Seventeen || Yordaf's Temple

The church was a small building, probably only a bit taller than anything else in Carona, but it had been built on the long archway that tied the town square to the path leading to the harbor, affording it significantly greater height and authority. Sitting on the eastern side of the town, Rue had seen its shadow looming over the square in the early mornings, but had not bothered to pay much attention to it until then, when he stepped through its doors.

There was a short hallway, for filtering and greeting, which quickly opened up into the congregation hall. It was bright and inviting; the ceiling was tall, the pews arranged spaciously, the large windows along the walls clear and well-cleaned, allowing sunlight to pour into the building and reflect off the white wall, causing its interior to bloom brilliant in the light of day. Far across from him stood the pulpit, and several feet behind the pulpit an abstracted statue reaching up to the crowning accomplishment of the building, a dazzling stained glass window that refracted a beautiful array of colors across the floor.

He was stunned to see it – to see everything, so bright and inviting – that he almost missed the figure approaching him from the far side of the church.

"Good morning," the man said, and Rue focused his attention forward. An older man – perhaps forty, all dressed in white robes – moved toward him, seeming almost to glide along the floor. His eyes were bright; his smile genuine. "I wasn't expecting any visitors today. Certainly not newcomers."

"Klaus directed me here," Rue said.

"Hmm. One of his associates, then? Have you come to pray for safety and success?" The man bowed slightly and held out his arm, indicating the pulpit. "Our doors are always open to those seeking communion with God."

Rue hesitated.

"S-sorry," he said quickly. "I actually– I was looking for Pastor Doyle."

The man straightened up. "How rude of me," he said, and held out his hand. "I am Pastor Doyle." Rue reached out to accept his hand and shake. "What has brought to search for me, mister...?"

"Artema. Rue Artema."

They broke off the handshake, and Doyle tilted his head slightly, regarding Rue with a placid expression. "That's an unusual name," he said. "Where does it come from?"

"I'm... not really sure."

"Ah well." Doyle smiled. "What business do you have with me, Mister Artema?"

"Rue is fine," Rue said. "I, um... I had a few questions about... a sorcerer."

Doyle smile slipped slightly. "A sorcerer?" he asked. "I'm not sure how I can assist. Our town is not exactly replete with magic users."

"No, I mean..." He exhaled and forced himself to get to the point. "Are you familiar with the name Yordaf?"

Now Doyle looked at him with a renewed intensity. "Yes," he said. "Father Yordaf... a name with a great deal of ill omen. What of him?"

"I don't know," Rue admitted. "I was going to have a look at the old cathedral–"

"Across the lake?" Doyle asked quickly.

"Ah– y-yes," Rue said, a little shaken by how sharply Doyle had interrupted him. "Some of his work might still be there, but Klaus couldn't give me any specifics. He said you probably knew more about it than he did."

"Mm." Doyle closed his eyes. "A dreadful tale." He looked up. "You are set on exploring the cathedral?"

"I don't have a choice."

"There is always a choice," Doyle said. "That is how Man knows he is best beloved by God. He instilled in us a power to pursue good and evil alike, and all things in between, that we could choose our own destinies, either in His glory or... not."

Rue said nothing.

"And you've clearly made your choice," Doyle said, nodding. "Very well. Let me tell you of Father Yordaf."

. .

Rue was still running through the story as he made his way through the forest.

Father Augustus Yordaf, as Doyle had told him, was a devout man of God, the head priest of the church of Old Carona. He was a good man, well loved, and for more than his spiritual guidance; he had studied as a clerical physician before moving fully into the ecclesiastical role of his order, and was well versed in magical and practical healing.

During his time as the head of the clergy, a woman came to him in dire need of healing. Yordaf was highly accomplished at his works, and did everything he could for her, but it was to no avail. The woman died, and Yordaf was crushed. He performed his duties as well as could be expected, but his grief lasted for a long time. There was discussion of relieving him of his responsibilities – not because he was failing to uphold them, but to give him a little more space to deal with his own emotions – but before the matter could be fully discussed he started to recover. He went about his duties with the same vigor as he had before, and soon reclaimed his position as spiritual leader of the town.

But as he made his abrupt recovery, strange things began happening. Monster corpses turned up on the edge of the woods, or by the lakeside; at first that was all there was to it, but as time passed the corpses were found progressively more mutilated, from being skinned and flayed to being burned with ritual runes to being left as nothing but a pile of carved bones. Rumors started to spread of strange noises originating from the church, wailing and howling that went on for several minutes every night in the deepest hours of the morning. Some of the citizens tried to investigate, but they claimed to never find the origin.

And then some of them disappeared.

The kidnappings were a blip at first; it was assumed that those who were taken may have been consumed by monsters, which was not an unusual happening at the time. But then more people started disappearing, most of them women of a certain age profile, and the town became afraid. More people attended Father Yordaf's sermons until they became a daily occurrence, and the cathedral was almost overflowing with the fearful. In public Yordaf's words could calm the masses, and in private he would provide comfort and reassurance to the families of the missing.

Yet more people continued to vanish, and the church continued to scream.

Somebody finally broke in to the church during these night terrors and witnessed the source of the distress. While the cathedral performed its holy functions during the day, at night Father Yordaf had established a small, hidden room, inside which he would perform terrible rituals and experiments. The man who saw this fled and warned the rest of town, and they started to gather, to destroy the cathedral and the horrors buried within it.

Doyle said it was impossible to be certain, as no clear evidence had ever been found, but it was assumed that Yordaf had become possessed by a demon. He lived his life as he always had during daylit hours, but come nightfall succumbed to the demon's influence and performed horrific rites under its orders. When he was found, Yordaf's possession became absolute, and he locked himself away in the cathedral and started to conjure his twisted experiments back to life, anticipating that he would consume the town by force.

This, Doyle insisted, was why Old Carona had burned. The vile influence over the area had started when Grand Magician Elroy began his own peculiar work, and contacted Yordaf – or perhaps the demon within Yordaf – to assist him, and eventually culminated in Yordaf unleashing his twisted army on the town. This was more than could be taken, and so the guardian of the islands – the great dragon that still watches over them to this day – had taken matters into his own hands and passed judgment on the town, consuming it in purifying flame.

"How do you know that?" Rue had asked.

"A story passed through our order," Doyle had replied, "to remind us to maintain our vigilance– for ourselves, and for Carona. I can't say how much is true, but let me warn you. I have visited Old Carona, and I have been to the cathedral, and it stands immaculate to this day. There is something that maintains it still, and it is not there by the will of God."

An unnerving conversation, to be sure, but Rue wasn't entirely sure what it had to do with Elroy or the Prima Doll. Or if it did at all. Klaus had just wanted him to be aware of what he was getting into, after all; maybe that's all it was, a warning of foul air and dark spirits.

Rue crested the edge of the hill and paused there for a few moments, taking an opportunity to catch his breath. Before him spread the lake, placid and glassy; beyond, on the other side of the bowl, Old Carona. He saw through the remains of the town, and to the silhouette of the cathedral still standing tall against the sky. At least it wouldn't be hard to find.

He made his way around the edge of the bowl, his eyes flickering sometimes from the cathedral back down to the altar in the lake. It was awe-inspiring, and deeply frustrating, knowing what lay beneath that seal – being so close to it – and yet being powerless to do anything.

Not much longer, he reminded himself.

He made it to the far shore of the lake, and the ground began to change. The pleasant, soft grass that rimmed most of the lake bowl gave way to something harder, first a layer of gravel then a layer of stone and concrete, pockmarked by grass and shrub that had erupted from beneath the old layer of civilization.

Then, buildings, or the remains of them; blasted apart, blasted open. Hunks of crumbling concrete and the gleaming edges of shattered glass littered the streets. As he worked further into the old town's remains, the detritus grew worse and even messier, and the streets felt even more closed off.

The encroachment of nature became thinner and thinner, the buildings more solid, and there were brief flashes where he could not see the destruction of the town, where the buildings had collapsed away from him, or still somehow held themselves strong, and he would come to a stop in the middle of the street and look around and see what had once been. It was covered in grime and vines, windblown and eroded by rain, but for fleeting bursts he could see how the town must have once stood; the cathedral looming over the residential buildings, the powerful disk of the sun visible on the western horizon.

As he walked, he felt a strange sensation rising up in his chest. Atelier ruins were one thing, but he could almost hear the sounds of the living town, and to see it so desiccated was heartbreaking. He found himself blinking away unbidden tears; sorrow and nostalgia were wreaking havoc on him. By the time he reached the cathedral itself, he was strangely shaky, and had to take pause to catch his breath.

Then he looked up at the cathedral.

He understood fully what Klaus and Doyle had tried to impress upon him; even in the midst of this blasted, hollow city, the cathedral remained, gleaming and imposing. It wasn't perfect – the facade bore visible cracks, the windows were dulled and distorted by age, creeper vines were threatening to make their way up the walls – but it was in far better condition than any building in the town should have been, and looking upon it was... disconcerting.

But he had seen protected buildings before. Even ignoring Doyle's story, Yordaf had been a sorcerer in league with the Grand Magician; protecting his building was not out of the question.

He stepped inside.

The instance he passed into the foyer he was struck by how dark it was inside. Where the church of Carona had been built to allow as much natural light in as possible, the cathedral had been designed to capitalize on a powerful sense of height. Looking up, the ceiling seemed to stretch far taller than it had from seeing it outside; the whole room felt much taller than it could possibly be. The windows were tall but narrow, barred across, and composed mostly of colored rather than clear glass. At one point it must have been awe inspiring, to see the patterns of light spreading out over the congregation hall, but even though everything inside was neat and tidy time had not been kind to the glassware; the glass was warped and infused heavily with dust and ash, casting twisted and muted fragments of color across the floor.

Far overhead, he could make out a chandelier dangling over the ceiling, and moving down he saw that its light must have been augmented by a great many lesser torches and lanterns. He peered around the room and saw a small switch set into the wall behind him, a magic trip-switch that, five hundred years ago, would have set the whole room to light.

He flipped it without much hope, but to his surprise he felt something twist on the other side, and suddenly the chandelier – most of it, at least – bloomed to life, followed swiftly by the lanterns and the torch brackets. The wave of awakened magic was so sudden and intense he couldn't help but shiver.

But now he could see.

He made his way down the center of the aisles, slowly, looking down both wings of the hall as he went, searching for anything unusual. As he approached the pulpit, however, he was struck mostly by how normal everything seemed to be. For how old the building was – for how damaged the town was – the interior of the cathedral, with its neatly aligned pews and undamaged pulpit and almost flawless lighting, was making him nervous.

But the only thing that met him on his way up to the pulpit was the faint whisper of the activated flames and his own muted footsteps. When he reached the far end of the cathedral and found that nothing had happened, he stopped concentrating on what was around him and instead looked at what was in front.

Behind the pulpit, carved into the wall, was a rather large relief, nearly twice as tall as he was. The relief depicted a woman, naked, facing forward, arms spread and palms up. Her face was serene; her hair flared out around her head like the rays of a sun.

He stared for a few seconds, utterly perplexed, and then pulled himself up to the pulpit, to the same level the relief started on, and approached it.

Rue had seen plenty of churches – of different houses of worship – over the past few years, but he had never seen any that had artwork quite like this. It wasn't a religious figure, or at least not one that he was aware of, and while the posing at least played at religious imagery there was something about it that didn't seem right. A local saint or martyr? Maybe, but...

Something else wasn't sitting right with him, either. He turned and looked down the length of the cathedral, and while the building felt tall and imposing, it also felt somehow truncated. He had crossed one end to the other too quickly; there should have been more building.

A small, hidden room, Doyle had said. Rue turned back to the relief and knocked. He shifted over slightly and knocked again. Then once more, far off on the right side of the relief, and the sound returned hollow.

He started to search in earnest now, pressing his hands against the relief and feeling for any indication of seams. After a few minutes he found them; the door was organically designed, not just a rectangle, its edges blurring into the details of the relief. When he had that narrowed down, he tried pushing, he tried pulling, he tried wedging the blade of the gladius between seams and somehow forcing it open that way. No good.

A switch, then?

His first instinct was to check the pulpit, and sure enough, there it was; the bottom level of the pulpit was hollow, and sitting in the middle of that was small switch. He pressed it.

There was a dull whine from somewhere down below. The floor shook, and Rue had to grab on to the pulpit to keep his balance. Mechanisms that had laid dormant for centuries were suddenly groaning and screaming, trying to force themselves back to life, their cry filling the cathedral with a distant, eerie roar.

Something heavy clunked away; something beneath him snapped. Then, from behind, the piece of the relief buckled oddly, tilting to one side as part of the mechanism soldiered on and the other part simply failed. It shivered a few times as the machinery tried to compensate, then gave up. The cathedral fell silent once again.

Not exactly perfect, but enough of the door had been displaced that there was a small crack near the bottom, not substantial enough for him to fit cleanly through but enough that he could wedge his arms into it and try to shove the rest of the door out of the way. Unfortunately, either the door was much heavier than he had expected or the machinery had failed in such a way that it wouldn't allow it to be opened any further.

He pushed away from the door and gauged the size of the hole. He knew what to do.

He conjured the image in his mind: offshoot of the porcupine family, small mammal with short legs and a surprising amount of heft for its size, covered in spines. He didn't know what, if anything, was on the other side of the door, but if something was going to attack him before he could properly react he didn't want to be caught completely off-guard.

Heat gathered in the crystal on his forehead, then released across his body, flaring brilliant blue over his skin. When the light vanished, he shook off and quickly tested his new limbs. All in order, he took a quick look around, got his bearings, and moved, slipping easily through the small hole and out onto the other side.

It was far darker in the isolated room, of course, and Rue allowed himself several seconds to see if anything would pounce or emerge from the shadows. When nothing happened, he tentatively stepped forward a few feet and stood waiting again. Still nothing.

He released his hold on the monster's form and returned to himself, trying to take in as much as he could in the brief flare of magic in the process, although there was relatively little to see. He was in a small room, and there was a suggestion of a few old pieces of furniture. There was also a suggestion of a lamp; he reached up overhead and groped in the darkness until his hand came upon a small knob, and he twisted it, hoping the magic woven into the lantern was just as strong as it was outside.

It wasn't as strong, but after a few seconds of waiting the lingering spell managed to activate again, bathing the room in a dull reddish glow. He let his eyes adjust and took a few steps forward, up to the desk in front of him. There was something on top of it – a few somethings on top of it – difficult to determine in the poor lighting even when he was practically standing on top of it. He picked up one of the objects, planning on examining it closer to the source of light, but stopped almost immediately.

Whatever he was holding was brimming with magic. He couldn't make sense of it, of course, but it reminded him of what he had felt inside the cube, without the layers of obfuscation over it. He turned and brought it back to the light to get a better look at it, and confirmed his suspicions; it was a gauntlet, far too small for adult hands but perfectly fitted for a child.

He went back to retrieve the other items, all of them bristling with spell-work; a second gauntlet, and a pair of small sollerets. This had to be what he was looking for.

He shoved the collection out through the hole in the door, then briefly transformed into the porcupine so he could follow. When he was back out in the open and back in his own body, he collected the small arrangement of accessories and laid them out on top of the pulpit. If he rummaged around he could probably find some kind of little box to put them in for easier transport, although if not it wouldn't be hard to bring them back, just unwieldy.

Before he really had a chance to look around, his thoughts were interrupted by clapping.

Rue looked up.

There was a man standing at the pews; it took Rue only a few seconds to recognize him as the male partner of the woman that had attacked them in Elroy's atelier.

"Hey, neat trick!" he called.

Rue leaned forward on the pulpit and regarded the man warily. "Where did you come from?" he asked.

"You aren't real subtle," the man said. "I just followed you here. Figured you knew what you were looking for better than I did." He sat down and leaned back, kicking his feet up on the pew in front of him. "And I guess you did, didn't you? You wanna hand those over?"

Rue stared at him. "Not particularly," he said.

"Figured as much." The man shifted in his seat, now leaning forward on the pew, and Rue continued to study him.

"You're... Duke, right?" he asked.

"Ah, yeah, we weren't properly introduced, were we?" He stood up and half-bowed. "Duke Murdoch. And – I mean, nothing personal – but I'm probably gonna have to kick your ass if you don't want to give me whatever you found."

Rue continued to stare at him.

"Nothing personal," Duke repeated.

"Yeah, no, I got that." Rue looked around quickly, trying to see if there was an easy way around this without needing to fight, and while he could think of a few ways to slip away without a confrontation there was nothing coming to him that would let him carry the gauntlets and sollerets when he left.

But maybe he could talk.

"You did some kind of crazy things back in Elroy's atelier," Rue said. "I've never really seen magic like that."

Duke brightened up immediately. "You noticed?" he asked. "But I guess you didn't recognize it. Shadow Legends. The main character is a ninja who studies up on secret ninjutsu techniques and uses them to–"

"Wait," Rue said quickly. "Sorry, I'm not following."

Duke slid off the pew and started walking up the central aisle. "You like books?" he asked.

Rue was starting to have difficulty following the thread of conversation, but if he could keep Duke talking instead of punching, he was willing to give it a try. "Yeah. Sure. I, uh, haven't really gotten a chance to read in a little while, though."

"That's a shame," Duke said, and he sounded like he meant it. "Me, I love books. Nothing gets me fired up like a good story. I was reading this book last night, Fist of Fire, and oh, it had everything. Action, adventure, romance... I pulled an all-nighter just to finish it." He laughed. "'Course I'm a little tired after that, but it was completely worth it. Watch this!"

Duke faded out of existence, and Rue threw himself backward just in time for Duke to flicker back, his fist wreathed in pale flame as he punched straight downward in the spot Rue had just been standing. His fist made contact with the floor and splintered the wooden boards, sending up a small cloud of wood particulate and carpet fuzz. Rue had already dawn his own weapon and was standing on the defensive, but Duke simply pulled his fist back and shot him a broad grin.

"The Diving Inferno," he said. "The ultimate technique of the Fist of Fire. Pretty cool, huh?"

Rue was silent, absolutely confounded, but slowly gathered himself to respond. "Y-yes," he said carefully. "It– yes it is."

But then he realized; Duke had never intended to hit him, or even show off the attack. He just needed Rue to get out of the way.

Duke had produced a small bag from somewhere in his coat and was slipping the items into it; by the time Rue came back to himself the only thing left was one of the gauntlets, which Duke was in the process of reaching for. Rue forced himself to remain motionless as Duke picked up the last of the armor and slid it into the bag. He tied it off, hefted it over his shoulder, and shot Rue a grin.

"Guess you thought better about the whole not handing it over thing, huh?" Duke asked. When Rue slid his sword back into its sheath, Duke smiled more broadly. "I was kinda hoping to have a good fight with you, gotta admit, but milady wanted me to bring whatever you found back to her quick as I can. Maybe some other time?"

Duke had half-turned away from him when Rue responded by transforming into a saber-fanged tiger and throwing himself at Duke's back.

Duke toppled immediately, and Rue reached down and grabbed the bag with his teeth. He hefted it back up, about as comfortably as he could, and leapt off of Duke's back, springing into the middle aisle. He looked over his shoulder to see Duke dragging himself back to his feet, and then he turned his attention toward the door and ran. He heard Duke right behind him, but he was far faster in this form and if he could clear the building then he was home free.

Impact suddenly sent him careening to the side, the bag ripped from his teeth, and he crashed into the pew, knocking it backward. Rue managed to pulled himself upright to see Duke pulling his fist back, ephemeral flame still clinging to him, a triumphant grin across his features.

Right. Short-range teleportation. Ninjutsu. Whatever.

Duke picked up the bag again, but this time he threw it behind him and turned to face Rue. Rue clambered upright, letting go of his hold on the saber tiger and returning to human form. No point trying to outmaneuver him now; Duke was ready for a proper fight.

Rue drew the sword from its sheath just as Duke suddenly rocketed forward, his fists flying. Rue ducked and shoved to the side, jolting the pew to the side as Duke tried to run over it, and Duke was thrown off balance and crashed just behind Rue. Rue threw himself back to his feet and bolted, leaping over the center aisle and diving for the bag of goods. He managed to grasp the bag and yank it up off the floor as Duke flickered into existence just in front of him. Awkwardly, Rue tried to slash at him with the gladius, but Duke managed to deflect the blade with his arm and nearly knocked the sword from Rue's grasp. Rue unbalanced himself to keep hold of his weapon, and Duke twisted to the side and snatched the bag back.

Duke reeled back until he reached the far aisle, and threw the bag over his shoulder again. He was frozen for a moment, his eyes flickering between Rue and the front doors, and he seemed to have just about come to a decision when suddenly the front doors opened.

"Rue!"

They both turned to see Elena stepping into the cathedral.

"Elena?" Rue asked. "What are you doing here?"

"I– I was coming to tell you," she said breathlessly, running a short distance down the central aisle. "There was a weird guy following you, I've never seen him before, but he– oh!" She relaxed slightly. "I guess you already met him."

Rue looked over to Duke. Duke shot him a quick look, and then suddenly threw himself down the aisle. Elena spun, trying to follow his movements, and Rue swore and threw himself over the pews, trying to close the distance between himself and Duke before Duke could escape, running through his options.

He discounted all of them when Duke slammed head-first into the doors.

Rue jumped the rest of the pews, dove out into the aisle, and ran up to Duke. Duke had collapsed just in front of the doors, groaning slightly, he hand against his head and the bag fallen discarded next to him. Behind them, Elena walked up, picking up the bag as she approached. She looked at them both curiously.

"Who is this?" she asked.

"His name's Duke," Rue said. "He was following me so he could steal the treasure from here."

Elena sniffed. "Well that's not very nice."

"Shuddup," Duke growled. Rue took a step back – and drew Elena back with him – as Duke forced himself to his feet. Duke quickly checked himself for damage – forehead, nose, teeth – and wound up just pressing his hand against his forehead. "That was a rotten trick, locking the door behind you."

Elena tilted her head. "I didn't..."

Rue quickly assessed Duke, looked to see where exactly Elena was, and then side-stepped over to the door himself. He grasped the handle and pulled. The door shook, but did not open. Confused, he pushed against the door, but just the same it refused to move.

"What?" he breathed. He tried the other one, but, unsurprisingly, it was just as reluctant to open. He checked the lock mechanism on the door, twisted it both ways until he heard it click, tried again.

The doors refused to open.

Duke sidled up next to him. Rue flinched to the side, but Duke just shook his head. Then he reached for the doors and wrestled with them himself. Still nothing.

"What, are they stuck?" he asked himself.

"They opened really easy when I came in," Elena said. "Maybe there's something on the other side?"

"They open in," Rue said. "If there's something outside, it wouldn't keep us from being able to pull them open from this side."

He took a few steps back and examined the door. There was nothing out of the ordinary that he could see – no chains, no locks, nothing that might have tripped and sealed it behind them.

Then, a noise.

It was a faint hiss, a faint rattling, a dull moan. Rue almost mistook it for the sound of the machine he had activated earlier – further away and trying with even less hope to perform its task – but he realized quickly that it was not muffled, and after he listened for a few more seconds he realized that it was not, in fact, wholly mechanical.

He turned.

There was a creature standing there, center of the aisle, watching them. When it inhaled, its chest shivered and shook; when it exhaled, it did so with a low hiss. It was humanoid, but indistinct; its body was swathed in ragged cloth, its face hidden beneath a grated helmet. Rue stared at it, and though he could see no indication of eyes he had a terrible feeling that it was staring directly back at him.

Elena had turned as well, and was looking on in silence. Finally, Duke looked away from the door and toward the monster. For several seconds, none of them spoke.

Then, slowly, Rue found words.

"It's one of Elroy's dolls," he said. "There were a couple of them in his atelier. What's it... why is it here?"

And how was it there? The ones in Elroy's atelier had been dead – no, lifeless, there was a difference. 'Dead' implied they had been alive before, and though he could not quite explain why Rue felt that the things in Elroy's atelier had never actually been alive. Although he wasn't entirely sure the one standing in front of them was actually alive, either. There was something about it, seeing it animate, that made his skin crawl.

"You think this thing sealed the door?" Duke asked.

"I didn't see it near the door," Elena whispered. "What's it doing?"

At first Rue thought it was a general question, but he realized that one of its shoulders was twitching, something moving in erratic, jerking motions underneath its cloth flesh. Slowly, laboriously, the arm began to move, the shoulder grinding out a high-pitched whine as its mechanisms forced themselves to turn. A shaking hand rose up, fingers splayed, and with a terrible wrenching whine it staggered forward, almost falling over itself as its legs barely responded.

It staggered one step, two, and then almost launched itself at Elena.

Rue stared, paralyzed, willing himself to move but somehow unable to. The monster lurched toward Elena, making a terrible, broken moan, and he had to move, raise the sword, even just tackle the thing, keep it away from her but there was something so wrong about it something missing that he could barely comprehend how it could be there at all–

Fortunately, he wasn't the only one there.

Something flashed white in front of him, and in a heartbeat Duke had the thing tackled and slammed down against the floor, and Rue found that his limbs would respond again. He reached over, took Elena by the arm, and drew her away from the puppet while Duke stood up, grabbed it by the throat, and hurled it hard against the wall. It crumpled on impact, releasing a series of metallic snaps and pops, and then slumped to the ground, unmoving.

Duke turned to face them, and looked at Elena. "Are you okay, little miss?"

Elena nodded. "Y-yeah. Thank you."

His attention immediately turned to Rue. "And you were just gonna let her get attacked?"

"I'm sorry," Rue said. "Something just– I couldn't move, it..."

Duke folded his arms and looked down the cathedral. "There might be more of those," he said. "We need to get out of here."

Rue ran his hand through his hair, tried to calm his breathing. "Y-yeah, agreed. There must be another door in the back, or something..."

He started down the aisle, a bit shaky and now on high alert. The puppet had snuck up on them out of nowhere, and he had a terrible feeling that was not the only one there. Where had it come from, though? Elroy's atelier was too far for it to have originated from there...

He heard a loud crack from behind and spun around to see Duke yanking his hand away from the door and hissing. The door now bore a notable crack, although it was not nearly enough to break it; likewise, Duke's hand now bore a notable latticework of blood.

"What did you do?" Rue shouted.

"I thought maybe if that thing died the door would open. Y'know, like a magic spell." He shook out his hand and gritted his teeth. "They didn't."

"Oh no!" Elena cried, and she dropped the bag of armor pieces and ran up alongside Duke. Her hands now free, she reached into one of the pouches at her side and withdrew a small flask of pale blue liquid. "Let me see your hand, Dukey!"

In response, Duke yanked his hand away and stared at her. "No, no, I don't need– Dukey?"

In his confusion, Elena reached up and yanked his arm free and town to her level. She uncorked the bottle with her teeth and splashed some of it against his hand. She set the bottle down and brought up the edge of her dress, using it to lightly daub at the damage. Duke was trying his hardest to slip away without actually disrupting her, but Elena was surprisingly firm and methodical, and after only about twenty seconds she released him and returned the re-corked bottle to her purse.

"Better?" she asked, and without asking for him to continue added, "You couldn't just leave it like that, with all those splinters. It'd get infected!"

He shook out his hand and stared at it for a moment, his expression contorted in irritation before slowly giving way to surprise. "It... hm. Thanks."

"Elena, where did you get that?" Rue asked.

She looked up. "It's a healing bottle Fancy Mel gave to me, a little while ago. She told me to save it for when I really needed it, so when I saw Dukey following you I thought he might be a bad man and brought it in case you got into a fight." She looked at Duke and smiled. "But you aren't that bad at all, are you?"

"If you keep calling me Dukey I might be," he grumbled.

"That's... that's really handy," Rue said. "Hopefully you won't need to use any more of it during this trip." He picked up the discarded item bag, thought about it, and handed it back to Elena. "Hold on to this," he said. "I don't know where that thing came from, and if there are any more of them Duke and I need to keep our hands free to fight."

"I'll keep my hands free to fight," Duke said. "You can freeze up and be bait."

Rue ignored him.

He took the lead and headed back toward the pulpit, with Elena following right behind him and Duke taking up the rear. They crept up to the front of the church, and Rue turned off, examining the wall along the far end. Nothing to the right of the pulpit, and when they made a train to examine the left wall, there was nothing there, either.

"Maybe a door to the side?" Elena said.

But they checked both wings, and all that met them was solid walls and twisted windows.

"Maybe break through a window?" Duke suggested.

"Ignoring the problem of scraping through broken glass," Rue said, "they're too small." He pointed out one as they walked by. "If the width of the window was all we had to deal with, then sure, but they're divided by these cross bars."

Duke examined the window. "Well," he said, "you could get out, then."

Rue stared at him. "What?"

"C'mon," Duke said. "I saw you turn into monsters. One of 'em was pretty small. If we broke the glass, you could turn into somethin', slip through, and see if there's something keeping the door closed from outside. Or try to open it from outside." He paused and thought. "I mean, maybe it locks inside? We all got in without any trouble."

Rue hesitated. "I'm not sure– I mean, I don't want to leave Elena..."

"It's okay!" Elena said brightly. "Dukey will–"

"Duke," he corrected sternly.

"–be able to keep me safe. Right, Duke?"

Duke gave her a blank look, but made a point of looking at his hand. Already the bleeding had stopped and several of the cuts had healed over. "I owe you for fixin' my hand," he said. "Guess I can watch over you."

Rue bit his lip and looked across the cathedral. There was no indication of monsters pouring out of the walls, or that there were any more than that one lone puppet. Maybe that's all there had been. Maybe it had been sitting somewhere and their presence had disrupted it. Maybe, maybe.

"All right," he said finally. "Stand back."

He removed the sword from his side, sheath and all, and turned it so the hilt was aimed at the window. Then, with all of his physical force behind it, he slammed the hilt against the window and knocked himself backward with the rebound.

All right, probably should have known that wouldn't work.

"I've got it," Duke said. He removed his coat, wrapped it as best he could around his undamaged fist, and drew back. "Fist of Fire," he whispered to himself. "No window is gonna stop my fist! Of! FIRE!"

And he punched clean through the window.

Duke pulled his hand back through, using his coat as a means of sweeping aside most of the glass and trying to get rid of some of the jagged shards that still poked out through the window pane. It was still a rough job, and Duke looked a little shaken for having done it, but he grinned and Elena clapped and Rue couldn't help but smile faintly.

"Very nice," he said.

"Heh. A little bit of glass is nothing for the Fist of Fire." Even as he said it, though, Duke sounded a little breathless and drawn, and he was visibly perspiring.

"You're both really strong!" Elena said.

"Whatever it takes to protect a lady," Duke said, inclining his head. "Now gimme a sec, I need to shake the glass outta this thing."

He wandered a few feet off, unrolled the coat, and proceeded to do just that, trying to free it from the clinging glass shards, and trying to keep his face away from it. Rue watched him for a few seconds, then looked back to Elena.

"What are you doing here, Elena?" he asked. "You know how dangerous it is out here?"

"No," she said. "And I don't think you do, either." She allowed a couple of seconds for the observation to settle in, and Rue had to admit that no, he didn't know, either. He assumed the worst – hence why he was distressed that Elena had followed him – but he couldn't be sure if it was really that dangerous for her, either. Then again, with that puppet having appeared from nowhere...

But they couldn't have known about that before walking inside the building.

"That doesn't answer my first question," he said quickly.

"Well," Elena began. "I– I wanted to help. So I went down and asked Dad where you were going, and I was gonna wait until you left the church and then follow you here and maybe help you find the things for the Prima Doll." She paused. "Dad kinda told me about Prima."

"And you were just going to follow me?"

"I was," she said, "but when you were leaving I saw Dukey– Duke, I saw him shadowing you, and I remembered that fight you had with those hoodlums yesterday and I got kinda nervous so I went back home to get the magic potion just in case, so I was here a little late."

"That's incredibly reckless of you," Rue said. "But... thank you." He braced himself on the edge of the windowsill. "You sit tight. I'll be right back."

"'Kay."

He focused and released, emerging from the wave of magic in the quick, lithe form of a pollywog. He slipped out the broken window without any difficulty, transformed back on the other side, and made his way around to the front doors.

When he rounded the corner, he was expecting to see something – more puppets, perhaps, holding the door shut from the other side, or else some kind of magic sigil that would suggest a spell had left them trapped inside. But when he came around the corner there was a great deal of nothing.

He walked up to the front doors of the building and pressed his palms against them, feeling for magic, but there was nothing unusual there, no spells, no traps. Confused, and thinking perhaps whatever had locked them in was gone, he pushed against the door.

Resistance. Denial. The doors refused to budge.

He paced along in front a few times, searching for some alternative route, something they might have missed. He checked for anything that might be making it harder for one of the doors to open; he checked for switches or levers or trails of magic that one of them might have tripped on the way inside. He found nothing.

Rue was growing concerned.

He pressed against the doors, shoved against them, pounded his fist against them, shouted to the other side– "Elena! Can you hear me?" There was no response, which wasn't altogether unforseen – the doors were thick, the cathedral huge, and he had come through a window in one of the wings, so it wouldn't be that strange for Elena not to hear him – but he was growing nervous. Something in his chest had turned solid and frigid, and his mouth was going dry; the next time he tried to call Elena's name, he almost choked on the word.

Something's wrong.

He tried to force himself to calm down, and after about three seconds of that he turned and ran back around the side of the cathedral. He ran up to the broken window and nearly threw himself through it, transforming mid-jump and sliding out onto the other side. As a pollywog he hit the other side of the window sill at an odd angle and sent himself flopping to the ground, slightly dazed.

His recovery was agonizingly slow, even though it only took a few seconds for him to get his bearings back, and he immediately made use of the pollywog's air-swimming capacity to spiral up into the air and come to a stop several feet high, looking around the room. Elena should have been standing right by the window; she should have been there to check on him the instant he crash landed onto the floor.

And she was not there. She was not near the window. She was not near the door.

He shot to the other side of the cathedral, gained more altitude, swam the perimeter and scanned everything below himself– and above, just to be thorough. She was gone. She was gone, and Duke was–

–splayed unconscious behind the pulpit.

Rue snapped his tail and tore through the air, landing alongside Duke. In a flash of azure, he emerged as himself again and knelt down next to Duke, checking his vitals quickly. Heart-rate elevated, but okay, and his breathing was fine. Rue ran his hand along the back of Duke's head and felt liquid warmth; he brought his hand back and saw it streaked with scarlet.

How long had he been outside? Only a few minutes, surely...

There was a noise, mechanical grinding, and he looked up to see one of Elroy's dolls sitting in a corner of the platform, hidden in shadow. It must have noticed him, too; the puppet's head turned so its helmet was facing him, tilted so the place where its eyes should be was angled to him.

It exhaled, a terrible crackling hiss from the depths of its lungs, and starting to drag itself upright. Rue felt that same cold lance strike through him, chilling his blood and freezing his muscles.

The puppet was gathering itself now, rising up from where it had been slumped over, extending its arms. Its legs were awkward beneath its body, not quite synchronized to how it was supposed to move, but after a few steps it caught on to the rhythm of walking and stumbled closer to him. Rue's heart leapt up into his throat; his whole body broke out in a cold sweat. He couldn't stand to look at this thing, couldn't stand to be so close, he had to get away, there was something wrong with it–

Then he saw the blood.

It was not substantial – there was spatter on its outstretched hand, flecks of blood traveling down its side and across its torso – but the puppets were mechanical monsters. They didn't bleed. That was either from Duke or Elena.

Slowly, Rue forced himself up to his feet, and much less slowly brought the gladius to his hand.

"What did you do?" he whispered.

The puppet responded with a terrible shriek, and it lurched toward him.

And Rue, his every instinct screaming at him to get away from this thing – monster – abomination – stepped forward and brought the sword down on its neck. In a single swipe, the metal pole connecting the head to the body was severed, and the puppet fell lifeless in front of him. He pulled back, breathing heavily, and stared at it for several long seconds, trying to understand.

What were these things? What was wrong with them?

Or what was wrong with him. The ones at Elroy's atelier had been no trouble, he could handle them – seeing them, manipulating them physically – with no difficulty. But these...

Then the soul coalesced.

He saw it rising from the puppet's body, a point of light that cast no light, spiraling upward in twitchy, jerky motions, dipping down suddenly as though it could not sustain its own weightlessness. It was hemorrhaging energy, great drops of light peeling off its body and fizzling out as they fell to the ground. Even the core of light, typically a solid sphere from which the rest of the soul's energy fell, was... wrong. He couldn't entirely get a handle on its shape; it seemed to be strangely amorphous, twitching and writhing and bubbling and collapsing as he stared at it.

"The soul is sick," he said quietly.

He had never seen anything like it before, this deformation of the spirit. He briefly considered subsuming it, to understand what had made it so malformed, but he felt such a powerful sense of revulsion the idea that he had to physically pull himself away.

The puppet's soul drifted, faded, disappeared, and the queasiness in the pit of his stomach slowly started to lift.

Behind him, Duke moaned.

Rue turned and knelt down next to him. "Hey," he said. "You okay?"

"M'fine," Duke said. "Just caught me off guard."

"Here, I'll help you up."

Duke turned his face to look at Rue for a moment, his gaze still unfocused. Then, slowly, Duke held out his hand, and Rue took it, helping him stagger back to his feet. Duke took several seconds to steady himself, and, unbidden, Rue helped him stay upright when he almost tilted over.

When it looked like Duke was just about standing on his own again, Rue asked, "What happened?"

"Dunno," Duke said. "You left, and that girl came over to talk to me and check on my hand, and then all of a sudden something– something big sounded like broke and then a bunch of those dolls came outta nowhere. I tried to fight 'em off but they knocked me out, and–" He stopped talking, the color draining out of his face.

Rue already knew where this was going. "They took her."

"Y-yeah. They must've..."

"Why would they..." No, useless question, move on. "D'you know where they went?"

"I didn't see where they came from..."

Rue shot a glance around the room. He hadn't seen anything when he had been circling, but then again, he'd only had eyes for Elena; he had hardly even noticed Duke, white coat against the dark red carpet.

Then he saw it.

The hidden door in the relief. Where he had managed to jolt just a piece of it open, the puppets must have managed to finish the job; the door stood wide open, the unnerving reddish glow spilling out into a ruddy streak on the floor in front of it. Rue squinted, looking further into the room, and realized that the wall on the far end was gone. They must have come in from there. Wherever 'there' went.

"They're through there," Rue said, pointing to the door.

Duke followed where he was pointing. "Yep," he said. "That'll do it."

"I'm going after them."

"You better be," Duke said.

Rue stepped toward the door and heard shuffling footfalls behind him. He looked over his shoulder to see Duke was following him.

"Duke," he began.

"You aren't stopping me," Duke said.

"Your head is bleeding."

He waved off Rue's words. "I've had worse."

"Look, I can't let you–"

"The hero," Duke said sharply, "never abandons the lady."

Rue looked at him and realized the futility of saying otherwise. "All right," he said. "Just... if you can't go on, don't force yourself, okay? The hero also knows better than to kill himself before the quest is complete."

"Not true," Duke said. "The third installment of The Warrior Heart series, the hero Tiesto–"

"Tiesto was fulfilling a blood oath. Anyway, the real prophesied hero was Ueda, and he certainly didn't die until he'd killed the False King."

Duke stared at him, mouth hanging slightly open.

"I like reading," Rue said. "I just haven't read anything new for a while."

Duke smiled.

"Y'know," he said, "you aren't half bad."

"C'mon," Rue said. "We better hurry. You sure you're up for this?"

Duke nodded. Rue looked down the corridor. He sucked in a deep breath through his teeth, exhaled.

Then turned down the passage and led the way.