Warning: The cruelty-to-minors chapter. Also contains a short paladin.
—
He slammed the stone door shut behind them and hoped the shadows wouldn't beat against this wall. Here they'd more substantial figure: they left black corpses on the ground when they burned and died. Too bad they were harder to kill. Montaron flicked the dark blood off his sword and watched his torch burn. Something beat against the door, and nothing slid through the cracks on hinge and sill. The drow cast what she said was a ward and leaned back.
"It's wide," Montaron said. "Walk, drow; seal off against more happy surprises."
"We're here," Xzar said, delighted as a noble's brat on Winterfair-morning. "Bring out the head of Lord Corthala, Montaron! I want to make his eyes light up in joy. Literally."
The thing made noises in Xzar's hands, and stunk to the Nine Hells; then the brown eyes erupted with a sickly green light that shone into the corners and depths of the walls. Blasted head looked to be glaring everywhere. Out of vague superstition Montaron avoided its direct eyes.
They found a corridor patrolled by only one creature, a wolf of shorter variety whose throat Montaron managed to slit after a fight. It lay bleeding black with its head cut off for good measure. The drow bent over it.
"What fashion of creature are you, traitor to the Lady of the Night?" she whispered, and dug her fingers into the bleeding wound at the neck. "A howler with zik yinnin, a wailer with sharp teeth. And to which surfacer deity does a place such as this belong?"
There was a door sealed with some emblem that would've answered her question if any of 'em had surface theology worth noting. Montaron picked it open, its rust making the job soft and easy. Ahead were smaller cells like a temple's priestly meditation rooms, or wanker's or slugabed's rooms. Let 'em pick one and have the drow ward the doors, and times were good to snatch a bit of rest. The shadow-creatures were lots of things but they weren't smart; but there had to be someone or something holding charge. Xzar skipped along the passageway with skirts held high, Corthala's head floating dourly above him.
"Slow it, mad wizard," Montaron said.
There were sounds coming from the last door. The three of them stood in front of it; it was fastened with a lock too high for halfling's reach, bolted on the outside.
"Travellers!" a woman's voice said, a glass-cutter accent like some blasted paladin, though it was weak-sounding. "I see your light! Do you hear me in return?"
"Far too loudly," Viconia complained, a smile spreading on her face with easy cruelty. "We are commissioned to rescue pitiful Imnesvale; why have the shadows kept you prisoned?"
"There can be no harm in telling you, for if you are a trick of it you must know already. And for the first time you bring light," the woman said. "The shadows...slew my Patrick, and slew the rest of us; and spoke that I was wanted for a consort, for what that may mean. It took Merella, a ranger..." The woman's voice broke. "Release me and I shall fight evil by your side. I swear I shall not falter again. I am Mazzy Fentan, knight of Arvoreen and a servant of righteousness and justice!"
Hin deity; halfling acting like a bloody paladin.
"I am Viconia DeVir, a drow cleric of Shar," Viconia said. "Oh, and the two males are Zhentarim. I'm told that is quite evil in the surface world."
—
The armour weren't in bad condition, decent metal but a touch too heavy for the way he liked to fight, a lack of platemetal-rattling before his blade ended up in their back. The shortbow and quiver he picked up ready in case of finding a use for them; and then the sword gave a jolt in his hands and shocked him with divine flare. He screamed out and swore.
"The blade of my lady Arvoreen is not fit for the likes of you!" Fentan complained, gloating over his pain and shock; he ought to belt her one for it. They'd tied her hand and foot to rest in a cell. She was a tall red-haired hin, built with muscle wasted from her prisoning and a chest that might've been fuller if she'd been fed up some. She was pale and thin and dirt-faced, glaring at them out of eyes as violent as the wizard's in one of his moods. The Shade Lord'd want his consort alive, and for that she was worth keeping that way until the shadows decided she was surplus to requirements.
"You are plainly as evil as those you claim to fight," Fentan went on, her pipes rising higher. "You have murdered that poor man whose head you keep above you as a vile trophy; you actively serve evil through each breath you take; you pervert the course of life and justice..."
"That poor man was a murderer of wizards of the governing authority of Amn," Viconia said. "Perhaps you should try to be less...what would you surfacers say? Judgmental, perhaps? You begin to bore me, female."
"—I have no reason to believe a word you say, and using him thus is beyond the bounds of all decency!" She glared at Montaron. "You may seem to be hin, but you are none of our clans and nothing like my Patrick! Arvoreen will see you punished for your transgressions of all the hearth we hold dear—"
"Eat up your meat," Montaron said, and all but forced the dried jerky into her mouth. Her cheeks reddened in anger, but she was just bright enough to think she might get a bit of her strength back for whatever escape she'd try later. Then he let her some water. "Will I need to gag ye, or would you like to bring all the shadows down on us?"
Yeah, she gambled on the Shade Lord being worse than two Zhents and a Sharran, no matter what she whistled in your ear about it. More fool her, shutting up and trying to glare with dignity at the necromancer studying his spells with the book bobbing around his head like an apple in the water.
Viconia gathered up scrapings of stone and dirt in her hands, casting some sort of spell; she made them look like a heap of grey sand, small and fine. "I am going to bathe in sand and oil," she announced. "Only the uncivilised apes are unclean. Mage, I suppose by the standards of humans you are acceptable; but when was your last bath, sakphul?"
"Couple months," Montaron said, giving her a longer time than he remembered to shock her. Women fussed about these little things. That was the reason why paid whores were better: enough gold and they didn't nag.
"Dirty," Xzar said, pointing at him and giggling.
"I'm not taking my kit off in the middle of a dungeon," Montaron said indignantly. "Go ahead and give us a peep-show, drow. If it's good, I'll show ye an Amnian band of pearls." Didn't take her long to understand the gesture; Fentan gave a shocked noise.
"You may hang my cloak up for a screen," Viconia said, suddenly angry again—didn't take much to set the wench off, Montaron thought, impressed with himself—"and if you dare look I will cast a permanent spell of withering on your privates!"
"Understood, miss!" Xzar said, and buried himself in his book.
"No chance of a wizard eye?" Montaron asked him.
The drow scrubbed herself with sand and oiled down her skin, her feet bare and hairless, flinging her ghost-white hair up above her cloak.
"Up and says outright we're Zhentarim," Montaron complained to Fentan. "No sense at all, that wench. We don't go around 'splaining to southern folk that we're agents of the Black Network."
"Because you fear reprisal by the good," Fentan said coldly. "Evil cannot stand. Sooner or later good men band together to rid the world of darkness. Arvoreen will be with me even as you slay me."
"Is she your mother, then?" the wizard said, leaning over her. "Arvoreen? She who guides your path and your blade?"
"I serve her as a knight. You Zhentarim are slaves to the Lord of Lies; or is it the Tyrant Lord again this month?" Fentan said. "It's hard to remember when you change cloaks so often."
"Not me. No, not me." The crazed wizard shook his head. "I'm alone. I don't have to bow and scrape and pretend to believe things I don't. I won't belong to anyone— And that's not my point! You rot in a dungeon. Arvoreen left you to rot in a dungeon. Res ipsa."
"The gods are not called to repair each small misfortune," Fentan said, trying to look through the mad wizard like a Zhent noble imagining the peasants weren't spilling stink over his fancy-flown tiles. "You speak like a heretic..."
"I will not worship," Xzar said, half-singing like a knuckleheaded troubadour, hopelessly childish. "The rabbits eat you from the toes up. Your mother hates you, she left you. Why not bite off your own fingers to save you from starvation?"
"Necromancer," Fentan said, not flapping her lips too loudly, "Arvoreen is infinitely nobler than you think. Can you understand what is freely given?"
"Amusing lies, false promises, and torment others get to feel? Don't tell me, rosy knight. That was not your answer?" the boy-mage said.
"Your mistake is to think everyone is like you," Fentan said. "I give faith to Arvoreen; when you listen to others you must know that we choose a better course. I have sworn to deeds of kindness and virtue in her name, and I feel her still within me. Choosing to give freely, on both sides, creates a bond that cannot be broken."
"Are you certain?" Viconia said, swaying wrapped in her cloak above Fentan. "I have broken those of your kind and humans alike..." She raised her holy symbol for a threat. Spell-casting, Montaron saw, translucent strings of black smoke reaching to the wouldbe paladin— He stood to knock the pair of fools out of their—pissing contest, it'd be called were they men. Fentan set her face and stared into the drow's eyes, and then it was Viconia to take a step slowly back.
"I will not yield. You are weak," Fentan said, and then the drow backhanded her in the mouth, hard enough to dislodge a tooth.
"Say that once more and you will be a sacrifice to Shar this night."
"You have no...instabilities of an excuse for evil, drow," Fentan said slowly, spitting blood. "Neither you nor the halfling..."
"And the wizard is a necromancer," Xzar said, and gestured up at Corthala's head. It moved down to stare close into Fentan's eyes. He giggled. "That's it! If you're a powerful necromancer then the rabbits can't hurt you. If you know enough of the planes that cross into and under bringing darkness."
"We move on, if your Ladyship's done with the bath," Montaron snapped. "I'll bring Fentan lest ye damage the merchandise further."
—
Longlimb-sized dark stone corridors made him half lose his sense of direction in their echoing turns. Far worse than that blasted maze below Ulcaster all for a damned book for the do-gooding Bhaalspawn; and the shadow-wolves far worse than those undead wolves. Some of them stayed away when the drow threatened Fentan; some of them he killed, running swift across the ground and driving blade well into neck. In one bite lead drained into his bones again and he swore at the drow for her to cast that prayer again.
"It drains me," she complained, leaning on Fentan as a walking-stick. "Here I suppose I must support you or perish myself—"
"Here we stand making sure ye keep good enough condition for it, for it ain't more pleasant to suffer through," Montaron said. Xzar brushed his hands over a mage's false armour, a dagger in his fingers. "Couldn't ye cast anything aforehand to stop it happening?"
She pulled herself up to full height, short for a pointy-ear and scarce a foot above him. "Fool! Don't pretend you know the least thing of my power. Males are never favoured by the divine in the Underdark, because you're all weaklings and fools... Nau. A moment. Shar, hear my prayer. Is it possible to grant...?"
She promptly dropped to her knees in a shadowed corner. Montaron eyeballed Fentan to make sure she didn't get any bright ideas; the mad wizard wandered off, picking over something on the ground and storing something in his cloak. It was a pale dirty piece of old stick—no. It was bone; Montaron wasn't one to worry too much over a necromancer practicing his profession.
"You have native cunning enough to earn your life another day, sakphul," the drow snapped, rising from her knees. "Come here." She laid hands over him, and chanted something that seemed to settle on his skin; dark and if anything creepier than the necromancer's mad foolings with mage-shielding, but it felt as if it kept there and did its job against the things that would make him weak as a nursing brat.
"Wizard, get back here and shift your legs," Montaron ordered. "Your turn to drag Queen Fentan."
"I must be almost done collecting the puzzle pieces," Xzar said, and sang. "The radius and the ulna connected to the carpals; the carples connected to the metacarpals. The metacarpals connected to the proximal phalanges, and so many tiny little pieces..."
"Yer wasting time," Montaron spat, and went over to drag the fool.
"Don't you see that it's important, Monty?" Xzar pulled one bone about the size of Montaron's forearm out of his robes, and then a larger second one. The first was pale below dirt and dust. As for the second—Montaron knew perfectly well it were natural as what they said priest Fzoul Chembryl of the Keep liked to do with goats. A dark grey turned half to solid black in the sickly green magelight, riddled with more holes than a Lathanderian's cheating cheesemaking, as if it ought to have fallen apart long ago. "That from a shadow-wolf," Xzar said, showing the contrast; "this from—a necromantic puzzle! Lead me to more pieces, Monty. You won't regret it, promise..."
"Like ye said I wouldn't regret poking the sleeping wyvern's tail? Like ye said I wouldn't regret dashing into fighting six ghouls at once? Like ye said I wouldn't regret thieving the ring and necklace of the two most powerful necromancers in the city?"
"Well..." Xzar said. "Maybe exactly like that! But it's all part of a brilliant adventure with friends, isn't it?"
"I am no friend to any of you," Fentan said, as if bringing trouble she earned on herself were part of knighting.
—
Eight—no, nine shadows, now; hissing for the return of the consort. Viconia produced a dagger held to Fentan's throat. The fool mage had hesitated to pick up something else in the corners, and they were separated in three.
"We carry the Shade Lord's plaything to him; if she dies your master shall be displeased!" the drow threatened them. They approached her closer, and Montaron saw it; that if Fentan died the shadows would have them. They'd tire with the shadows surrounding them; and then they could have what they wanted— He tensed, ready.
"—Or what if she is nautgordo...mutilated?" Viconia suggested, and moved the knife to Fentan's bound hands. The knight tried to kick her in the shins. "Does your master want her missing a hand, a foot, a breast or two? Does he truly?"
They hesitated, then, fixing what they had instead of eyes on the drow. Xzar's magelight dimmed, the crazy mage stopped and staring with his fists pressed to his chin.
"Emara!" Fentan cried to one of them. A taller shadow hissed at her, human-shaped. "Emara, my friend! Is there none left of yourself?"
And was that what they did to ye, when the claws bit deep and made your strength the same as a wet rabbit? The drow's warding still lay on him, of that at least Montaron was certain. Shadows—she mightn't be able to command them for they weren't her goddess'; the mad mage might be bloody useless as per usual; but Montaron knew how to move through them and kill things from behind. He didn't need the mad mage's fading light to see, and didn't need it to allow them to see him.
Mage first; the drow held 'em waiting to her voice. The end of the dagger bit quick and quiet and deep into the back, and he was still in the darkness away from what they had in place of eyes. Viconia cried out; Fentan broke free at last, kicking her then flinging herself to a shdow as if she could damage unarmed. Montaron stuck his dagger deep into where the kidneys should've been of the next one in his way, and this time another of them saw him.
"Bloody wizard!" A sudden spark of blinding light, false light; Montaron was in the shadows it cast, and stopped a creature just before it reached the mage. The strike wasn't so good, not full in the vitals like when he'd time to prepare a mark; but it scraped through and then Xzar gave his share of missiles that beat into it. Two laid hands on Fentan and tried to drag her off, as if they could get her through shadowed cracks in the floor. No sense in taking chances; he'd threaten Fentan himself if he had to, slit out her eyes for the Shade Lord— They were soft-boned and he'd jumped high. His weight made a black wrist cut off from the shape, but it didn't stop the shadow. Then slam Fentan's thick skull with the pommel so she'd be sensible and unconscious; and cut into the shadows and don't let them kill you—
Viconia's mace flashed through the dark with her surrounded. She weren't bad, weren't good either, and they made her bleed.
"Spell ye used for the gibberlings, mage! Get it flung!" Montaron yelled. He gibbered something about rising dark and shadows from places beyond, knuckles bitten in his face: exactly the wrong time for him to lose it. Montaron stripped a throwing knife from his belt and threw it hilt-first to his forehead, then rushed a shadow's legs while another tried it with him from behind.
"But—I only have shadow-skulls besides the puzzle, Monty! Oh, and a bit of sulphur and guano scrapings... Get down for a cheap trick of invocation!"
Fire scorched through the air, just above Montaron's head; the drow knew enough to duck and it only singed her. Then there was mopping-up to be done, with him having to slit the throats of the ones still moving while all the drow did was try to patch them up, standing between the pair of frails and getting their throats duly slit. Xzar lit a fire in a puddle of oil that kept flaring longer than it should've, letting them have a moment of rest. Montaron cleaned his blade on the fur of a shadow-wolf.
"Rest a moment," Viconia said, smoothing her clothes. "We have learned that they wish Fentan in particular, and that they convert the bodies of those they kill."
Weren't nothing left of Emara but a singed spot on the floor, not far from Fentan's head. Black scratches into your body until the black took all of you and left your bones riddled and hollow exactly like the bones the wizard had shown. He kept control of himself; he'd fought bloodsuckers and ghouls and the mad wizard's experiments gone wrong, and ye needed to stay ready.
He flung his sheath aside with a clatter. "Bloody wizard! What in all the Nine Hells do you think ye're doing!"
"The puzzle, Monty. All the pieces are here. Isn't it nice?"
"That," Viconia said, leaning over the mad mage and the arrangement on the cloak he'd laid on the ground, "is a child."
There were bones there: a full skeleton, all joined to each other, skull and ribcage and arms and legs. Short enough for a halfling; small enough that it wasn't. Human child.
"Yes. Won't she be fun to reanimate?" Xzar said. He scattered chips of black stone around the body.
"—That's a child!" Montaron yelped. "Ye can't do that to a— We might've let kids get hurt once or twice, but ye don't make a zombie of a—"
"Silly, silly, Monty." Xzar waved a long forefinger down at his face. "You think that bad things never happen to children. Of course they do! They happen to everyone. Tu surge, puella..."
"I don't kill kids and I don't like 'em used for necromancy," Montaron said, aiming the knife; but the mage had already started. "Some lines ain't meant to be crossed, madman."
"Slaying infants of no importance never gave any deity greater strength," Viconia said. "If there is no reason, you need not do it! From practicality," she said.
But it had begun. Xzar brought his hands through the air, and the bones of the child rose up together.
"I want no part in this," Montaron said.
"I animate...grown things," Viconia said, "they are more effective."
The kid was slightly shorter than Montaron, and between her bones it looked like clear jelly was gathering. The bones were slightly yellowed, old; some shadow or something had killed her and scattered her bones away. Looking into a child's skull taken by a freak necromancer weren't his idea of fun. The drow raised a hand to cover her eyes.
"I did not," Viconia said. "The Spider Queen was enraged, but I knew that it would have not made her stronger or more influential or a greater deity. I lost my will and did not slay the baby. It was one of the lesser priestesses who took her life. I lost my favour to the Spider Queen, I left my home, and I chose not to slay that because it would have been useless..."
"Ye left the Underdark for being too lily-livered a drow?" Montaron said, just to torment her. Blast the mad wizard! Leave graves to be where they were. Use Corthala's head as a football all he wanted, kill Fentan and turn her ribs to a backscratcher, but this one gave him the shivers. Human girl's animated body. The jelly-stuff settled on her—and worse, it was giving a shape to the moving skeleton.
"There must have been a reason," Xzar lectured, staring at the thing he'd created that shouldn't exist, "why they used others to make shadows. But not these bones. They scattered them and they couldn't touch them."
Yellow-haired, the ghost had been. Yellow-haired and tan-skinned like she spent time out in the sun, yellow-eyed, dressed in old robes. The jelly-stuff settled over her and changed like she was still walking here in her old home. Old-fashioned heavy silk robes in pale pink and yellow and orange. Ye left kids like that out of the paths of your blade; they weren't no threat. And the ghost wept without a sound, tears spreading down her cheeks over and over and never landing on the ground. Cried like the child she was.
"She wears robes of a priestess, and the symbol is sun," Viconia snapped. "I left the drow and gained uneasy nightmares. I see now that this old temple was as much an enemy to Shar as this male shade. Truly I am never well-fortuned."
The girl-ghost wept on while Xzar watched her. She opened her mouth, but no sounds came out. He raised a hand, and her bones walked forward in obedience to him. Fentan stirred on the ground below, and started yelling and screaming.
—
The ghost girl had cried for the past hours. Montaron kicked at a bit of twisted skeleton lying on the ground. This one'd been adult longlimb; why couldn't the mad wizard have picked one of those to puzzle over? He could crack open kneejoints with the best of them and finish the undead easy. Instead the weepy child-priestess kept sobbing silently.
"Stop crying," Xzar told her, dropping to one knee to make her height. You'd think the sun-deity types who liked kittens and prancing around with flowers in their hair and fertilising things would pick up one of their own, 'stead of trapping their ghosts where mad necromancers could get at them. Then Viconia voiced the same he'd wondered.
"Perhaps she is important to this place," the drow said icily. "At least her wailing makes less noise than the halfling knight."
"Desecrators," Fentan said weakly, almost subdued now, head lumpy still from that blow.
"Here you are." Xzar flicked a few gibbets of what might have been blackened liver out of a large grey handkerchief, and held it up to the girl's face. It went through her translucent skin. "Why don't I try again?" He waved his hands in the air above the child's arms. He moved his fingers like scissors, chanting. A square piece of pale gold material flew away from the child's ethereal right sleeve. The rough handkerchief moved to the girl's face to cover her tears. "There, there. That's what they're supposed to say, isn't it? Maybe you'll feel happier soon. Thinking of magic always helps. Or picking which of the voices in your head to listen to. Or making good friends and family, like Monty and Lady DeVir here. But sometimes I remember the rabbits, being cold in the dark, what happens when you're alone and nobody is going to come for you ever again and everyone will hurt you the moment they want to and in the night what happens if someone can see but you haven't taken elven eyes instead, or the priests and the eyes in the dark chase you and claim you because of everything you are and everything you will be. Little feet danced around the summerstone and they cut out your heart and they sealed you here and ruined your bones, and then I saw you dancing in the sunshine. Were you happy until they hurt you? That's easy to be. If you can't fight the bunnies, then you'll always be afraid of being alone in the night. Unless the threads in the air come to give you solace; and in weaving them spirits like you come to be your friend..."
Xzar guided the child to the next room, where blackened tiles marked and scarred a once-carved floor and statues lay smashed in piles of stone dust. There, in the bricks of the walls, an oddity; Montaron smashed open the old hiding-spot and got out a teardrop-shaped rock that turned pearl-white when he wiped it, and a few scattered sling bullets. Then he stopped, hearing the grinding of stone; an old trap, old trigger that still worked, whether by this or by the latest paving the drow or the mad mage'd trodden upon he didn't know. "Down—" he shouted, fearing lightning bolts or worse. A mountain of bones rose high as the ceiling, its arms gigantic scythes and its skull burning red.
The biggest tangled the best in wires and old rope. Montaron sat, brushing off singes and smoke from one of the wizard's bad-aimed spells. Viconia touched a fragment of smashed skull and watched it crumble to dust. The ghost-girl had moved close to the spot in the walls; she held the handkerchief from her sleeve up to her face, weeping still.
"Monty," the mad wizard snapped, one hand on his waist, holding out his left hand. Took a moment to figure it; then Montaron handed over the bullets so the mage could tell if they were fancy or not. Xzar waited impatiently and he passed over the gemstone as well.
"Don't eat it," he told the wizard wearily, "don't ruin it unless ye explain to me why you're taking down our profit, don't lose it, and don't come up with any bright ideas of doing something I didn't list just to annoy me." Worth a few gold at least; nice quality, moonstone-like. The bullets had a trace of gold below their grime, but gold wasn't the right metal for weapons, more like to be fool's gold. The wizard cast some divination spell on the lot of them, throwing bullets and stone up in the air alike to spin around his head like some overwealthy fool's orrery.
"—A droplet of honey is perfectly balanced: geometric magnificence, surface tension, gravity into direction; sphere extended in formula. And a droplet of pearl shine enchanted to remain..." Black dirt washed off the circles rotating around him. The bullets glinted gold in the dark and the moonstone started to glow pale. He marched over to the wall, knelt down by the child again, and stuck the stone in the centre of her forehead.
Her snivelling started to be heard instead of only seen. The ghost-kid wept and wailed softly; not as bad as the Bhaalspawn brat's whining, resigned as if the child was used to misery. Her outline got stronger around her bones, skin filling in above her skull and her tears brighter, though you could still see she was a walking corpse that oughtn't to be. And her eyes glowed light gold.
"Child," Fentan said, her shoulder smashed and bloody from a fallen brick in the battle. "Release her, necromancer!"
The child sobbed, and the necromancer tried to wipe her face. Then she turned to a chattier ghost.
"Misery inside you," she said. She raised a bony hand and touched Xzar's cheek the same way he laid a hand on her face, and it was creepy as all hells. "Pieces of a broken vase flying as if they wanted to be a different shape. The night broke you." High voice, childish piping half-whispered, carried on the winds of some other plane. Nothing he could do but keep a good grip on his sword, Montaron thought.
"They can't break you twice," Xzar said. "Be many things; be nothing; fly in the shatters of you. The jagged glass reflections make it the truth that everything happens simultaneously, to let it all be true at the same moment. Riddle me, when can nobody hurt you? When the you is not yourself."
"Lock in a black box room," the child said. Her bones travelled down the necromancer's cheekbones, and she stared at him with gold eyes turning a paler white. She smiled below her tears, and her skull's teeth widened below her skin. "I wouldn't lock you in a black box room, strange boy. But Lord Amaunator would, for he is just. I can't feel him any more."
"They leave you," Xzar said, nodding madly as if he understood everything the ghost said, "they forget to help you while you're hurt. I don't remember."
"I had a fever. It was a long time ago. Everything was yellow and I dreamed of headaches and nothing fitting together. The sun cast shadows. I'm much older than you, I think," the girl-ghost said. "It was dark, and it's still dark. You're dark."
"Amauna. Your name is Amauna, and you see things others couldn't see," Xzar said.
"You hear voices others can't hear, and you turn them into destruction," Amauna said. "I want to go home."
—