The Sea of Mind settled into a resting state. Evan sat in the empty white space and let himself absorb what had happened.
He was an Arcanist now. He had crossed the threshold into the Will Realm, which was the point at which the relationship between a mage and their element stopped being a process of manipulation and became something closer to conversation. He hadn't expected it to happen here, hadn't planned for it, had been operating on the assumption that his inability to commit to the dark element's reality would keep him below that threshold indefinitely.
The Book of the Dead had done something to that inability. Not directly — it hadn't told him the dark element was real in some metaphysical sense that resolved his uncertainties. What it had done was show him death from the inside, and death was the dark element's domain, and from inside the experience he'd been unable to maintain the intellectual distance that had kept him from connecting.
He'd later come to understand that what he'd actually reached wasn't quite the Will Realm in the classical sense. But that was later.
For now: he was stronger, and he was alone in a tower level that had no exit he could find, and somewhere in the same structure were Rafael and Sophina.
The Book of the Dead had faded. He hadn't been able to hold it, but he'd read everything in it, and his memory was unusually reliable since the transformation. The text was less a book of spells than a philosophical document — the Gonishu account of the universe as experienced from the position of death, which they treated not as an ending but as a vantage point from which certain truths became visible that living experience obscured.
He stood up and looked for a way out. A staircase of light appeared at the edge of the space, extending upward into nothing. He started climbing.
---
In the other levels:
Rafael, on the level above, had attacked the Book of the Dead with his dragon lance. The book had declined to be attacked. The words on the frontispiece had gone through his defenses and into him at a level his holy light couldn't reach, and now he was kneeling on the floor asking his god to help him understand what he'd just been told, his armor still blazing, his dragon watching him with an expression that was new to her face.
Sophina, below, had passed through the book completely — her hand found no resistance, the book was not a physical object that could be grasped. She'd read the frontispiece and fallen into a state in which the blood-mist poured out of her and back in, and her apparent age dropped by two or three years, and something formed at the center of her chest that hadn't been there before: an elemental core, black-red, unlike anything in the standard vampire physiological model.
She tried to take the book and couldn't.
Stairs appeared. She climbed.
---
All three arrived at the tower's highest level within minutes of each other — Sophina first, then Evan and Rafael almost simultaneously, from different staircases.
The top floor was large — two hundred meters across, made of lapis lazuli stone, open to a sky that was the wrong color for the time of night. Through the walls, transparent from the inside, Evan could see the castle grounds below, the volcano's lava flows cooling, the vampire contingent gathered at a distance.
Evan and Rafael saw each other.
The killing intent was mutual and immediate, and neither of them troubled to hide it.
Rafael was injured. His face had the grey undertone of someone running on suppressed pain and willpower. Shorn, behind him, was moving carefully — one wing held at an angle that suggested damage.
Evan measured the situation. He'd just broken through to Arcanist rank. Rafael was injured. The dragon was injured. The odds were better than they'd ever been or were likely to be again.
He glanced at Sophina.
Sophina was watching both of them with the expression of someone who has just realized the exit depends on cooperation from people who want to kill each other.
Evan straightened slightly and addressed her with perfect courtesy: "Miss Sophina. I believe we have a shared interest in our current location's exit. Shall we discuss the Knight of the Rhomb first?"
Evan looked at what the tower's top floor held: lapis lazuli paving, a sky above in the wrong shade, walls transparent from inside but opaque from out. Through them he could see the grounds below, the lava flows cooling, the vampires gathered at a safe distance.
He looked at Rafael.
Rafael looked at him.
Sophina stood between them, watching both, her expression carefully arranged.
"Miss Sophina," Evan said, pleasantly. "Our situations have a great deal in common at this moment. Shall we address the Knight of the Rhomb before we address each other?"
Sophina gave him a small curtsy. "Honored Lich. Let us send this servant of the Prime Church where he belongs."
Rafael said nothing. He raised his dragon lance slowly, pointing it at Sophina. The golden light that had come into his eyes in the moments before was still there — steadier now, deeper.
Evan understood a half-second before it broke. There was a technique in the Prime Church's higher orders: a temporary invocation, drawing the essence of an angel into the body as a protective and amplifying force. It didn't heal wounds, but it reorganized remaining strength in a way that made the host temporarily more than what they were.
He threw the Lich's Howl first, without announcing it.