Gyrgory drove the shire horses like a charioteer in the gladiatorial arena. It was an admirable performance. But the Warden feared it would not be enough.

  The wound in his belly had reopened. Every yard they gained as the cart rattled along the wide dirt track that would eventually become the main highway to Gorgosa, he felt the weakness coming over him, the shivering fever that was Death’s emissary. He had been wounded in battle before, forty years ago. Then, he had been a young man in his prime. And even so, he had passed close to Death’s abode. He had gone into a blackness, seen a Void, walked beside Koronzon. The dreams he’d had in the old woman’s house had reminded him of that place. Mere fantasy. The last dying action of the brain. He could not believe it was a real place he had visited. It was merely his fevered mind creating one last illusion before the illusion of life itself was shed.

  But he was not as young or as strong as he was then, though still stronger than most men half his age. He’d inherited an abnormal constitution from his father. After all, it was the only way to explain how he had thrown off the Kiss of Eresh, when so few survived its ravishment.

  And how the Warden continued to live with it himself.

  Yes, the old woman had seen the plague-scars daubing his flesh. They rendered his torso a topographical map made up of oceans of calcified pustule and shining continents of blackening skin. When the disease spread up his neck to his face, there would be no more hiding it. But for now, he endured.

  He wondered, dimly, if the men knew. Even before the escape of Telos, they had begun to treat him differently. Always, they had been cautious around him, as one might expect subordinates to behave in the presence of a superior officer. But now they trod as though he were unstable, as though his orders were madnesses that made no sense. He had questioned his own mind and will, if truth be told. In the dark watches of the night, where he finally was able to remove his armour, he had sat in the blackness and wondered whether his mind could be trusted. The Kiss of Eresh warped the outward flesh, but it also warped inwardly. At times like this, he contemplated the death of a warrior, to cast himself from the battlements and die sane.

  Like your father you shall defeat this illness. He hated his father, hated how he had placed such misguided faith in the gods, how he had turned all his anger and fear upon his son. But he had to respect his toughness.

  Blood filled the Warden’s mouth and he coughed. A trickle of red ran over his lip he quickly wiped away. Things were torn within him. Gyrgory glanced sideway, fear and anxiety written on his face.

  The Warden looked at his hands, slimed with red. Strangely, he thought of Kyrick. The sorcerer had ultimately failed, his magic wearing off before it could be of much benefit. But he had opened the Warden’s mind to new possibilities. He saw now that sorcerer was not so much the magic touted by charlatans but really a form of advanced science. The art of Daimonic Ascension operates on the principle of soul-transfer through the medium of blood. We call this evocation. The scientific applications of Daimonsblood are known already. You use it yourself in a limited way…

  That, he could work with.

  The cart lurched again. The Warden coughed, and this time the blood filled his mouth with the taste of iron. Pain spasmed in his belly. It was like a serpent had been set loose in his guts, tangling his organs, spreading venom wherever it thrashed. His head and vision swam. Phantoms lurched from the periphery of sight. He was slipping, slipping. A cold, ancient hand beckoned into blackness. He would not survive. Not through will alone…

  “Grygory…” he whispered. “Grygory, stop the cart.”

  Gyrgory obeyed, pulling at the reins. Loyal Grygory. The Warden felt something like love towards the man. When this was done… But he could not think so far ahead. His mind was shrinking, shrinking to a nub of consciousness that could perceive only what lay two feet in front of him.

  The horses slowed then stopped. The Warden began clambering out of the cart. Grygory ran around and caught the Warden.

  “What is going on, Warden?”

  “Don’t look, whatever you do,” The Warden said.

  Grygory’s face was a mask of terror. The Warden pushed him away and stumbled off the road towards a copse of trees. He had so little strength. He clutched his belly which was now leaking through the bandages, wetting chainmail, armour, and hand. He gritted his teeth.

  It felt like it took an hour to make those ten steps into the tree line. When he was ensconced in relative shadow, he fell to his knees. He did not bother checking whether Grygory had obeyed his final instruction or not. There was no time for such things. The lens of his focus had been cracked, was nearly shattered entirely.

  He began to wrench off his armour, strap by strap. Doing this with only one functioning hand was difficult. Precious moments wasted as he fumbled with clasps and struggled with the weight of the metal. This is the weakness in which most people live daily, he thought. This is what you have risen above, and what you must avoid at all costs.

  By the time the breastplate fell to the earth, he breathed in wheezing, corpse-like gasps. His belly was a black opening pouring blood on the soil. He beheld, in the dawnlight, the ruin of his torso. What might have been a beauteously muscular form was marred by the glossy tattoos of sickness. They resembled horrifically warped love bites, hence the name: the Kiss of Eresh. There was a language in their form, a curse.

  He drew from his belt the Daimonbone dagger. He hefted his mace—could barely lift it now—brought it down with sloppy force. But it was enough. Bone was shattered into fragments. He did it again, and again. When it was fragments small enough to swallow, like a pile of discarded teeth, he scooped them up, closed his eyes, and swallowed. They cut his throat on the way down. He groaned with the pain but kept swallowing.

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  Gasping, throat on fire, he searched for the decanter of Daimonic remains. He withdrew it. Saw the life within wriggling. For a moment, his courage failed. Then the encroaching void reminded him time was short. He unstoppered the decanter and drank down the writhing form—like swallowing a worm. He gagged but gritted teeth to stop the reflux. Swallowed one last time. He felt it moving within him.

  Now the words, the words.

  Could he remember them? His mind was pure fog.

  But from some deep place, blacker than black, they arose. His lips mumbled them, but the meaning shone bright in his mind’s eye.

  “O bone of Memory,

  O Memory of greatness past.

  Daimon Soul, speak to me from Death!

  In thy limbs still lies Power!

  In this bone still runs Life!

  Thy time has ended, ours begun.

  Grant thy Life unto thy churl:

  thy will be done beyond thy Death!”

  Silence answered him at first.

  Then a cloud passed over the sun.

  He felt something, a vibration, as when deep music is heard from far off, so only the subtle tremors of it can be felt. It passed through all his limbs. Flame kindled in his belly, something awakening.

  Then there was the Presence. It drew near to him and he felt it as tangibly—no, more tangibly—than any living thing. The vastness of it stultified him, made him scream in terror. Intelligence. Power. Energy. A Life so vast that it had not been quenched in Death, only delayed.

  Who are you? It said. Who are you that would sup of my strength?

  “I am Koronzon Hammyr!” he roared. “You will heal my wounds, lend your power to mine!”

  Laughter answered.

  I will do no such thing. You are no Daimomancer. You know not the imaginal forms.

  The Warden’s mind reeled. This was not some senseless intelligence. It knew things about the world. It had been aware, all these thousands of years. How was it possible? He did not understand. But he knew now, with certainty, that for all his deceptions Kyrick had been right: the Daimons were more than mere beasts of some prehistoric age. Their usefulness lay in more than just their resources. Now he understood why the Daimomancers were feared. Kyrick was but a lesser scientist in this art. But imagine what a greater one could do?

  “You will harken to me!” the Warden said. “You are dead. It is only through me that you might know life again.”

  Laughter, again.

  You know nothing. Our time comes again. The spirit of renewal is within us. We are not dead. Our forms were hideous rent, but we shall possess them again. Even now, there are those among us who have healed almost to fullness. We shall rise and destroy your parasitic kind. And then… But what came next the Warden could not fully parse, for the depth of the hatred obscured the meaning of the language.

  He could feel something tearing in his stomach, and he realised the living worm of tissue was resisting him, somehow, was trying to break free. He screamed as he felt it writhe towards the open would in his belly. The stitches were tearing. He was blue-white with bloodloss.

  “Then let us… let us…” His speech slurred. “Let us reach a compromise! Name your aim, and I shall aid you in it in exchange for you aiding in mine!”

  The Daimonic presence halted.

  What could you possibly offer me, mortal? I am ageless, mighty, prescient. You are but a frail speck of dust, made in the labs of those horrors you call gods.

  Those words sent a chill through the Warden like he had never known. The gods. This thing within him had outright acknowledged the existence of the gods. Yet it also denied their divinity. Perhaps, then, that was the answer. There were beings who had once dwelt on Erethia, but they were not divine, or all-knowing, simply strange.

  The Daimon seemed to know the Warden’s thoughts. An emanation came from it that seemed almost like purring.

  So, you too are an enemy of the gods? This we can abide. Perhaps you might be useful after all?

  And then the voice faded, and pain erupted all through every atom of the Warden’s being. He screamed—uttering words in a language he had never spoken before, that he did not know. Blinding white light enveloped him. He felt muscles knitting, nerves rearranging, and strength. Oh! Such strength! The power of it dwarfed his reason. He flew from his body into some stratosphere of empty brilliance. He spun as on a whirligig, outside of body, time, or sanity. In the blinding light of Ascension he careened through voids of self while upon some dim plane far, far below his physical matter was rearranged in accordance with the Imaginal Ideal.

  Then it was done. He knelt in dirty and moss. Light crept through the canopy of trees. Birds sang. He gasped, and felt the air sliding smoothly in and out of his lungs. The wound at his belly was sealed. He stared at his torso and saw the marks of Eresh’s plague had vanished. Healed! I am healed!

  His right arm, the one that he had been forced to gouge to prevent the venom from spreading, was still a mangled wreck, and he was barely able to move it. This Daimon is not all-powerful, then. Still, he had avoided death. Once more, he had transcended the wheel of chance. I live to see my mission through. Telos shall be found.

  I shall aid you in this, the Daimon whispered. And you shall aid me in the destruction of the gods.

  The weight of that pronouncement fell heavy on him, a sky that only his shoulders could bear, for was he not the Hammyr of the Theronts? He had been called to great purpose before. Now, he was called again by a greater power. No gods, the Warden thought. It is not that they did not exist, but that I was always meant to destroy them.

  “So be it,” he whispered.