May the gods save me for they are my last hope.

The Wanderer knew she would come. Nobody understood what his intentions were when he had all the prisoners gathered together. He struck while all thought it was merely time to be given loaves of bread and cups of water. While all others stood in lines, strands of spider silk spread through the air. They twisted and curled, vanishing as the dawn light played against the thread. Had my stomach called me to eat, I would have been among those poor souls. Ironically, it was the Wanderer's instruction that saved me. Not that he told me to keep my distance, but that I no longer felt myself imprisoned like the others.

At his command, nothing more than a beckoning of his hand, the silk constricted around every man's throat. He did not merely strangle the prisoners, but the guards and even the warden too. The chaos was immediate, but it was silent for none could raise their voice. I saw some draw out blades and shivs. They attempted to cut the silk but none succeeded. It only took seconds for the weakest among the prisoners to succumb. They fell before their faces had even turned blue and they dragged the others down in a writhing, choking mass of death.

I heard some men cry out in surprise, anguish, a hint of empathy I thought the mine would have eaten out of their souls. They came running from their hovels, unaware what had happened. The Wanderer killed them too, but I know not how. Wherever his gaze fell, soon blood spurted across the stone, soaking into the gravel as he stamped his staff across the mine.

The affair did not seem like him. It was crude, rough, and quick. I was soon to learn why he acted with haste. I suspect he didn't even have the time to round up those workers above the mine and was forced to let them flee and carry word of the atrocity. Thinking about it now, I can only laugh at the idea the jarls might bring their army to what has become of this pit. How they will be confused! I laugh for the same reason warriors laugh after a battle.

Whatever power he harnessed from so many deaths he put to quick use. Cracks and runes spread out from him like the shadows of birds. In moments the entire mine was swamped and it began to change. A thousand miners could have spent their lives to do what he accomplished before the sun had even crested the rim. No, I am a fool. He killed a few hundred, and he accomplished precisely what those hundreds could have accomplished. The equation must balance! This principle holds for all other laws of the world, why would it not hold for the laws of magic?

I was too awestruck by the destruction – the creation! – before me to realize at the time, but it planted the seeds. No, it watered the seeds that had already been planted within my mind. I know not the precise mechanisms of action he used, but had he been able to freely bend the world to his will, he would not have needed the sacrifices. The marvel was simply in the speed with which the ragged mine was carved out and re-shaped as one builds a castle or a dungeon. And he prepared it all for her.

What splendid radiance. Beauty itself made flesh and blood, aflame with rage. She floated as a bird in the wind, trembling with anger as she spoke. "Seven hundred years, wizard."

He stood atop a pillar he had constructed, back straight and chest broad as he lifted his head to leer back at the angel. "Oh, we've known each other longer than that. Back when you were a killer, not a fool playing with a glorified doll house."

In her hand was a weapon akin to a scythe for reaping the harvest. When she lashed out with it, though her reach was no more than a mortal's, she cleaved open the mouth of the pit. The onslaught of rubble obligated me to dash out from the shadows, to run and leap across the winding paths the Wanderer had made. She paid me no heed, as if I were less even than a mouse in a cellar. "They're not dolls, Amurabi! They are the very people your god cherished. Have you forgotten that? Why he died?"

The Wanderer slammed the butt of his staff upon the stone. "I will not hear you speak of him, you wayward child! You still do not even know why your wretch of a mother abandoned you. You have shut your eyes and wiled away the years, afraid to even confront the darkness. Did you think your foul peace would last forever? That you would last forever? Nothing in this world is eternal but the darkness of death."

The ground rumbled as he spoke and great branches of pure copper spewed forth like a bird cage to enclose the pit with the three of us inside. The angel struck at it with her blade, but was rebuked. Though she seemed swatted from the sky, she regained herself before striking stone. Her laughter echoed even into the cistern like pit I had taken refuge in. "This is how you think to trap me? Did you forget I was always the angel of war? And where will you flee, wizard? How will you get away from me?"

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"What do I have to fear of a woman who never fought with her life truly on the line? Come. You are more useful as a corpse," he said, and they talked no more.

Her first blow cleaved the stone beneath his feet, striking like the ramming prow of a war ship, but drew no blood. No trace of him remained upon that pillar, but five reflections of him rose up from all about her, each wielding a different power of the gods, as if their magic had been stolen and made his own. I saw stone liquefy and move as if alive to strike at her, only to crumble to dust at a glance from her. Hawks made of lightning jerked through the air to be cleaved apart by her blade. Walls of flame encased her until her pearlescent wings buffeted the blaze back. When she did drive her blade through one of the apparitions of the Wanderer – driving it clear through his chest and pinning him to the wall – it swelled the way a rotting corpse swells. She had to leap back before the carcass erupted in a spasm of carnivorous leeches.

One of the wretched things landed near me and I missed much of their fight as the vile thing leapt upon me. My screams only encouraged the monster as it bit through the flesh of my arms and sucked upon my blood. Only when I had smashed it with my heel did I look down and see that it bore the face of none other than Warden Engval.

A madness of fear sent me running out of the little pit.

I can say little of what followed with certainty. My mind and memories do not comport with reality, as if I stumbled into a dream. Falling feathers became blades of steel. Walls of writhing shadow devoured stone. I saw the angel cleaved in half with blood raining across me and yet then she was whole, but the blood remained upon me, mixed with my own.

The Wanderer summoned phantasms out of nightmares and the angel shone with bolts of light that liquified stone until the slag from smitheries dripped down and boiled in the water about me. When the steam stung my eyes and the cacophonous crash of their blows became naught but a dim rumble in my broken ears, still they tore one another to pieces.

And then the monster came.

Legs the size of elder trees, with bristles of hair large enough to be spears. It pushed through the earth itself to lunge out of darkness and snap jaws around her. Even with her body pierced by venomous fangs, she did not relent.

And I knew this was my doing. This was the object of all that toiling with the Wanderer. It was by my hand and sweat that a beacon of all that is good in this world was slain.

For all that I lamented my punishment, now my lament is that I was condemned for blasphemy. I should have been punished for coveting the domain of the gods. My head should have been struck from my shoulders before my hands could work such evil. I have no hope for grace or forgiveness from the shepherd of death save that the spirit of my forefathers seized upon me.

With my arms blistering from steam and my legs frozen, I pulled myself up from the pit of that mine. I may have been nothing more than an insect compared to these titans, but even insects bite.

The Wanderer paid me no heed. He worked some sorcery, compelling and undoing the angel's magics. When she turned her blade upon the arachnid behemoth he stitched it back together. Strands of blood magic stitched nerves together and kept it alive, kept it fighting her. Even as a horrid miasma blackened the sky and its body was dismantled, it refused to die so long as she moved.

I could see it was taxing him. He breathed hard. His legs were spread wide and his knees shook. The Wanderer was as much a man of blood as I was. Though I had no blade of steel, no gift of the gods, I threw myself at him and drove him off the cliff. My singular thought was to dash his brains across the rocks and together great death herself.

But something struck the whole of my body. While we fell, I was blown away from him. I alone tumbled to the stone and broke as he floated in the air. But it was not nothing.

I had given her a chance, a mere moment when the beast faltered. Her blade struck true and cleaved the Wanderer in half. No magic stitched his form together. No corpulent burst of maggots. No mirrored duplication. The true man fell to the rocks.

It was she that stood triumphant. Though I could hear nothing, I could see the laughter of relief as her mangled body struggled to stay standing. And she turned to me with a smile. A gesture brought up the water about my body and it was no longer cold. There was a warmth, a homely embrace. It lifted me up and took away my pain.

I was lost in her gaze when her neck split and ran red. She wavered and fell and it was the Wanderer who stared down at me with wrath in his eyes. Though he had no legs, he gripped his staff and levered himself up, viscera falling out of his chest across the fallen angel.

He spoke a command and pointed a finger down. The water consumed me.

He did not kill me. He entombed me in the world below without a glimmer of light so that the monsters of darkness may feast upon me. I write this with the only ink available to me : the blood of my own body.

May the gods forgive me for the evil I have done.

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