“And how do you feel?”

A cacophony of mixed emotions rang out in the class.

“I feel better.”

“I’m still a little sad.”

“Like I don’t need to stay angry.”

“I want that cookie!”

Laruna smiled, silent tears bubbling from her closed eyes and streaming down her face. Her anger was still there, as were her memories of pain, but they were distant, far below her; she had left them behind as a seabird lifts itself from the surf and soars toward the burning sun. She was no longer the rage, the fury. The fury was a tool, no, a fuel, and it would come when the fire needed it.

She whispered her answer so low that nobody could hear it over the cacophony of eager children.

“I am the fire.”

“Yet the flames that burn the brightest fade the fastest,” said High Priest Athelan. The Elf nodded at hundreds of ivory candles beside him, arrayed in a candelabra as massive and glittering as an inverted chandelier. The massive fixture gave off as much light and heat as a funeral pyre, but without the unpleasant smell. In case his metaphor was not obvious enough, the Tandosian patriarch added, “So it was with their Majesties Johan and Marja, for cruel fate has taken both Andarun’s mighty king and beloved queen far too soon.”

The former rulers of Andarun lay in state on either side of the blazing candelabra, or rather, Marja did. Johan’s casket was empty save for a jewel-encrusted broadsword and a red cloak. The box reminded Weaver Ortson of the king’s armor; covered in gold, ornate to the point of bad taste, and lined with crimson velvet. Marja’s casket was true to its honoree as well; draped in elegant silks, beveled with silver inlay, and built double wide.

“Crueler still, our monarchs had not had time to produce an heir to succeed them,” the priest continued. “Pray for wisdom and guidance for all as we navigate these uncertain times.”

Ortson rolled his eyes. In these uncertain times, the one thing the guildmaster could count on was that the nobles and dignitaries gathered in Andarun’s throne room needed no primers on recent royal genealogy.

Tradition held that there were twelve days between a monarch’s death and the royal funeral, with no dancing, music, or drink. This period of abstinence was ostensibly for mourning. More practically, the cessation of dances, revelries, grand balls, and other social obligations gave the nobility a chance to scheme and maneuver before official talk of succession began. The Duke of Dunhelm and Duchess of Waerth were spreading rumors of bygone trysts to undermine each other’s lineage. Houses Tyrieth and Bethlyn were dropping distinctly unsubtle hints about the ages when Elves ruled. Several Gnomish clans were trying to unite around pushing for a Halfling king. It was like watching the opening moves of a game of thrones, only played between several dozen sides and all at once.

Ortson had neither concern nor patience for the identity of the next monarch. Nearly a fortnight of mandatory sobriety had sheared away all vestiges of the guildmaster’s blissful ignorance, honing his mind into a diamond-tipped point that was leveled squarely at the king’s empty casket. Johan’s last messenger sprite trilled in his memory, playing out the last moment of the Golden Dawn like a tiny, grim mummer. Every repetition of the macabre performance brought new questions with it.

How had the king, moments after his final, anguished cry, managed to send the messenger sprite? And why did the king only speak at the beginning and end of the message? Why was he silent as the rest of the Golden Dawn fought and died?

Or was he silent at all?

The guildmaster’s mind kept going back to the horrible cry of whatever creature had ended the Golden Dawn’s short career. Weaver Ortson had fought drakes, griffins, abominations, dark cults, demons, owlverines, and every manner of dire beast before he hung up his sword and took a job in the guild’s administration. But he’d never heard any sound like the hideous roar that the sprite had imitated, burbling and screeching and thunderous all at once. Yet despite the unique and alien nature of the shriek, something about the call tugged at Weaver’s memory. There was a familiar cadence beneath the warped call, less like a bestial snarl and more like⁠—

“Ha-haaaaaa!”

The last note of the trumpeting laughter hadn’t faded before the gasps and screams of the mourners drowned it out. Ortson attempted to wheel about in his seat, but the Duke of Dunhelm fainted dead away and fell into the guildmaster’s lap. By the time Ortson had deposited the limp noble on the floor, Johan the Mighty was already limping up the steps before the great candelabra.

The king shrugged aside the attentions of concerned bannermen. His golden armor was grimy and dented, his hair a tangled mess, his face a splotch of soot split by a white crescent grin. “I have returned, my good people! I nearly lost hope, as my journey home took every ounce of… my… my…” Johan’s triumph faded as his eyes fell on the second casket at the foot of the throne. “My queen!” he gasped, rearing back in shock. When he rocked forward again, momentum sent him stumbling toward his wife’s coffin. “How? How can this be?”

Looking back and forth between the weeping king and the doorway he had entered by, Ortson was inclined to wonder the same thing.

“She could not bear to live without Your Majesty,” cried Athelan above the astonished whispers of the assembled mourners.

“No! Marja, no!” sobbed the king, falling beside the queen’s coffin. He pulled a silk handkerchief from his belt and draped it over the ornate cover. “I swore… I brought it back, but I was too late, my love! You were taken too soon!”

Weaver’s gaze swiveled to the back of the room again. Behind rows of stunned mourners, several bannermen stared with slack-jawed confusion back at Ortson. Weaver surmised the guards were also wondering exactly how the king had managed to travel from the dungeon to the funeral without word of his emergence preceding him.

“Now this cursed dragon has taken everything from me!” Johan sprawled over Marja’s coffin now, his hands and face pressed against its top, his pauldrons grinding into the wood with every pronounced sob.

“Our joy at your return is eclipsed by this tragedy,” said the High Priest of Tandos. Weaver’s eyes narrowed. Athelan was a famously taciturn man, preferring to communicate via thin-lipped grimaces over speeches. The priest’s reluctance to spare a word for his fellow man went beyond a desire for a frugal tongue; the old Elf was a miser of words. And here he was waxing poetic about Johan’s return and Marja’s death with such force, such precision, such timing, that it seemed almost rehearsed.

The guildmaster would have mulled over this point longer, but the king suddenly pushed himself up to his elbows and looked around the room with wild, red-rimmed eyes. “Where is Guildmaster Ortson? Weaver Ortson?”

Ortson’s mind flashed back to a quest early in his career, when he had been creeping around a small hill that had suddenly opened a huge, yellow eye right next to him. Then, as now, his instincts froze him to the spot. But back then, the Balemound had gone back to sleep, whereas the king kept calling until every eye in the throne room had turned on the paralyzed man.

“Uh… sire?” Ortson, lacking any other conceivable course of action, raised his hand.

“My old friend.” Johan’s face split into a wide grin as his eyes fell on the guildmaster. “You must do a task for me.”

“As… as Your Majesty wishes.”

Johan grinned. “This kingdom faces a threat greater than I ever imagined. The dragon has killed my whole party, and almost myself, and now it has taken my love. If any of us are to survive its fury, if we are to slay a beast of legend, we will need more than just professional services. We will need heroes of destiny!”

“Yep. Definitely destiny.” Theological Support Friar Brouse pointed up at the statue of Niln with half of a scone. “See it all the time.”

“That’s what you said last time!” High Scribe Pathalan called to the traveling monk from the far side of the Al’Matran sanctuary, one sandaled foot out the door in case the sculpture tried anything funny. “You said it was just latent fate shifting reality or something.”

Several of the attendant priestesses and acolytes clustered behind the high scribe murmured in agreement.

“See it all the time,” said the friar again, as though this statement was in and of itself a sufficient response. He took a bite of scone and chewed thoughtfully as he watched the bronze likeness of the previous high scribe.

“Really? Statues just move all the time?” demanded the current officeholder.

“Ain’t movin’ now,” Brouse observed, spraying crumbs over his yellow robe.

“But he did! He grinned for weeks, and then he looked all calm and normal when the Dwarf visited, and since then he’s been… winking at us.” The high scribe shuddered. “Goddess, I swear his eyes are following me.”

“Just an illusion. People always see things,” muttered Brouse. He looked down at a gyroscopic contraption that was slowly rotating several colorful beads around a dish of blue liquid. “Nothing unusual in the weave.”

“Well, there might have been when we called you three weeks ago!” snapped Pathalan.

“Hey! You think you’re the only temple that’s got holy relics acting up?” Brouse glowered back at the cowering Al’Matrans. “You lot have been making calls all month. And some of the big ones got real emergencies, too. The marble glowmoths over at the Temple of Fulgen are actually starting to glow. Every fresco showin’ anything past the First Age is turning black. I had three different temples calling in statues, paintings, or relics bleeding last week. Serious stuff.”

He pulled a blue crystal from his bag and tapped it twice. It flickered with a cerulean light, then made a sound like a bumblebee on a griddle and expelled a cloud of azure smoke. “Thrice-cursed bones! And I can’t get a bloody nornstone to work for the life of me! Between the temples’ whining and artificers’ swindlin’, I got enough problems to give a god a headache. I don’t give a fig leaf about some statue making faces at—gah!”

The torches in the sanctuary flickered, casting dark shadows across the room. When they flared back to life a heartbeat later, several Al’Matran’s screamed. The statue of the former high scribe was smiling up at the ceiling above the empty throne at the center of the sanctuary, looking as though he anticipated the goddess herself was about to crash through the roof and land in her old chair.

“See?” demanded Pathalan. “It’s got to be a ghost or… or dark magic. Something sinister!”

“Ain’t looking at you now, is he?” asked Brouse. “Hrmph. No magic. And no haunting, neither.” Brouse scratched at his beard and looked back and forth from the spinning beads to Niln’s face. “I still say it’s destiny. You get this sort of thing when people are about to have big, life altering changes thrust upon them.”

“Do you?” Pathalan’s voice oozed sarcasm and doubt.