Chapter 1

‘Hello?’ is not the password, said the Mouth.
The door slit was swiftly closed on the purveyor of the Inn.
There was no password, silence was the password.
The Mouth turned back toward the dimly lit chamber filled with arguing scoundrels.

A large fenfolk of some kind, perhaps a firbolg, slammed his hairy fist on the wooden table.

‘I’m waiting,’ said the Fist. His voice was monotone as cold steel.

There was still mumbled disagreement amongst the thieves.
Rogues were gathered from the frontier of the Breach all the way to the slums of Delfarr.

This was the most ambitious plan The Mind had yet conceived.
He sat in a corner, silent as a false god.
He had greater plans than this heist.
The Mouth was parroting what he’d explained about the job.

They were to take the wizard’s artifacts.
The ones contained in his tower’s vault of riches.
The smarter among the thieves coveted magical artifacts,
the less sophisticated imagined heaps of gold.
This imaginary mountain of coin was to be stolen somehow.
A fool’s wishful thinking.

‘You have the easiest job. And therefore the most to gain,’ countered the Mouth.

‘So stick to it and shut up,’ the Mouth said with not a little irony.
The Mouth, a man with a brazen soul and a tongue of quicksilver. A charisma of the maddening kind.

He splayed on the table the map of the castle they had paid dearly for, both in life and coin.
‘This is patchwork and partial.’ He cast a meaningful glance toward The Eyes.

They’d not been able to scry through the abjuration spells cast upon the tower.
Evidently the Vizier retained some of his magic for his personal use.
The team, having no divination abilities of their own, blamed this on their scryers’ lack of talent they couldn’t understand.

‘Ears pricked, I will not repeat myself.’
He looked meaningfully toward the twins.
The Ears put down her drink as her thoughts seemed to drift back into reality.
The Eyes kept his blind sight upon his divination sphere.

‘The plan goes something like this,’ The Mouth smiled fantastically.

Time elapsed toward the pivotal date. It was the fifth of Septuary.
Today an important delegation was occurring at the castle.
The king and Vizier, and all the court, would be in attendance.

Fist had made his distraction at the bank.
The town constabulary was currently arresting him.
His escape was to be a later heist.

They’d made it into the keep dressed in the guards’ uniforms.

The four of the infiltration team had simply walked through the main gate. They were all necessarily dwarves, or disguised as such.
This was a dwarfish stronghold, after all.

The Nose, a last-minute merc for hire, but with such a reputation for professionalism as to seem a reptile, unshakeable. He lacked a nose, as brutes sometimes do. His alias wasn’t his choosing.

The Ears, a natural-born telepath, a rarity as you must know. She was listening to the thoughts of the scryer.

And certainly not least, The Mind, the name speaks for itself.
They had walked to the portion of the memorized castle with the tower.

It had been too easy.

They knew the Vizier was not at home, as the Eyes had him in his crystal ball, stood in the king’s audience chamber. Though they dared not lower their defenses.
The wizard had many spies, some which could fly there in an instant.

His attendance for the delegation was an odious part of his job, one on which the plan hinged.

The first obstacle they encountered they had planned for.

There was simply no door to the tower. For a wizard who can phase through walls needn’t magical locks for doors he doesn’t need.

The Mind wielded in his hand a small scepter of ebony wood,
a wand he’d received from the Vizier himself.

With a whispered word, the wall disappeared.

They passed through the gap as the stones reappeared behind them.

In the center of the tower there was a spiral staircase which elevated to several floors.

They began searching the chambers for access to the vault.

They weren’t entirely sure what they were looking for.

Although the Mind had his guesses.

Crowded on tables were instruments used in every science known to man.

It was only when the Mouth happened upon an innocuous closet door that they found what they’d been searching for.

The Ears heard minds inside this room.

Let it be said that wizards are dragons in their hoards, though they hoard not gold.
The vault opened into a polyhedral chamber, twelve-sided and draped in tapestries and exotic carpets.
Furs of beasts unknown to any non-traveler softened the floor.
The embroideries depicted alien wars—creatures locked in combat with distant knights beneath unfamiliar stars.
Against such chimerical visions, the rest of his tower felt provincial.
Beneath the adornments, the walls and floor were flawless emerald stone.
Stars shimmered within their depths—stars belonging to no world he had ever known.
A universe folded into a space no larger than a man’s reach. Meager. Sustained only by constant effort. All the mage could manage.

The Mind recognized this place and the objects within it.
For he had once apprenticed to the great Vizier.
Though that was many years ago.
So much of his suffering had been in dedication to this moment.

The artifacts they were after were not inert things. They were animated, enspirited—once bric-a-brac, now companions of a sort.
A crown housing the minds of every king who had worn it.
A sword that whispered in the language of half-sleep.
A water clock that ticked according to its own subjectivity.
A stone containing the echo of a ghost’s second death, a vessel for recursive afterlives.

The Mind avoided the dark corner where an anterlantern burned.
Its black flame drank hope and courage; its touch froze flesh.
It smelled of ozone and endings. The most dangerous relics lay there, and he lingered on them despite himself.

In the corner there was a glass cage. The Nose made the mistake of approaching said encasement.

It uncoiled in its corner, pale and elegant, wings folding like silk. A bat-moth hybrid, hairlike spines tracing its back. Its face would have belonged in a court portrait—sharp, noble, composed.
Its eyes were wrong.
Reptilian slits, bloodshot green, ancient and appraising. Around its neck hung an amulet bearing the sigil of a long-dead royal line.

Like warmth after the cold. A drowsy peace. The slowing of a heart too tired to beat fast anymore. Even through the glass it smelled faintly of chamomile and sleep.
The Nose smelled this without his nose.

The creature smiled.
It spoke without raising its voice; its words were not commands but invitations. Promises of rest. Of eternity unmarred by scarcity.
Of abundance so replete it rendered mortal striving quaint.

“Submit,” it whispered.
The Nose knelt.
Not in terror. In reverence.
Years of resistance gone.
“Submit to Elspera, the smile at the window.”

The Nose was upon the brink of shattering the glass with his guard’s mace when The Mind swiftly appeared wielding a talisman.
It did not shine, it did not burn, but it was holy. And so the creature recoiled in its corner.

Like a freezing man jolted awake by a hot bath, The Nose’s vision sharpened. The warmth cracked. The enchantment died. He saw the eyes for what they were—hollow pits offering comfort only in annihilation.

‘Caution now, steel yourself,’ was all he said.

He spoke a blessing and sunlight poured out from his palms. The cantrip was masterfully done, not that anyone in the vault but him could know this.

The body stiffened, then collapsed into itself, elegance folding into something serpentine and wrong.
The room went still.

The four watched as the corpse shriveled, flesh collapsing inward, roiling. From the blackened mass spilled insects and small serpentine things, fleeing as though from a dying star.

This was the fate of vampires.
Denied the afterlife they sought, they did not die so much as their souls fractioned endlessly, condemned to reincarnate as lesser life. Forever diminishing.
Never ending. Never ascending. Always falling until they crossed the boundary of life to dead matter, then from matter to energy. Eventually becoming the very sunlight they once despised.
Immortality, reversed.
The Mind had learned this natural philosophy from the Vizier himself.

Death became her and they were all glad for its dying.

All that remained was the amulet.

The Mind broke open the glass and retrieved the necklace.
He held it in his hand for a moment—a sentimental amount of time.
But then he opened a box of sanctified cedar and placed it safely inside.

‘Like a beetle in a jar,’ spoke the Mouth, his voice shaking.
He closed the souled jewel in the box.

But he had not yet found what he was looking for.

That would be the wishing coin.

It looked like an ordinary copper piece.
But this mundane money, if thrown into a well, would grant anything one wished.

An alloy made of meteorite from a fallen star,
and adamantine mined from the columns of hell.

He went about calmly searching.

The Ears listened to the scryer with his updates.

The Vizier was still in the throne room.

‘Time is golden, let’s waste none,’ mouthed the Mouth.

The small-statured party split up among the tables and shelves of relics.
Their eyes scanned the material noise looking for the innocuous coin.

Quills and books bound in monstrous hides littered a desk.
Upon that desktop was the upturned skull of a cyclops.
Inside where its brain and soul had once been were coins of all currencies.
It made for a poor container, as money poured out from where the eye had been.
The Mind was the first to see this and he began sorting through the metal.
He found it. It looked as though it were mere copper, and it was stamped with the face of a king unknown to the Mind, some regent from a civilization which had long since died.

He weighed its worth in his mind.
To end magical authority.
That was his goal.
To break the mystic bindings of the world,
and so free himself of his thralldom.
This was what he longed to wish for.

The sword in the corner began mumbling in its sleep.
‘Never trust a slave,’ babbled the sword.
‘The blade, sharper-tongued than it seems,’ muttered the Mouth.

‘Death to fungus,’ retorted the sword.
‘Perhaps not,’ he corrected himself.

The lucky coin was found.
Now all they had to do was leave
and get to a mundane wishing well in order to make their wish.
That was the rule of the ritual.
All magic is founded upon symbolism.

To do so would require luck as much as skill,
and fortune is fickle and capricious,
especially toward those who share these traits.
They had to remain calm.

The coin was heavier than it should have been.
The Mind weighed it in his hands.
It is one of the many oddities of the world, he thought,
that fate should hinge upon so small a thing.
He pocketed the copper piece.
He would no longer be a slave.
No one would be.
He would be great again.

‘The Vizier is on the move,’ beamed the Ears into the minds of all.

They gathered what artifacts they could into their bags and then departed the dodecahedral room.
They swiftly descended the tower’s many steps.

They made it back to the stone wall and the wand was again used.
It again opened a hole.
They passed through it smooth as smoke.

‘A patrol in the next hallway,’ thought the Ears for everyone.

At this point they were overloaded with haversacks.
They would look a strange patrol themselves.

They began walking, then running, in the opposite direction.
This was leading them deeper into the stronghold.

‘To the sewers, we make for plan B,’ stated the Mouth.

They rounded a corner into the second-story balcony of an interior courtyard.
All jumped over the banister onto the tiled roof and then slid into the inner garden below.
Plants from all over the world were grown in the botanical realm of the Vizier.
Though the deadlier ones were kept in the greenhouses.
Deadlier—the plants here were not safe.
Careful not to prick themselves on the thorn bushes,
or brush against the flopping palms of the lichen trees.
Their shadows were large yet camouflaged amidst the flora as the growing torches ensconced on the walls and ceiling shone bright as the noonday sun.
And then they disappeared into a lower hallway.

There were several twists and turns, one circle back. The patrols had to be dodged and waited out.
The Mouth was able to flex his cunning as he cannily talked their way into the underlevels.
His excuse was that the king wanted wine for when he was finished listening to the delegates from the empire of the tall ones.
A meeting which the Eyes was watching intensely.
The human diplomats had brought news of great importance, far greater than the outcome of this little heist.
The wars on the Breach were not going well.
They were requesting martial and financial aid.

The Mouth produced his own wineskin, which he had brought for this very opportunity,
and used it as a prop to convince the guard.
‘The king needs a drink.’
The guard had languid eyes and let them pass easily.
They’d been fortunate in this dullard.

They descended past the cellars and the dungeons down to the very roots of the castle.
Here was the sewer access.

Through a decrepit wooden door they made their way into a stone tunnel.
A canal of putrescence ran between two outer walkways.

‘He knows,’ relayed the Ear.
All knew what this meant.
The Vizier had returned to his vault and found it amiss.
This meant they had precious little time.

By now they were running.
The Ears were trying to keep up.
She was not a dwarf and was a foot shorter than the rest.

There were countless exits from these tunnels.
Dwarfs were born to dig,
and they’d dug a sewage system which could rival the capital city of Delfarr.
But there was one exit in particular they were after.
The Ears, running from behind, communicated each turn in the maze.
With the exertion her thoughts had become hazier,
more imagistic, less of language.
They followed the signs she conjured in their minds—more intuitions than conceptions.

The exit they sought led them even deeper into the old city,
the city which had been built upon.

The surface Citadel and surrounding city had been a relatively recent development.
The ancient fortress still resided below.
Its abandoned labyrinth would make for a perfect getaway,
assuming nothing else had moved in.

Their Scryer was losing the ability to follow them at such a distance below the earth.
The Mind was now relying on memory.
Though all of this looked new.
The stonework looked newly built.

This had all been too easy, relatively speaking.
Could the Vizier have known?
Had he planned for their plan?
The sewer lacked insects.

The Ears had an intrusive thought, then stopped in her tracks.
Then the Nose stopped in his tracks.
They all turned.

‘This feels wrong,’ huffed the Nose.

That’s because it was wrong.

There was no smell.
What kind of sewers are scentless?
Perhaps an illusory one, where the mage constructor couldn’t create facsimiles of all five senses.

‘This is a pocket dimension,’ realized the Mind.

They all stood, scared.

Illusions become weaker once they are noticed.
The walls began to fade.
The air became warmer.
Sound reverberated around them.
Then they were not in the sewers at all.

But in a glass cell inside of the wizard’s vault.

Similar to the cage the vampire had been imprisoned within.
In the corner of the room they saw another glass which contained the Fist and the Eyes.

The Vizier stood before them on the other side of the hardened glass.

His name was Delphos and he stood pallid against the background of black and starry artifice.

Now the apprentice and his entourage stood before the lone master.

In the corner the anterlantern remained.
It burned black and cold.

Delphos felt a pang of pity for the crew of petty thieves.
They would suffer a new destiny they had never asked for, all for the sake of his pupil.
His transgressions were no longer his alone.

Their punishment would be service.
For he had something in mind which needed to be stolen.
And they had passed the test. The Nose took his mace to the glass, as The Mind had done before.
It rebounded as though from a force field.
He fell to the ground and did not try again.

‘You look wretched, Gask,’ he spoke to the Mind.

‘What’s going on here?’ probed the Ears from within Gask’s mind.
There was no longer any point in lying.
The plan had and hadn’t failed.

‘Hello, master, I’ve gathered the thieves you asked for.’

Yes, this was all the planning of the ‘Mind’.

Deliver a competent team of thieves to his pact master.

The wizard could no longer trust his usual agents.

Those loyal enough to refuse the offer of a higher pay had been killed.

Dealt away with subtle assassination magics.

And the kingdom’s resources were entirely compromised.

No, he needed those who were unaligned and unsophisticated.

Those who could be easily controlled.

He needed something stolen from his own family.
Delphos’ brother was a druid.
A lich, to be exact.
One who had gone foul in his old age.
The Vizier preferred his pact magic to such drastic necromancies.
To bind oneself to one’s body is an unholy thing.
Not that Delphos believed in god—the real god, the outer one.
In any case, the facts remained. His twin was dangerous.

See, this lich hadn’t been corrupted, or become arrogant, or unfeeling.
Quite the opposite.
His sympathies are what undid him.

Delphos no longer had the powers for such an operation.
He was diminished now, operating with a fraction of his former mind.
Even so, he remained wise enough to find help.
He was of the golden age, when magic had been invented rather than catalogued. When spells were acts of discovery, not recitation. Many cantrips now taught to apprentices had originated with him—things so inevitable in hindsight they felt as though the world itself had been waiting for him to notice them.
Genius often looked like inevitability from the outside.

Delphos went to his desk and lit a cigar.

He’d never liked the sound of his own voice,
especially when it needed to condescend towards explanations for his actions.

He produced the real wishing coin from his pocket.

‘Only mortals can make wishes which come true.’ This was true enough.

‘So I have no use for this.’ This was a lie.

‘Gask, this is now yours. You are free. I know this was your ulterior motive.’

‘The rest of you, I need a job which will pay out far larger than what you were promised here.’

The Mouth spouted expletives.
‘Enough with the villainy and dramatics. Why not just offer us the job to begin with? Why the trickery?’

‘You blame me for trickery as a thief in my home?’

‘I needed to know your competencies; this sufficed, but I must leave for now.’

He placed the coin onto the tabletop.

‘Feel free to leave whenever you wish, Gask. I release you.’

Delphos left the vault. They stood there in their glass.

‘No bathrooms in this cell,’ observed the Mouth.

The Ears probed toward the dilemma in Gask’s mind.

She was surprised when he decided to help them on their quest.