Sael was, for lack of a better word, annoyed.

  The kind of bone-deep irritation that came from wasting time on something that should have been prevented eons ago. He walked toward the three mages with measured steps, his gaze cataloging each of them.

  The woman on the left was tall, perhaps in her forties, with dark hair pulled back in a tight bun. Her fingers were stained purple up to the knuckles, like she'd been digging through diseased soil. The purple veins crawled up her forearms in branching patterns that pulsed faintly with each heartbeat.

  The younger man on the right couldn't have been past thirty. The veins reached his wrists, and he gripped a lance—stolen from one of the soldiers behind Sael—with white-knuckled desperation.

  The man in the center was the worst.

  Corruption had spread through him like roots through fertile ground. It traced along his neck, disappeared beneath his collar, and emerged again at his temples. His eyes burned with that sickly light, brighter than the others, and when he breathed, Sael could see faint wisps of purple mist escaping his lips.

  These were the most corrupted individuals Sael had encountered today. Which, considering he'd already purged six others from the upper mines, was saying something.

  Sael stopped a few paces away and looked directly at the man in the center. "You must be Moss. Yes?"

  The man's expression flickered between confusion and wariness. "Who are you?"

  The woman's hands came up, earth magic coalescing around her fingers. The younger man began channeling something; fire, from the heat shimmer forming in the air.

  Sael cast [Dispel] twice.

  Both spells collapsed before they could even take shape, unraveling like poorly tied knots. The gathered mana simply... stopped existing. One moment the woman had been pulling power from the stone around them, and the next her hands were empty, the magic gone as if it had never been.

  She tried again immediately, panic making her movements sharp and desperate.

  [Dispel].

  The same result. The magic died before it could form.

  The younger man was pulling harder now, gathering power with visible desperation. Purple light flared around him, brighter, stronger—

  [Dispel].

  Gone.

  "What—" The woman's voice cracked. "What did you do? I can't—"

  [Dispel]. Sael didn't even look at her as he interrupted her fourth attempt.

  Moss was staring at him now with something approaching horror. "Who are you?" he demanded again, louder this time, but there was a tremor beneath the words.

  Sael tilted his head slightly, considering. "I usually tell people my name out of politeness when they ask," he said, his voice carrying clearly through the cavern. "But I don't feel the need to be polite to a man who has surrendered his humanity to Corruption." He paused, letting that sink in. "So no. You don't deserve to know."

  He turned his attention to the other two mages.

  [Blast].

  The woman's head snapped back. There was no warning, no buildup of magic, no visible spell formation. Just a sound like a thunderclap in an enclosed space and a spray of red that painted the tunnel wall behind her. Her body crumpled, the lance falling from nerveless fingers to clatter against stone.

  The younger man had barely registered what happened when Sael cast again.

  [Blast].

  Same result. The body dropped. Blood pooled on the ancient stone, mixing with dust and purple residue.

  Two corpses. Three seconds.

  Moss stumbled backward, his hands coming up in a warding gesture that might have been an attempt to cast or might have just been instinctive terror. Purple light flickered around his fingers, trying to form into something, anything—

  [Dispel].

  The light died. Moss tried again, reaching desperately for power.

  [Dispel].

  Sael walked forward, closing the distance with unhurried steps. Moss backed away until his shoulders hit the tunnel wall. He was still trying to cast, still reaching for power that Sael simply wouldn't let him touch.

  "You have caused the death of twenty-three people in these mines today," Sael said.

  "No—no, that's not—we were just researching—" Moss's voice had gone high and thin. His eyes were wide, pupils dilated, the purple glow in them pulsing erratically.

  Sael looked into those eyes and saw what he'd expected to see. Stage Four of Corruption. Maybe early Stage Five.

  At this point, the mind was essentially gone. You could still talk, still reason after a fashion, but you weren't the person you'd been. The corruption had rewritten too much, had dug its roots too deep into the parts of the brain that made you human. What remained was a puppet wearing a familiar face, and if left alive, it would do nothing but spread more Corruption. Intentionally.

  Sael had seen this before.

  A memory surfaced unbidden: a father in a small village, back during the wars. Stage Four, just like Moss. His wife had refused to let their children be Corrupted, and tried to flee in the night with them. The father had killed her in their bedroom, then went to each child's room in turn. Three small bodies. The village tried to help him afterward, to treat it as a tragedy caused by a moment of madness.

  Three months later, the entire village was corrupted. Every man, woman, and child. The father had been at this same stage when it started, and everyone had thought he was still himself. Still redeemable.

  They'd been wrong.

  Sael didn't bother saying he was sorry. There was no point. The man in front of him was already dead in every way that mattered.

  He reached out and placed his hand on Moss's head. The man flinched, tried to pull away, but Sael's grip was iron.

  [Read].

  Moss's eyes went blank. His mouth opened in a silent scream as Sael sifted through his mind like pages in a book, looking for specific information while discarding the rest.

  "The professor you worked with," Sael said, his voice steady as he watched memories flicker past. "Aldric Eryndor. Do you know where he is?"

  A memory surfaced: a meeting in a dark room, Aldric's face half-shadowed by lamplight, giving instructions in that careful, measured way of his.

  "Do you know his plans?"

  Another memory: diagrams spread across a table, complex magical formulas that hurt to look at even in recollection.

  The deeper Sael searched, the harder it became. Corruption had woven itself through Moss's mind like thorns through a garden, twisting memories, fragmenting thoughts. What should have been clear recollections were distorted, tainted with purple haze and obsessive spirals. Sael could feel the madness pressing in around him; fractured thoughts looping endlessly, desires amplified to the point of incoherence, the scaffolding of a human mind collapsing under the weight of what had invaded it.

  "How advanced are they in this? Are there any other places they have?"

  More memories surfaced, but they were fragmentary. Aldric had told Moss only what he needed to know for the work here. Nothing about the broader scope. Nothing about other locations, if there were any. A compartmentalized operation, which made sense for someone as careful as Sael understood Aldric to be.

  But trying to dig deeper felt like pushing through quicksand made of broken glass. The Corruption had eaten away at the connections between memories, had warped the very structure of thought itself. Any further and this would only torture the rest of the man this... thing used to be.

  Sael withdrew his hand. Moss collapsed, gasping, tears streaming down his face as sensation returned to his body.

  "Please—" he started to say.

  Sael placed his palm against the man's forehead again, almost gently.

  [Blast].

  The purple light in Moss's eyes flared once and then went out. The body went limp, and Sael lowered it carefully to the ground. Behind him, he heard the sharp intake of breath. The scrape of boots on stone as someone took an involuntary step back.

  Sael turned to face the soldiers.

  Their faces told him everything he needed to know. Horror. Confusion. Fear. And on one face in particular, something else. Something that looked like it might be doubt. Or temptation.

  That one had been close to accepting when the Corrupted had spoken to him earlier. He looked directly at the soldier.

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  "You were tempted," he said. It wasn't a question.

  The soldier's face went pale. He opened his mouth, closed it, then managed a jerky nod.

  "If you had accepted what they offered you," Sael continued, "you would be infected right now. Not immediately, Corruption doesn't work that fast at first, but it would be in you, growing and spreading." He gestured to the bodies on the ground. "These people were all beyond Stage Two. At that point, they were no longer themselves. They were agents of Corruption wearing familiar faces."

  He pointed to Moss's body. "What they did to you—what it offered you—that's how it starts. A desire. Something you want. Power, knowledge, strength, whatever calls to you most. And if you accept, Corruption gives it to you." Sael paused, making sure they were all listening. "But it also makes you desire more. Always more. You'll never be satisfied. You'll go to greater and greater extremes to have more of what you wanted, to the point of madness."

  The soldier was staring at him, transfixed.

  "Eventually," Sael said, "it will devour you. Your mind, your will, everything that makes you who you are. All that's left is a thing with your memories and none of your self. A puppet that thinks it's still human, that can still talk and reason and justify what it does, but isn't. Not anymore."

  He let that sink in for a moment, watching the understanding dawn on their faces. The horror deepen.

  Sael didn't enjoy this. He didn't enjoy being the one who had to explain why killing people—even Corrupted people—was necessary. He particularly didn't enjoy the way they looked at him now, with that mix of fear and respect that he'd seen too many times before. But if his ruthlessness here saved even one of them from making the mistake of accepting Corruption's offer...

  "Do you understand?" Sael asked, his gaze fixed on the soldier.

  The young man swallowed hard. His hand came up in a shaky salute. "Yes, sir. I understand."

  The captain straightened to attention. He brought his fist to his chest in a formal salute and bowed his head. "We understand, sir. Thank you for... for stopping this."

  The other soldiers followed suit, straightening, saluting, some of them looking shaken but resolute.

  Sael nodded once, accepting their understanding if not their gratitude. He didn't need thanks. He just needed them to remember this moment the next time Corruption came calling.

  Because it would. Now he knew.

  Sael emerged from the mine entrance with Captain Dernwell and the other officers behind him. The chaos had subsided, leaving behind a terrible quiet after violence had finished doing its work. The courtyard was a mess. Broken stone there, scattered weapons here, and blood that soaked into the dirt in dark patches that would take days to fully dry.

  Bodies lay covered with sheets near the barracks. Soldiers and miners moved among them with the reverence reserved for the dead, their faces tight with grief. Medical personnel worked on the wounded, their hands moving with efficiency even as exhaustion showed in every line of their bodies.

  All nineteen names from the list Sael had seen in Carth's memory were accounted for. Dead. Every single one of them had been corrupted beyond Stage Two, their minds already consumed by the thing that wore their faces. Six more had joined that count; people who hadn't been on the list but who'd clearly been infected, their purple-veined faces testament to how far the Corruption had spread through the mining operation.

  Twenty-five corrupted mages, all dead now.

  But they'd taken others with them. Twenty-three miners and soldiers had died in the attack. Crushed by boulders, burned by magic, or simply caught in the wrong place when the violence erupted. Their bodies lay with the others, indistinguishable in death from the people who'd killed them except for the absence of those terrible purple veins.

  The tragedy of it settled over the compound like ash. People moved through it with the stunned slowness of those who hadn't quite processed what had happened yet, whose minds were still catching up to the reality of how many friends and colleagues they'd lost in the span of a few minutes.

  Sael walked through the courtyard, his boots crunching on fragments of shattered stone. He could feel eyes on him as he moved and hear the whispers that followed in his wake.

  "That's him, isn't it? The one who..."

  "Did you see what he did to those mages? Just—boom, boom, boom. Like they were nothing."

  "He killed all of them. Every single one. Didn't even break a sweat."

  "Who is he? Anyone know?"

  "Some mage from the capital, I heard. Duke's man."

  "He flew here. Just dropped out of the sky like—I don't even know what."

  Sael kept walking, his expression neutral. A few people met his eyes as he passed, and he nodded to them, small acknowledgments that seemed to surprise them more than anything else. Most looked away quickly, uncertain how to react. He understood the feeling.

  He also understood their confusion, their fear, their grief. He'd seen it before, during the wars, when he'd had to purge corrupted villages or eliminate infected soldiers before they could spread the Corruption further.

  Near the medical area, he spotted a dwarf sitting on an overturned crate, cradling his right arm against his chest. The arm hung at an angle that made it very clear something was broken, and the dwarf's face was screwed up in pain that he was trying very hard not to show. His beard was braided in the traditional style of the Iron Hills clans, and his clothes marked him as one of the mining supervisors based on the quality of the fabric and the clan symbols stitched into his vest.

  Sael changed direction, heading toward him.

  The whispers followed, growing slightly louder as people noticed where he was going.

  "What's he doing now?"

  "Is he going to...?"

  "Just leave him alone, he's been through enough already."

  The dwarf looked up as Sael approached, his eyes narrowing with suspicion and pain in equal measure. His jaw was set in that particular way dwarves had when they were hurting but would rather die than admit it to anyone, especially a stranger.

  "What do you want?" The dwarf's voice was gruff.

  Sael stopped a respectful distance away, gesturing to the arm. "That doesn't look very good."

  The dwarf glanced down at his arm as if he'd forgotten it was broken, then back up at Sael with an expression that suggested he thought this was possibly the most obvious statement anyone had ever made in the history of obvious statements.

  Sael felt he could have come up a more intelligent reply, but it was too late now.

  "Aye, well, that's what happens when a boulder the size of a cart lands on you." He shifted slightly, wincing as the movement jostled his arm. "One of the healers will get to me eventually. They're busy with worse cases."

  "Would you allow me to help?"

  The dwarf's eyebrows rose. "You can heal too? What are you, some kind of..." He trailed off, seeming to search for the right word and coming up empty. "You know what, never mind. I don't even want to know anymore. Today's been strange enough already."

  Sael allowed himself a small smile at that and knelt down beside the crate, bringing himself closer to eye level with the dwarf. Up close, he could see the pain lines around the dwarf's eyes more clearly, the way his breathing had gone shallow to avoid moving his torso too much, the pallor beneath his naturally ruddy complexion.

  "May I?" Sael asked, reaching toward the injured arm but not touching it yet.

  The dwarf studied him for a long moment, his dark eyes sharp despite the pain. Then he nodded once, a sharp jerk of his head. "Go on then. Can't make it worse than it already is."

  Sael placed his hand gently on the dwarf's forearm, feeling the heat of inflammation beneath the skin, the wrongness of bone that had been forced out of alignment. The dwarf tensed at the contact but didn't pull away.

  [Heal]

  Light bloomed beneath Sael's palm, a soft radiance that was neither purely gold nor purely green but something in between, like sunlight filtered through spring leaves. It spread from his hand up the dwarf's arm, flowing into the damaged tissue with warmth.

  It took perhaps ten seconds, maybe fifteen, and then the light faded as naturally as it had appeared.

  The dwarf stared at his arm. He flexed his fingers experimentally, then rotated his wrist. His eyes went wide. He bent his elbow, straightened it again, then flexed his entire arm in a movement that should have caused excruciating pain but clearly didn't.

  "By the Stone Father's beard," he breathed. He looked at Sael with something approaching wonder. "It's... it's completely healed. Not even a twinge." He flexed his arm again, harder this time, as if testing to make sure it was real. "I've had healers work on me before, but never... it usually takes multiple sessions for a break this bad, and there's always some lingering soreness for days afterward."

  "You should still be careful with it for the next few hours," Sael said as he stood. "The bone is healed, but your body will need a little time to fully adjust."

  The dwarf nodded, still staring at his arm with a mixture of amazement and disbelief. Then he seemed to remember himself and looked up at Sael. "Thank you. Truly. I..." He paused, then extended his newly healed arm. "Thrain Kalstum. Supervisor of the deep excavation teams."

  Sael clasped his forearm in the traditional dwarven greeting. "Sael."

  Thorin's grip was firm despite everything he'd been through. "Just Sael?"

  "Just Sael."

  The dwarf huffed something that might have been a laugh. "Fair enough. Strange day for questions anyway." He flexed his arm one more time, shaking his head. "Thank you again. I mean it."

  Sael was about to respond when he heard movement behind him; he turned and found a small group had gathered at a respectful distance. A woman with a deep gash across her shoulder. A man whose left hand was wrapped in bloody bandages. Another woman who was limping badly, her leg clearly injured. And there, near the back of the group, was Erris Farrow, Bulma's younger brother, trying to keep weight off his right leg while pretending he wasn't in as much pain as he clearly was.

  The woman with the shoulder wound spoke first, her voice tentative. "Excuse me, sir... would you... that is, if you're not too tired from..." She gestured vaguely at the courtyard, at the covered bodies, at everything. "Could you help us too?"

  Sael looked at them.

  "Of course," he said, and watched relief wash over their features. "I intend to heal everyone who needs it, starting with the most severely wounded first." He glanced around the medical area, taking note of where the healers were working, which patients were in the most critical condition. "But since you're here, I can begin with you."

  The small group exchanged glances, and then the woman with the shoulder wound stepped forward.

  Sael spent the next several minutes moving among them. The shoulder wound closed under his touch, the deep cut knitting back together until only smooth, unmarked skin remained. The man's crushed hand reformed, bones straightening, tendons reconnecting. The woman's leg healed, whatever internal damage had been causing the limp disappearing as if it had never been.

  More people approached as word spread. A miner with broken ribs. A soldier whose back had been badly burned by corrupted fire. Another dwarf with a concussion and a fractured skull that would have killed him within the hour if left untreated.

  Sael worked through them methodically. He didn't speak much, just asked brief questions about their injuries, received their stammered thanks with quiet nods, and moved on to the next person.

  Finally, he came to Erris.

  The young guard was trying very hard to maintain a professional demeanor despite the obvious pain he was in. His right leg had a piece of rebar protruding from the thigh—not deeply embedded, but enough to have caused significant damage. Blood had soaked through his uniform around the wound, and his face had the pallor of someone who'd lost more blood than was strictly comfortable.

  "Guard Farrow," Sael said.

  Erris straightened automatically at being addressed, then immediately regretted it as the movement jostled his leg. He managed to turn the wince into something that almost looked like a grimace of determination. "Sir."

  "Your sister is going to be very unhappy with you if you pass out from blood loss," Sael observed.

  A ghost of a smile crossed Erris's face. "She's going to be unhappy with me anyway. I'm supposed to be at my checkpoint." He glanced down at his leg. "I was helping evacuate the workers when... well, when things got exciting."

  "Sit down before you fall down."

  Erris opened his mouth as if to protest, then seemed to think better of it and carefully lowered himself onto a nearby crate.

  Sael knelt beside him, examining the wound without touching it yet. The rebar had gone in at an angle, missing the major artery by what couldn't have been more than an inch. Lucky, considering how much worse it could have been.

  "This is going to hurt for a moment when I remove it," Sael said. "Then it won't hurt at all."

  Erris nodded, his jaw tight. "I understand."

  Sael placed one hand on Erris's thigh just above the wound, already channeling healing magic into the tissue. With his other hand, he grasped the rebar firmly. "On three. One—"

  He pulled it free on one.

  Erris made a choked sound that he immediately tried to suppress, his hands gripping the edge of the crate hard enough that his knuckles went white. Blood welled from the wound for perhaps half a second before Sael's magic took hold.

  [Heal]

  The same golden-green light flowed from Sael's hand into the injury, and Erris's expression went from pained to shocked as he felt the wound closing, the damaged muscle knitting back together, the punctured blood vessels sealing themselves. Within moments, there was nothing left but smooth skin and the memory of pain that was already fading.

  Erris stared down at his leg, flexing it experimentally. "I... that's..." He looked up at Sael with something like awe. "Thank you, sir. I don't know what else to say except thank you."

  "Try to stay out of trouble for the rest of the day." Sael said, standing.

  Erris managed a weak laugh. "I'll do my best, sir."