A state of unrest.

[Alysia]

“I have had enough of waiting.” announced the demon mage, Dar-Karow. Over the course of the argument, his words had grown clipped. Candles burned low upon the council table in Rhilshen Fortress; outside, the moon climbed a cloudless night sky. “I am sick to death of waiting! You may be inclined to trust in providence, Javan, but I am not. You are not biding your time, you are procrastinating, and she will suffer for it. She is a prisoner in a declared sorceror’s war. Have you even begin to investigate? Does this not concern you?!” He slammed his hands down on the table for emphasis.

Javan held the demon’s fiery gaze. “Obviously, it does concern me. I’ll forgive your words knowing that you are upset and still mourning your own losses, Dar, but I still can’t believe that whatever happened does not figure somehow into some design of hers. Alys is strong enough that this shouldn’t have happened.”

“Alysia is not all powerful. You are a purblind fool if it did not occur to you that even the mighty may be caught unaware,” Dar growled. He ran his hands over his shaven scalp in distress. “I hold this Bloodline to be of greater personal importance than the realm, but if you will not look at this as a matter of extreme urgency to the clan, consider this. What is weeks there is months here, and she has not made a public appearance in Rhilshen for months. This has not gone unnoticed. The curs of the realm grow snappish with discontent. It is time to send the Bloodguard to find her and exact retribution upon her captor, or it is time to give up and announce the Emperialle has been lost and allow claimants for the throne to swarm Aeshelm.”

“You’re mad. A sorceror’s war is a private matter.” Javan made a curt, dismissive gesture with his hand. “And the discontent of which you speak hasn’t gone unnoticed either, and the minor nobles won’t do more than show their teeth - unless they know that the Emperialle is gone, and then, then all Hell will break loose in the realm. Be patient, Dar, and trust her. Alys won’t forgive us for interfering in her plans.”

“Javan, I don’t think it was planned,” interjected Chryrie. The moredhel-fae stood as she spoke. From her appearance, it was obvious she had been sleeping little; indeed, she had been spending hours poring over old journals and many of the more esoteric tomes in the libraries at Rhilshen Fortress and at Alysia’s retreat in Sethil. “Somehow, Veighn knew her truename.”

The demon-mage uttered something blasphemous, shooting an accusatory glare at Javan. “I trust, Ser Ratt, that you understand the implications there? How long do you think she could hold against that? When she comes back, if she comes back, she could damned well be working under a compulsion. Will you not risk her rage?”

“Dar, calm down and shut up. You’re just being paranoid now, an alarmist,” drawled Lledrith, interrupting Javan as he took an angry breath to speak. The vampire looked from Javan to Dar. “Trust me, I’d know if someone else had been in her mind.”

“Maybe you would. Maybe you would not.” The demon mage pointed at Lledrith. “I have good cause to be paranoid. You can not even tell that she still lives. Your late mother would have been of more use than you. She would not have waited a day to go hunting.”

“F— you, Dar. I’d know if Alys were dead. We all would - you haven’t been part of the Bloodline long enough to know that.” Lledrith said, smirking. “Javan’s right, she won’t thank us for getting involved. I trust her to take care of her own business - why don’t you? Huh?”

“Enough arguing. We’ll do the work of the devil for him.” A wry voice spoke, mocking sleepily from the shadows. “Alys has named no heir for her Bloodline, but the ties of blood between her and I are closest and oldest. We shall vote.”

“So we shall.” Javan would not dispute the authority of the one who spoke, the shadow-thief who had born the blood of Vladslace, Li’Ved and Skye alike. He gestured at the center of the table. Two circles began to glow upon the surface, one red, one white. “First, to bide and gather information for another month - I’ll even go myself.” He tossed a crimsor coin into the first, red circle. “Second, to send to Dark Lake the Bloodguard with their individual Legions and an appropriate complement of Mage-Wardens.”

By the time those present had cast their votes, the coins scattered across the white circle outweighed those in the red. Javan stood and bowed formally to Dar-karow. “I concede, Master Demon-Mage, and will send the Bloodguard to find their Mistress.”

The demon mage stood and mirrored Javan’s bow.

[Alysia]

The troll named Khaz longed for the familiar skies of Rhilshen and cursed the circumstances that had brought him to Rhydin on this uncertain and probably futile mission. He shielded his eyes against deceptive glow of dawn, squinting at a towering reach of rock that stretched into the sky. Outlined by stars still bright in the heavens and just barely visible from the black shore of the Dark Lake, he could discern the shape of a castle atop the rock.

Around him, the Bloodguard practiced their craft. Their use of sorcery charged the air, thrummed against the nullifying fields of his armor, and made his leathery skin crawl. He grimaced at the sensations and idly watched a lean, black-clad figure stride across the lawn, down from the manor house, down toward the shore. Dar-karow, he thought. Khaz flexed his shoulders under the heavy plate armor he wore and turned his head from side to side, cracking the joints in his neck.

As Dar approached, the troll acknowledged him with a dour nod and mockingly made as if to fall upon his sword. “Master Demon-Mage,” he said. “Here to watch us expiate our shame.”

“That is possibly more words than I have ever heard you speak at one time, Khaz. I did not know you had it in you.” Dar retorted. He nodded toward the chateau that overlooked the Dark Lake. “That is Wraithspire? What do you make of it?”

“Need to build some siege engines.” Khaz’s toes curled at the thought of bringing the walls down and tearing apart some squishy magic users.

“Don’t ask the troll,” said Karthalan, a Destillian lich who had once stood at the apex of Rhilshen’s priesthood and now served at Khaz’s direction as the leader of an elite cadre of undead bodyguards and mages - the Bloodguard. “He only wants to bash heads. He would have us shake it to pieces, kill everyone else, and pull the Priestess from the rubble. It is not that simple. ”

Khaz growled.

Dead eyes met the troll’s shadowed stare as Karthalan continued. “The chateau is heavily shielded, twisted in time, and seems to exist on more than one plane. We can not sense the Priestess at all. She may be in there – or she may not. We have not made any concerted effort to break through the wards, as we feel there might be deadly repercussions to the Priestess.”

“There is risk with inaction as well as with action.” The bald demon-mage stepped around the looming troll to speak directly to the Bloodguard, looking at each in turn. “Lady Nightstar emphatically believes Alysia is there, and I believe her. It is your duty to take risks.”

[Alysia]

"Ah... The demon-mage chastises us to our duty," answered Karthalan, holding Dar'Karow's gaze as he spoke. He gestured vaguely with an arm that ended in a stump near the wrist. "And so we shall take these risks he mentions. I trust he'll assist us."

Dar-karow said, “I will. I have the Mage-Wardens bivouacked near the shrine. Most of them are Masters. Some are Adept-level, and there are no few shadow mages. Your own legions are held at the staging point in Rhilshen. I trust they will not be necessary unless the repercussions you anticipate are realized.”

The troll grunted and tuned out their voices for a while, looking up at the distant Wraithspire with a sneer of contempt.

"If or when we break through the wards, we will need a focus to summon her. Something that belongs to the priestess," rasped Stead, another lich of the Bloodguard. "Something personal."

"Are you sure there is time for that?" objected the demon mage. “Why do you need a focus?”

"She chose not to reveal her truename. Not to us." Karthalan explained.

"You do not know her truename." Dar repeated in disbelief. "Not one of you?"

Karthalan’s robes rustled dryly as he shrugged. "You’re her brother. Don’t you?" he countered.

"No. " The demon mage frowned and shook his head, perplexed that the so-called Lord Yhaull knew Alysia's full name, her truename, when her own mage guards, advisors, and blood-bonded kin did not. "A focus... perhaps her blades?"

"Both blades were with her when she was taken," said Karthalan.

"Scrolls. Or jewelry," muttered Khaz. His contempt for the mages was evident in his growl. "Check her rooms." He pointed toward the manor house.

[Alysia]

Dar-karow Demon-Mage stepped into the silence of Dark Lake Manor. As he walked, his footsteps echoed through the halls. His movement disturbed a fine layer of dust upon the floor.

Facing the prospect of a wizards war, the household staff had been dismissed and the street rats, several orphaned children Alysia had adopted and employed as spies, had been sent through the shadow gate to the relative safety of Rhilshen. The animating forces that kept the manor’s gargoyles alert had dissipated, leaving the stationary watchers nothing more than elaborately carved stone. The place was dead quiet.

Jewelry. Did she have a treasury in this house? Should he have started his search in her tower? He didn't know. The doors to the library were near and stood open, beckoning silently. He summoned a globe of coldfire, sent it bobbing into the pitch-black room that smelled of books. Feeling like a thief, Dar crept along behind and beneath the light, which hovered stationary over a carved wooden table piled haphazardly with bone scroll cases and bound tomes. In the shadows, he saw more of the same, lined up orderly upon shelves and racks. A full-length mirror stood nearby, gilded and etched with ice - and he thought that a strange furnishing for a library.

Mystified, he reached for a scroll case and opened it, automatically translating the runes in his mind. He was skimming his third scroll and had begun to consider summoning Infernal assistance in his search for an appropriate focus when the sense of splintering wards jarred him to acute alertness and snared his attention. He dropped the rolled parchment and traced a sigil in the air, casting outward until he encountered a sense of Chaos. Before he could identify the source, a cascading, brittle sound - like breaking glass, he thought - from upstairs shattered the silence.

:Khaz, I hear an intruder.: he sent to the troll. :Second floor, maybe third.:

A wordless brutal assent radiated back from the troll.

[Alysia]

Dar drew cloaking shadows around him and headed for the stairs at a run, stopping upon the landing. He heard nothing but his own heartbeat, then the sound of a soft gasp. Another heartbeat. Movement He continued to the third floor and advanced warily to a door, gestured at the handle to release the lock. It opened and he raised his hand, marshaling a killing levinbolt that crackled on his fingertips.

He saw a woman huddled on the floor in the suffocating darkness, naked and surrounded by fragments of what looked like blood red crystal. With a growing sense of shock, Dar recognized the dark tattoos upon the woman’s wrists, the warm alabaster of her long limbs, the white-gold mane that covered her face. There was an elusive hint of gold scales on the curves of her shoulders and hips, and a faintly glowing outline of hellborn wings at her back. She was shrouded by the Chaos he had sensed.

“Alysia?” the demon mage whispered in surprise.

The woman lifted her face, and he discerned the smoldering crimson eyes, the blend of elf and demon upon her features. She sat up and stretched wearily, staring at Dar. “I have been a captive for far too long,” she murmured in a silken contralto.

“I might have killed you. What the Hell happened? How did you get free?”

“I. . . the wards broke.” She sounded hesitant, but Dar could sense her honesty. The woman’s stare turned speculative, appraising. “ Gods and demons, but I’m starving after so long in that damnable prison,” she said.

He dispelled the energy he had summoned and looked away. Something about her nudity disturbed him. “Find yourself something to wear first.”

“If you insist. Though if I expire from bloodthirst while satisfying your embarrassment, it’ll be on your conscience.” Petulant, she did not look at the Dar, and instead flung open the doors of a wardrobe and began slowly rifling through the contents. After making some disparaging comments about the selection, she finally chose a sleeveless shift of black silk and black gladiatrix sandals. The dress, beaded with jet and obsidian, clung to her curves and left her arms and legs mostly bare.

She moved toward him with a intent, expectant look in her eyes.

The demon mage shook his head, started to reply in the negative and pull away. She seized his hand and lifted his wrist to her mouth before he could protest. He felt a painful tingle where her lips touched his skin and was lost in a surging haze of ecstacy in which he only dimly heard an armored stride booming upon the stairs; a second later, Khaz kicked the door fully open.

The troll, holding an immense claymore before him, bellowed a wordless challenge which died in his throat as he saw the two figures before him. He lowered the sword, turning an inquisitive frown from Dar to the silver-maned woman. At the troll’s glare, suddenly aware of the proximity of warm alabaster against him, of the blood dripping down his hand, Dar took a step back. And another.

“Intruder, you said,” Khaz grunted. “Ha.” The troll snorted with barely suppressed laughter.

“He was wrong,” snapped the woman, straightening. “I can tell you’re about to ask me about my ordeal. Don’t. It is not something I wish to discuss,” she rasped. “And it is imperative we go, now. I will be collapsing the shadow gate behind us to prevent any from following.”

[Alysia]

The star-spangled dawn had wasted away into the murk of dusk, and Alysia felt a sense of dread as she stood upon the twilight shore of the Dark Lake and looked across her home. Gravid clouds hung over the caldera, grumbling with thunder and the charge of hail. The wards about her domain lay in tattered ruins: she could acutely feel the lack of balance, the surge and ebb of feedback that coruscated across the murky sky like phosphorescent spider veins and rasped invisibly across her nerves.

The signs were unmistakable – a shadow gate in the vicinity had collapsed very recently.

“What the Hell,” she muttered. Absently, she began sorting through tangled ley lines and trying to get a sense of what had happened in her absence. The collapsed gate was playing havoc with the local ley lines, sending the neglected wards into instability. Muddling her perceptions was a fog of fading Chaos.

As she surveyed her surroundings, she was greeted by a giggling sylph. Alysia voiced a silent query. In response, the wind elemental spun unmistakable sand-figures of Khaz, Dar and the Bloodguard, then whispered in a voiceless breath that Alysia herself had worked a mighty magic to collapse the shadow gate before leaving for Rhilshen.

“Are you daft? I’ve done no such thing.”

The laughing sylph shrugged airily and spiraled away, riding the breeze that heralded a breaking storm. Alysia wondered if captivity had teased away the last vestige of her questionable hold on sanity. Maybe I'm the one who's daft here. . . She started to stride toward the manor, then shook her head. She had been tightly holding the weapons Veighn's golems had returned to her, but now relaxed her grip, letting both bastard sword and katana fall to the black sand of the shore. She stepped to the water's edge.

Determined, she looked down at the glassy black surface of the lake, scrying across the edge of time. At first, she saw only her reflection in the water. She waited patiently. As the clouds overhead grew heavy and threatened to discharge their burdens, the vision resolved. Her reflection stood before an arched doorway within Dark Lake Manor, facing the portal which held the shadow gate that led to Rhilshen. Dar stumbled through, holding his wrist as if in pain, then Alysia saw herself step forward, gesture to draw up the roiling shadowy energies of the gate, and sever them with a flash of Chaos.

That’s impossible. I haven't... She felt a flash of doubt, thinking that she might be intoxicated by Veighn's damned cordial, or even still trapped within the Black Wizard’s opulent prison, surrounded by flawless wards, dreaming. Hail began to fall, disturbing the mirror-surface of the lake.

No. . . Her thoughts raced as she watched the ripples spreading outward. Prison. Mirror. Lightning flashed and blinded Alysia for a moment. “Hellfire,” she spat. “It was Alazais.” She sprinted toward the manor.

[Alysia]

The carved-oak doors to the manor house stood open, and a flash of lightning showed a mosiac of gray and green, thick dust and wind-blown leaves upon the stone floor. The place was empty of the sorceries that had maintained it and the lives that had sustained it. The house felt empty and dead, as though it had been empty and dead for years, rather than weeks or months.

Within a cool grotto beneath Dark Lake Manor, surrounded by gloom and damp, Alysia observed a miasma of Chaos that hung in the air before a closed arch, tiny motes glowing dull and red. She stretched one hand forward into the shifting, shapeless mass, ignoring the rising scent of ozone, and struggled to capture and bind the fading energies that were her link to a distant realm. She found a trace of Alazais' passage through the Nexus and seized upon the familiar sense of Rhilshen, grasping for a ley line to anchor the collapsing gate.

Then came a jarring recoil that cast her from the Nexus and left her stunned. "The way is barred to you," came a sibilant voice, flat hissing in the silent cave. Something ancient and black, smelling of jasmine smoke, twisted from the shadows of the fallen portal, snake-like. Shocked that a ward had been set against her in her own domain, Alysia gaped at the serpentine figure.

The last anchor of the Shadow Gate finally collapsed, surging back into the local ley lines before dissipating. Alysia's fists clenched in frustration, and she shouted and vented her fury against the walled archway until she felt something sharp cutting into her palm, a trickle of wetness dripping up her wrist.

Stung back to immediate needs, she turned her hand over, saw the icy, faceted gleam of a diamond stud upon her bloodied palm. Lucien's promise, she thought. What promises did the Black Wizard wring from him. . . She shuddered at the sense of violation that lingered. And what of my own promises? Can they be kept?

She subsumed her anger beneath a patina of icy serenity. Stepping back into the gloom, Alysia made for the upper levels of the manor. Outside, hailstones clattered and cracked upon the windowpanes, playing counterpoint to a faint crackle-hum as tattered wards realigned and ambient energies began to rebalance.