The gate was large and old, the stone colonized by a climbing plant that had been growing there for what looked like decades. Before he could reach it, the gate opened, and the plant fled the surface in seconds.
In the gateway stood a girl.
Coffee-brown hair in waves, pale skin, a figure that read as young but not childlike. One glance and she'd have passed for a noblewoman anywhere on the continent. The second glance showed that the twin-headed dog crouching at her feet — one head exhaling black smoke, one exhaling poisonous fire, its tail a barbed triangle — was completely docile, its chin near her ankle, its four eyes pointed at the ground.
Evan brought every sense he had to full attention.
"A necromancer," she said. Her voice had no temperature in it. "Or something like a Lich, but not quite. You haven't drained vitality from someone living — I'd see that. What are you?"
"I'm Evan. Who are you?"
"I'm Sophina. Duke Winser's daughter." She studied him. "You look like a Lich. Not quite like one. Explain that."
"Something went wrong in my transformation ritual. You also look like a vampire but not entirely. What are you?"
"Half-human," she said. "My father is Duke Winser. My mother was a person." A pause — not self-conscious, simply informational. "You came here for the Philosopher's Stone rumor."
He didn't confirm it. She didn't need him to. "You want to enter the castle," she said, "you prove you can. That's the arrangement here."
The twin-headed dog doubled in size.
Evan opened his mouth and let the Lich's Howl out — the sound that wasn't quite a sound, the compressed air that read as a blade — directing it past the dog and at Sophina. She threw up the Blood Ward immediately, the egg-shaped barrier crackling with vampire runework, and the two forces met and pushed against each other.
While she was occupied with the Howl, Evan spoke: "Bone Cage."
The white bones erupted from the rock and earth and enclosed the dog. Sophina's attention split. She canceled the Blood Ward and looked at her dog, now standing inside the cage with an expression of bewildered dignity.
Then she looked at Evan. Something changed in her face — not much, but he caught it. He'd used the Bone Cage Spell rather than something lethal. She understood what that meant.
She tested him anyway. Her voice dropped into a cadence he'd never heard, old and rhythmic, and she finished with two words: "Ravages of Time."
He felt nothing personally. But the flower nearest to him withered to dust in the span of a breath, the stem following, the soil around it crumbling. A time-based attack, single-direction: accelerated aging. On a living person, the effect would have been severe. On a Lich, whose relationship with time had already been disrupted by the transformation — minor.
He stepped sideways out of the radius, the green light in his eyes brightening slightly. Sophina looked at him with something new in her expression.
"There really are Philosopher's Stone rumors here," he said, more conversationally. "I came to see. I don't have anywhere else to be."
A long pause. Then: "You're not the Prime Church's instrument."
"Definitely not."
The Blood Ward dissolved. "Come in," she said.