“Okay, I’ve packed my things,” Ayame said. She had just returned, her belongings bundled into a bindle slung over her shoulder.

  Ori chuckled at the sight, his mood markedly improved by Freya’s news.

  “What is it?” Ayame asked, catching his amusement.

  “I’ve got a void storage ring. If you’d like, I can carry all that for you.”

  “Oh, this?” She lifted the bindle slightly. “It’s no trouble. It’s not that heavy, really. Why? Is where we’re going really far away?”

  Ori nodded. “Pretty far. And you’ll need both hands free.”

  “Why?”

  “To hold on.” Ori gestured, and Lucas, who had already arrived and had remained invisible, revealed himself from beyond the treeline.

  Ayame gasped and stumbled back in alarm, then shot a look at Ori’s cackling before her expression turned rueful.

  “Would you rather hold on to me, or have me hold on to you?” Ori asked, leading her towards the Dire Strix. Nearly four metres tall, its white, snowy plumage did little to soften the intimidation of its solid black beak and obsidian eyes.

  “You hold me, please. I don’t quite trust myself to hold on to… to…”

  “Lucas,” Ori supplied. “He’s called Lucas. He’s one of my familiars.” He patted the great bird’s wing. “And he’s very convenient.”

  Ayame reached out and set her hand against the white down on Lucas’s breast.

  “He feels…”

  “Like sunlight between your fingers on a cold day,” Ori said.

  “Exactly like that,” Ayame breathed.

  “Another one,” Lucas grumbled through the bond.

  “Consider it the price of immortality, my friend,” Ori replied silently, smiling at the former foe turned aerial, stealth taxi.

  “I’ll need to drop you outside the valley,” Lucas added.

  “The trap?” Ori asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Fine.”

  After Ori stowed her belongings, he guided Ayame up across Lucas’s wing until she perched precariously on the giant creature’s back. A subtle application of magic and the same makeshift harness he’d used for Tess held her in place before he climbed on behind her. Within minutes, they were airborne.

  Ayame’s breathless squeal and rigid tension eased after the first few minutes. Ori let Lucas climb in powerful wingbeats, the wash of air settling around them as they rose into the cloud layer and beyond. When Lucas truly turned on the speed, his magic formed a stable pocket of air that let them breathe and speak normally, shielded from the supersonic roar of wind outside.

  “This is incredible,” Ayame said. Her grey-blue tail batted against Ori’s chest as he held her, his hands around the silk-covered curve of her narrow waist. There was a musk to her, hair-scent mingled with dusty sweat and a faint trace of jasmine he found oddly pleasant.

  “I’m glad you’re enjoying it.”

  Ayame turned, caught Ori’s gaze, and seemed to realise their proximity all at once. Her tail stilled for a moment, then she relaxed and leaned back into him.

  “Is… is this… okay?” she asked, her voice almost lost to the wind.

  For a moment, Ori weighed how to answer, what she meant or her motives, what she or he wanted or whether either of them was moving too quickly. Then the Bondweaver answered for him, pulling her closer, his arms tightening around her waist.

  It was an odd contrast to hours of conversation, sitting in each other’s arms in silence while the world raced past. It answered more of Ori’s questions about Ayame than any words could have. And if Ruenne’del had accounted for the trap laid out for him, she had almost certainly accounted for Ayame’s rescue as well.

  Serendipity was rarely just that, not after what he had seen of summoning and time travel. After all, Seraphine, Harriet, and Poppy had all carried fates that should have ended centuries before he was born, and yet they had still found their way into his life.

  Which was to say that if Ayame was meant to be saved by him, then the method and timing were probably irrelevant, and worrying over the coincidence was wasted effort.

  “We’re here, just over the next valley,” Lucas called.

  “Alright. Put us down as close as you can,” Ori replied.

  They landed on a ridgeline overlooking what had once been a town. Beyond the trees, Ori saw evidence of battle: swathes of forest cleared by magic and fire, bodies scattered through the woods, growing denser the further down the valley his eyes tracked.

  Dozens of people milled about, and even from a mile away, the shocking mop of Ruenne’del’s pink hair and braids stood out against the gloom.

  “A mortal did all this?” Ayame said, her voice awed.

  “I’m sure Rue helped. She’s about as powerful as I am.”

  “But didn’t you say she’s just a seer?”

  “Not just anything. She’s also a Seelie princess.” Ori took Ayame’s hand. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  Within half an hour, they reached the remains of the town. Crystal shards littered the burned-out ruins alongside fresh bodies. The sight and smell of the massacre were overwhelming, even for him.

  Ruenne’del smiled as they approached, arms folded. Freya sat on her shoulder and gave him a quick wave. Ori smiled back. Tess, still helping the formerly imprisoned, did not notice him until he was within ten yards. When she did, her face split into an overwhelmingly bright smile. She squealed and ran at him, leaping up, her long legs locking around his waist as their lips met.

  “We did it!” Tess gasped when the kiss broke. “We saved them.”

  “Well done. I’m mega proud of you.” Ori looked her over, still beaming. “You haven’t awakened?”

  “I… well, I was waiting for you.” Her voice dropped to a whisper as she leaned in. “I wanted to… form our Taurna’diem at the same time. Can we do that?”

  “We can certainly try,” Ori said lightly, despite the carnage around them, “and have fun doing it.”

  Their obvious incongruous joy drew a few looks from the survivors, but after what their rescuers had done, no one voiced an opinion.

  “So you found her?” Tess stepped back, her storm cloak swirling in the non-existent wind, flashes of lightning moving within it. Long legs bare beneath a forest-green poncho, she studied the blue-haired fox woman with a more considering smile.

  “Tess, meet Ayame. Ayame, this is my Captain Tess.” Ori gestured.

  Tess gave him a crooked smirk at the possessiveness in the title.

  “Nice to formally meet you, Ayame,” Tess said warmly, then turned back to Ori. “So, is this what I should expect? Whenever I’m busy, you go off and find someone new?”

  “Oh no!” Ayame stepped forward. “It’s not like that. He saved me, and then—then I asked to come. Really, I invited myself. He was just being nice.”

  Tess chuckled, then stepped in and hugged her. Ayame froze in the taller blonde woman’s arms.

  “It’s okay,” Tess said. “He saved me and my family too.” She released Ayame and glanced towards the survivors. “I still need to help these people, but…”

  “I can help,” Ayame said quickly. “Just tell me what to do.”

  “Oh, Okay.” Tess shot Ori a look, then took Ayame’s hand. “Come with me.”

  Ori headed for Ruenne’del. Over their bond, a subtle music of anticipation rose as he drew closer, her eyes never leaving him.

  Without a word, he pulled her impossibly light frame into his arms. Her feet lifted off the ground as fairy wings hummed above his grip.

  “Hello to you too!” Freya huffed as her perch was disturbed. Ori chuckled as the pixie shifted into her sprite form and buzzed away, heading for Tess.

  “Thanks, Freya!” he replied over the bond.

  Ori watched her go with a chuckle, then returned his attention to the woman in his arms. He tried to send the ocean of gratitude he felt over the bond, along with the raw need and steady desire that had grown with each passing day. He started to speak, but Ruenne’del shushed him, a finger to his lips, grey eyes locked on his.

  “I know,” she said, and kissed him once, quickly on his lips. “I found you a present.”

  She slipped down and tugged his arm, leading him towards an open pit.

  “What is it?” Ori asked, confusion and disgust mixing with curiosity as the Leanan Sídhe brought him to the edge of a ten-metre-wide open grave. The closer they got, the louder her anticipation grew through the bond: giddy expectation threaded with fear, excitement braided with intense curiosity. Was he supposed to do something with the bodies?

  As he stood on the lip, Ori looked down into a circular pit roughly ten metres across and about two metres deep, packed with the remains of hundreds. Some were swollen and grey, skin pulled tight close to rupturing, eye sockets hollowed by scavengers. Others were fresh enough that their features still held, eyes open, mouths fixed in their final moments of horror. Blood had seeped down the heap and pooled between the crevices, thin and glossy, almost black under the overcast sky.

  Flies roiled over it all, the sound a low, ceaseless rasp. The stench rose in sweet, rancid waves, thick enough to coat the back of his throat. If he were still mortal, it would have folded his stomach. Instead, it joined the many memories of slaughter and misery, from his own life and from the lives from absorbed souls.

  Ori turned to Ruenne’del, questioning.

  “The pit is their trap,” she said. “And my gift.”

  “Gift?” Ori echoed, disgust sharpening the word as he wondered if he had completely misread her. He looked back down, Vision of the Progenitor flaring as he searched for the meaning behind her claim. It did not take long to see it.

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  A tide of paracausal energies, broken and still-suffering souls, lifeblood, and a twisted mix of mana, karma, and infernal high magic fed into a mechanism Ori could scarcely begin to understand.

  “Fuck me,” Ori breathed out.

  He felt Ruenne’del’s smirk through the bond.

  “Is everything okay?” Tess asked, concern in her voice as she tentatively peered over the edge of the pit.

  “I’m sorry, Tess. We might be here a while,” Ori said, his focus fixed on an exposed length of enchanted spinal cord. From its size and structure, he could only assume it had come from some kind of serpent. The whole mass was carved with a dense collection of enchantments.

  He turned to her. Tess masked her disappointment well, and Ori reconsidered his earlier urge to deal with this realm-wide threat first before finally cementing his bond with her.

  Not that he was in the mood right now. Using one of his newest void storage rings, Ori had quickly stored all the bodies from the pit after clearing it with Ruenne’del. With the flesh removed, he sloshed through a half-foot-deep pool of blood as he inspected the grand working of enchantment and sigilcraft that he was coming to understand as a gate, a demon gate, powered by blood, souls, and concepts he still could not name. Most of the artefacts lay beneath the pooled blood, so he began with the external connections: evenly spaced lines around the rim of the pit, feeding into, or drawing from, the massive enchantment below.

  He looked back at Tess. “It would be dangerous to leave this here, and until I can use magic again, it’ll be difficult to help the people too injured to walk.”

  “No, I understand.” Tess shook her head. “Don’t rush on my account.”

  “I’ll make it up to you.” Ori caught her smile as he looked up. “How about dinner back in Thorncross tomorrow?”

  “Make it a date,” Tess said.

  Ori nodded. “A date it is then.”

  Briefly wondering whether that meant something different here, and recalling his previous poor track record with dates, he made a mental note to ask Freya what the expectations were.

  It also gave him a deadline, and with that thought, Ori’s Split Mind set to work, picking at the twisted knot of magic around him.

  Hours later, Ayame peered over the edge, disgust warring with determination as she waited for him to notice her.

  “I might be able to help.”

  “I…” Ori was about to turn her away, unwilling to let anyone else wade through the blood and filth for him. But the enchantment was far beyond his ability to dismantle alone. He exhaled. “Can you see the bridges between these enchantments?”

  He was certain sigils linked them. He could even see the paracausal flows connecting one node to another. But he did not know what kinds of energies they were, and most importantly, it was unlikely he could manipulate them directly. Not without dismantling the enchantments and sigils, which he could not do without magic, and right now, would not do with magic, because using mana risked triggering the trap he was trying to disarm.

  If Ayame could dismantle the sigils that linked the source to the wider trigger, he could safely use his mana, and the whole problem would become far less dangerous.

  “I can.” Ayame’s special perception kicked in again. She had explained that this, more than anything, was why she had received a bestowal at Thorncross from the Arch Wardsmith. With the ability to see the flows of lesser paracausal energies and even see through them, as demonstrated by her ability to see through his Presence camouflage at Thorncross, much of what made sigilcraft difficult to parse became clearer, if not obvious, for her.

  Ori, not for the first time that day, considered buying transmutation scrolls to upgrade Vision of the Progenitor again. But compatibility and affinity still played a decisive role in whether an upgrade would take, even for him, and he simply sighed.

  He looked around, trying to think of any reason she should not help, then relented.

  “If you can dismantle the sigils without using mana, that would honestly be a massive help.”

  Ayame’s bright smile surprised him. “Dismantling wards is my favourite.”

  She slipped over the lip of the pit, and Ori returned his focus to the artefacts below.

  Darkness had long since settled over the remains of Stablemere Ford by the time Ori was working by torchlight; an hour had passed since Ayame joined him. She needed tens of minutes for each spoke of the trap’s mana trigger. In the meantime, Ori analysed and mapped the enchantments in his mind, identifying new elements he intended to dismantle, recreate, and experiment with later.

  “Okay, I’m almost… done!” Ayame called. A moment later, she appeared at the rim, expression bright and expectant, tail wagging in the firelight.

  “Alright…” Ori checked, double-checked, triple-checked, then checked again. Then he began scoring mana-disrupting indents with his Gizmo, into the connected enchantments while watching for any reaction.

  It took another hour before he was satisfied that the first system was inert.

  He climbed out of the pit, heart racing as he looked back into the ominous black circle. Torchlight gleamed on the glossy surface of the pooled blood. Knowing it and the mass of fractured souls beneath it, Ori knew he had done as much as he could without mana.

  In theory, the trap was inert. A mana detector tied to a mana-draining field with a radius of half a mile, Tess had been lucky to fight from extreme range. Beyond that, an array of curse projectors served as fail-safes if any part of the mechanism was dismantled out of sequence. Beneath the layered traps sat the demon gate itself, set to open on the command of the now-dead demon general, or upon activation of any one of the systems above.

  A meticulously over-engineered ambush, built with an archmagi in mind.

  The Du?list sneered.

  It would not allow its strength to be turned into a weakness.

  “Freya, can you get the others to clear the area?” Ori asked through the bond. “I don’t know what happens if I’ve got this wrong, but distance seems sensible.”

  Throughout the afternoon and evening, he had relied on her to relay instructions above and to feed him updates from the valley.

  “Ori, there are too many who are too injured to move, so unless you would have us abandon them...” Freya replied. “And this trap… If it were as simple as putting a mile or two between us and it…”

  “Then what do you suggest?” Ori asked.

  “I’ll tell the others. We’ll stand together if anything springs.”

  “Are… are you sure?” Ori’s voice roughened as fatigue and stress met the steadiness in her words, sending an unexpected warmth through his chest.

  “They’re already coming.”

  Within minutes, Tess, Ruenne’del, and Freya joined Ayame at the pit’s edge. Ori’s heart thudded as Seraphine’s Beacon appeared in his hand.

  “Oh, it seems we’re all assembled,” Seraphine said through the bond. “What’s the occasion? Oooh, that's quite a bit of blood, how quaint.”

  “I’ve been dismantling a trap made for an archmagi,” Ori said. “Made for me. And now we find out whether I’m as good an enchanter as I think I am.”

  “Oooh, thrilling.” Seraphine squealed, Ori chuckled at her attempt to lighten the heavy mood, then he released a long exhale.

  He could feel Ruenne’del’s excitement through the bond. Success or failure, life or death, neither truly mattered to her. She basked in the uncertainty of what he would do and what would happen next.

  Hopefully nothing, yet, despite his best efforts, Ori knew it would not be that simple.

  “Here goes nothing.” He said under his breath.

  He looked to each of his bonds. Each offered a tight-lipped smile and a nod of encouragement. Vision of the Progenitor blazed, and he cast a simple Light Orb.

  For a breath, nothing happened. No curses, no mana drain, no detectable effect, then Ori saw it. The fragmented souls above the pool writhed and twisted, he frowned.

  He activated Will of the High Human at once, casting Mind over Mind and Mind over Motion, then unfurling a Celestial Domain that swallowed the entire valley.

  Death Ward halted the torment and consumption of souls, but only temporarily. A mechanism still fed the grand enchantment below.

  Ori’s gaze snapped to the pool of blood, draining fast. That was the last clue he needed.

  He jumped into the pit, Greater Feather Fall accelerating the drop into a controlled dive, his breath-empowered perception pushing him to move faster than gravity alone would allow.

  His Void Sensing Gizmo snapped into his hand. Mana surged through its systems as he inspected the gate’s mechanisms and sources, now racing to consume every free mote of paracausal energy in the valley. An invisible timer was counting down towards a future Ori could not allow.

  His eyes shone like stars as he traced the enchantments beneath the thinning blood. He found the interface and moved quickly, fusing one of the tools in his wand to bypass the security seal that barred access. He checked again that this was not yet another layer of the trap, then let a portion of his consciousness sink into the artefact.

  He emerged onto a vast plane: dark, endless, and packed with tens of thousands of demons all assembling for war. According to the artefact, this was a staging space between realms, a pre-powered infernal gateway or wormhole, held half-open, balanced on a hair trigger.

  Ori watched in mounting horror. The weakest demon in sight was Sovereign Rank. He would struggle against even a tenth of what he was seeing.

  Then his heart chilled.

  A presence, old and primordial, turned its attention towards him.

  Split Mind kept most of him anchored outside. Only a third of his awareness had entered the true trap, and that portion was now locked in a battle of wills with a Pinnacle Rank infernal devil. It strode towards him with a grim, satisfied smile, certain of its victory, as the army around it gathered and the artefact drew power to open a portal to Twilight.

  Ori thought fast. The other parts of his mind worked frantically, scoring and reshaping the gateway’s enchantments in the hope of disrupting the portal forming above him.

  Then an idea struck like a bolt of lightning.

  Tracing the enchantments that governed the bridge between realms, Ori knew there was a theoretical way to erase, or reset, a staging area like this. In discussions with Martel Wheeler, the old man had dismissed the idea at first during a discussion on gate artefacts. He argued that what Ori had described as a 'False Vacuum', a term borrowed from quantum field theory, was just that: a theory. Introducing a lower minimum state into an existing staging area, he’d said, was impossible.

  Then Ori showed him an altered version of the enchantment, an edit that could do exactly that.

  Martel had stared at it for a long time before scoffing. "An interesting theoretical exercise," he’d called it, "Wonky nonsense," and "nothing you should ever rely on."

  Now Ori intended to do just that.

  He carved new enchantments with frantic speed, bypassing the staging area’s controls and inscribing a new floor into the esoteric value of the dimensions between planes.

  Ori held his breath as he completed the sequence and activated it.

  For a moment shorter than the gap between his racing heartbeats, nothing happened. Then the demons surged into a charge. The grand devil’s smile slipped as psychic pressure slammed into the portion of Ori’s mind still trapped within the artefact's interface.

  Pain tore through him, his soul suffered damage, his Life-force drained, and his shoes began to smoke. Down in the pit, the blood that had once reached above his ankles now sizzled and spat as the last drops boiled atop the infernal gate.

  And then it happened.

  Like a magic eraser, a deeper black swept across the staging area, deleting hundreds of demons at a time from existence.

  Ori felt the moment the Pinnacle-rank infernal devil turned and fled towards the far end of the gateway, away from the wave of profound nothingness consuming the artificial space. For an instant, Ori wondered if they were merely being safely ejected, but then the air back in the pit thickened impossibly with Peritia as Fate rewrote itself upon the silent massacre.

  With Mind over Motion and perception pushed far beyond his rank, Ori watched in slow motion: the clean erasure of an army, the implausible reversal of a circumstance that should have doomed him. With it came a new awareness of Fate, of his nature as the Demon Bane, as his page in the Library of Fate was rewritten, and the Arch Redeemer and Wandsmith each became entities now recognised by Fate.

  The devil threw one final, terror-stricken glance over its shoulder before a black deeper than the void unmade it. The reset wave, only now reaching the opposite end, swallowed the last of the staging area before silence followed.

  Ori's companions stood on the pit’s edge, suspended in an ocean of Peritia as thick as treacle.

  One point zero one billion…

  One point four two billion…

  Two point seven eight billion…

  Four point seven one billion…

  Six point three five billion…

  Nine point two one billion…

  Eleven point two billion…

  As Ori watched his Peritia skyrocket to an amount far beyond what he needed for his next racial evolution, a creature nominally ten times more powerful than a common god was deleted from existence by a mathematical, theoretical field effect that should have had no place in this world of demons and magic.

  Ori stared at the final value on his page, the world silent apart from his heavy breaths and racing heart.

  With his domain still active, he felt as much as he saw his companions aglow, each of them having taken their share from the banquet of Peritia.

  “Ori! What did you do?” Freya hissed through the bond.

  “Ori, I’m floating. I… I think Fate really wants me to awaken,” Tess said, her voice uncertain.

  “Wow, Ori,” Seraphine said, as Ayame yipped in panic.

  Ori saw Tess and Ayame both drifting off the ground, held down only by Ruenne’del, who had one hand on each of them. His domain shifted towards life. His magic assessed first, then healed where needed, starting with his companions and then the newly freed villagers, the full force of his domain sweeping through them with a rush of healing magic.

  Then, with the last vestiges of his control, Ori set the once-damned town awash in Lightfield. Millions of light orbs bloomed, turning the valley into an ocean of stars. Life and Cosmic affinity, Law of Radiance, and Purify Light infused the spell, and the improvised feat of High Magic sanctified the land.

  Souls bound by the artefact and dark rites were released, the bodies of the infernally damned burned away, the taint on their lingering souls was cleansed, and, as a final mercy, Ori redeemed what could be redeemed, offering a blessing to a poisoned land that had never deserved its grim fate.

  As the tide of Peritia settled, Ori’s hold over his domain finally broke. The damaged fragment of his mind, still tethered to the artefact, snapped back into the whole with a jarring slap and with the worst threats neutralised and the relief of knowing everyone was alive and well, Ori released his hold on consciousness.