Kaitha nodded. “Good. I can’t… the addiction and withdrawal were horrible. And it wasn’t just what it did to me. I was in a sort of… well, it wasn’t a relationship. It’s complicated, but it was something. Whatever it was, I hurt him. I mean really hurt him.”

“Many of us hurt the ones we care about in the throes of addiction,” said the priest.

“Yeah,” said Kaitha. “But I put four arrows in his throat and eye.”

The members of the circle on either side of the ranger scooted their chairs, slowly and carefully, away from her.

Kaitha shook her head. “And then he left, obviously.”

“Under his own power?” Cherri sounded confused.

“And whatever we had, or almost had, I… I realized that was what I always wanted. But it’s gone. It’s gone, and I can’t bring it back. And I try to distract myself with work, like another quest can take my mind off things, but I’ve killed a liche and saved the city. I’ve slain the toughest monsters on the guild boards. I’ve earned all the highest honors a hero can get. There’s nothing left to strive for.”

Kaitha’s voice quavered as she tried to recover. The script lay in burning shambles around her, but she had to plunge ahead. “I get quests and endorsements, but they don’t give me anything I didn’t have before, way back when I started drinking and taking salve. I made it to the top. Twice. And there’s nothing here but myself and… and an emptiness. A nothing that’s bigger than anything I ever had.”

She was talking faster now, as though her words could outrun the tears welling up from her depths. “And it’s not even a craving for salve, though gods know I want a hit. It’s nothing I can get. I just felt this void even back when I was taking kicks all the time, and I wanted… something. Something I never had, and I couldn’t name back then. But now I can name it. It’s him. Everything was better when he was there, and then I…” Her voice broke at the memory. “I drove him away. But now I don’t think there’s anything that can fill the hollow, and I just want to forget everything. I don’t want to remember.”

The silence of the circle was interrupted by Cherri violently blowing her nose into a handkerchief.

“Uh, but I’m taking it one day at a time,” Kaitha added, and then sat down to a spatter of uncertain applause.

“This seems like a good time to break for refreshments,” said Brother Mattias, prompting a small stampede toward a table by the door. There were always refreshments at meetings like this; if you wanted people to grapple with their inner demons and surface old pain in front of several strangers, it helped to have pastries and coffee. The members of Kaitha’s chapter of Siblings in Perpetual Sobriety seemed especially eager for the distraction of hot drinks and cheap tea cakes tonight.

Kaitha wasn’t hungry, and she felt worse than ever, but the old priest caught her before she could leave the temple. “I wanted to say I appreciate how you spoke up, today,” he told her. “I know that wasn’t easy.”

The ranger thanked him with a joyless smile.

“And of course, you are welcome to come for as long as you need. Always,” said Brother Mattias. “But I think you may benefit from speaking to a therapist.”

“I’m seeing two,” she replied. “They both agreed I should come to this group.”

“Ah.” Kaitha recognized the pained look on the priest’s face, the wince of a man who wanted to be of more use than he could. “Well, there’s also a group up on the Sixth Tier for Elves who may be experiencing dark thoughts.”

“Yes. They’re the ones who recommended me to my second therapist,” she said.

Brother Mattias’ wince deepened. “Right. Yes.”

They stood in the awkward silence of two people who don’t want a conversation to end poorly, but are just about ready to let it so long as it ends soon.

The priest broke first. “Well, you come as long as you need. Sometimes, all you can do with troubles like this is face them head-on and see them through.”

Kaitha nodded as she pulled on her cloak. “I will.”

“And you’re keeping the dark thoughts in check?”

Kaitha bit back a retort and frowned at him.

“Good.” The old priest smiled. “We’ll see you soon. And in the meantime, I pray that you find what you’re searching for.”

Chapter 6

“It should be in… in this drawer, I think. Or maybe… where did I put that?” Jynn muttered to himself as he rummaged through an old alchemist’s cabinet at the back of his modest laboratory. “Perhaps in the chest?”

Gorm drummed his fingers on the countertop behind the wizard and eyed the various apparatuses laid out across its surface. Mortars and pestles, thin glass tubes, beakers, and a small runestone sat in no particular order around the charred hunk of wood at their center. The archmage’s dog, a motley ball of scruff aptly named Patches, napped by a potbelly stove. “This going to be long?” he asked.

“It will take longer if you keep distracting me.” Jynn extracted a length of copper pipe from the chest and peered down its length.

Gorm shrugged and looked at Gaist. The weaponsmaster stood at rigid attention near the back of the room, staring straight ahead. Or rather, he was staring pointedly away from something. Gorm glanced to see what it was, and immediately regretted it when he met Heraldin’s gaze.

The bard gave a hopeful smile. “Have you given any more thought to the ballad rights for our adventure?” he asked.

“No,” said Gorm, and his tone added that he didn’t plan to.

Heraldin pressed on anyway. “It could be mutually lucrative for us to⁠—”

“I’ve heard ye sing,” the Dwarf said with an air of finality, then stood up to have a look around the rest of the laboratory.

The room was in the basement of the Veluna Heights apartment complex, building C, and as such it was decorated in the painted-cement-and-exposed-pipes motif popularized by budget-conscious landlords across the multiverse. Beyond the cheap and minimalist construction, however, it looked like the typical lair of a powerful wizard. There were stacks of papers everywhere, bookshelves buckling under the weight of arcane grimoires, appropriately dribbly candles, and all the other trappings of a brilliant mind bent around the secrets of the universe at the expense of a tidy office.

Gorm had seen many such studies over the course of his career, and that made him uneasy; most of the mages he’d paid a visit to had been necromancers, demonologists, and other rogue spellcasters who’d gone villain. They all favored a particular motif.

“Lot of skulls in here,” he remarked, trying to keep his concern from his voice.

“What? Oh, yes, I suppose,” said Jynn.

A specimen on a musty desk caught Gorm’s eye; a tiny, red-skinned humanoid with a pointed nose and cloven feet. It hung limply between two wire stands, suspended by metal hooks pushed through its bat-like wings. Its multifaceted eyes were dull and lifeless. “An imp?” Gorm asked.

“Yes, of course,” the archmage said without looking up. “I’d assumed a hero of your reputation would have seen many of them.”

“Aye, but not dead,” said Gorm, nonplussed. “Ye can’t kill demons! Well, ye can, but when ye do they evaporate back to whatever hell they came from. It’s some inner-dimensional… I mean, their bodies are all attuned to some sort of… Well, I don’t know how exactly ye mages say it happens, but even if ye chop a demon’s head off, ye can’t be sure they won’t be back lookin’ for revenge some years later. Never seen a corpse before.”

“Ah, yes.” Jynn smiled and glanced over at the tiny body. “My father’s notes detailed a way to use shadow and death to bind a demonic entity to this reality, preventing it from reconstituting in its native dimension.”

“And your father taught you this spell?” asked Heraldin.

Loose scrolls and dried herbs tumbled from a drawer as Jynn rummaged around in it. “Not directly. He devised the basic weaving pattern in the late stages of the Leviathan Project and documented it in his journals. I suspect he was looking for a way to more safely dispose of summoned demons, but the technique is also useful for studying the physiology of extraplanar beings.”

Dwarf, weaponsmaster, and bard exchanged concerned glances. “Interesting,” said Gorm “You’re still doin’ research on Project Leviathan then?”

“Among other things.” The wizard pulled a small runestone from the drawer and waved it triumphantly in the air. “Aha!”

“Are you studying… anything else yer father looked at?”

“Oh, here and there.” Jynn’s disinterest was too firm and quick to be genuine nonchalance. “Picking at old notes and his remarks. And his work on the soul-bound has deep implications for our study of low magic; combining the souls of the deceased with that of a fallen extraplanar being to resurrect an enhanced incarnation of both is⁠—”

“Evil?” interrupted Gorm.

“An abomination?” ventured Heraldin.