Su spent the next two hours moving through the city like a particularly paranoid ghost. The greenhouse was compromised. The cathedral was too obvious. Every safe house she'd mentally catalogued now felt like a trap waiting to spring. The Hierophant's words echoed in her skull: You are already ours.

  She'd settled temporarily in the bell tower of an abandoned church on the city's eastern edge, Fernando tucked beside her in his increasingly battered bucket, both of them silent as they processed the day's escalating disasters.

  The rescue had worked. Aksen was free, probably halfway to the border by now if he had any sense. The city was in chaos, with half the population convinced they'd witnessed divine intervention and the other half demanding the guard "do something" about the multiple supernatural creatures apparently holding the city hostage.

  But none of that mattered because the cultists knew where she'd been. Which meant they could track her. Which meant—

  "You're spiraling," Fernando observed. "I can tell because you've been cleaning the same feather for ten minutes."

  Su stopped mid-preen. "I'm thinking."

  "You're panicking."

  "Tactical assessment isn't panic."

  "You've assessed the same three exit routes twelve times. That's panic wearing a planning hat."

  Su glared at him. "Don't you need to... photosynthesize or something?"

  "Already did. Now I'm providing emotional support through honesty. You're welcome."

  Before Su could formulate a suitably sarcastic response, the world lurched. Psychically. Like someone had grabbed the fabric of reality around her and yanked. Her void-energy recoiled violently, her vision blurred, and she felt a familiar presence descend over the bell tower like a suffocating blanket.

  "No," she whispered. "No, no, no—"

  Shadow erupted from the floor. Not the controlled darkness of her Shadow Step, but something more corrupt. It wrapped around her legs, her wings, pulling her down toward the stone floor that had suddenly become permeable, like the shadows were a portal to somewhere else.

  Su fought. Activated her Void-Sovereign powers, trying to command the darkness to release her. But this wasn't her void-energy. This was something with its own will, its own purpose, and it was stronger.

  "SU!" Fernando's mental voice was sharp with panic. "WHAT IS—"

  She managed to grab his bucket with one talon even as the shadows swallowed her whole. The last thing she heard was Fernando's indignant shrink before reality twisted, compressed, and spat them out somewhere different.

  Su hit solid ground hard enough to rattle her beak. She rolled, came up in a defensive crouch, void-energy crackling between her feathers as she tried to orient herself.

  She was in a room. Large, circular, built from dark stone that seemed to drink light rather than reflect it. Tall windows overlooked the city—she could see Eldermount spread below like a map, which meant she was high up. Very high up.

  The Chancellor's tower. She'd never been inside it, but she'd seen it from a distance—a black spire at the city's heart that the nobles called the Seat of Governance and everyone else called "that ominous doom-spike where bad decisions get made."

  Fernando's bucket had landed a few feet away. The fern looked distinctly ruffled, several fronds bent at angles.

  "You grabbed me," he said, his mental voice carrying genuine surprise.

  "Wasn't leaving you behind."

  "You could have escaped faster without—"

  "Shut up. Where are we?"

  But before Fernando could answer, a voice, dripping with the kind of superiority that came from never being told "no"—spoke from the room's darkest corner:

  "The Seat of Governance, level forty-seven. My personal study. Welcome, little speckled nuisance. We've been eager to meet you properly."

  Su spun toward the voice. Her void-energy flared defensively, painting the walls with writhing shadows. Stepping out of the darkness, his charcoal and violet plumage shimmering with corrupt power, was Vermilion Plume.

  He looked worse than the last time she'd seen him—or perhaps better, depending on how you measured "has fully embraced being an eldritch peacock." His feathers held less color now, more absence, like he was becoming a hole cut in reality's fabric. His eyes were completely black, no pupils, just pools of hungry void.

  And he was smiling. If birds could smile, it would look exactly like the expression on his face—predatory, anticipatory, deeply unpleasant.

  "You," Su hissed, her entire body tensing for a fight she probably couldn't win.

  "Me," Vermilion agreed, stalking forward with liquid grace. "The last time we met, you assaulted me with a fern. Imagine my surprise when the Chancellor's tracking ward—the one I placed on you during that encounter—activated this morning. You made quite the spectacle."

  Su's mind raced. The tracking ward. When he'd grabbed her during the vault fight, he must have tagged her with some kind of magical marker. She'd been so focused on escaping that she hadn't noticed. Stupid. And now she was paying for it.

  "What do you want?" she demanded, buying time while her eyes scanned for exits. Three windows—all too high to reach before he'd intercept. One door—definitely locked and probably warded. The shadows themselves—his territory, not hers.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Vermilion tilted his head, studying her with those dead eyes. "Want? Oh, little speckless one, I want many things. I want to understand how you survived the Crested Wyrm. I want to know what made my dear brother—" the word dripped venom "—desperate enough to curse a human. I want to dissect the void-corruption you've somehow stabilized into a weapon."

  He took another step forward. Su tensed, ready to Shadow Step even though she knew it probably wouldn't work against someone who commanded darkness itself.

  "But what I need," Vermilion continued, "is to deliver you to the Chancellor. He has questions. So many questions. And he's not a patient man."

  "Yeah, well, he can get in line," Su snapped. "Your cult friends also want a piece of me. It's a whole thing. Very popular, apparently."

  Vermilion's expression flickered—surprise, quickly masked. "The Ashen Tongues approached you?"

  "More like ominously promised I was 'already theirs.' Real creepy vibes. You'd like them."

  "I'm not affiliated with those fanatics," Vermilion said, his voice carrying genuine distaste. "They worship a broken seal and think dead things will solve their problems. I work for the Chancellor because he understands power, not superstition."

  "Right, because kidnapping birds for your boss is so much more dignified than religious zealotry."

  "At least I'm honest about my motivations." Vermilion's shadows began creeping across the floor toward her. "Now. You can come quietly, answer the Chancellor's questions, and perhaps negotiate some kind of arrangement. Or you can resist, I'll beat you unconscious, and you'll wake up in a very uncomfortable laboratory. Your choice."

  Su's mind raced through options. Fight—lose. Flee—impossible. Negotiate—with what leverage? She was Level 15 in enemy territory against a corrupted Sky-Dancer who had home-field advantage and approximately zero ethical constraints.

  Fernando's voice whispered in her mind: "The locket. Call the dragon."

  Su's claw moved instinctively toward the locket hidden under her feathers, but Vermilion noticed. Of course he noticed.

  "Ah," he said softly. "The Wyrm's token. I can smell it on you. You think Yvan will save you? Even if he could manifest here, even if he wasn't still held together by stolen geometry, the Chancellor's tower is warded. Nothing gets in or out without permission."

  "Worth a shot," Su muttered, and grabbed the locket, pushing her will into it.

  Yvan. I know you said there'd be a price, but I'm currently about to be dissected by an evil peacock, so if you could—

  The locket remained silent. The ward was holding.

  Vermilion laughed—a sound like breaking glass. "Did you really think—"

  The windows exploded inward.

  Not shattered by force—dissolved, the glass turning to powder as a wave of concentrated wrongness poured into the room. The temperature dropped twenty degrees in an instant. Su's breath came out as frost.

  And through the window where glass had been stepped a figure in bone-white mask and absence-black robes.

  The Hierophant. Flanked by four other cultists, their masks weeping ash, their presence making the very air curdle. Vermilion's expression shifted from triumph to fury to genuine alarm in the space of a heartbeat.

  "YOU," he snarled. "This is the Chancellor's space."

  "The Chancellor's authority ends where our god's will begins," the Hierophant said in that terrible multi-voice harmony. All four of his companions spoke in perfect unison: "And our god has called this one."

  The Hierophant's too-bright eyes fixed on Su. "Little cage-breaker. You should have accepted the invitation. Now we must insist."

  "Yeah, about that invitation—" Su started, but the cultists were already moving.

  Shadow-magic erupted from Vermilion, slamming into the lead cultists with enough force to crater stone. Two went down. The other three just kept coming, their movements wrong—joints bending in directions they shouldn't, speed that defied biology.

  Vermilion was powerful. Corrupted and dangerous. But the cultists were devout. And devotion, Su was learning, could be more terrifying than power.

  The fight that erupted was brief, brutal, and completely out of Su's weight class. Vermilion's shadow-constructs clashed against the cultists' void-walking techniques. The room filled with darkness so thick Su couldn't see three feet in any direction.

  She used the chaos to move, grabbing Fernando's bucket and Shadow Stepping toward where she remembered the door being.

  A cultist materialized in front of her. Not the Hierophant—one of the others, mask weeping continuous streams of ash that gathered at their feet like snow.

  "The Stone hungers," all four remaining cultists said through this one's mouth. "And you are the feast."

  A hand reached for her. Su did the only thing she could think of. She channeled every ounce of her Void-Sovereign power and screamed–three lifetimes of accumulated frustration, fear, and absolute refusal to be anyone's pawn, compressed into a single telepathic assault that would have made the Lord of the Wood from her second loop proud.

  The cultist staggered. The multi-voice harmony broke, became individual screams. Su didn't wait. She Shadow Stepped again, found the door, used Precise Disassembly to turn the lock to powder, and ran.

  Behind her, Vermilion was shouting something about "containment breach" and "unauthorized."

  She didn't care. She was running down a spiraling staircase that seemed to go on forever, Fernando's bucket clutched tight, her heart hammering against her ribs, her void-energy burning through her reserves like wildfire.

  She made it maybe four floors down before the staircase just... ended. Not collapsed. Removed. The cultists had cut off her escape route. Su skidded to a stop at the edge of empty air. Forty stories of drop stretched below her, the city lights like scattered stars.

  Footsteps behind her. Multiple sets. The cultists, moving with that horrible unified purpose. Vermilion's angry shrieking echoing from above. She was trapped.

  "Any ideas?" she gasped to Fernando.

  "Don't suppose you learned to fly?"

  "I'm a PEACOCK. We're decorative!"

  "Then I suggest—"

  The floor beneath them simply dissolved, removed from existence, like someone had edited it out of reality.

  Su and Fernando fell. For one terrifying moment, Su's mind went completely blank. This was it. The end. Third loop, dead by falling. What a stupid way to go.

  Then instinct kicked in. Not training. Just the desperate, animal survival reflex that had kept her alive through two previous deaths.

  She spread her wings. Useless for sustained flight, but maybe...maybe... enough to glide. She angled toward the tower's side, using her void-energy to create small Shadow Step jumps mid-air, bouncing between moments of falling and brief teleportation, turning a fatal plummet into a barely-controlled descent.

  She hit a tower balcony three floors from the ground, rolled, tumbled, and smashed into a very expensive-looking stone balustrade. Fernando's bucket cracked against the railing, the bottom falling out, dirt scattering everywhere.

  Pain exploded through Su's left wing. Something had torn. Badly. She could feel warm blood soaking her feathers.

  She tried to stand. Failed. Tried again. Made it halfway before her legs gave out.

  From the tower above, she could feel them coming. The cultists, moving through the building like smoke, drawn to her like moths to flame. Vermilion, recovering from whatever the cultists had hit him with, probably already calling for backup.

  She was done. Out of energy, out of tricks, out of luck. Fernando, somehow still conscious despite being dumped out of his bucket, lay in the scattered soil beside her.

  "Su," he whispered into her mind, his mental voice weak. "You need to move."

  "Can't."

  "Then use the locket. Try again. Maybe the ward's weaker down here."

  "It won't work."

  "TRY."

  Su reached for the locket with a trembling wing, expecting nothing, hoping for.

  The world twisted. A summoning. The dragon's magic, finally breaking through the ward, not to save her but to drag her somewhere else entirely.

  The last thing Su saw before reality folded around her was the Hierophant stepping onto the balcony, his too-bright eyes meeting hers, his multi-voice speaking words she couldn't hear over the roar of draconic power overwhelming everything. Then darkness. Complete and total.

  And then—

  Mistwarped (Mistworld Series, Book 2)

  by NeoRyu777

  When solving the unsolvable means breaking the rules, are you justified?

  why the Undead existed at all…

  And the Mist isn’t so easily conquered.

  Mistbound is now available on Amazon!

  Mistwarped is now available for preorder:

  https://www.patreon.com/c/Mistbound