"I'm tougher than I look. And I've been where Lily is, condemned for being a whore and discarded out of hand, more times than I can count. I'm not going to not try."

Ame mentally sorts through the provided information.

"Can you show us where you lost her trail, Rose?"

"And what do you know about this necromancer, I heard a rumor about dhar poisoning, but how do we know it's a necromancer-"

"Yes, of course. It's out back, come through? Ah, I'm not sure where I heard it either, but they say ghouls and things have been wandering around the forest, and then the rumors stopped saying 'dhar' and started saying 'necromancer'..."

Ame follows Rose into and through the brothel.

"This forest, where you think Lily's been taken. What else do you know about it?"

"Um, there's an old village in there? That was destroyed maybe a year or two ago? And some ancient ruins from some Demon Lord nearby... They say it was a bad idea to settle there in the first place, that doom was inevitable."

They're in back alleys now. She points over to a connecting alley, then says, "Here, this is the place."

Ame looks around, taking in the details. After a moment of that, she casually parkours up the alley wall to get a look from the roof. How close is the forest?

It's easily a few miles away, far enough that it's a smudge of green on the horizon from here.

(Elizabeth starts doing something with the Winds below, presumably checking for signs of necromancy.)

"Yep," she declares after a minute. "There was definitely a necromantic spell cast here. Low power, probably cast from this scroll." She nudges a scrap of creepy-looking parchment with a foot. "Something disabling or enthralling, I'm guessing? I don't think there's anything useful I can learn from it, so I'm going to burn it unless we have any objections? And then, if we're going to - attempt a rescue - we need to leave like now for it."

She looks up.

"I'm scared, Ame. I'm not saying we shouldn't help, this is horrid, but-"

Ame smoothly drops back down to the alley floor.

"But what?" Ame says quietly, rhetorically, understanding but not swayed.

She closes her eyes and opens her windsight as wide as she can. Forget what was cast. Did whoever or whatever cast it leave a trail?

It's-

Incredibly faint. She might even be imagining it. But, maybe?

"I'm with you," Bys says, obviously enough. "It feels like the right thing to do. Dangerous or not."

That gets a fleeting smile, but she doesn't open her eyes.

Ame seizes on the faint impression, struggling with every part of herself that knows how to struggle to make her windsight clearer. It doesn't use her eyes, but maybe Axiom can do something to, like, her brain maybe? Windsight is using her visual cortex, maybe even her optic nerve; the windsight is a sense, not a sourceless hallucination-that-happens-to-be-correct. She needs to be able to see the trail with her eyes open. And there's no reason she shouldn't be able to; the fact that windsight isn't coming into her brain through her eyeballs should make that easier, c'mon... 

Something-

-Changes.

Dhar is disgusting. It's rot. Colorless and sticky and horrid, ugliness that exists at the absence of the other colors of magic, of the normal, natural looking structures. It looks, somehow, like Brockton Bay.

The trail is clearer now. All she has to do is follow the traces that look like home.

Ame's eyes snap open. She shoots forward, racing out of the alley, following the trail. She blazes straight through the city gate without slowing down.

She only goes far enough to confirm that the trail leads into the forest before she slows and waits for Liz (and Bys?) to catch up, holding her hand out for Bys, to reinvigorate her as usual.

With her other hand, she starts casting Magic Missilepod.

-Not worth yelling at her for it. She sends out a quick magic dart to hit Ame in the back, to track her with, then starts casting shadowhorse.

"Looks like she's got a trail," She tells Rose. "We'll let you know what happens. If any of us are ever seen again."

Then she's off into the main street too, causing a ruckus with her frightening apparition.

"We're going after the necromancer!" Bys shouts as they pass the gate guards, who are shouting and demanding an explanation. "We've got a trail!"

"I need a stealth spell so I can scout ahead without accidentally starting the fight early," Ame mutters to herself once she finishes casting.

There's not enough ghur. She's collected a little just by existing but not enough to maintain Pelt of Caeris for any length of time. She can channel while she runs, though. Pull in as much ambient ghur as she can. But it's going to be scarce.

Ame looks to her party. "Let's do this."

And she leads them into the forest.

Elizabeth shadowhorses up ahead of Ame and tosses out a knuckle-sized piece of amber, positively brimming with ghur. "Minor power stone! Expensive, so use it well!"

...She has to dismiss the horse and follow on foot into the woods, once the trees get thick enough.

Dhar is outright ambient here. It feels oily on her skin. Ugh.

A thin perimeter of animate undead wolves, stags, and crows brimming with foul energy is patrolling for any intruders.

...yeah zombie wolves and whatnot, she's very glad she doesn't have to ration her ghur after all.

Thanks, Liz. Big time.

Five beats slip through her mind and the amber wind wraps around her body as she draws her gladius.

"Punch through or clear them out?" Ame asks.

"Sneaking is a no-go. Assume they'll alert their master. Punch through, so they don't have time to gather. Speed is life."

"And Liz without her spooky horse."

Ame gives Elizabeth a look.

"How do you feel about piggyback rides?"

"That sounds like a bad idea." She starts tugging up the loose sleeves and bottom of her robe, tucking in to prevent floppiness. "I'll hold hands and run with you, I can take a little sweating if I must. Plus, when the fight starts I can even chain Hearts Afire on all of us."

The undead sentries are perhaps less observant than a living equivalent would be, but there are enough of them, especially of the crows, that there's ultimately little chance of passing through unnoticed. It stinks here, dhar having an almost physical presence even beyond the pervading sense of wrongness spreading through the whole forest.

Of course, there's even less chance of passing unnoticed when one of the crows caws loudly and Abyssia shoots its head clean off from forty paces almost reflexively.

They run towards the thickest concentration of foul energy visible on the horizon, snarling beasts' roars echoing in the forest all around them. Abyssia shoots another, Elizabeth generates a fogbank that seems to slow them down on their right, and they run.

More beasts. Wolves snarling behind them and slowly gaining, and a stag breaks through brush on the left to charge with unnatural force, antlers forward to spear. Elizabeth, almost being dragged along behind the two faster runners, casts Hearts Afire, and it makes everything they're doing just slightly better, filling their muscles with energy, their minds with certainty as they move and shoot and loose a magic missilepod at the stag and twist to stab-

The closest beasts are dead as Elizabeth blooms out a great fireball, setting part of the forest alight and illuminating the area.

"Keep going!"

When they charge into the clearing up ahead, they find a series of small fields, overrun by weeds and saplings, clearly recently abandoned. Ahead of them is a group of wooden cottages, the kind of small, sad village they've previously passed through. Except for one thing...

Dhar covers the clearing, tied in the thick, interlocking ropes that combine into larger strands of a seven-pointed star where a red glow lights up the burnt ground, linked in circles and cross-bars. Clearly unstable and ready to explode, yet somehow held in place by the same tension that is trying to tear it all apart. Inside that circle, elaborate designs channeling the flow of energies - stranger energies even than dhar, which seem to be welling up from charred spots at six of the seven points, swirling into the center, where-

-a black-robed figure pacing along the edge of the circle is shouting, "Find her! FIND HER! Quickly-"

-a naked woman straddles a river of power, positioned between a writhing mass of black tentacles emerging from a glowing portal and a bubbling mass of crusted bloody viscera, as though a human body had been ground into a slurry and then compacted into a floating sphere. The woman is petite and round-faced and frightened, barely on her feet as the black tentacles swarm over her, writhing and clinging, plunging visibly into both her lower holes-

-but her hips move with purpose and deftness in time with the penetration, her hands stroking two others with equal skill, her mouth latched onto yet another, sucking like she doesn't want to let it go-

-her body is flushed and dripping sweat, her movements jerky and desperate, like its her clinging to the edge of - the tentacles she isn't occupying are ignoring her, instead slithering past her, reaching around her toward the hovering ball of bio-slurry, throbbing with a luminous inner light. She's holding them back-

She suddenly spits out the tentacle in her mouth and switches it to her hand, holding it firmly as she points it firmly away from both herself and the ball of blood as it throbs with light and a ghostly image with a vague bestial shape flows out of the ejaculating tentacle... before seeming to scream in agonizing death as it is torn apart and blown away by the flows of dhar.

...Elizabeth and Abyssia make choked horrified noises. 

The black-robed figure turns to them, shouting out in a young man's voice. "No, no, no! You'll ruin it, this is a very delicate ritual! Not when I'm this close! Ghouls, get rid of them!"

What at first seemed like ordinary corpses in the fields stand up en masse, growing great claws and fangs as they begin to charge. Abyssia raises her rifle towards the figure-