Reshid woke up surrounded by heavy darkness. The room smelled like fresh corpses and something else. He remembered lying in the street, waiting for the crowd to disperse, then nothing. He had drifted in and out of consciousness in the meantime, but there were a few things he remembered—Agatha’s face as she leaned over him, whispering something about playing dead and black-robed priests, gathering the dead.

It wasn’t totally clear to him why a priestess hadn’t raised the alarm when it became clear that not all of them were properly dead—a few of the revenants had started transforming during transport, drawing on their essences to fix whatever Geoffrey had done to them. It would erode their humanity, but Reshid knew that would also immediately make them stronger. There was no way that those carting the bodies back to the crypts hadn’t noticed.

He hadn’t stayed conscious for the entire trip. Clearly, even he was in worse shape than he’d initially thought. His reserves of essence were gone, used up to heal himself, even though he hadn’t actually been physically wounded by the paladin’s attack. He drew power from the crystal in his pocket, draining all of its power easily. Just as quickly, that energy seemed to drain away again. In doing so, though, it lifted the fog from his mind and perked him up considerably.

He knew he was in the crypt, which wasn’t much of a surprise once he thought about it. Agatha was here somewhere, and that young priestess of Morana. They hadn’t laid him out on a slab, like they normally would with a corpse. Instead, he was on the ground and someone had put a folded up bit of cloth under his head to cushion it.

Their survival—the whole thing with Geoffrey and Frederik, followed by Agatha and Verena’s subterfuge after the battle—smelled like politics. And now, politics were putting him and the other revenants in the Deep Paths squarely into the line of fire. Politics that Orem had already been forced to pay the ultimate price for. For nothing.

He needed to get back home, down below, and quickly.

The next time he came up here, Geoffrey was going to pay. What was the point of keeping revenants off of the surface in the first place? Did the gods just hate the sight of them? It wasn’t a good explanation, but it didn’t really matter. He needed to find his friends, and he needed to get moving.

–------

Agatha was exhausted and sore in a way she’d never experienced before. They’d been loading, transporting and unloading the dead all night. The cart didn’t fit into the crypt, so they had to put the bodies into a wheelbarrow to move them to the individual grottoes. Ordinarily, they’d be brought in on stretchers by priests of Morana, but there were too many bodies and no time for ceremony.

The woman in her wheelbarrow right now was one of Frederik’s soldiers, probably killed by one of the lich’s creatures, judging by the gaping wound on her neck. She moved toward one of the large rooms near the stairs, where Verena had told her to put the soldiers.

Suddenly, a door creaked open behind her. She flinched despite herself and whirled, only to recognize Reshid. His clothes had been torn and burnt to rags, but he looked unharmed underneath. What was new was the expression on his face. His eyes were hard and filled with purpose.

“Agatha.” He nodded to her, before cutting right to the chase. “How many of the others are going to make it?”

Agatha shrugged uncertainly. “Maybe half? It depends on how many of the right essence sources I can get and how quickly. A few stone and air elementalists were already recovering before we got back here, but you’re the first one up. Charlie should recover soon, considering where we are, and we never found Em. She must have escaped, somehow.”

“Lonnie?” Reshid asked.

Agatha shook her head and Reshid’s face fell.

“I think he’s dead. Really dead, I mean.” At his hollow expression, she put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll try to get a source for water essence anyway. Who knows?”

He didn’t really look comforted.

She would look, but she wasn’t optimistic. It probably wouldn’t work. Revenants could recover miraculously from all kinds of injuries, but even they only really came back from the dead once—the first time. Still, it was worth a try, right?

“Alright.” Reshid took a deep breath. “What about Rory and the soldiers?”

Agatha shrugged. “I don’t know. Geoffrey was one of those soldiers, so I don’t think he’ll go after them… at least not most of them. They’re not a threat to him with Frederik gone. Still, though. If they’re smart, they’ll leave the city, or get themselves reassigned. Duskhaven hasn’t had a paladin from any temple in over a hundred years. There’s nothing we can do for them now without exposing ourselves here.”

Reshid nodded.

“Fine. I suppose that’s true. I just have two more questions.” He met her eyes, and even though his hair had grown back in and his skin smoothed out, he suddenly looked even older and more tired than when she’d first met him.

“Could you ask Verena to find out if my son had a family?” Orem had been alive all this time, mostly living here in Duskhaven. He might have a wife—Reshid might have grandchildren. And if he did, they would be in danger now. He needed to find out, and if they were out there, he had to make sure they were safe.

Agatha nodded. “Shouldn’t be a problem. Gossip about the Captain of the Guard is probably circulating all around the city right now.”

Reshid nodded. Just one more thing, then.

“Where did you put his body?”

–--------

Charlie woke up feeling as if he’d been dragged behind a horse. His head pounded in agony, and his entire body ached. Essence was flowing into him from all around, pouring in without his conscious direction.

He was healing himself instinctively, overdrawing the power around him to save his life. It was what Idrin and the other revenants had warned them against—but it was better than dying, surely.

He opened his eyes, and was greeted by near-darkness. He lay on a stone slab, underground somewhere. A familiar, icy terror gripped his heart as he realized where he was. There was nowhere else that he’d ever been that had so much ambient decay essence. That, and he’d woken up here once before.

It was different this time, he knew. He was a revenant, not a ghoul or a demon and he hadn’t been chosen for divine punishment, mistakenly or otherwise.

Probably, anyway.

He remembered a bright light, with Geoffrey at the middle of it. Something powerful had certainly been responding to the paladin’s invocations. Still, no one who would listen to Geoffrey could possibly be a true god.

As his eyes finally adjusted to the darkness, Charlie discovered that a pale light shone at his feet. Sitting up, he found a single, tiny light crystal lying there, offering barely more light than a single guttering candle.

Seconds later, footsteps approached from the main passageway. He couldn’t quite make it out, but he thought he saw movement in the darkness.

“Hello?” He called into the darkness.

Were some of the lich’s forces still here? He drew in essence from the dead all around him, trying to arm himself against a potential threat, but most of it drained away immediately, healing and strengthening him. It was patching up his wounded soul, and he could feel it changing him a little bit. The essence made him feel… hungry somehow.

A familiar voice came out of the darkness.

“Charlie? Is that you?”

Charlie blinked in surprise.

“Verena?” He asked. “What are you doing here?”

“Me?” She scoffed. “I work here! Where else would I be?”

“Ah…well. That’s a fair point, I guess…” Charlie responded, scratching at the back of his neck and trying to decide what to say.

“I’ll… go get Agatha, alright?” She said, turning around. “Just wait there for a minute.”

She swept out of the room, leaving Charlie to blink in confusion at the door. Moments later, the door opened again and Agatha walked in.

“What are you doing here?” Charlie asked, looking at her incredulously.

“I should ask you the same,” Agatha responded, but she gave him a quick recounting of events from her perspective.

“Verena told me about what happened to you, or at least the parts she knew about.” She finished.

“Verena?” Charlie squinted at her in the darkness, confused. “Why is she here? More importantly, why is she helping?”

“Don’t look at me like that.” She scolded him. “You’d probably have died without her, you know. The temples don’t all see eye to eye on how to deal with every issue. I would have been surprised if Morana and her priests let Vaclar—or Geoffrey, for that matter—intrude on her domain without any kind of resistance or reprisal.

“I… see.” Charlie said slowly. “But the Deep Paths don’t belong to Morana, either, they’re the domain of the Old Gods…”

Agatha sighed. “It’s not about the Deep Paths. Honestly, Charlie, just think about it. Morana’s domain is death. She decides how humanity deals with the dead and the undead. But Geoffrey practically declared a holy war against the undead in the Deep Paths, and he did it in the name of justice, of Vaclar. It’s a slap in the face!”

“Ah. I guess I missed a few things…” Charlie replied. “What happened out there? And how are the others?”

She let out a breath and finally pulled out a bigger light crystal, illuminating the room a little more. Her face was lined with exhaustion, and she was still dressed in her dirty traveling clothes and her many pocketed leather apron.

He knew that, with the essence he had overdrawn, he must look even more disturbing than he had before. But she didn’t back away, or comment on what she saw.

“Verena said that he called down judgment on the city. Vaclar’s essence is purely light-based, but his expression—what he can do with it—is completely unique, as far as I understand. His judgment is supposed to attack the soul directly. We don’t really know how it works, because the priests don’t let us study it. But it is very effective against the undead—ghouls especially. Supposedly, it only strikes down demons and the unjust. In practice, it just seems to strike all undead.”

Charlie’s eyes widened. “And the others? How did I survive to wake up here?” …again, he silently added.

“Oh, well, revenants are hard to really kill. It’s your essences, you see?” Agatha grew more animated as she talked, getting into one of her topics of interest. “I mean, think about it for a minute. Why should an undead creature die when you kill it?”

“Because it’s implied in the word?” Charlie wasn’t following, and that annoyed him.

Agatha rolled her eyes at him. “No! I mean, all revenants use their essence to sort of repair themselves after coming back the first time. Why wouldn’t you be able to do it again? Assuming you’re not properly dead, I mean, and you have access to the right essence before you die. It probably depends a little bit on your expression, as well. Reshid could have probably walked away if he’d a good source of essence nearby—not really the best environment for him, the middle of a city.”

That didn’t make any sense at all to Charlie.

“You can bring revenants back from the dead?”

Agatha sighed.

“No. If we can get them the right essence sources, if we’re fast enough, and if they aren’t really, properly dead already, they can maybe bring themselves back.” She pointed at him for emphasis. “Kind of like you just did here.”

Charlie had heard enough. The details didn’t matter—they needed to act. The Lich was gone. They'd won—sort of. But the others needed to find out what had happened up here. If Geoffrey had his way, this was only the beginning.

The guardians would be coming down, and they needed to prepare.