SECOND RING • PREMONITION

Upon his awakening, he would always wait for a while until his eyes adjusted to the surrounding darkness.

The premonition that the world was somehow supposed to be brighter would never leave him. On his way, he soaked up every possible source of light – fading bonfires where sleeping labourers huddled up for warmth, sparkling crystals, trembling blue sparks of glow-worms lurking for food, even fluorescent fungi clinging to cave walls. He passed through corridors after corridors, their bristling teeth dripping water – the maws of the monster that was about to devour him. In the end, it always devoured him. It tore the pathways of his thoughts and filled them with its own orders.

This time they brought several dozen husks. Barely a shift earlier, they gave their lives to their masters in a sacred ritual – they were easy to recognize by their characteristic attire, uniformly gray except for dried stains of blood. When he stepped in the fields, others were already taking care of the husks, burying them under handfuls of soil and carefully placing seeds and spores inside. Luminous spheres of light floating just above the ground, arranged in regular patterns, guarded their growth.

He knelt by the husk and suddenly flinched. Something was wrong, but he couldn't state what. The order was clear – he simply had to take a handful of soil and follow the others – and yet something he wasn't fully aware of plagued his mind and paralyzed his body. He lingered over the husk and focused on the flash of that thought.

He finally understood. That wasn't a husk. Its head wasn't opened, its indistinct features twisted with painful solace, motionless gaze of its eyes drowning in darkness. Slightly lower, that body's – that man's – fingers were tightened on the hilt of a long knife. The rest of the knife was stuck in his chest.

He slowly unclasped the man's cold fingers and put his arms along his body. Then, he grabbed the knife himself and carefully got it out, at first aiming to put it aside so it wouldn't get in the way of his work. Yet he hesitated. It was the first and most likely the last time when he held in his hand something that he would only see at a warrior's side; something that decided this man's fate. Something that put him out of his misery.

He grabbed the hem of his vast coat and hastily cleaned the blade of blood. Smooth metal immediately soaked up nearby sparks of light. On its surface, a half-visible picture came into view, as if emerging from the distance, from the depths of darkness. It was a face, similar to those floating by. Yet this one did not float by; it was stubbornly staring at him, wanting him to remember. Indeed, he remembered, even though memories usually brought him no solace. He remembered that there was something more than raising those burial mounds and sowing poisonous plants, that there was a place where faces weren't unfamiliar and indifferent. He remembered that the man staring at him was a servant of Arlathii Twice-Deceased. And that his name was Zerthimon.

He lowered the blade and anxiously looked behind him. The work in the fields was passing slowly as usual, but he might have drawn the guards' attention. He was certain that their impenetrable minds recorded his every move. He wasn't wrong. A pair of dark, shining eyes looking out from behind the tangle of tentacles met his gaze. A moment later, a powerful blow struck him down to the ground.

When he opened his eyes, he noticed with horror that he found himself face to face with this unknown dead warrior. How far from death was he himself? How many more blows was he to receive? He helplessly sank his nails into the ground. He knew that the sentinel didn't move a step, and the labourers didn't notice anything – or didn't wish to notice.

Slowly standing up, he got back to work, mechanically digging out lumps of soil underneath which the warrior's body gradually disappeared. Some part of him could still be saved. Without disrupting the monotonous rhythm of work, Zerthimon unnoticedly reached out for the knife and tucked it behind his ragged sash.

He didn't know how much time could have passed when the work finished. It was his exhaustion that made him know – sickening tiredness usually meant the end of the shift. Or was it the omnipotent sentinels who decided about it as well? With an effort, he stood up and, after the dizziness passed, looked around to find the path between the burial mounds.

He was standing amidst heaps of bodies.

She was standing amidst heaps of bodies.

They won the battle at a high cost – her unit was decimated. It still wasn't certain how great the losses were; the warriors that could still stand on their feet knelt by the wounded to examine if life didn't leak out of them completely. They would then leave them on the ground, close their eyelids and move on in resignation. Sometimes they would reach out for makeshift, hastily prepared dressings. Sometimes for daggers.

She looked at the arrows growing out from the bodies like ghastly flowers watered with blood. Favourite weapon of dryads, centaurs and the eladrin. They should have been trained in it before this expedition, but their masters only relied on blades and their own psychic attacks. After all, it didn't matter whose hands wielded the blade.

It wasn't her first expedition to Arborea. She had commanded several others before, leaving swathes of scorched ground in her wake. A part of her unit crossed this portal for the first time – for this part this expedition usually became the last. She found it difficult to recognize some of the faces. Perhaps she never even saw them until they were twisted by death. She looked at them in silence, listening to their silent lament.

Bodies of their adversaries were barely to be found; they only killed as a last resort. This time their goal was different – to capture as many as they could.

Her master ordered her, however, not to care about the lives of the dryads, who had proved to be utterly useless for their purposes. She wouldn't dare to delve into the nature of said purposes. Any mention of it overcame her with instinctive, almost primal fear. Centaurs would be difficult to capture either way. So that only left the eladrin. At least twenty of them sat tied in a small niche of a forest cave that served them as a camp and, along with her warriors, awaited the return to the underground, although much less impatiently. She wondered if she was going to be rewarded or punished for that; sometimes, it was hard to tell the difference. The masters were rarely satisfied, and their demands were constantly growing.

The tenth day of the expedition was coming to an end. Day – a word characteristic of Arborea, where time was measured by the sky burning with feverish blue and again bleeding into silent blackness. The change was slow, but she would always watch the sky with curiosity. Underground, there was no sky. There was no warm, fresh air filled with soothing rustle, buzzing, chirping and fluttering as if it were alive.

'Gith,' she heard the familiar voice behind her back. 'Let's go back to the camp. We won't save anyone else.'

'By Ilsensine, there are only half of us left,' she said grimly. 'I hope our master will soon announce the end of the expedition.'

She leaned over a warrior resting against a tree. He looked so calm, as if he was peacefully asleep; if it weren't for the arrow that pierced through his leg. With an effort, he lifted his eyelids and threw a glance at his dagger.

Gith took out her own knife. She cut off the arrowhead and locked her trembling fingers around the feathers, smearing them with blood. The warrior's eyes were dazed with pain. Vlaakith's eyes widened with horror.

'What are you doing?'

'I lost almost fifty men. This one can still be saved.'

'Gith, he can't even walk.'

'We will carry him back to the camp. Someone will dress his wounds there.'

'You know what the masters do to the heavily woun–'

Gith tightened her grip and pulled. She carefully put the arrow down on the ground and reached into her travelling bag for any remaining scraps of bandages. Vlaakith gave a heavy sigh, seeing how blood almost immediately soaked through several layers of the dressing. Suddenly, she closed her eyes, pressed her fingers to her temples and lightly nudged the commander's shoulder. With one accord, they both turned their heads in the same direction.

It was Vanthaonar. At least such was the verbal component of his name – its full sound was beyond the range of their perception. They didn't see him in the physical sense, of course, only felt a presence rising in their minds. His dark silhouette loomed against the background of the thicket; as soon as it took distinct shape, Gith knelt down on one knee and lowered her head. It brought some kind of relief not to be forced to look at this inhuman face, these monstrous eyes in whose gaze one could be caught as in a spider's web. Vlaakith followed her, but he didn't pay any attention to her. He would only ever speak to the commander. And yet she knew that he would pay attention if she did nothing.

When he approached them, Gith's fear vanished, giving way to blissful solace. Once again, everything was in the right place, as if the eternal, holy order of things was revealed before her. She was called to serve at powerful Vanthaonar's side, the only one chosen among hundred other blades. She was drowning in his cold, infinite aura, forgetting her name. Through his all-seeing eyes, she watched today's battle. Now she understood how great their victory was, she was grateful to the heroes that gave life to their cause and trembled with fury at the very thought of the cruel eladrin. Having fixed her imperfect, broken memories, Vanthaonar raised his hand over her head and took a draught of psionic energy.

Vlaakith dared to take a glance. She was so close and yet entirely beyond his reach. From the outside, it looked horrifying – the commander was holding her head while tiny flashes of lightning were flickering in the air under their master's fingers. And yet – how much she desired to be in her place, if only to touch a scrap of his robes. When he went away, she grabbed Gith, who was shakily standing up, and passed her a waterskin.

They raised the half-conscious warrior up from the ground and, holding him on their shoulders, slowly headed to the camp.

Even such a modest substitute of the underground gave her a feeling of security. Gith quickly passed by the niche where they kept the captives, as if to completely forget that it existed. She sat by the fire, joining her warriors. Many of them rested, naively believing that the warm Arborean night would heal their wounds. Some could never heal. Not after the devastation wrought by previous expeditions. Especially the long journey through the labyrinths of Pandemonium, where their own shadows filled them with fear greater than hordes of beasts lurking in the…

A jolt. Too strong for a regular telepathic signal. It was a cry for help, she suddenly realized, sinking her fingers into her temples.

'What's going on?,' Vlaakith's voice asked from the outside. But she wasn't capable of getting outside now.

She reached out for the hilt of her sword and with a mad plunge dashed out of the cave. She felt as if a dagger's blade pierced her but she could still run. Currents of impulses led her to the right direction through the bodies on the scorched ground. Interrupted impulses. Fading.

A moment later, she saw with her own eyes why the impulses weakened. The were drowned by a sudden stab of a knife, straight between the ribs. Again and again. Like the ones dealt by a distant shadow leaning over someone that lay on the ground.

'No,' she groaned almost inaudibly, falling to her knees. The signal pulsing in her head died down, as if it were never there. She felt blood filling her mouth. No, it was just a feeling, there was no blood. So she could scream.

The scream echoed, reaching its goal. The eladrin turned toward her, bloodstained knife in his hand. He didn't manage to parry the attack. Gith knocked the dagger from his loosening grip and struck the final blow. She threw herself ahead and fell to the wounded one's side. But he couldn't see her anymore.

She now saw him in a different way. His ferocious eyes suddenly became blank eyeballs of an animal, and what she had always called a face turned out to be four disgusting tentacles. Three. One of them was chopped off.

She felt dizzy, as if Arborean air rushed into her head. As if it were alive.

She pulled her head back and burst into hysterical laughter.

'By Great Ilsensine,' Vlaakith whispered behind her back.