and every day for the rest of my life, as long as it wasn't too ridiculously expensive. After all, if they prices me out of the market I might have to resort to killing people in order to pay for it. I'm not entirely sure that the King has a bounty hunter system in place but I'm sure that I'd be able to find someone willing to pay." She smiled as she half turned away, cupping her chin with one hand, "Come to think of it, there's a certain Abbey which I'm pretty sure would be very interested in paying for the return of a certain ex-member of the clergy there. I wonder if I should look in with them on the way back to the capital."

"You won't dare," Jeremiah blustered.

"Well seeing as nobody has come up with that potion I don't really have a need to do I?" Kaelin let her hand flop over, "But if someone should come up with that potion then they should consider the fact that they will get a whole lot more customers if they keep their profit margin reasonable, wouldn't you say?"

Jeremiah frowned as he considered it.

"That maybe half way sensible," he admitted at last, "But I want to be able to go through the library in the Wizard's Tower on our way back to the Capital."

"Now that's an easy thing to agree to," Kaelin nodded, "So in the effort to speed up us getting there, how about you come and have a look at the runic circles we've found inside? If we find out where they came from then we might be able to stop all of this in the next few days and be out of here."

Jeremiah closed his eyes and practiced deep breathing until his color had just about returned to normal.

"Fine," he grated out, "But only because I want access to those books as quickly as possible."

"Deal," Kaelin held out her hand on instinct but was glad when Jeremiah huffed passed her without taking it. Sometimes his rudeness really did help the world to go round better.

Jeremiah huffed and puffed along the corridors, not quite complaining about the 'mess' that was still all over the floor. He was minimally interested in the grand circle on the floor of the main hall but it was when Kaelin led him to the one in the barracks that he really became interested.

"Well now," he smiled as he bent over to peer more closely at the marks beginning to fade out on the floor, "Maybe you are useful for something other than collecting fleas."

"You're welcome," Kaelin rolled her eyes as she muttered.

Jeremiah flexed his knuckles and set to work, muttering under his breath as he passed his hands through the air above the circle. The fading symbols sharpened, their forms looking as if they were raising back up out of the stone of the floor until they lay there more perfect and clear than even when Kaelin had first found them. Jeremiah continued muttering, fingers beginning to trace symbols of his own in the air. A sickly yellowish green light began to infuse the runes, crawling through them. Kaelin felt the hair on her arms beginning to stand up on end.

With a sharp fizz and crackle the runes flared and burnt out, leaving only the nose tweaking stink of burnt hair but Jeremiah grinned expansively.

"It turns out that you were more intelligent than your usual standard when you brought this matter to my attention, my dear," his grin reminded Kaelin of a pike fish grinning at its prey just before it struck so she folded her arms and said nothing about his back handed complement, "They used three of those runic circles to break into the citadel and I know exactly where to find the site of the last one."

"And we'd want to find it because?" Kaelin asked deadpan.

"Because I think it is still active," Jeremiah's grin did not falter, "There is a vast magically signature in the cellar area of this complex and if I'm right then we might be able to catch the last few stragglers as they leave." 

"They were leaving?" Kaelin raised an eyebrow, "Now that does surprise me."

"Really my dear," Jeremiah smiled, "Do you really think that they would have all stayed for the after battle feast?"

"Yes," Kaelin was blunt, "What surprises me was that Grandpa could convince any of them to leave once the dinner gong had sounded, normally...." She trailed off.

"My dear Kaelin, are you feeling alright?" Jeremiah asked with sickly sweet concern.

"He was here," Kaelin's eyes were wide but her pupils had shrunk down to pin pricks, "Holy heaven help us, he was here!"

"My dear, I don't understand, who..."

"Grandfather!" Kaelin roared, "Grandfather was here! He was here in person because he's the only one who could have forced them to leave off chewing up everything inside this place!" She continued to curse and swear for several minutes, turning on the spot, unable to decide what she wanted to hit or throw.

"There's something else you need to know," Jeremiah said carefully but not out of concern for her but rather trying to judge how much distress he could cause her.

"What?" Kaelin stilled, "What else?"

"Oh, just a little something," Jeremiah looked away and scratched his arm. Hat buzzed on the top of his miter.

"What else!?!" Kaelin roared, the whites of her eyes turning red with the force of it.

"Oh just that some of the werewolves that attacked here were Ash Elves, once upon a time," Jeremiah shrugged as he said it. Kaelin's face went pale again.

"Oh squit," she breathed. The secret was well and truly out of the bag now. Her intellect had told her, her nose had told her and now someone who had every reason to tell the truth because he knew it would hurt her had told her.

Ulrich and Zilvra arrived in time to see Kaelin sitting down on a cot, holding her head in her hands to stop her fingers trembling. She was taking long deep breaths but appeared to be shivering with each one.

"What did you do?" Ulrich's sardonic tone was totally lost on Jeremiah.

"I merely answered the question she asked me," Jeremiah spread his hands benevolently. 

"Do you remember Elisha telling us that there were more and more of the 'men-beasts' that could match a Damned Soul on the battle field?" Kaelin asked, "Do you remember the fact that he said some of them fought as if they were being driven by a will outside of their own?"

Ulrich frowned for a moment and then snapped his fingers.

"First day we were there," he stated, "The dinner on the terrace."

"Yes," Kaelin nodded, "Do you remember how I said 'they'll be infecting people, whole towns at a time'?"

"Ye-s-s-s-s," Ulrich said slowly, a nagging suspicion rearing its ugly head.

"We just found the town," Kaelin confirmed that suspicion in an instance, "They are infecting the Ash Elves, whole citadels at a time. What we are seeing dead here are the ones strong enough to fight, fight the infection and fight the will behind it. The weaker ones are being forcibly recruited and once they are infected there's no going back." She looked at Zilvra. "You had better check the bodies in the main hall again. Grandpa would have wanted one of the Matriarch's favorites as his new breeder."

Lady Zilvra put her hand to her mouth, her skin going dove grey, eyes wide with horror.

"I thought that wolves mate for life with only one partner," Jeremiah's smile wasn't pleasant.

"Wolves do," Kaelin confirmed, "Werewolves on the other hand, or at least werewolves of my grandfather's bent... My grandmother wasn't the only women he had at his beck and call and none of them were his true mate. None were his equal, all he was interested in was having his full quiver. Why do you suppose that natural wolves despise werewolves almost as much as humans do? Werewolves are a perversion of both human and wolf, the worst traits of both and none of the decency of either. If I hadn't run when I did, well you saw Greely. My guess would be that I had been promised to Grandpa's right hand man as a reward for being his most loyal minion, if I was..." her mouth twisted, "Worthy of having a litter. Guess I should be grateful for always being the runt."

"Do I really want to know what constituted being 'worthy of a litter'?" Ulrich asked.

"Strong enough to survive in the wild forest but still submissive and meek to Grandpa and any others of the 'Pack'," Kaelin hunched her shoulders, not looking at him, "Some of my sisters were providing pups for the Pack before they finished their second decade."

Lady Zilvra hissed something between her teeth in her own language, the lilting tune of it gone flat and bitter with disgust.

"So how did they get in?" Ulrich asked, looking form one to the other, "That was what you were trying to find out when you left us at... at the nursery." He swallowed. He really did wish that he hadn't looked in that room. He'd never considered having children of his own, as a no-blood himself he hadn't wanted to lumber another generation with the taint of having unmarried parents. No way would his father have given permission for him to marry before he'd left the family estates and afterwards, well the life he'd been leading hardly lent itself to settling down but what had been left in the nursery... Gods above but there were some creatures that needed putting down.

"The runic circles," Jeremiah smiled, "Three of them but I do not think that they were crafted by a werewolf. The pack used them to come through and retreat with their prize but the magics used to hold those portal open were not werewolf in origin."

"Were they Ash Elf?" Ulrich asked.

"You dare?" Zilvra rounded on him.

"I do not mean someone in the Fastness of the Snake Clan," Ulrich held up his hands, "But when we were on the surface we came across Greely, the werewolf who spoke in the courtyard, leading a small squad and they were with one of your people."

"What?" Lady Zilvra whispered after a moment.

"They were with an Ash Elf, someone called..." Ulrich clicked his fingers a moment, "Deslin! The other elves there called him Lord Deslin. He was telling Greely and I quote, 'concern yourself not, you will have what you want once we have what we want'. Now I maybe misreading the situation but it sounds to me like one of the clans, some where, have a working agreement with Kaelin's Grandfather."

"Impossible," Lady Zilvra backed away, shaking her head, "None of the clans..."

"Maybe not one of the clans," Kaelin interrupted, earning a censory glare from the body guard standing in the doorway, "You said yourself that some of the weaker members of the clans sometimes leave and make it to the surface. What if this is a collection of such individuals? What if they believe that they can become a clan in their own right if they use the werewolves to weaken the other clans down here first?"

"That is a deliciously treacherous idea, my dear," Jeremiah smiled, "But it is incorrect I'm afraid. The being that created and controlled the circles has the taste of both dragon and the fey."

A cold silence fell as they all stared at him.

"I think I prefer it being a renegade group of Ash Elves," Ulrich said after a full minute.

"I take it that the fey are not nice people?" Kaelin asked, "But hang on, Felicity the Chest Weasel was a fey... thing. She didn't seem so bad."

"Speak for yourself," Jeremiah muttered.

"Unfortunately that is the problem with the Fey," Ulrich said, "Some of them are no worse than children who have had too many sweeties and not enough smacks on the bottom, others of them, ugh." He shuddered. "Have you ever heard the term 'hag ridden'?"

"Yes," Kaelin admitted.

"Well that's the very least of what a hag came do to you," Ulrich explained, "If a hag gets hold of you, you'll be lucky if you get out of there with all your limbs still on the right way round."

"Some say that you are lucky if she just straight up skins you for her cooking pot," Jeremiah interjected, "And if people would stop interrupting me I was going to tell you all, once again, that one of the circle is still active down in the cellar."

They all looked at him and as one turned to the door.

"Any idea of the numbers?" Ulrich asked as they trooped down the corridor, his centipede crawling along the wall beside them.

"I'm afraid that I only know that about thirty came through," Jeremiah replied as he walked along beside them, "As far as I can tell none of them have returned back through the circle."

Ulrich looked at Lady Zilvra and after a moment she nodded and stepped back among the ranks of her body guard. Wordlessly they clattered down the steps that led into the bowels of the citadel. It reminded Kaelin of the King's dungeon were they had been held before they were wielded together to make the current King's Special. However, the King's dungeon had not included the blood stains on the walls or the smears of something unnameable on the floor. Here and there, bits and pieces still lay on the floor. The werewolves had enjoyed their fun down here as well only...

"Jeremiah," Ulrich called, "I hate to break it to you but you've misjudged your magics."

"I beg your pardon?" Jeremiah demanded.

"I said you misjudged your magics," Ulrich crouched, one hand brushing the floor, "Cause I've just found the circle down here and it is as cold and dead as the werewolves that have been relieved of their heads."

"That's impossible," Jeremiah pushed through the shadows to his side, frowning as he gazed down at the circle of runes, "I can still feel that it is active and it's... over... there?" His anger faded as he realized that he was pointing at a heavy door that hung askew and split on its hinges. They stood facing the gaping maw of the doorway and Kaelin shivered as the hairs on her arms stood up on end. There was something subtly wrong about the way the shadows were moving, spilling out of that doorway like a questing tongue that slowly tasted the air and beckoned them in.

"My Lady Zilvra," Ulrich spoke over his shoulder, "I believe that it would be prudent for the sake of your family if you remain back here with your brothers while we investigate this."

"The clan is dead..." she began.

"But your family is not," Ulrich replied, "While you live your family endures. You are the last living part of the clan, while the family line endures with you then the clan has the chance of rebirth in a new form. If you die now then the clan remains dead. The Kraken clan is dead, the Snake clan has a chance of continuing in your blood line."

She opened her mouth to reply and then looked down at her hand. The tattoo of the serpent twitched across her skin and flicked its tongue. She lifted her head and said something to her brothers in her lilting tongue. They withdrew to one side of the cellar, down one of the side corridors so that they were out of the direct line of fire from the doorway.

Ulrich looked back to the doorway to find Jeremiah already filling it. Kaelin just shrugged, perfectly happy to let the unpleasant priest to take the risks for a change. Ulrich's curiosity compelled him to go closer. Rising on to his tip toes he craned to look over Jeremiah's shoulder. Beyond Jeremiah's bulk he could see a room built for the more valuable slaves. Laid out more like the barracks upstairs with proper, if simple beds, in two rows and a fire place at one end it never the less it seemed empty at first glance but then Ulrich spotted the crowd of men at the back of the room. The patterns of burn scars on some and the rock dust in the hair of others said louder than words that they were metal workers and stone masons but right now they were crowded against the left hand wall of the room like they really wished they could walk backwards through the solid stone, their eyes locked on...

On one of the beds on the right hand side of the room a young girl sat, her red bob cut hair falling around her face as she carved the small wooden figurine in her hands.

Jeremiah stepped into the room and something crunched under his foot. He looked down and saw what was unmistakably a rib bone, suck dry and bleached white, stripped of fat both inside and out, broken under his foot. Beside it lay a wolf skull but larger, more domed than any wolf skull could hope to be. As he looked up he realized that it was not the only werewolf skull littering this room. The girl on the bed was looking up at him, blinking through strange crystal lenses held in wire rims.

"Hello my dear, who are you?" Jeremiah asked with what he thought was a pleasant smile.

"I am Estella," she replied, brushing wood shavings off her foreign dress, "Estella Blackstar. And you would be?"

"I am merely a humble servant," Jeremiah bowed, pressing a hand over his heart. She looked like a girl, she sounded like a girl but there was the feeling of dragon magic about her and he remembered the feel of the Fey he had sensed earlier. It was never a good idea to give your name to the Fey.

She sniffed and tilted her head slightly.

"I think you are lying," she stated, "I don't think you are a servant and I don't think you are humble either."

"Well people of your age are rarely good judges of character, my dear," Jeremiah smiled again, "I assure you that I am the most humble and willing servant of King Tatsuya."

She frowned some more.

"You are," she stated, "You are lying. He doesn't like liars, he doesn't like liars at all."

Jeremiah frowned, stepping furthering into the room so he could face her properly. The craftsmen on the other side of the room cowered.

"I beg your pardon, my dear, but who doesn't like liars?" he asked.

Some thing squelched behind him. The noise was both fluid and solid at the same time, like bones being twisted out of their joints and then slowly being pulled from their flesh, a grizzly wrenching, twisting sucking sound and then the hot breath puffed on the back of his neck.

"Excuse me but do you know where around here I might find a completely soulless husk?"

The voice somehow both rumbled and bubbled at the same time, lovingly drawing out the last word.

Jeremiah twisted round so he could look over his shoulder. Some thing stood there, something that was straight out of a nightmare.

To call it a black dragon would have been way off the mark. It was black and it was a dragon but it was not just a black dragon. It fit inside the room but somehow the space around it seemed distorted, giving the impression that it was a much larger being seen at a distance, that it loomed over Jeremiah in all its liquid glory, the dark matter of the void of stars made form. Nebula shifted and flowed over its hide, a hide that rippled and swelled even when it was still. It wasn't liquid but it wasn't quite solid either, struggling to hold its form. It eyes were the sick glow of dying super novas.

Jeremiah didn't pee, not quite.

"Well I do believe that there is a whole courtyard of werewolves that have no further use for their mortal forms, you could take your pick," he suggested.

A tail, miles long and yet contained within the room, lashed.

"No I mean a still living soulless husk," it gurgled and hissed in the same breath.

"Well there is a still living werewolf outside this very room," Jeremiah fought not to smile and scream at the same moment, "I believe that some theologians consider werewolves to have bargained with the devil for their unnatural powers. After all, it is a well know fact that curses only afflict those that deserve them. Everything is god's will, such banes are the mark of moral failing..."

Wings, in which the light of ailing stars sputtered and shifted, flared at the same moment that Kaelin called, "I heard that!"

"No!" the festering voice seethed, "I mean a..."

It stilled or at least tried to, its form sagging in layers and then hauling itself back into shape, regarding Jeremiah with greater intensity. Jeremiah suppressed the urge to whimper and run. Targeted by those world ending eyes, he gritted his teeth to stop them chattering.

"Oh," it seeped, "Oh you're close, you're very close. You are quite the sack of shite, aren't you?"

Jeremiah glowered as he heard Kaelin snigger outside the room, then he closed his eyes as a muzzle of liquid jet and perishing suns lowered towards his, breathing in his scent.

"Gah!" the thing exclaimed, backing away, making the room bend around it to do so, sneezing and rubbing its muzzle, "Oh foul... disgusting... odious." It seemed to be struggling to clear whatever had offended its sensibilities out of its nasal passages. "Gah, you are one of his! Oh of all the ill luck, five hundred years of searching and the first truly deserving vessel has already tainted itself with HIM." It snorted and spat at Jeremiah's feet, a puke of a wriggling black sludge that writhed before curdling and evaporating.

"Oh very well," it sighed, dragging its claws over the flagstones, "I shall have to settle for the arrangement I already have."

Jeremiah heard Estella stand behind him.

"What arrangement would that..." he began, hating the fact he couldn't keep the nervousness out of his voice.

With a wordless cry of effort the thing liquefied fully, flooding passed Jeremiah in a raging torrent of dark goop. Jeremiah jumped away from it with a terrified squeak, turning in time to see it strike Estella full on. Her body jerked and flailed, arching backwards as it was embroiled in the tidal surge. Someone, and Jeremiah never admitted who, moaned in terror as he realized that it was forcing its way down her throat. Estella's upper half flopped forward as the last of it disappear but somehow she remained standing, then she straightened and Jeremiah stepped back, fingers arching in the Holy gesture of the god he had abandoned. Her eyes were completely black. She blinked, once, twice, thrice and the black faded, allowing her real eyes to look out at the world. She smacked her lips several times, a look of puzzlement crossing her face.

"Now I'm hungry," she said.

The craftsmen broke. Jeremiah found himself buffeted and shoved as the terrified men pushed passed him, heedless in their desperate need to be out of the room where Estella stood, sobbing in their terror. Their pounding footsteps faded into the distance.

"I think you scared them," Jeremiah observed to Estella. She sighed.

"Silly people," she shook her head, "If I was going to do anything to them I could have done it days ago and I don't like my food warm and wriggling." She bent, fished a small satchel out for under her bed and trotted out of the room. She looked up at Kaelin as she left and smiled.

"Hello, I don't suppose you know where the kitchens are?" she asked.

"Um, that way," Kaelin pointed to the stairs nonplussed.

"Thank you," Estella said cheerfully and bounced away through the dungeon and up the stairs as if this was all just routine for her.

Inside the room Jeremiah sank down on to one of the beds and waited for the shaking to stop.

Outside the room, Ulrich had been trying to keep the guards distracted with tails of his exploits while he was a member of the King's Special as well as some of the amusing situations Jeremiah had gotten himself into on their travels. Having seen what had boiled out of the shadows behind Jeremiah, he'd had no ready wish to step inside the room and potential draw its ire. Part of him had admired and been appalled that Kaelin had stood listening at the door and spoken loud enough to be heard inside the room.

As he had regaled them all, Lady Zilvra had openly smiled at his description of the deception he had carried out on board the Armored Dragon and even some of her brothers had started fighting not to smile. Ulrich took that as a win. He had faltered in his telling when the young girl skipped out of the room with a carefree smile on her face to greet Kaelin. Kaelin's response was more than he could have managed.

One of Zilvra's brothers went to bar the girl's way, an ugly look on his face but Zilvra stopped him, a hand on his wrist. Her brother looked at her with a great deal of fear in his eyes but Zilvra paused a moment obviously trying to formulate what she wanted to say.

"No," she said quietly, "We cannot stop her."

"Is this because of her power?" her brother replied carefully, a look of being ready to cower in his eyes, "Do we not need to keep her controlled?"

"No, or at least, not like that," Lady Zilvra corrected herself and paused again, pinching the space between her eyes, "We are without clan, without fastness, without power. We must learn the ways of the powerless, the ways of building alliances with others by making them want to be allies for the alliance's sake. We... we must learn the ways of the small, of the weak, for now... now we are one of them. We do not have the power any more to demand and have others do our will merely because we say so, we must be able to give on equal terms to those we wish to do our will. We..." She faltered again, struggling to find words for so massive a break with a life time of training.

"Give and so get," Ulrich finished, "It is not the whole of how we of the weak do it but it as good a place as any to start and it need not be a physical thing that you trade for what you want. After all, we of the King's Special traded our services as warriors and adventures in exchange for our lives so it maybe time to consider what skills you can offer to those of the surface in exchange for sanctuary."

"The Surface?" Zilvra was startled at that suggestion.

"Where else do you have to go?" Kaelin asked, "Can you safely stay down here in the Underworld? Yes you have this fortress but even I know you need a basic number of guards to man a place like this. Do you reckon you have enough? 'Cause I'm pretty sure that once the word gets round that the kerveads were drawn here by their thousands the other clans are going to know you've been well and truly mullered. Will they leave you alone? Or will that dragon spider hatchling of yours go to the highest bidder?"

Zilvra looked at Kaelin in shunned amazement and for the first time, discipline broke down among her bodyguards as they turned questioning, frightened gazes at each other.

They didn't have the numbers, Ulrich knew that at a glance, they wouldn't be able to hold this place, they would be little better than rats in a barrel. Kaelin went to say something more but Ulrich lifted a hand to still her. Zilvra's gaze had turned inward and she needed time to process everything Kaelin had just said.

Ulrich gestured Kaelin a little way away from Zilvra and her brothers faced up to the fact that their world was falling in on itself and they hadn't even really had a chance to defend it.

"Are you absolutely sure no one in the werewolf pack could have pulled off a stunt like those runes?" he asked quietly, "Gramp's couldn't have bitten a wizard and made them do it for him?"

"No," Kaelin shook her head, "Even if it was a dragon kin, which would explain why Jeremiah picked up a dragon signature to the magic, that wouldn't explain why he sensed Fey as well. A human wizard won't have tasted like dragon and fey plus there is the fact that a wizard would be too strong willed to be dominated by my Grandfather. You have to keep a strong hand on your sanity when you're a wizard or you wind up like the one Elisha dealt with and he was too insane for my Grandfather to get his claws into. No whatever this is, it is something that allied itself willingly with the pack and no I have no idea what Grandfather could be offering in return."

"Ah well," Ulrich shrugged, "Worth asking." He sobered. "Not really reassuring though," he observed.

"Tell me about it," Kaelin muttered then added, "Oh look out, here comes trouble." Jeremiah had just left the cell.

"Maybe we ought to ask Thorian to hold him down for a change," Ulrich murmured back, "Hang on, that's a point," Kaelin observed, he looked around, "Where is Thorian?"

"He was working in the courtyard to help clean up the mess out there," Kaelin remembered but she didn't get any further as Jeremiah stormed up to them.

"I thought we were the King's Special," Jeremiah looked like he was towing his own personal thunder cloud about on his brows, "I thought we were supposed to be a team!" Kaelin raised an eyebrow at that. "And where were you when I was facing down a monstrosity of the outer dark masquerading as an innocent? No where!"

"Well, dear boy," Ulrich smiled, turning Jeremiah's mannerisms back on him, "You seemed to be handling it quite well on your own. It seemed such a shame to interrupt and steal your thunder."

"Steal my thunder?" Jeremiah quivered, "I was having the fright of my life opposing an eldritch horror and the witch disguised as a child that undoubtedly the cause of the destruction of this clan and you think you would have been stealing my thunder?" Kaelin couldn't work out if Jeremiah was angry, still frightened or offended.

"Well you did accuse Hartseer of stealing Thorian's thunder that one time when we were in the Dead Swamp," Ulrich explained, "I did think you would object in the same way if I interfered and drove it off before you had the chance of dealing with it yourself."

"You... I..." Jeremiah spluttered. Kaelin raised her eyebrows. It was unlike Jeremiah to be this agitated and she wasn't sure why. Granted she hadn't seen exactly what had been in that cell with him but it had smelt of the clean, crisp deep frost of winter when the last reds of autumn were still on the trees, the sort of night that made you glad to be able to see the stars.

"I could have been its host!" Jeremiah burst out.

"Oh how terrible," Kaelin muttered, "What ever would we have done if Jerry had a new personality?"

"You I'm sure you would have been fine old boy," Ulrich said, "After all, if you have faith enough you can tell the mountains to go and throw themselves into the sea. I believe that is a quote from the Holy texts of the abbey you came from so it would stand to reason that your god would have protected your soul, even if you had to be the passenger in your own body for a while."

"Well you wouldn't have been!" Jeremiah yelled, "How do you think you would have stopped it if it had possessed me and then decided that you looked like a tasty little snack?"

Kaelin and Ulrich just looked at each other. Jeremiah glared at them, opened his mouth to say something more but then read their expressions.

"You wouldn't have..." he took a step back.

"I'd say that we would have had a lot more justification than the murderer of Stink of the Midden had," Kaelin's expression was one of flat dislike.

"Come on now people," Ulrich held up his hands, "Let's not brood over what didn't happen. I think we have had enough of a spite for one day. If nothing else we all need to decide where we are going from here and I for one would like to discuss it in much more comfortable surroundings than we are in at the moment."

"You want to go up to where that child-thing has run off to?" Jeremiah demanded.

"Well I can't see any other way of getting out of here and if she wanted us dead, then she probably could have done it already," Ulrich shrugged and turned to Lady Zilvra, offering his arm, "My lady, shall we?"

After a moment she smiled, even it that expression was a little tired and sorrowful, before laying her hand on his arm.

Kaelin meanwhile bowed sardonically to Jeremiah.

"After you sir."

He glared at her but started huffing and puffing his way into main part of the fortress. As they reached the top of the stairs Kaelin started sniffing.

"What is it?" Ulrich asked, hand going to one of his sword hilts. If those mangy curds had come back for a second go...

"Frying," Kaelin said after a moment, "I smell something frying. I'm not sure what but something meaty is frying and I also think I can smell hot bread. Not butter though, I can't smell butter."

"What is butter?" Lady Zilvra asked. Kaelin went to look at her as though she thought Zilvra was as thick as a brick but Ulrich shook his head at her. Kaelin frowned.

"I believe that the Ash Elves are not that familiar with the beast known as a cow, are you?" he smiled at Lady Zilvra to show that the question was not meant as a disrespect to her or her people.

"What's a cow?" she frowned, that adorable little frown that made the end of her nose tilt up. As they wandered through the corridors Ulrich tried to explain what a cow was and therefore what such things as butter, cream and cheese were. Kaelin was pretty sure that Zilvra didn't believe a word of any of it. They pressed on, traveling closer to the smells of cooking and gradually others of their party picked up on different smells. They traveled through the fancy parts of the citadel and into the more utilitarian areas of the fortress. As they were walking do a plain but wide corridor something small nipped out of an open light doorway on the left hand side ahead of them. Jeremiah jerked his mace up as the small thing hoovered in front of them. Kaelin also blinked as it fanned its feathered wings in front of them, creating a noise not unlike a bumblebee. It chirruped and swiveled its pointed ears towards them, tiny paws posed in midair, its two toned brush flicking behind it. Kaelin found herself leaning towards the tiny, feathered winged fox, a creature so small that it could have sat in the palm of her hand. It chirruped again and then flipped in the air and speed back through the doorway.

"After you good sir?" Kaelin looked at Jeremiah.

"My dear, I have already been through a doorway first today," Jeremiah smiled at her, "And what I saw is going to haunt me for a very long time. I may not be the sharpest knife in the draw but I do hope that I can learn from my mistakes."

"If that is what you call it," Kaelin grunted and cautiously looked around the door frame.

Thorian sat at a long table in the middle of the room, a huge fire place with something equally huge turning on a spit behind him, a platter with some greasy looking meat heaped beside door stopping hunks of bread on the table top in front of him and a huge mug of something foaming in his hand. He was grinning and watching Estella as she finished putting the last touches on the little finch in her hands. She held it for a moment and then the color rushed up through it, turning it a deep crimson. It swiveled its head from side to side and then hopped round on Estella's hand to look at her before twittering to add its song to the six other strains of music that were chattering, chirruping and bleeping round the kitchen.

Thorian laughed in delight and then noticed Kaelin's upper half craning round the doorway to stare.

"What?" he asked, "I was hungry."

Kaelin opened and shut her mouth several times before she managed to shake her thoughts into any form of order.

"We wondered where you got to," she took the risk of stepping into the room. The little creatures swirled round her but flitted away when Estella called to them. Emboldened by that Kaelin stepped further into the room.

"As I said, I was hungry," Thorian took a swig out of his drink, "Its heavy work cleaning up all the mess in this place and you lot disappeared. Aye will say that her people were better than that." He gestured with his mug to were Zilvra was hovering anxiously in the doorway. "They stuck with me at the job until some of their friends who'd been with that funny dragon chick thing came to give them some time off. Found some wheel barrows some where so their getting faster at clearing this place out. When the first lot downed tools I thought I'd join them in having a break. Plenty of work to do here, still be there when I finish."

"And how did you come to meet our little enigma?" Lady Zilvra asked, sliding on to the end of the bench opposite Estella, watching the girl with a guarded expression.

"She walked in with her little friends," Thorian shrugged, "Cute little things." He rubbed the back of a rather lumpy looking toad on the table top. It inflated and then warbled a string of notes that sounded that they were made by a violin, turning a shifting pattern of purples as it did so.

"Now you don't see that everyday of the week," Ulrich slid on to the bench beside Zilvra.

Jeremiah stood near the door, arms folded and a glower on his face. The magical signatures of the little things around Estella were tiny, tiny and of a nature he didn't understand. It was sort of like the Fey but there was a dozen different threads woven into it as well. They buzzed and thrummed with life, a life that was brim full of the joy of life, a bubbling, blooming joy of life. He hated it. The winged fox swooped near him.

Everyone in the kitchen jerked round as the little fox screamed, Estella nearly falling over backwards as she tried to leap to her feet only to be imprisoned in the gap between the bench and the table. The winged fox was engulfed in a fist of embers and sparks that bored holes though it until its writhing form disintegrated. The other little creatures whirled in panicked circles, each yipping, yelping or crying in their own manner before diving back at Estella and piling back into her bag.

"Why did you do that!?!" Estella cried, tears gathering at the corner of her eyes.

"I agree," Zilvra stood more slowly, "What need was there to destroy the creature?"

"What's the matter, my dear?" Jeremiah's smile made Kaelin want to vomit, "A little uncomfortable now that your passenger has been diminished?"

"What?" Estella asked after a moment, apparently unable to process what he was accusing her of.

"You passenger," Jeremiah didn't stop smiling, "That perversion of a dragon that rides within you. Tell me, does he ride in your lungs? Or is it your stomach?"

"Stop being mean about Valodrael!" Estella bristled, "He's my friend!"

Everyone stared at her.

"Er, who are we talking about?" Thorian asked after a moment.

"This little girl," Estella clenched a fist at his words, "Has a passenger riding within her, a warped mockery of a dragon that apparently calls itself Valodrael. It is what is powering those little models of her. Just how much power did he lose when I destroyed your little parody of a living being?"

Estella drew herself up to her full high, eyes flashing. "Valodrael doesn't 'power' the talismans any more than I do! They're talisman wood, I only carve the form free of the excess. If you really new anything about magic you'd know that!"

She slipped into a foreign language that seemed to be mostly consonants and a couple of nasty sounding vowels. Nobody round the table knew exactly what she was saying but they all knew what she was saying. For once, Jeremiah didn't seem upset by the tirade but rather amused by the little slip of a girl trying to insult him. Estella drew an even deeper breath to yell some more and abruptly snapped it off behind her teeth, head jerking sideways as if listening to someone nobody else could heard. Expressions played themselves across her face, the play of a conversation conducted internally. Her eyes roved over the others at the table and then turned to gaze at Jeremiah. Her expression was more calculated and something about it made Jeremiah take a step back. It was no longer funny.

"Are the talismans something Valodrael taught you?" Zilvra asked carefully.

"Other way round," Estella said back down at the table and helped herself to a piece of bread, "I met him because of the talismans. Carving them had always been my way of escaping being lonely and my usual supply of the wood had been destroyed..." She trailed off for a moment and then rallied, "So I'd gone further a field than I usually did hunting for another supply. That and I needed some time away to find the strength to keep somethings under lock and key. And that's were I found him. He was hiding out in this crumbling shack in the back woods, surviving off what animals wandered his way. With..." She stopped a game, listening to that silent voice. "With his help I was able to leave home so we've been on the road ever since."

"And how did he wind up in a... shack?" Lady Zilvra asked, frowning with effort. Gently questioning a non-Ash Elf was not her forte but she was no longer a member of a powerful clan. The wheels of the world were turning in another way and she had to turn with them or be run under by them.

Estella shrugged.

"It was as far as he got after he had to flee the other continent," she took a bite of bread.

"The other continent?" Ulrich blinked.

"Yeah the other continent," Estella repeated and then looked up at their dumbfounded expressions, "You know - the other continent, the one beyond the eastern sea." They continued to blink at her. "Haven't you ever heard the rhyme? Further East than east, beyond the eastern shore, the burning land does to heaven soar." She waited a beat. "You really haven't ever heard of it?"

"I have heard of the eastern lands," Ulrich admitted, "But not that there was a land beyond that sea."

"There isn't, not really any more," Estella agreed, "It burnt about five hundred years ago. Valodrael managed to get out in time but precious few others did and they were all mortal races, they would have died ages ago."

Ulrich lent back on the bench as Thorian drew Estella's attention, asking her if she could carve him a talisman all of his very own. Hartseer had said several times that he had been stomping across the continent for four hundred and ninety seven years, looking for redemption but he hadn't said what exactly this Domili he had spoken of had looked like.

"Trouble in heaven?" Kaelin asked quietly.

"Just wondering how on Hestia you can contain something like Valodrael," Ulrich muttered, trying to hide his voice underneath Thorian's booming excitement, "And whether or not he is sometimes a little free in his interpretations of Estella's wishes. I'm wondering just how far away from himself he can work his magic from himself."

"You think Valodrael could have been the one who opened the portals? Without Estella noticing?" Kaelin asked, leaning towards him.

"He certainly seems like the sort of creature that would thrive on chaos," Ulrich murmured, "So I'm beginning to wonder if he could be the source of all the trouble down here..."

"No he's not," Estella interrupted in a sing-song voice, "If he was why would we have spent goodness only knows how long sat in that dismal little room? And why would the werewolves try to eat me if he was the one calling them in? Though..." she pouted a moment, "I suppose we could be why the trouble came here if the other dragon sensed Val and didn't want to share its territory."

"The other dragon?" Ulrich blinked.

"Yes the other dragon," Estella replied, "Val's been smelling her all over these caverns. It's why we were coming down here in the first place. We wouldn't have come near these caves if we hadn't smelt her. I know there's that big dragon down here but he smells old and lazy whereas this one stinks to high heaven of magic. That's what we were after. Val needs to find a way to get a new body of his own and to do that we need to track down some of the rarer sorts of magic, so if you're after her as well then I think we could work together on this."

"And what would Valodrael want in return for helping us to find the cause of all the troubles down here?" Ulrich asked carefully.

Estella closed her eyes for a moment, listening to some internal conversation.

"He wants first dibs on her library," she opened her eyes.

"And he won't try to eat us?" Ulrich dug for clarification.

"You? No," she turned and glared at Jeremiah, "Him? Possibly." Jeremiah smiled and bowed to her ironically.

"I do not think that he would much enjoy the experience my dear, after all my god might have words to say about such things."

"Indeed," Estella's eyes were flat with dislike.

"Well what to do?" Ulrich sat back and tapped his fingers together, "Who's more trustworthy? Jeremiah or a dragon? Jeremiah or a dragon? Jeremiah or a dragon?"

"It's Jeremiah we're talking about," Kaelin said wryly as she lend across to him.

"Good point," Ulrich smiled, "Dragon it is."

Estella smiled and then her eyes changed, the black of her pupils spilling out until they consumed the entirety of her eyes.

"We have an accord," the bubbling, rumbling voice spoke from her throat, "And I will see it honored." She/it turned their head to look at Jeremiah with a warning rumble before the black retreated back to where it should be.

"I am so glad that my companions agreed to launch themselves on this suicidal path before consulting me," Jeremiah said sourly. Zilvra tapped the table to get his attention.

"I think that you should know that if this Valodrael is what he says he is then he far more knowledgeable by far than any of us here," she informed him, "We have legends that the Void dragons and the Astra dragons were the only dragons that did not turn against the Begetters in the Time of Betrayal. It is said that they fled some where incredibly far away but their life spans put even other dragons to shame. The only ones that came close were the Titan-Silver dragons and they turned on each other in the god war that followed the Time of Betrayal. No one has seen either of them since. Valodrael maybe the only one who can tell you some of the power you so desperately seek."

"Oh," Jeremiah raised his eyebrows and looked back at Estella with a renewed light of interest in his eyes but she didn't change her expression from one of flat dislike.

"Try harder, Padre,"  she said flatly, "You hurt our friends. I learnt long ago not to forgive that easily."

"What joy," Jeremiah snarked, "We've picked up another unpleasant free wheeler, thanks to the inconsideration and impulsive decision making of my thoughtless companions."

"Well, technically it was Ulrich who made this decision," Kaelin passed the buck, "I'm just along for the ride to see how far we get before our new draconnic friend condemns your soul. Should be interesting to watch you have to play nice to keep on our young friend's good side. Got any particular rules or do you just make it up as you go along?" She turned to Estella.

"You are too nice," Estella, despite her youth, had a good grasp of irony, "But Valodrael doesn't trade in souls. His," she jabbed a finger at Jeremiah, "Patron claims that right, the right to judge souls worthy of existence but Valodrael doesn't. The Void Dragons never did, they allowed the small races to judge who among their number they didn't want so there no danger to your immortal souls just because you're going to journey with me."

"So which way do we go?" Ulrich asked cheerfully.

"Out of the building?" Estella suggested, making Kaelin snort to cover up a laugh.

"May I suggest that you rest here for a sleep cycle?" Zilvra offered, "It will take some time for the kerveads to clear, even if we manage to empty out all the dead in the next few hours and it will be dangerous to travel close to them while they are still swarming in such numbers."

"That sounds like a capital idea, good Lady," Ulrich smiled at her, "Would it also be permissible for us to resupply from your stocks?"

"You may as well," she said sadly, lowering her head into a hand, "Truth is that I don't know where to go. You are right that we cannot stay in the Underworld, with the clan so diminished we have no chance of protecting ourselves from our enemies but the surface world is foreign to us and we can hardly expect a warm welcome when the other clans have been raiding so frequently into the upper world."

"And you weren't?" Jeremiah folded his arms, not quite sneering.

"We had more pressing matters to concern us," Zilvra narrowed her eyes at him and then smiled as something slinked into the room, "Matters such as this little one." She reached down and rubbed the top of its head, making it close its many eyes in ecstasy. Ulrich frowned as he looked at the spider-dragon hatchling.

"Is it me or is he bigger already?" he asked of no one in particular.

"There were wounded beasts in the scholars dome," one of the Ash Elves that had arrived with the Hatchling informed him, "Ceann Mor has hunted well in his first hours."

"Splendid," Ulrich suppressed the shudder, "As for where you could go, you could try the Wizard's Tower." Lady Zilvra frowned. "It is in the area we surface dwellers call the Dead Swamp and at the moment he could do with a hand driving of the werewolves and the Ash Elves who are allied to them away."

"And you think he would accept us?" Lady Zilvra frowned.

"He is a... inactive member of the King's Special," Ulrich found the right word eventually, "He should understand that people sometimes have no choice but to change. The other one you could try talking to would be Risgath of Nether Wallop. He is an Ash Elf like yourself. Again they are being besieged by the other Ash Elf clans but he is the one who asked us to come down here and find out what all the trouble was about so he should have an open ear." He trailed off as he saw her expression of ecstatic joy. "Was it something I said?"

"Risgath? As in Risgath Zaphruan?" she asked, the light that had died when they discovered the body of the Matriarch finally back in her eyes.

"Yes," Ulrich nodded and fished out the book, "He gave me this, said it would help with our journey down here." To his astonishment Zilvra burst out laughing, a sound that he didn't believe her capable of. The spider-dragon hatchling chirruped in confusion. Still laughing she scratched its head again.

"I'm sorry," she still laughed, "I'm sorry, its just after all these years, finding out that little brother was right about everything..." She laughed again. After staring at her for a few more minutes Ulrich turned his head to look at the other Ash Elves. One of the oldest there cracked his mask of indifference enough to answer Ulrich's questioning look.

"Lady Zilvra was born as a twin to the one known as Risgath," he informed him, "Risgath left our clan, our people and our land many time candles ago. He was one of the canniest preys I have ever hunted and bares no scars because of that. Though it is frowned upon I always respected the fact that he had escaped us before we even realized that he was making the attempt. There is strong prey that can fight you into retreat but the strongest prey is that escapes you without a fight at all."

"As to what he was right about," Lady Zilvra wiped her eyes, "He told me once that our unkindness, our lack of care for other races would one day be visited upon us ten times over and we would be the ones left weeping in the ashes left behind. He told me that one day we would be the hunted and we would find all doors closed to us because we closed the doors in the faces of others. I thought he was a fool at the time and it turns out, he was right." She nodded, "We will try to... ask my brother for help. Maybe we have some skills that this King of yours will be interested in trading, especially if we can... bring some of our slaves to him, if we can find them, you seem to have scared them all thoroughly." She arched an eyebrow at Estella.

"What can I say?" Estella shrugged, "Lots of people find Valodrael off putting."

"I can't imagine why," Ulrich said cheerfully but found that cheer hard to maintain as she turned her gaze to him and something dark stirred behind it.

"Can't you?" she asked and there was something not young girl behind that expression, something that had fangs all of its own.

"Still," Estella continued, clapping her hands as she stood, "If we are going to be going on a journey tomorrow I suggest we have a feast so we don't leave much behind for the scavengers. Who's with me on this."

"Sounds..." Thorian burped, "Good."

"Well help me out then," Estella suggested and turned to the range.

While his friends and Zilvra's brothers began the task of preparing a big dinner for them all, a task hindered by the fact that most of the Ash Elves seemed unfamiliar with kitchen jobs, Ulrich lent over to Lady Zilvra.

"Just so you know," he murmured, "Though there are other countries that practice it, King Tatsuya does not permit the practice of slavery, so if you wish to bring your craftsmen with you then it would be best to present them as such without their chains. Personally, I would say that though the clan has practiced slavery in the past that you have no wish to continue it and that your craftsmen are free to go where ever they wish, if it goes as far as you having to seek an audience with h... the King." He corrected himself at the last moment. He still didn't believe that she was ready for the idea of a male King.

"No slavery?" she asked, "Then how do you... have anything built or grown or created. Who does those tasks?"

"People," Ulrich replied, "Simply people. Yes they are still seen as the bottom of the social status but they are still people, not slaves. It gets back to the give and so get principle. They give their labor to build and grow and create and in return, at the very lease, they are given shelter, food and other material needs. And if the standard of what they are given is not enough, they can leave. Conversely, if the quality of the labor they provide is not good enough, then they do not receive their material needs. It is not always perfect as a system but it does encourage mutual respect of fellow people. It is how such small people like us can drive such big people as Thorian's out of the plains and into the mountains. Does that help?"

"I think so," she said after a few moments, "I think so." She lent her elbows on the table top, mouth hidden behind interlaced fingers, frowning as she gazed at something not in front of her.

The wheels of the world turned.