He's right, of course, but it is among the cruelest possible phrasings, and she realizes abruptly that he is afraid to lose her, and angry about the last time she gallivanted off on a desperate mission, and scared, probably, about the fact that the world is ending and they probably only have one gamble left and she's decided to make it this one. 

"I'm sorry," she says, quietly. "Find me a better shot, and I'll take it."

"Let me go with you."

"No. Most plausible ways for me to die stupidly are not aided at all by having another unarmed prisoner present, and you are not replaceable on the mission-critical getting me off the island afterwards operation."

"Fine."

"If we all die you get one hundred years of being unbearable about it in the Halls."

"You know, just because Lucian saw the Halls is no reason to be sure they really exist. Surely it is within the powers of the Seven to have fooled him."

"If there are no Halls you get to be unbearable for two hundred years. Will you take me to Driftwood and turn me in for the bounty?"

"No. Make Seena do it."

During the war no one really had the spare resources to crack down on Sourcery, but Bishop Alexandar made it a top priority when they reached a peace, and she couldn't even disagree that vehemently. No Sourcery, no Void invasion, and while that wasn't attainable - you can't stop everybody - little Sourcery means little Void invasion, which means maybe time to recover and retool and figure out how to win, which it quickly became clear meant "how to get the gods to grant the world another Divine." She spent two years on a mission to the Ancient Empire, chasing down a rumor of a lizard candidate for divinity who turned out to be dead.

Alexandar, of course, had been trying to ascend himself. She got sparser and sparser updates on how that was going. 

When she came back he'd announced that collars had been developed for blocking Sourcery and that Sourcerers would be deported to Fort Joy, where there was research in progress on a cure. She'd wanted to confront him. Matten had argued that she'd probably been gotten out of the way on purpose, that confronting him was stupid, and that she should either get over her death wish and play to win or get the rest of her people out to Palavar so that she can kill herself in whatever manner she finds most emotionally satisfying.

He won that argument.

She doesn't have a death wish, not really, just a - profound and existential uncertainty about her own judgment which makes it hard to keep taking long shots, over and over, knowing that most of them will fail and make the window of hope even narrower. It would be easier to just go out to a border fortress in an area half-overrun by Voidwoken and kill fifty of them in a day every day until one day the fortress was overrun. But there's no winning that way, just delaying the inevitable. 

The best real play she's thought of is to do what she should have done five years ago and try to take the Divine Order from Alexandar, if necessary by killing him, and then try to become Divine herself.

And for that, the first step is Fort Joy. Quite possibly the last step! But definitely the first one.

Imene isn’t an idiot, but she is also not very experienced in subterfuge. She is sure she will succeed at the part of her plan where she fights her way out. She is optimistic she will succeed at the part of her plan where she figures out what, exactly, Alexandar is up to at Fort Joy, and maybe even the part where she makes the atrocities stop by talking down the people engaged in them.

She is very worried she will fail at the part of her plan where she is undercover long enough to discover the atrocities in the first place.

It is easier than she expected. Fort Joy's now-quite-large population of displaced Sourcerers are mostly neglected to prey on one another, not actively surveilled; there are simply too many of them for this number of wardens. No one seems particularly interested in who she is, or what she wants.

There is not enough food (an atrocity, technically, but not the kind of matter she can accuse Alexandar over; everyone who she complains to about the food will instinctively see that it's a nearly impossible problem and that they'd neglect it too.) There are at least a lot of fish in the ocean around Fort Joy. She makes friends because she is good at spear-fishing and does not charge the small children for food. They flock to her and tell her rumors. That the cure is dark magic; that the cure is just an execution; that the cure doesn't exist at all and is just meant to keep them cooperative.

There were rumors on the mainland, too; she can’t take rumors to the Bishop’s seat, and in any event one of the questions she most needs to answer is whether he already knows.

Eventually the children show her to the cave where the elves hide, the prisoners of Fort Joy having segregated themselves by race and set up their own internal governments in the way that people predictably will. She proposes that the children share the fish with the elven children. She does not go in herself. The elves will be grateful to her if she gives them fish, and - subterfuge is always nearly intolerable but this in particular would be.

She spends a long time praying for the strength to go in and does not find it, which has never happened to her before.

She asks one of the children to ask around about whether the elven children need anything else, and they report back that the caves are full of vicious amphibians, and that is sufficient to find her the strength, apparently. She goes in and asks permission to hunt them. She can use amphibian parts to make arrowheads. 

"You will likely die," observes the lone elf perched on a rock by the mouth of the cave, "But if that is how you wish to go I won't stop you."

Imene is shabbily dressed and barely armored. It’s subterfuge. That’s how you do subterfuge, she’s pretty sure; less about lying to people and more about not looking like someone they’d think twice about in the first place. She probably won’t die. But it would be very stupid not to take a warning seriously just because it’s probably intended for the weak spear-fisherwoman she appears to be. “What makes them so dangerous?”

"The fire. And the lightning. And they are large enough to swallow you whole, if they cared to, but I think they are not hungry again yet after their last meal. Even when they are hungry, it's the fire and the lightning that get most people who go after them. Perhaps you'll fare better, if you're expecting it."

She will almost certainly be fine. Matten's voice (after a few years of working with someone, you hardly need them around to hear the advice they'd give you) is of course still that it's a risk for no benefit, because Fort Joy's secrets are not hidden in the caverns where frogs prey on frightened elven children.

Saving the world is very bad for people. Saving innocent people is very good for them. And ultimately she cannot imagine winning this without being someone that she herself would want to trust, and someone who does nothing but execute on their latest long shot makes few decisions that build trust, few that can be observed and judged on their own terms.

She looks down into the caverns. They're spacious; even unlit, you can tell how far they stretch on from the scent of the air and the distant sound of water. "I don't plan to get very close," she says seriously, "and I'm good with a bow. But thank you for the warning."

If she succeeds the cavern is safer and they can actually use all the space. If she fails, that's a good meal or two for the whole group. "Go ahead then. What are you called, so we'll know if someone comes looking for you?"

Oh no subterfuge. “People around here call me Spear. Because I fish with one. And because I haven’t given them another name.”

"Very well, Spear. You may call me 'Stick' if you survive the frogs. If you don't... try to crawl back this way."

She considers her for a moment and then reaches into her bag and pulls out a resurrection scroll. “I have been told I have a stubborn soul. It sticks around. If I crawl back but not quite far enough, and you manage to get me once the frogs have gone off to whatever frogs do, I’ll pay you more than the scroll’d fetch in here.”

"What reason would I have to do that, instead of keeping the scroll and whatever else you have in that bag?"

"The money's not in the bag." She shows it; a couple of healing potions, a couple of invisibility spells. "I suppose I ought to also pay you more than those are worth too, though if I'm having a bad time with your frogs I'll probably use them."

"Most of the Magisters don't take bribes, so money's only useful until Griff realizes he'll probably never be free to spend it."

"Something that painful to realize? Sounds like we have all the time in the world."

"I'll consider the option if it comes up but we'd probably rather have the scroll, for an emergency." And the meat but most humans find that disgusting and taboo, so she doesn't mention it.

How honest of her. Imene smiles slightly and then feels guilty for acting friendly; around elves it is always hard to shake the sense that anything other than wearing the truth on a brightly painted sign around her neck is betraying them all over again. Doing that would not be a reasonable risk the way that fighting the frogs arguably is.

"Keep it all the same, while I'm out hunting; it's not as if I'd rather it end up in a frog's stomach." 

And she'll head off, to try to find a good spot, and to splash some glowing pigments around until she's learned the shape of the space and assured herself she can shoot in it. 

Alaherren gives a quick whispered explanation to Amyro, who takes up her position at the cave entrance, then guides 'Spear' through the camp and past the barricade to the frog-infested back half of the cavern. She perches on the barricade when Spear is past and settles in to watch, or at least listen.

She's good at killing things. She used to enjoy it, and at the time she considered this unvirtuous, an evil or at least a great temptation towards evil. Lucian didn't like killing things; he did what was necessary and grieved the necessity. 

She does not enjoy it any more, and she's pretty sure that this is not in fact because she has grown in wisdom, but because she's diminished in something else.

She is still very good at it. She lets her eyes adjust to the cave, and finds a space where she can't be ambushed, and selects her arrows and waits, intending to kill the giant frogs at range before they get anywhere near her. In fact they move very fast, and she kills them only at moderate range before they get all that close to her, but she still does kill them, and is only very lightly singed for her trouble. She spends the next while carving them up for parts. It's sort of relaxing.

Alaherren waits until the croaking dies down and then creeps forward. She watches as Spear carves up the frogs, then approaches and holds out the scroll.

"I suppose you'll want this back, then."

Well, it's not actually useful to her without allies, so she should probably start making them.

“Unless you want to follow me around and see if I need it eventually. I guess I’ll have to pay you more, if I’m asking for that.”

"Depends. I'm guessing you didn't trade for the money or scroll with a bunch of fish."

"I smuggled some things in. What are you on the lookout for?"

Dallis' keys and a berth on an outbound ship. "Nothing in particular. The magisters didn't search you when you were arrested?"

She haaaates subterfuge. “I - wanted to see what was happening at Fort Joy. I found a sympathetic magister.” Who knew he was leaving supplies on her orders but not that they were actually for her, at Matten's insistence.

"You should have stayed away."

"What makes you say that?"

"There's a cure, supposedly, for being a sourcerer. The magisters take people out of the camps here, and cure them, and send them back to the mainland. But nobody ever stops in here before leaving to say goodbye to their friends on the island and - Before you came here, had you ever once seen a cured sourcerer? Ever once seen a ship full of ex-prisoners unloaded on a dock? So the cure is a lie. But then why are we here? If their only purpose was to prevent the use of source, they'd just execute sourcerers. No collars, no prison camp out in the middle of the ocean, all the magisters standing guard here and on the transport ships could spend their time tracking people down instead. If this were an act of mercy, the guards would be less cruel, there'd be more food or shelter... not that there is any reason to expect more mercy than you show to petty thieves and killers. So. They are doing something to people and using the story of a cure to cover it up, and whatever it is they are doing is - worse than death by starvation or sun-sickness or seaprickle venom or Griff's enforcers. And they brought us all here for it, to the island of the Source King. As to what specific unholy contraption of Braccus' they plan to subject us - your guess is as good as mine."

"That was approximately my inference as well. And why I came here, because - with proof, with witnesses and details, with something more than 'come on, they're definitely up to something evil' we can get it shut down. Not - soon enough." Not in time to save any of these people, probably. "They are doing it in secret in part because it is almost certainly a great evil that will be wildly unpopular when it is public. People will be outraged to learn that these crimes were being committed in the name of the Divine. The Bishop will be outraged, unless he's in on it, and if he is then all of the ambitious people who'd like to be Bishop will be outraged." It'll be hers without even all that much bloodshed, if she can prove that Alexandar dug up some unfathomable ancient evil to which he's feeding peoples' children having told them he'd cure them. She really cannot say that.

She decides not to point out that the Bishop was here not a month past overseeing the executions of every Magister caught taking pity on the prisoners, in favor of a line of questioning that might actually be productive. "There's a flaw in your plan. You are now here, on the inside of the world's largest gaol, and the Bishop and any potential rivals are outside. And across the sea."

A reasonable inference and yet a false one! She cannot say that. 

"I will need to escape once I have proof," she agrees instead. "I think it should be doable. I have allies in Arx who will send a boat once I contact them."

This is either the opportunity she was hoping it might be or a trick to find the prisoners most likely to plot an escape so that they can be dragged off to their dreadful fate next. "Hm." she says noncommittally, and hands the scroll back.

"...give me your hand?"

It's not that she minds elves. It's just that the last time -

She offers it. It's only shaking a little.

She brings the palm to her mouth and holds it there for a moment, to give Spear a chance to pull away. When she doesn't take it, Alaherren bites down on the muscle at the base of the thumb. Not enough to be seriously impairing, not more of an injury than she could heal with a moment's effort, but the taste of blood fills her mouth and -

Guilt. Overwhelming guilt, and grief, and determination. There is little to do belowdecks on the prisoner ship but to plan for the future or reflect on the past, and she has already been over her plans dozens of times. Not that she hasn't dwelt on the past as much or more, but it is easier to fall into idly. Through force of will she turns her mind to the future again - She will look for allies or witnesses from among the other sourcerers. Hopefully someone who can help her sneak out of the prisoner area to the other areas of the fort where she might find more evidence. Then to rendezvous with the others and sail back to Arx where Alexandar - She hopes Alexandar will listen.

"Alright. What are you paying, to follow you around while you break into the fort proper, pick you up when you die, patch you up when you don't quite -" she heals the bite, by way of demonstration, "- and...make it rain when you're thirsty, I suppose?"

“I have gold, for all it’s worth in here, and a knack for fishing, which is worth a fair bit more. And I’ve got a boat out, though I think only an optimist would put any stock in it and there aren’t many of those here.”

"It's better than no boat out, if only by a little." There are boats in, to deliver new prisoners and supplies, and the magisters not being inclined to sink all of their own ships in the harbor every boat in is a boat out. "Are your allies likely to be any help in getting these damn collars off?" Alaherren thinks she might be able to break the lock by freezing water in it but isn't confident enough in her ability to do this safely to start with her own, and for some reason when she explains it like that she hasn't gotten anyone to volunteer to let her try it on theirs.

“I expect so. ….I think one should not, actually, use Source. Certainly not in inhabited areas. They say the Bishop wears a collar and it strikes me as the one reasonable thing he’s done.”

"Regardless of whether one is using Source - and I've not particularly felt the need to before being imprisoned here - it seems like it would be hard to live a life outside of Fort Joy while bearing a very obvious mark of an escaped Sourceror"

“You’d need to be very sure of how you were playing it, at least." She hasn't decided if she's going to take hers off. "I’m sure they can get it off. I think it can be done with ordinary tools. Really, if it were more difficult, there’d be no need for Fort Joy…though perhaps there isn’t.”

"I suppose the question I was asking was more 'will they' than 'can they,' though I infer that you believe they would. You have my help then. What kind of proof are you looking for and do you expect to find it in this cave?"

“I want to determine what they’re doing with the people they claim to cure. I expect they keep detailed records. I want to rescue a couple of people with horrifying sympathetic stories, presuming there are some such, but it seems likely that there are. If there are prisoners whose presence here would create a diplomatic incident I want to find them in particular.

I don’t really expect any of that is in the cave. I just came here to kill the frogs off.”

"They weren't actively causing trouble but I am sure the others will appreciate the space. What do you have against oversized fire-spitting frogs?"

"I don't want to answer that but my reasons for not wanting to answer that aren't particularly fair to you so I will answer if you press me."

She shakes her head. "It's not very important for me to know. Do you have any leads?"

“Fellow says the crocodiles out on the beach teleport, which probably means they swallowed a magic item which would be nice to have. I also found a way to sneak into the dungeons, but I don’t really want to employ that until I have a way to get the people there out.”

"A way to get people out, such as a magic item which allows one to teleport? Perhaps that should be our first task, then?"

"I was planning to get on it as soon as I had some allies who can fight. Crocodiles are not generally very threatening but substantially because crocodiles cannot normally teleport."

"I'm not useless in a fight but I've not been in very many, and none with crocodiles."

The advantage of having more people is that it'll be an easier fight; the disadvantage is that other people will also want the item of teleportation. Probably one ally who isn't asking her too many questions and is on board with her main mission is the best balancing of those considerations. "Maybe we can go out hunting first, for practice working together, and then hit up the crocodiles. There are some beasts out on the coast I haven't bothered hunting only because I couldn't move that much meat, but I imagine your people could."

"I expect there'd be interest."

Then they can go hunting. The things which are edible and not too far from Fort Joy were of course all gone before any of them got here, probably within a few weeks of the first prisoners disembarking here, but there's quite a lot of island on the side of the fort that the prisoners have access to, and anything sufficiently dangerous or enough of a hassle is still alive. There are also voidlings, of course, wandering the beach. You can't eat those. She watches Alaherren fight them, trying to get a sense of how useful an ally she's acquired.

Alaherren fights like a mage, which is to say she typically hides behind a rock flinging blasts of frigid air at the voidlings until they are coated in enough ice to immobilize them. When one creeps up to her through a blind spot she disorients it with a jolt of lightning and then, after some struggle, dispatches it with a flint knife in one hand and a crude wand made from an etched seashell tied to a stick in the other. (The stick breaks in the process.)

Imene knows the type, half her friends are mages. (More than half her friends are dead.) She thinks they can probably tackle the crocodiles without inviting the complications of additional assistants, and probably should go ahead with that. Unless Alaherren trusts anyone who they should bring on board. (Her read is that if Alaherren does trust anyone that much, she wouldn't be wrong to; she doesn't seem like an optimistic person.)

Some of the other elves here would be trustworthy with this, but aren't likely to want to do anything to stir up trouble. (Which is to say, Saheila is reluctant to stir up trouble and everyone else listens to her. Alaherren does not clarify this point to Imene.) Alaherren doesn't know any other trustworthy prisoners.

Right. Then she proposes that they go kill the crocodiles. They almost certainly won't die and it's nowhere near the riskiest part of this plan and there's not a cheap way to make it less risky. (She does not explain all of this reasoning to Alaherren; it would come across either condescending or alien and she doesn't know which. Alaherren probably doesn't know enough for it to come across as distinctly Lucian-mentored but that'd be even worse.)

The crocodiles spend most of their time lazing in the sun on the beach, a ways away from the part of the island that the prisoners frequent. They could ordinarily perch in the trees nearby and just shoot them; with the crocodiles capable of teleporting this will probably be notably riskier but still better than any other plans. 

It does seem safer. Do all the crocodiles teleport or just one? If it's an item it should probably just be one... if there are reports of multiple teleporting crocodiles this might be something different and less useful, but if it's only one, they can maybe watch and identify which one and target that one first?

When she came out to scout it out it looked like just one, not that she can now pick out that one among the others. Probably if they sit in the tree all day it'll teleport eventually and reveal itself.

Ordinarily a day spent sitting in a tree scouting with a new ally would be something she enjoyed immensely but under the circumstances she mostly feels dread and misery. She attempts to conceal this; Alaherren would misinterpret it. 

"How long has it been since you got here?"

"Three months."

"Have things changed in that time? More guards, or less food, or - if you have a sense of how often they take people away to cure -"

"There used to be more food, I've heard, but that changed before I arrived. More guards and - stricter, less kind - in the last month. They take people away in groups...every couple weeks, maybe?"

"Are the guards always Magisters?" It's probably not even an important distinction to people outside the Order.

"That's what I've heard them called."

"I'm surprised the Magisters are going along with this. I don't think you could keep whatever evil magic they're doing secret from all of them. You'd expect someone would speak out about it when they get back to the mainland."

"I assume the ones that would be inclined to speak out mostly don't get sent back to the mainland. Or they know they'll be executed for treason if they do, and are afraid enough to keep quiet."

"In a sense I hope that's so because it means we'll have lots of allies once we can credibly protect them. In another sense -" - in another sense the Divine Order has fallen very far, very quickly. Under Lucian it would never have been treason to resign in an enormous huff about how he'd done something evil. People did it moderately frequently. Her inner model of Matten is yelling at her that it's a very specific sort of person who has opinions about that and that by venturing them she is identifying herself as such a person, and for what exactly?

A crocodile teleports with a splash onto a voidling, saving her from the dilemma. It spits the voidling out after determining it is made of naught but rot and darkness. "- that's our crocodile," she says with satisfaction.

'that's our crocodile' was not how Imene expected to end that sentence when she started it but if she's going to press that point she can do it later. "And already covered in water. How convenient."

Imene has a lot of specialized arrows for killing things. She doesn't usually use them while hunting because they do terrible things to the meat but in this specific case they are not hunting this crocodile to eat it and they need it dead before it can teleport away. She'll pull out the fancy frost arrows and help Alaherren freeze it. 

Once the one crocodile is frozen in place the fight is straightforward. They still have to kill a couple of the others, so that it's safe to get close enough to the teleporting one to butcher it, but the other crocodiles indeed do not teleport and are incapable of climbing.

"In another sense...?" she asks as they start carving up the teleporting animal.

"I had hoped that the Bishop would do better than this even in difficult circumstances."

She has a hunch, which if true might explain a few of the things she's been wondering about 'Spear'.

"...Were you very close?"

With Alexandar? Not particularly. With his father-

"It's complicated but I think 'yes' is less misleading than 'no'."

So her hunch was right and they were personally acquainted, and not just in passing. Most humans do not know most other humans, even when they live in the same city, so - this probably means 'Spear' was someone important, or someone with ties to the Divine's family - 

"I suppose that his involvement in all this might come as something of a betrayal then."

" - I guess? But - it's not really about that," even if it does feel like there's something inside her that will never be whole unless she somehow manages to confirm whether Lucian was lying when he sent her - "it's that if I can predict him, I can predict how it'll go to bring proof of what's happening here back to Arx. And if I can't predict him then it'll be harder to make that go well. We lost a lot of ground to the Void during the last civil war, we probably won't survive having another one."

"He's been here. I don't expect your report to move him any differently than seeing it himself did."

"Hmm. When?"

"About a month ago."

It's not exactly surprising, and the way she feels isn't exactly surprised. Honestly from a strategic angle it's probably simpler. It still hurts. There aren't many people she knew from before, and apparently some of them she didn't know as well as she thought. 

She peels back some crocodile viscera and plucks out a set of obviously magical gloves. "Hah."

"Huh. I expected a wand or something... I'm a little surprised it could activate those from inside its stomach."

"Eating magic items does odd things. A friend of mine ended up with flight that way, but when we tried to replicate it the recipient exploded instead."

"How did you - was it the same item, or a different one? Why did your first friend eat it in the first place, did they expect that result? How long did the flight last? Was it aerotheurgy or polymorph -"

Of course. It's been too long since she's hung around mages. "Polymorph. Different item, commissioned from the same creator. The first friend was trying to conceal it when taken prisoner during the war. It lasted several weeks, which is why we were willing to risk a lot to replicate it... after the first failure we lost some momentum, though."

"Naturally." Right, this might not be something Spear is eager to talk about. She rinses off the gloves. "I suspect the beast's gut didn't damage these too badly, since it was still teleporting around. Do you want to try them first or shall I?"

If she's going to run off with it she'll have the opportunity eventually and there's no point delaying that moment. "Go ahead."

Bwip

Bwip

Bwip bwip bwip

"Well, they still work," she says, pulling the gloves off her hands and handing them over.

Imene hasn't felt happy in ....five years...but if she stares sternly she will give Alaherren the impression that she thinks it's bad Alaherren is clearly delighted, and she thinks it's good. Really good. Just not really good in a way that makes her happy herself. 

She attempts to smile anyway. She is not fantastic at it.

That's probably worse than not doing anything at all. "You can hold on to them for now," she says instead. "I can't help but feel I will underappreciate them."

...Yeah she might have gotten a little too excited, there. She'll take the rebuke in stride and get back to business. "These should work, for getting people out of the dungeons. Or we might be able to get into the fort proper without being seen. There are some spots by the south end that don't get patrolled often, that should be in range..." 

"Mmhmmm. People in the dungeons might know something useful but the records will be in the fort proper. Do you know how much turnover there is among the Magisters, would we be recognized if we were disguised?"

"There's some new faces since the bishop's visit, but none newer than a few weeks and -" she tugs at her collar "Even if they're expecting new people we'll stand out."

You could disguise the collars but it'd be a bit of a stretch. "Then I'm inclined to go into the fort first, because once we start rescuing people from the dungeons they'll be on high alert, and poke around and see if we can get the records; then we can rescue people from the dungeons on our way out. What do you think?"

"I think that sounds as good as any plan. Have you got a rope?"

"Yes." When you take extremely unlikely long shot efforts to overthrow the Order and save the world you should at least go into them fully equipped, even if this involved putting a lot of people at risk for smuggling.

"Tonight, then? Unless...maybe the daytime would be better, so we don't need lights to read the records. Hm."

They can steal them (and in fact she's planning to) but they still have to know what to steal. 

"Very early morning, maybe."

"Agreed. Just before dawn."

Sourcery isn't evil, or at least wasn't before it started summoning hungry Void creatures. Sourcerers themselves probably don't tend more evil than most people. There are - or there were - plenty of Sourcerers who just lived quiet lives unless trouble came for them. Farmers, merchants, priests, only pulling out their extraordinary powers in the most terrible of need.

Famous sourcerers, though -

Most of those are evil.

It's not just true the way that it's true that most famous conquerors are evil. Most famous conquerers are evil in the opinion of Imene, who has high standards and a disgust for war and a deep suspicion of glory. But most famous conquerers do not turn the people who mildly annoy them into pigs, and also light them on unextinguishable fire, and also make them immortal so they can be a pig on fire eternally.

Braccus Rex did that. 

This understates his creativity! Thousands of people annoyed him and he only did that once!

He really wasn't even that creative! Admittedly sometimes he instead turned people into immortal slugs which were eternally on fire, and sometimes he turned people into immortal fish which were eternally suffocating, and sometimes he turned people into twisted statuary, but Imene would not characterize creativity as a particular quality of Braccus Rex. He was cruel, and petty, and possessed with the secret of immortality, and all he did with it was conquer his way across the human lands and inflict various atrocities on the lizards despite having no way to hold Ancient Empire territory and alienate everyone he couldn't enslave.

Eventually, they figured out how to cut him off from Source, hauled him away from his Fort Joy stronghold, held a trial, and put him to death. His would be the forgettable story of a thousand petty tyrants, except for the part where Fort Joy remained, the island around it full of miserably cursed victims and trapped towers, tempting people over and over again to go digging for the secret of immortality. 

So not at all like a thousand petty tyrants, then. Also there was that one time -

Also there was that one time a thousand years ago that an absolute idiot of an evil necromancer raised Braccus Rex from the dead in the hopes of learning his terrible secrets directly from his lips. Braccus Rex murdered the man and went on a rampage of reconquest, only to be defeated, again, and killed, again. Which really just goes to show that the first time wasn't a fluke.

If Imene could make all her allies immortal and bend the world beneath her hand and drink in Source like it was water, she wouldn't lose.

Lucian had of course wanted to know Braccus Rex's secrets, like ten thousand men before him, and after he'd unified Rivellon - and before the true stakes of the war with the Black Ring became clear - he'd sent some people to scout out Fort Joy and the surrounding island, to report on what kind of effort it'd take to clear the lands and learn their secrets.

He sent cautious, capable men. Some of them even came back. They confirmed the rumors about pigs that were on fire and capable of pawing at pictograms to convey that, yes, they are people. They said also that rotting skeletons stalked the land, and poisonous gases, and deadly creatures, and traps and terrors. Lucian was an ambitious man. He put it on the to-do list.

Then the war intensified, and then he ended it with deathfog, and then he died. And then Alexandar decided to put the Sourcerers he was rounding up on Fort Joy, where the Order had found a 'cure' for them. So it wasn't really a question of whether they'd dug up some ancient evil on the island of 'as many ancient evils as you can possibly fit onto one island'. It is mostly a question of which ones, and what they're planning to do with them.

"Found - something." She begins to read aloud, hurriedly - "...The monks do listen, but they are so listless and dull. They respond, but they do not engage... the last batch of sourcerers were nearly catatonic... we'll need far more..."

"Take it with us." The records Imene is flipping through are much less likely to be useful, all ship cargos. "From who to who?"

"Orivand to Dallis, and one to Orivand from 'the front' - war with the Ancient Empire, apparently -

- Here's a mention of a breakthrough by 'Kniles' but no mention of what it was, if you see anything else about that person -"

"- war with the Ancient Empire? We're not at war with the Ancient Empire. Or we weren't two weeks ago!" If they're at war with the Ancient Empire everything is probably irretrievable....she sets that thought aside. Not a problem for right this minute.

She glanced through some personnel files a while ago - she goes back to them, looking for a 'Kniles'.

"War with a large 'organized and effective' group of - a rude word for lizards - It could be some smaller faction -" she clarifies.

"...More of the same with regards to sourcerers but nothing new so far. Orivand had a lot of correspondence."

The Ancient Empire claims to rule all lizards but then the Divine Order claims to rule all men. Things are always more complicated up close. She can't think of any large organized groups of lizards that they have any business fighting, regardless. They have no business fighting anyone but the Void invaders, right now. And of course in that fight there is not precisely a front, as the Void creatures appear near wherever Source was used...

Kniles is a Magister, assigned to Fort Joy when it started taking prisoners, paid rather poorly, reports to Orivand. That's a dead end. Orivand himself as the commander of the fort does not have a personnel file here. Braccus Rex does not have a personnel file here, though she does think to check and then in fact check. The post-cure Sourcerers also do not get personnel files, though they're accounted for in rations and on patrol schedules - not in parts of the fort where they'll come into contact with uncured Sourcerers - they are not named, on those patrol schedules, just Monk 52 and Monk 213 and so on - she pockets that. It might be evidence.

They don't find anything else immediately damning in the records here.

"The dungeons, then?"

"Can't think of anywhere I'd rather be."

She can't think of anywhere she'd rather be but only because a couple of years ago she decided that the part of her which was constantly longing to be in the Hall of Echoes with everyone she loves so she can go demand answers from Lucian was not serving her, and excised it; now she only wants to be wherever she might save the world. And right now that's here, in a narrow underground cavern that connects up with the dungeons under Fort Joy. Caving is an unpleasant activity and the teleportation gloves, far from making it more pleasant, just make it an acceptable risk to squeeze oneself into ever more miserable predicaments.

But as promised, the cavern opens up on an empty cell in which a skeleton is grimly chained to the wall, and the cell door is not designed to block teleportation, and so they're in.

Nothing to be learned from a skeleton, so - "You check that the cells on that side, I'll check this one."

The first cell is empty apart from a rat. The second one contains a vibrant blue lizard, collared, in torn and tattered clothes.

"Get out of here," she hisses, "Before you're caught and get us all in trouble!"

"We're escaping. There won't be any trouble."

"Ohhh no, I've heard that one before. Tried it myself, and thank the Gods I made it back. It's worse out there than in here, take my word for it."

She's not particularly inclined to, at least not without elaboration. "Why, what's out there? We'll be killed or worse if we stay."

"Undead cannibals! I hadn't gotten twenty feet out of the tunnel before they caught me and tried to drag me into the swamp. I could hear the screaming of some other victims the whole time, it was horrible."

Lizards are strange, this one is paranoid, and undead don't eat. Still - "...tunnel?"

"The sewer tunnels drain on the other side of the fort but I already told you, it's no good."

"So you did. Are you sure you're not coming?"

"Damn sure, now get out of here before you get caught."

The first person Imene comes across is slumped insensate on the ground. She prods him for a while, gets nowhere, tries a healing potion, gets nowhere with that, and gives up and moves on. Outside the next cell there are two Magisters, arguing not all that quietly about something.

       " - it's your funeral."
"I'm just saying it's better to get it over with."
      "Get what over with, life?"
"Talis said they just wanted them to go as far as the armory. Enad's group was told to find a way into the armory. If you sign up now, you have half a chance of coming back. Wait another month and they're going to be ordering people to storm the cursed tower."
       "Or they'll give up on the whole bloody mission because it's stupid and they're down to a skeleton crew here."
"Keep telling yourself that."

She does not really want to pop out from the shadows and kill them both but it's probably the best way to proceed if the intent is to break some prisoners out. She stands there a while even as their conversation moves on to complaining about the food, hoping Alaherren will turn something up that decides her.

Alaherren sees Spear, sees the magisters, and does her best to gesture "So what are we going to do about them? Retreat or attack?" without making a sound or coming into the light.

They're sitting and chatting like they're on duty; they'll probably eventually be replaced by someone else on duty. There's no plausible scenario where they search the dungeons and rescue the prisoners without encountering any guards. And if their excursion upstairs is noticed, the guards will be on higher alert; there'll be more of them to fight. 

She hates killing people.

She signals to Alaherren that she thinks they should attack.

Does that mean 'attack'? It probably means attack? Ugh. She'll start readying a spell and be ready to stop if Spear meant to indicate retreat.

They need to work out an actual signed combat language in common, but that's a tomorrow problem. Imene has a smuggled magic bow that ignores armor. She lines up a shot, fires. 

She has a somewhat harder time of it, having to ablate away the antimagical protections on the second magister's armor before she can actually hurt him, but she can at least draw his attention and keep him too busy to shout for help while Spear lines up a second shot.

She hates killing people and she's very good at it. It's over almost immediately. 

She checks to make sure no one else is coming, and then kneels to pray.

Guards, may your souls be free. May they go swiftly to the halls, and may those who love you greet you there with as much joy as sorrow. May we meet again, if you will it, or may the troubles of this world never again trouble you, if you will that. If you will look upon me in my journey, please guide me down the path that saves our order and our people; please make me worthy of my mission, or anyways capable of it.

Rhallic, father of Men, take these your children to your keeping; forgive them their errors; grant them healing from the horrors of this life and the space to grow and learn anew; and guide us in our desperate struggle so that we do not all swiftly join them; give us the strength to save this world with which you entrusted us, and forgive us where we are unworthy of your trust. 

Lucian -

- the church has put off the question of whether you're supposed to pray to Lucian now that he's dead, as it looked like the wellspring of more divisions they couldn't afford -

- Lucian, I don't know whether to hope that the crimes done in your name are a horror and an insult to your memory, or whether to hope that you were right, and there are situations where only terrible crimes can save us, and this is one. I suppose at least if it's that I am to hypothesize it's possible to save us. Please, stay my bow, if I draw it in error, and if this is a mistake show me how to turn your Church away from it. 

And give me the strength to carry on. Please. 

She does in fact always carry on so in that sense the prayer is always granted. She searches them, not really expecting to find anything important and indeed not finding anything, and then continues through the dungeon. 

And so it is that she comes face to face with the first of the silent monks.

He's standing against the wall, looking blankly out at the opposite wall. 

At first she leaps reflexively back behind cover, and then realizes he's close enough by he should have seen the fight, or at least heard it, and that he is standing far stiller than people stand. 

"Huh. So that's what it looks like. I wonder why it's here."

"As a sentry, one imagines, except he's a very useless sentry, if he doesn't - respond to alarms." She steps forward, cautiously. "Can you hear me, sir?"

What if she takes his hand.

He follows, as if expecting to in this manner be led somewhere.

"Is the plan to take him with us as evidence, or to see if anyone outside recognizes him or - we cannot possibly escape with all two hundred of them."

"No, we can't. One would be nice though, as an illustration - can you obey spoken commands?"

"You should feel free to ignore me if you wish but I believe it's in your interests to come with us. 

Follow me."

He follows. Slowly.

Well that's not going to make their escape any easier but with the gloves they can teleport him across all the tricky parts. 

"Can you...nod if you understand me? Tap your foot?"

She tries a signed language, which also gets nowhere. 

"All right. I propose you stay where you're expected, for now, and we'll try to pick you up on our way out."

He does not respond to this until she guides him back over to where he started, which he permits. 

"There's probably - more. To the process. We may want to also get a complete one for evidence, but I think they'd be - harder to abduct -"

"One assumes this isn't the intended end result." Even if you're very evil it would hardly be worth all the effort. "I don't know whether it's an intermediate stage or a failed result...I think it wouldn't be worth the risk of abducting someone who'd fight back, but it'd be worth figuring out what they're aiming at. Or how they're doing it." She squeezes the man's hand, drops it, turns back to the stairs.  She feels cold and tired and empty, but that's nothing new. There's another level to the dungeons. The path forward is still clear and that's really the best anything ever gets.

The dungeons are poorly designed, from a security perspective. Most of the voices that used to give snarky commentary in Imene’s head have been quiet a while but Imaginary Matten never shuts up. Imaginary Matten thinks that their fatal flaw was presuming they need only respond to a prisoner breakout, that no one well-armed and well-organized with access to magic would be creeping about and positioned to remove a patrol before they called for help. 

 The cure victims are lined up as sentries, in some places, but are too far gone to raise an alarm; her best guess is that some ringing of a bell or cry for help would summon them out of their turpor. But she would rather not test it. They are unobstructed in reaching the torture chambers to the north, and unobstructed from there in reaching the torture chambers to the south, and unobstructed from there in reaching the storerooms, which are at least well-guarded.

This time she does not dither about murdering people. The torture chambers were rather steadying, on that front.  

She is not very surprised that the cure is horrifying. If it wasn’t, they’d be advertising it. She is surprised that there are just…torture chambers for torment that has nothing to do with the cure. Lucien, blessed be his memory, would conceivably have authorized the ‘cure’, if he thought there was no other way. He wouldn’t have allowed the fort to just fill, like a boat with a leak in it, with petty tormenters who are there just to do horrifying things to people. 

Alaherren is less surprised. If you collar people like animals, tell everyone that they're evil and a threat to the entire world, and lock them away with little to no oversight on the guards…

The storerooms have orders, inventory, instructions.  

Braccus Rex did not, in fact, invent the purging wands that lay buried in his armory in order to shred peoples' souls and make them empty shells that you could puppet.

He didn't need to.

He had dozens of ways of doing that, and making wands for it just meant that other people could do it, and Braccus Rex was not particularly big on delegation, not since Gratiana betrayed him.

Braccus Rex did, sometimes, shred the souls of mortal men. You could twist and warp and torment the shreds of Source left behind when you did this, after all, and make a shrieker, and those were useful. But he didn't use the wands.

Braccus Rex invented the purging wands because they could also be used to weaken sourcerers, and all his serious enemies were sourcerers, and not facing them directly was important enough to merit putting some terrifying power in wands for lesser mortals to wield. 

The fact that any wand that could do real damage to a sourcerer's access to source also shredded the soul of a weak random mortal was barely of interest to him.

It's a bit like someone pulling a fine wine out of your wine cellar and asking if you knew it was also a mediocre hair dye.

She finds herself thinking stupidly, madly, that it would have been nice to find something bad enough to achieve her purposes, but, you know, not actually quite this bad. Her mind is proposing lots of better-calibrated atrocities that would be nearly as politically convenient and not rob anyone of the next world as well as this one.

“Thoughtful of them to put it all in writing," says Alaherren, who continues to not be surprised by the depths of human cruelty. "Is this good enough for your purposes or do you need more?”

Imene is glad to have a practical ally. It would do no good for both of them to be upset.

“This should do. My allies intended to send a boat, when signaled, to the southeast side of the island, near the ruins of Braccus’s tower. We’ll take this, and -” She swallows. The options are really ‘have a civil war they cannot afford while the world is ending’ or ‘confront Alexandar and hope that he agrees a civil war can’t be afforded and is willing to stop the atrocities to avoid one’, which is what she was hoping for, but - which seems wildly naive, now. Or she could countenance it. She supposes there’s that option.

"...And?"

“And then I try to win a civil war,” she says, truthfully, because she’s really not any good at subterfuge. “I had half a hope that Alexandar could be reasoned with, because - it’s such a terrible idea, to be slaughtering each other while the Void invades - but -”

"These notes suggest Alexandar - or Dallis, at least - wants the 'cured' sourcerers for war with the Empire. The world hasn't seen true peace or unity in longer than either of us has been alive… it's not worse, for our collective ability to fight the voidwoken, if the Divine Order are killing each other instead of lizards and elves."

She flinches. “Yes. Better, maybe…if the world needs another Divine it’s hard to imagine them arising in Alexandar’s order.

I thought he’d resign, after the Deathfog. I thought Lucien would resign - but of course the Voidwoken invasion began almost immediately -”

"Men do not usually resign their positions after great victories."

She has to explain.

It is an injustice to Alaherren to ask her to join Imene's quest without having explained, to spring on her at some later date the extent of Imene's involvement in the massacre of her people. Admittedly that involvement was entirely 'tried to prevent it', but. Still. Some people wouldn't want to work with Imene anymore. Imene doesn't really want to work with Imene anymore. She deserves to know the truth; Imene should never benefit from the aid of someone who fully informed would have withheld it.

They are at this very moment in hostile territory with half a dozen men dead on the floor in front of them and at some point, probably soon, those men will be missed.

That's not his true reason; sufficient, maybe, but not primary.

Yes, he also thinks she should not confess her sins to people who might murder her for them. Because it would be selfish. Because they need her to save the world.

Lucien always thought that way. And it's not that she thinks he was mistaken, exactly, but - Lucien lost. Lost doing great evil that made it harder for the world to respond to the next horror, little as he had a choice. Alexandar seems to be exploring the possibility that Lucien lost because he wasn't evil enough.

Imene is not sure that there is reason to believe it actually goes better, doing the wrong thing all the time because you are desperate and have no affordance to do any better.

She closes her eyes. “Lucien designed - a portal to another realm. He sent me with it, to deliver a warning, and help people evacuate. It would not have saved everyone, of course. We thought maybe around half, if they had three days’ warning. More, if they had ten. I was hoping to arrive in time to give twelve…And the remediation project would still have been very difficult, and I know the trees were important, not just the people… it would still have been a terrible deed had it gone precisely according to plan, and Lucien and we who obeyed him were the ones who took the risk that it wouldn’t. But - not a great victory. A terrible terrible failure.”

Alaherren looks at her with a look of rising horror and frustration. 'the trees were important, not just the people' she says, betraying a complete lack of understanding of why the trees were important, as if elves were closer kin to beasts, for them both having legs.

"There weren't three days warning. And if he'd cared about there being survivors there'd have been more than that. It may have been your failure but - " she notices that she's almost shouting now, and cuts herself off.

"To the rest of the Order," she hisses, "the destruction of the black ring was a great victory, because they didn't pay for it."

“I know that there weren’t three days’ warning. I arrived too late. I don’t know what went wrong, it was an odd coincidence I was resurrected at all and by then Lucien was dead. I - you are probably right that most of the Order regarded it as a great victory. That is all the more reason all of the leadership should have resigned over it. - I understand that this must sound farcical, to you.”

"It does. You're too late to warn anyone about the deathfog, so tens of thousands of people die. The deathfog is unleashed too late to stop the black ring, so the voidwoken are unleashed on the world and kill thousands more. Somewhere in all of this the Divine gets himself killed, and now his son's going about enslaving every sourcerer he can find to bulk out his armies so they can go slaughter a bunch of lizards and add to the bloodbath. And you think he ought to resign."

The deathfog successfully stopped the Black Ring. She doesn’t want to say that. 

The war with the Empire is out of character for Alexandar and she suspects Dallis is the real driving force there and Alexandar can be reasoned with. Or at least she suspected so an hour ago; now she can't fathom Alexandar, but people are never really unfathomable and she's sure she'll get there. She doesn’t want to say that either.

 “I think I could explain my reasoning at length but not in brief, and I have not particularly demonstrated to you the kind of insight or judgment about the Order that’d make me seem worth listening to at length.

I’ve been assuming you are not especially interested in the personal character or redeeming qualities of the people who committed this long list of crimes, many of them against you, and in your place I wouldn’t be interested either.

If you are ever very bored I would be honored if you’d let me attempt the long explanation, though. I might, in fact, be wrong; I have spent the year since I came back from the dead with my close associates planning a coup, and that’s famously a situation where people make errors of judgment. And it matters very much to me, what Lucien knew, and what went wrong.”

"Not against me," she says, tiredly. "Against many others, but not against me... I'll hear you out. But not now, and not here."

“All right. Southeast, then. My allies will still take you if you decide you’d rather stab me. …well, probably not if you tell them you did that. But if you arrived with the papers, that’d do.”

Sorry.

She tilts her head. "Are you looking to die? Do you imagine that'd fix anything?"

“What? No! I don’t think they can pull off the coup without me, and the world’s not looking likely to fix itself! I just wouldn’t want to have a travelling companion who felt like I’d murdered their family and they’d be stranded on Fort Joy if they did anything about it.”

"It doesn't sound to me like you killed them."

“I don’t think so but I suspect that if my family had been killed some distinctions that seem very material to me would seem less so. Shall we keep to the coast, then? I’m nervous about those rumors there are undead stalking the forest.”