Rafael was one of the most decorated knights in the Prime Church's active service. His title was the Blade of Gabran. He had cleared out an entire heretic stronghold alone, including Great Knights and Senior Mages among the dead. He was the commander of the Iron Rhomb Guard, and he held the rank of Great Knight — one step below Epic Knight, and the gap between any consecutive knight ranks was not a small one.
His dragon's name was Shorn.
Shorn was a red dragon, which in the dragon taxonomy meant fire-aligned, physically powerful, and with the explosive quality of high-energy combustion in every physical act. She had bonded with Rafael young, and the bond between a dragon knight and their dragon was not metaphorical — they shared cognition during combat in a way that outsiders found difficult to describe. Rafael's strength and effective lifespan had both increased dramatically at the bonding. Shorn's intelligence had increased in parallel.
From the air above the Bolo Hills, Shorn found the vampire scent and reported it to Rafael. Rafael considered the tactical picture: Gonishu ruins with an active half-plane, a concentration of vampires, and intelligence suggesting the ruins might contain artifacts from a civilization whose magical knowledge significantly exceeded the current era's. He decided to clear the exterior first rather than descend immediately.
Shorn drew a breath and exhaled.
The fire ran across the slope below them. Every plant on the hillside that wasn't attached to stone burned or fled, the man-eating flowers going up in a concentrated roar that sounded, at high altitude, like distant applause.
Inside, Evan followed Sophina through corridors lined with dormant gargoyles, then into the half-plane.
He hadn't felt the threshold — hadn't felt anything until the space changed around him. The castle had a half-plane built into it, a separate dimensional space that the Gonishu civilization had anchored to the physical structure. The castle's concealment array had run out of power sometime in the five centuries after Kaelon's slaughter, which was why it had become visible to the outside world. The half-plane had remained intact.
In the half-plane's interior, the gargoyles were active.
They fought through them. Sophina was quick, efficient, and had clearly been here before — she knew which corridors the gargoyles patrolled and which were clear. What she hadn't expected was the bone cavalry: animated skeleton riders on skeleton horses, moving through the halls in formation.
Evan called up undead constructs of his own, which confused the skeleton cavalry's targeting for long enough that they could be dismantled piecemeal. It wasn't a clean fight. It took three hours and covered most of the half-plane's lower levels.
Outside, in the real world, Rafael was methodically working through the castle's defenses. He was looking for the entrance to the half-plane. He found the vampire contingent first.