The Spirit Bender chuckled and darted toward Taeral. The prince managed to move out of his way, but the Reaper quickly swerved and came after him again. "Your mind is too small to understand how insignificant you all are. You're mere blips in the fabric of the universe, mine to use however I please! You can't even fathom what it's like to exist like me, for millions of years, unable to escape or move on!"

"Why does your existence matter more than ours?" Taeral asked. He vanished just before Spirit cut through him. The Reaper's reflexes were sharp. Taeral reappeared behind him, but Spirit's scythe was already out to meet Thieron. The blades clashed with a gut-wrenching shriek, the impact causing a tremor across the frozen lake.

"Everything and everyone is disposable to me, as long as it hurts Death," Spirit hissed. "I may not be able to kill her, but I can make her existence miserable, as miserable as she's made mine!"

I moved back from their fight, worried Spirit might spot me. To my left, a couple of specters jumped Varga, their claws and fangs tearing through his leather suit and pale skin. They drew blood, which splotched down on the white ice like scarlet roses. I zapped myself behind him, grabbed his wrist, and teleported him several yards away from his attackers.

"Thanks, Riza," he said and quickly dove back into battle, as more spirits came at him. I released a flurry of phosphorescent sparks, dazzling the specters long enough for Soul and Widow to intervene and start clearing them out.

Looking back at Taeral and Spirit, I worried our guy might end up getting hurt. The Reaper made him run and dodge and move a lot, never tiring. But Taeral's energy was running low, his swings increasingly sluggish. The teleporting didn't help. I, too, felt exhaustion climbing its way back to the top of my consciousness, but at least I wasn't at risk of getting cut with Spirit's blade, then hit by his manipulative powers.

"I never wanted to be a Reaper!" Spirit snarled. "I never asked for this! All I wanted was to die, as I was meant to die! She wouldn't let me move on. I begged her. For millennia, I begged her, but she wouldn't listen."

"So what? You're punishing us all because Death didn't let you die?!" Taeral retorted. They'd both paused for a short moment, while Taeral got his breath back and Spirit quickly surveyed the battlefield and smirked. The odds had yet to flip in our favor, but, if we kept going, we still had a chance at fighting the specters off completely. We, the living, did the fighting, while the Reapers came through and reaped the crap out of these violent and bloodthirsty spirits.

"You're merely collateral damage," Spirit replied. "If you want anyone to blame, look to Death. This is on her. It's all on her."

"Coward," I blurted, drawing his attention. "You can't even take responsibility for your actions."

He grinned, but there was darkness in those galaxy eyes, the kind that predicted terrible things to come. "I suppose you're still wondering where your ghoul friends went, little Miss Know-It-All?"

Around me, the fighting continued. Vicious and ruthless, bloody and painful. Scythes glimmered in the light. Specters snarled and clawed and bit through everything they could get their hands on. The living struggled to keep up and not get torn to shreds. There wasn't enough time to do anything more, as the planet's hum became louder, the glow intensifying from within and threatening to blind us completely.

"I've got wards all over the place," the Spirit Bender added, his chest swelling with pride. "You thought I didn't know about the ghouls? I have eyes everywhere, you worthless creature. My magic sprawls across dimensions. Little bits and pieces left in my wake. Alarms. Whispers. Dead eyes that I can see through. I was ready before you even showed up!"

Dread clutched my throat, its grip tightening as I realized our ghoul allies would not be able to help us this time around. We were still fighting a losing battle, despite our emotional jumps from the pits of misery. Over and over, we'd climbed out of that darkness, clinging to a single thread of hope, only to get kicked back down. This time, it was the Spirit Bender's turn to crush our resistance.

But was this our end? Our true end?

Or did the rope go on for a little while longer?

Part of me was virtually incapable of letting go. As long as I still had breath left in me, I could do something. The Spirit Bender vanished for a split second, and I knew he was coming for me, so I teleported myself beside Taeral, instead.

Spirit reappeared where I'd stood, his scythe glimmering, thirsty for my life. Gripping my sword, I pointed its sharp end at him, while Taeral smirked. The Time Master was missing for a reason. I knew that now.

"We're not done here," I said, as the battle raged on. "We're not the kind to just give up so easily, especially when our foe turns out to be just a toddler Reaper throwing a tantrum."

The Spirit Bender turned to face us, his expression skewed by anger.

"Then you shall die here, while the entire universe burns," he replied.

For some reason, I found it hard to believe him. Even with one foot already in the hole, none of us could give up. Maybe that would eventually save us.

Taeral

The Spirit Bender's motives didn't make any sense. Perhaps to him they did, but to every other living being in the world, they did not justify this level of hatred and damage against people who had done nothing to him.

I caught glimpses of Death beneath the ice. There was no way of getting any closer to her, though. I'd tried, more than once, and Spirit had pushed back every time. The worst part was that I had to be careful about his scythe. One cut was all it took for me to become his slave, much like the thousands of spirits he'd hoarded here, on Aledras. We all knew that a First Tenner’s powers could affect the spirits and bodies of the living, too, and not just those of the dead—and our experiences with Soul, Widow, and Phantom had more than proven it. This was one of the reasons why they were so important to Death in the first place.

Not all of the spirits were from here, I noticed. In fact, most of them seemed foreign, in different shapes and sizes, ranging from gargantuan figures with bulky arms and legs, to little folk with pixie-like wings and long claws. His methods had yet to fully come to light, but I had to assume he'd gathered them from wherever he'd visited. He'd used bits of Reaper objects to amplify them into specters, and he'd bent them all to his will, forcing them to do his bidding.

There were too many. Without the ghouls, we couldn't clear out enough of them to give us an edge against the Spirit Bender. The more the Reapers cut down, the more came from behind, twice as eager and determined to take us all out. I hadn’t had the chance to deal with any of them myself, as I'd focused my efforts on the Reaper who'd brought them all together. From the looks of it, Spirit wanted to keep me to himself, as the specters seemed to avoid me.

"You think you're better than me?!" Spirit said and bolted toward me.

I zapped myself to the side, knowing he'd have his back guarded. I'd spent minutes trying to study and understand his movements. Without Brendel's elemental force, he didn't seem capable of blocking my teleportation abilities, which I found odd.

"I don't think I'm better than anyone," I replied. "I just think you shouldn't punish billions of innocent people simply because you hate your maker."

"At the risk of repeating myself, your mind is simply too small to understand."

Raising Thieron, I let its energy surge through me. It was desperate to cut Spirit down. I could feel it in my bones. "Or maybe yours is too empty to accept reason," I shot back.

He came at me again, and I vanished once more, reappearing closer to Death, for the first time. She spoke beneath the water. I could see her lips moving, but I couldn't hear her. This was my chance. I brought Thieron down against the ice, hoping it might at least help break the Silence seal.

Spirit rammed into me, knocking the air out of my lungs. We wound up sliding across the ice and into a skirmish of specters. In their madness and desperation, they jumped us, cutting and screaming their heads off. I swung Thieron outward, slashing at several specters at once. To my astonishment, they burst into golden sparks.

"What the…" Spirit was shocked as he pulled back and waved the others away.

Kelara swooped in, almost out of nowhere, and tried to take him down. He swatted her like a fly, and she fell, quickly tackled by multiple specters at once. Her screams of agony tore through my heart.

I rushed past the Spirit Bender and used Thieron against Kelara's specter fiends, causing more swirls of golden sparks to explode. Seconds later, I helped her up. She was as surprised as Spirit. "Tae, you can reap them," she said. "Even though you're not a Reaper yet… with Thieron, you can reap them!"

"I'm not done with you yet!" Spirit snarled, and I turned around to face him, while Kelara got busy with more of the incoming specters.

Blocking his scythe with Thieron, I kicked him in the gut and pushed him away. "You've committed so many crimes against the universe, it's downright ridiculous!" I said. "Whatever happens to my world or the others, I promise I won't let you get away with this!"

And I meant it, too. There were maybe minutes left on the cosmic clock, as Aledras grew brighter and more intense with every moment that passed. I knew we didn't have much longer. But even so, I couldn't let the Spirit Bender live to see another day, for everything that he'd done. Justice was needed, now more than ever.

"It'll all be over soon, and you'll be too busy sobbing to bother with me," the Spirit Bender replied, a smirk testing his lips. The certainty in his voice had faded, though. Was his resolve coming down, at last? Had I made him doubt himself, perhaps?

I moved to hit him again before he had another chance to attack, when a crackling sound brought me to a sudden halt. His eyes widened, his mouth drawn into a thin, small line. He knew something I didn't, and it didn't please him at all. On the contrary, it made his jaw clench with rage.

"The wards," Kelara shouted from the side. "Someone broke the ghoul wards!"

As if summoned by the mere mention of their names, hundreds of the former Reapers converged on the swollen crowd of specters. They jumped in and started eating every spirit they came across, while Seeley and the others did their fair share of reaping on the side.

I did feel sorry for these spirits. They hadn’t chosen to be a part of this. They deserved an afterlife, but until Death gave verbal consent to the Word's assistance, our powers were limited. We couldn't do anything other than reap them or let the ghouls eat them. Lumi and Nethissis glowed like light bulbs as they moved and cast protective magic shields to help some of our crew, but there wasn't much else they could do.

Taking the Spirit Bender down was proving to be a lot more complicated than I'd originally anticipated. Granted, I'd thought Brendel was my greatest foe, until she fell. Boy, had I been wrong.

But with the wards broken, the ghouls were unhinged and relentless. The crowd began to thin, and Spirit made his way back to Death. His worried glance darted across the battlefield, and I knew I needed to break him, one way or another.

"You're not invincible," I said. "The odds no longer favor you. Maybe this is the universe telling you something. You should take notice before it's too late."

The Spirit Bender scoffed. "You tart. It's already too late. I've spent centuries figuring out the right Thousand Seals to put Death under. Do you think she'll show forgiveness if I let her out now? Ha! Besides, I'm not one to get discouraged easily. Look around you, Taeral. Aledras is about to explode. Its blast will be so powerful, it will amp up the fae sanctuaries and it'll burn everything in its wake. I win."

"You know what? I've had enough of this insane crap," I declared.