The descent was almost longer than Sael had anticipated.

  He had been precise with the beam, of course. The [Disintegration] had carved its path with surgical care, threading between load-bearing columns and skirting the edges of rooms where servants slept or worked. The palace would not collapse; he had made certain of that. The structural integrity remained sound, the foundations untouched, the weight distribution accounted for. It was, if he was being honest with himself, rather elegant work for something done in a fit of pique.

  The hole itself was perhaps three feet wide, just enough for a man to pass through comfortably, and it descended through floor after floor of the palace in a perfect vertical line. Sael floated downward at a leisurely pace, Eld humming contentedly in one hand, the chancellor dangling from the other.

  The first floor he passed was some sort of kitchen. A cook stood frozen at a counter, knife raised mid-chop, staring at the hole that had suddenly appeared in her ceiling and floor. Vegetables lay scattered around her, knocked loose by the tremor of the spell. Her mouth opened and closed several times, but no sound emerged.

  "Apologies," Sael said as he drifted past. "Structural damage is minimal. You may continue."

  He was gone before she could respond.

  The next floor was a storage room, empty save for crates and barrels that had toppled against one another. The floor after that was a corridor, and here Sael encountered his first real obstacle: a pair of guards who had been patrolling when the world had suddenly developed a new vertical passage. They stood at the edge of the hole, weapons drawn, faces pale.

  "Intruder!" one of them managed, his voice cracking.

  "Technically, yes," Sael agreed, still descending. "Though I did enter through the front door originally. This is more of a... shortcut."

  The guards stared. Sael passed them by.

  The floors continued: a laundry, steam still rising from great copper vats; a barracks where soldiers scrambled for armor they would never don in time; a wine cellar where an elderly man clutched a bottle to his chest as if it might protect him from the impossible sight of a wizard descending through his ceiling.

  "That's a good vintage," Sael observed as he passed. "The seventeen-twelve, yes? I remember when they pressed those grapes."

  The man fainted. Which Sael thought was exaggerated, but then again, he was elderly. He decided to check on him later.

  Sael continued his descent. A seamstress's workshop next, bolts of fabric scattered across cutting tables, and a young woman who shrieked and threw a pincushion at him. It bounced harmlessly off an invisible barrier.

  "My apologies, madam. I will see to repairs personally."

  Then a records room, shelves of ledgers and scrolls, a clerk who had frozen mid-notation with ink dripping unnoticed from his quill onto the page below.

  "Carry on," Sael said.

  Then a hallway where three servants had flattened themselves against the wall, and Sael offered a polite nod as he passed.

  And so it went, floor after floor, the chaos of his passage rippling outward as he descended through the palace's guts. Shouts echoed from somewhere above. Bells began to ring. He glanced at the chancellor.

  Kezess had gone a rather alarming shade of purple.

  "Ah," Sael said.

  He released his grip on the elf's throat and cast [Float] in the same motion. Kezess hung in the air beside him, gasping and coughing, one hand pressed to his neck where Sael's fingers had left white impressions on the skin.

  "My apologies," Sael said. "I forgot."

  Kezess continued coughing for several long moments, his composure thoroughly shattered. When he finally spoke, his voice was hoarse and thin.

  "You... forgot?"

  "I was distracted." Sael slowed their descent further, letting the chancellor catch his breath. "There's quite a lot happening at the moment."

  He had already scanned the elf, of course. The moment his hand had closed around Kezess's throat, Sael had cast [Analyse], searching for the telltale stain of Corruption. It was the obvious explanation, the one that would have made everything simple: a servant of the Enemy, placed high in the court, pulling strings from the shadows.

  But there was nothing. The chancellor was clean, untouched by that particular darkness. Which raised the question of what, exactly, his deal was.

  The elf stared at him with something between disbelief and outrage. His silver hair had come loose from its severe arrangement, strands falling across a face still flushed from oxygen deprivation. The immaculate robes were rumpled now, the thread-of-gold trim catching the light of the passing floors.

  They drifted in silence for a moment, passing what appeared to be a small chapel. A priest stood at the altar, arms raised in mid-blessing, mouth hanging open. The three worshippers in the pews had turned to stare.

  "Forgive the interruption," Sael said. "Please continue your devotions."

  He returned his attention to Kezess. The chancellor had stopped coughing, though his breathing remained labored.

  "Who are you?" Sael asked.

  The question seemed to take Kezess by surprise. "I... you know who I am. I am the chancellor."

  "Yes, I gathered that. But who are you?" Sael studied the elf's face, still searching for the memory that refused to surface. "I know you. I'm certain of it. The shape of your face, the way you hold yourself. We've met before. Where?"

  Kezess's expression flickered, something passing behind those gray eyes that Sael couldn't quite read.

  "And why," Sael continued, "did you smile? When I revealed Eld. When the dragon's eyes went to the staff. You smiled."

  The words hung in the air between them as they descended past a storage room filled with old furniture, chairs stacked upon chairs, tables leaning against walls.

  Saying it aloud, Sael realized, it sounded somewhat excessive. The man had smiled. That was all. People smiled for many reasons, most of them entirely innocent. Perhaps Kezess had simply been amused by the dragon's predictable covetousness. Perhaps he had made some private joke to himself, a passing thought that brought a moment's humor. Sael did that sometimes; a stray observation would strike him as funny, and he would smile without meaning to, and then have to explain himself when people asked what was so amusing.

  Or perhaps it had been coincidence. A facial tic. An involuntary muscle movement.

  And now here Sael was, having strangled the man nearly to unconsciousness and dragged him through seventeen floors of the palace, all because of a smile that might have meant nothing at all.

  He found himself rather hoping it had been nefarious. The alternative was awkward in ways he did not wish to contemplate.

  Kezess's breathing had steadied. The purple flush was fading from his skin, replaced by something paler, more composed. When he spoke, his voice had recovered some of its previous smoothness.

  "An unstoppable force," the chancellor said, "meets an immovable object."

  Ah. A riddle.

  This was encouraging. Nefarious-minded people often began monologuing in riddles; Sael knew this from extensive personal experience. He had battled many such individuals over the centuries, and they almost always spoke in metaphors and cryptic allusions before revealing their true intentions. It was something of a professional requirement, apparently.

  "Go on," Sael said.

  Kezess straightened in the air, fingers still pressed lightly against his throat where bruises would likely bloom by morning. When he spoke again, his voice had steadied, though it remained rougher than before.

  "As for who I am," he said, "we met approximately four hundred and fifteen years ago. During your first year as the one of the newly appointed Albyonian heroes." A pause. "I was a child then. Barely seventeen."

  Sael studied the elf's face, searching for the boy beneath the man. Seventeen was young for an elf, practically infancy by their standards, though old enough to have developed the features that would carry through into adulthood. The shape of the jaw, perhaps, or the set of the eyes.

  Four hundred and fifteen years ago. His first year as hero. They had traveled extensively during that time, he and his companions, taking on every quest that came their way with the enthusiasm of the newly chosen. The world had seemed so vast then, so full of wrongs to right and monsters to slay.

  There was a caravan.

  The memory surfaced slowly, like something rising from deep water. A nomadic band of elves, perhaps sixty or seventy strong, traveling through the Thornwald with their wagons and their livestock and their children. The Thornwald had been worse then, before the adventurer's guild had established permanent outposts along its borders. High level dire wolves roamed in packs of dozens, and the bandit clans had grown bold enough to attack anything smaller than a military convoy.

  The elves had hired protection, and Pointbreak had provided it.

  "The Thornwald passage," Sael said. "The Wandering Folk."

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  Something flickered in Kezess's expression, too quick to read. "Yes."

  Sael remembered the caravan now, or at least pieces of it. Painted wagons in colors that had seemed garish against the forest's endless green. Musicians who played long into the night around fires that smelled of foreign spices. Children who stared at him with wide eyes and whispered to each other when they thought he couldn't hear.

  He had kept to himself during that escort mission, as he often did in those days. The adjustment from solitary young man to member of a heroic party had not come easily, and he had spent much of that first year uncertain how to behave around others. But he remembered teaching, now that Kezess had prompted the memory. Basic spellwork, mostly, the sort of foundational techniques that separated a competent caster from a truly skilled one.

  "Casting speed," Sael said. "I showed the young ones how to compress their incantations."

  "Among other things." Kezess had regained most of his composure now, though he still floated somewhat stiffly beside Sael. "You spent three evenings with us, while we traveled through the worst stretch of the forest. I was one of perhaps a dozen students you took on during that time."

  They passed another floor as they descended, this one a guardroom where soldiers had gathered around the hole with weapons drawn. At the sight of the chancellor floating serenely beside Sael, they hesitated.

  "Stand down," Kezess called out. "The dragon king has fallen. We are free. Go and spread word through the city. Sael the Great has liberated the Ashams!"

  The guards exchanged glances, confusion and hope warring on their faces. One of them, braver than the rest, stepped forward.

  "Chancellor, are you—"

  "I am unharmed. Go! The people need to know!"

  They went, scattering in different directions, and Sael and Kezess continued their descent in the silence they left behind.

  "You grew up well," Sael said after a moment. It was the sort of thing one said when encountering someone after centuries apart, though he was not entirely certain he meant it. The boy he remembered had been quiet and attentive, eager to learn but not obsequious about it. The man floating beside him now was something else entirely, something harder to read.

  "I had good teachers," Kezess replied. "Even if some of them only stayed for three evenings."

  They passed another floor, a library this time, where scholars had gathered near the hole with expressions of academic curiosity that seemed entirely inappropriate given the circumstances. Kezess repeated his announcement about the dragon's defeat, and the scholars scattered with considerably less urgency than the guards had shown.

  Sael turned the pieces over in his mind as they descended. The smile, the riddle, the revelation of their shared history. And now this, the chancellor calmly informing the palace staff that their tyrant had been removed, as if he had been waiting for exactly this moment.

  "The unstoppable force," Sael said slowly, "and the immovable object."

  Kezess inclined his head.

  "You recognized me when I arrived at the court."

  "I did."

  "And you knew... you knew what would happen if the dragon saw Eld."

  "I suspected." Kezess's voice remained even. "Ozyarathes is predictable in his pride. He had ruled for five years, and in that time I had learned his patterns. His desires. His inability to accept that anything might be beyond his grasp." The elf's eyes met Sael's. "When I saw you enter the throne room, I thought perhaps the opportunity I had been waiting for had finally arrived."

  They passed another floor, more guards, more announcements of freedom. The word was spreading now, Sael could tell; shouts echoed from somewhere above, and he caught fragments of conversation drifting up from below.

  "You gambled," Sael said. "You had no way of knowing how the confrontation would end."

  "No. I did not." Kezess's expression remained composed. "I had hired assassins before, you understand. High-level ones. Specialists in dealing with very high level targets. None of them succeeded. None of them even came close. Ozyarathes was too powerful."

  He looked at Sael almost apologetically. This was the first genuine expression Sael saw him do.

  "I smiled because I recognized you. And because I knew what would happen when Ozyarathes saw that staff." Kezess paused. "The immovable object, you see, was him. Five years I served under his rule, and in all that time, nothing moved him. No threat, no bribe, no appeal to reason or mercy. He was fixed in place, immutable, eternal." Another pause. "And then you walked through the doors, the unstoppable force."

  "I do not think it could have ended any other way," Sael said once they had descended past another room. "His temperament was clear from the moment I entered the throne room. Even without Eld, he would have found some excuse to press the matter."

  "Perhaps." Kezess did not sound entirely convinced. "But Eld made it certain. And that was what I needed."

  They were approaching the lower levels now, the floors becoming rougher, less decorated. The dungeons were close, and the shadows getting closer still.

  "So," Sael said. "What do you plan now, then? To become the new king?"

  The question hung in the air between them. Kezess was silent for a long moment, and when he finally spoke, his voice had lost some of its careful composure.

  "I have no interest in ruling. I never did." He looked away, toward the rough-hewn walls of the passage they descended through. "Ozyarathes captured me the day he conquered this kingdom. He needed administrators, you see. People who understood how governments functioned, how to manage populations and collect taxes and maintain the thousand small systems that keep a realm from collapsing into chaos, since he killed the previous king and his court. And I had lived long enough to know such things."

  Another floor passed, empty this time save for storage crates and the smell of old dust.

  "Five years," Kezess continued. "Five years I served him. Managed his affairs. Kept his kingdom running while he lounged on his golden hoard and demanded tribute from the lords he had conquered. I was not given a choice in the matter. The alternative was made quite clear."

  Sael wasn't sure what to say, so he said "Hmm."

  This one was for empathy.

  "I wanted out." Kezess continued. "I wanted to see him dead, and I wanted to be free, and when you walked through those doors, I thought perhaps God had finally decided to answer my prayers." A thin smile crossed his face, more bitter than amused. "It seems He has."

  Their feet touched stone at the same moment.

  Sael released the [Float] spell and looked around, orienting himself. The hole he had carved terminated here, in what appeared to be a storage cellar of some kind. Crates lined the walls, their contents long forgotten, and the air smelled of dust, old wood and something faintly metallic that he could not quite place.

  It was not the dungeons. Those were one level below, separated from this room by perhaps eight feet of stone and earth. He could feel the space beneath him, the hollowed-out corridors and cells that honeycombed the palace's foundations. And he could feel something else, too: a presence, muted but unmistakable, like a candle flame glimpsed through fog.

  Aldric.

  "To be clear," Sael said, turning to face Kezess, "I did not kill the dragon."

  The chancellor had been brushing dust from his robes. His hands stopped mid-motion.

  "What?"

  "Ozyarathes. I did not kill him." Sael gestured vaguely upward, toward the seventeen floors of chaos above them. "I knocked him unconscious and sent him beyond the firmament. He is currently somewhere in space, which is unpleasant but survivable for a being of his constitution."

  Kezess stared at him. The color that had only recently returned to his face began to drain away again.

  "He will return," Sael continued. "In fact, I marked him before I sent him away, so I can track his approach. He is already on his way back." He paused, tilting his head slightly as if listening to something far away. "I would estimate... four minutes. Perhaps five. He is moving quite quickly. Anger tends to do that."

  "You—" Kezess's voice cracked. He swallowed and tried again. "You did not kill him?"

  "No."

  "The dragon who would burn this entire city to ash if someone looked at him incorrectly." Kezess's composure had shattered entirely now, his words coming faster and higher. "That dragon is coming back? In minutes?"

  "Yes."

  "And I have told everyone in the palace that he was defeated. The word is spreading through the city as we speak. People will be celebrating. People are—" He stopped, seeming to realize something. "He will kill us. He will kill everyone. Not just me, or the guards, everyone who smiled when they heard the news, he will—"

  "I did not say I planned to let that happen."

  Kezess was pacing now, his careful composure entirely abandoned. "Then what? What is your plan? You cannot simply—you cannot release a tyrant and expect—he will never forgive this humiliation, never, he will—"

  "Chancellor."

  Something in Sael's tone made Kezess stop.

  "There are not many dragons left in this world," Sael said. "A few dozen, perhaps. Possibly fewer. They were never numerous, and the wars have thinned their ranks considerably." He met Kezess's eyes. "Having a benevolent dragon would be better than having a dead one. For the world, I mean. They are... useful, when properly motivated. Long memories. Vast knowledge. Certain magical capabilities that other species cannot replicate."

  "Benevolent," Kezess repeated. "Ozyarathes?"

  "Yes."

  "You—" Kezess stopped. Started again. "What are you planning?"

  "I have an idea," Sael said. "It may work. It may not. But I would rather attempt rehabilitation than extermination, when the alternative is the permanent loss of an ancient and irreplaceable species."

  He could see the questions forming behind Kezess's eyes. The objections, the concerns, the very reasonable points about why trusting a tyrannical dragon to suddenly become benevolent was perhaps not the most sound strategy.

  Sael turned to face the floor. "You are not an enemy," he said. "Which means you should not be here for what comes next. Go. Return to the upper levels. Try to restore some order to the chaos I have caused." He paused. "The shadows are nearly here."

  "The shadows?"

  "The ones who were coming to free Aldric. They entered the palace approximately ninety seconds ago. They are descending rapidly." Sael did not look back. "I will handle them. And Aldric. And then the dragon, when he arrives. You should be elsewhere."

  Silence stretched between them. Sael could feel Kezess's gaze on his back. He certainly had questions. Concerns about Sael's sanity, probably. Worries about what would happen if his "idea" for the dragon failed.

  But Kezess said none of it.

  "...Very well."

  Footsteps, receding. The creak of a door. Then silence.

  Sael stood alone in the dusty cellar, surrounded by forgotten crates and the smell of old wood. He closed his eyes.

  The shadows were fast. Faster than he had anticipated, actually. They had entered through a sewer grate on the palace's eastern edge and were now descending through another passage. He could intercept them in the corridors. Cut them off one by one, pick them apart in the narrow passages where their numbers would count for less.

  But then he would have to hunt down any who escaped. Track them through the palace's labyrinthine depths, corner them in storage rooms and forgotten cellars, deal with the chaos of a running battle in confined spaces. That would be time-consuming. And the dragon would be back in minutes.

  So it was better to wait. Let them come to their destination. Let them gather in one place, focused on their objective, convinced that they had succeeded. And then...

  The shadows reached the dungeon level. Sael tracked them through the stone, they passed cells without pausing, probably ignored the prisoners who stirred at their passage, made directly for the one cell that mattered.

  Three.

  They were at the door now. He could feel them working on the locks, the wards, the protections that the dragon had placed around Aldric's cell.

  Two.

  The gate gave way.

  One.

  Sael phased through the floor.

  The cell materialized around him in an instant: rough stone walls, iron chains, the smell of damp and rust and unwashed flesh. The five figures had frozen mid-motion, caught in the act of rushing toward the chained prisoner at the room's center. Their faces were hidden beneath hoods.

  "[Gravity]," Sael cast and all five figures slammed downward, driven to their knees by a force that turned the air itself into an anchor. The stone floor cracked beneath them. One of them—the largest, built like a siege engine beneath his robes—managed to push back, fighting against the invisible weight with raw physical strength.

  "Hmm," Sael observed, and doubled the mana input on the spell.

  The large one's arms buckled. He caught himself on his palms, muscles straining, refusing to submit entirely. Beside him, another figure was attempting to weave a spell, fingers twitching in the patterns of an incantation even as the gravity sought to press them flat.

  Sael tripled the mana input.

  The spellcaster's hands hit the floor. The large one's elbows gave out. All five figures lay prone now, utterly pinned, their now visibly purple mana flickering and guttering like candles in a wind. The stone beneath them had cracked further, spiderwebbing outward from the points of greatest pressure.

  Sael stood in the center of the cell, untouched by the gravity he had conjured, and surveyed his catches, then he turned to face the prisoner.

  The man was chained to the far wall, iron links running from manacles at his wrists and ankles to bolts driven deep into the stone. He was thin, and his dark hair hung lank and matted around his face, now hollowed by deprivation. And at his core, where the mana should have flowed bright and strong, there was... nothing.

  Not quite nothing. Sael looked closer, adjusting his perception. The mana core was there, but bound. Ozyarathes's work, almost certainly. A cage within a cage, ensuring that whatever power Aldric possessed remained forever out of reach.

  The prisoner had been caught by the gravity spell as well, though the chains would have held him regardless. He lay slumped against the wall, breathing hard, his eyes—dark and sharp despite his condition—fixed on Sael with an expression that was difficult to read.

  "Aldric Eryndor," Sael said. "I have been looking for you."

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