Allana couldn’t help but notice the tremor in Tenebres’s hand when he reached out to take the letter. Not that she could blame him–she felt herself tremble as well, though she doubted Tenebres could be as angry as she was in that moment.

  All her life, her path had been chosen for her. First by Telik, then by Geoffrey, and now by this mysterious Sebastian, this supposed friend of Geoffrey’s who couldn’t even stick around in the wake of the assassin’s death. After the shock of the night before had begun to retreat, she had begun to look forward to the opportunity to choose her own way forward for once. But no. She couldn’t have that, could she?

  “‘Allana and Tenebres,’” her friend started to read. A flash of chagrined gratitude ran through her. As Tenebres was well aware, Allana’s ability to read and write was feeble at best. She could muddle her way through most documents, but Tenebres reading the letter out loud saved both time and her pride. What was left of it, at least.

  Tenebres continued once Allana showed she was listening. “‘I am sorry that this letter is all I can leave you. While I strived to reach Emeston in time to save Geoffrey’s life, my failure to do so has set in motion other events that I must see to. Despite this, I felt the need to give you what answers I could, in the hope that I may help you in taking your next steps forward. I have no doubt your master would’ve revealed all of this before too much longer in any case, so please allow me to do so in his stead.’”

  Tenebres paused, as if waiting for reaction. Allana limited her impatience to a huff and waved for him to continue, which he did with a shrug.

  “‘I am sure you know, by this point, that Geoffrey was more than a simple, if skilled, assassin. Geoffrey, like myself and the man who delivered this letter to you, are what most of the world would call ‘adventurers.’ For the sake of time, I will leave any further information in that vein to Alleghy. In addition to rendering any assistance he can, I have asked him to answer what questions he is able to. I will not presume to know what road you will both choose to walk from here, but in the case that you choose to continue in Geoffrey’s footsteps, I will provide you the same information I was hoping to deliver to him.”

  “Bullshit,” Allana muttered, as much to herself as anyone else. Tenebres and Alleghy both looked at her with varying amounts of skepticism, but when she didn’t elaborate, Tenebres continued reading.

  “‘It is my understanding that in recent days you had been hunting the necromantic servants of a corpse hag. You may be surprised to learn that this is not the only account of unexpected undead in the heartlands. Mere days ago, I was made aware of a specter haunting the road between Correntry and Jellis. Should you be interested in finishing what you’ve started, I would suggest you look into the fate of a small village called…’”

  Tenebres trailed off.

  Allana arched an eyebrow, but he continued to stare at the letter, his crimson eyes wide with something Allana couldn’t quite make out, some cocktail of shock and fear and anger and anxiety all blended together.

  “Seo?” she asked, reaching for his hand. “What is it?” His fingers were limp and cold in her grasp.

  “It… it says Culles.”

  “What?”

  “The little village Sebastian is pointing us towards. It’s my home. Culles.”

  #

  “C’mon Seo…” Allana spoke softly, gently, as one would to a startled animal. “Sit down here, there you go…”

  In the back of her mind, she recognized that this was just how Tenebres had spoken to her the night before. The contents of the letter had shaken Tenebres so deeply that they had traded places.

  At a loss for what else to do, she had emulated his steps, leading Tenebres up to the darkened bedroom they had spent the previous night in, leaving both Alleghy and his Rogue-cursed letter downstairs.

  The boy, slender at the best of times, looked positively fragile as he sat on the edge of the bed, his feet not quite reaching the floor. When he spoke, his voice was hollow, lost. The same way she had probably sounded, not so long ago.

  “I always wondered…” he told her. “I wondered what happened after we left Culles.”

  Allana knew at least some of the story, after she and Geoffrey had pried it free months before. Tenebres had been raised in the village of Culles, a failing village in the heartlands, until a monster attack had crippled it. In the aftermath, as Tenebres told it, a charismatic man had come through, offering sanctuary to anyone who’d follow him. That man, Kellen, ended up being a cult leader, and Tenebres had spent the next few years living in the subterranean cave system that Kellen and his men had turned into a commune.

  Tenebres’s freedom from that cult was more an accident than anything else. A sacrifice gone wrong had somehow given him a gift even Geoffrey had never heard of, which the boy had then used to kill the entire cult that had tried to kill him. Afterwards, as far as Allana knew, Tenebres joined a merchant caravan en route to Emeston, setting him on the road to meeting Allana and Geoffrey.

  She had never thought to ask why Tenebres hadn’t returned to Culles, and she wondered if he had ever even actively considered it. By his reaction, maybe not. Not until this letter had forced him to.

  “I didn’t want to go back,” Tenebres said. Allana knew he was talking as much to himself as her, and stayed quiet as she sat beside him, gently stroking a hand along his forearm, feeling the shape of the bandages wound under his long black gloves. “I knew if I did, by myself, there would be questions. I’d have to tell them what happened, and how I got free… I couldn’t do it. I ran away instead.”

  “You wanted to find answers,” Allana reminded him. “You came here to figure out what the gift of the void was, and how to control it.”

  “I did,” Tenebres acknowledged miserably, tears staining his cheeks. “But I was running away too. I needed to go somewhere nothing would remind me of home. Of either of my homes.”

  “So then we won’t go back,” Allana told him firmly. “There’s no reason to listen to this Sebastian guy. No reason to trust him. We can stay here, track down that hag that was working with Telik.”

  “Aggleta,” Tenebres said softly. “That was what Telik called her.”

  Of course he had remembered. Allana never ceased to be amazed by just how quickly her friend’s mind worked, to remember a name mentioned off-hand during the confrontation with Telik.

  “We can’t.”

  “What?” Allana asked. Surprise made her sit up straight, pulling away from Tenebres.

  He looked at her, his own eyes as surprised as hers. “Lana… we can’t beat a hag.” He said it as if it was obvious, as if he was saying the sky was blue (or gray, more likely). “We barely beat Telik, and that was only because he was so self-absorbed he might as well have been blind!”

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Allana frowned at the tone of the response. “Well… yeah, but we could sneak up on her–”

  “Sneak up? On the hag whose partner we JUST killed? The one who has Rogue only knows how many thralls who weren’t as lucky as us? No, we would get killed, at best, if we went for her now.”

  Allana was speechless, her eyes wide as she stared at Tenebres, unable to believe what he was saying. “Wh-I thought you… I just…what?” she spluttered impotently, grasping for some way to respond to the boy’s straight-forward claim. This wasn’t how she pictured this conversation going.

  Tenebres’s smile at her confusion was still tinted by the tears in the corner of his eyes, but it was still genuinely there. “We should leave the city,” he told her.

  “To Culles?”

  Tenebres still seemed troubled by the thought–but he nodded anyway. “Yes. I didn’t want to go back but… I think we should. We know it’s important, and maybe we can do something there that has a slightly lower chance of getting us killed or enslaved.”

  “I…” Allana bit her bottom lip. She had come a long way in her time with Tenebres, she knew that. She wasn’t the sullen girl she was when she met Geoffrey, reluctant to share even the smallest detail about herself in case it would be used against her. But some things were still hard to talk about. Leaving Emeston itself… “Are you sure?”

  Tenebres seemed to buy her attempt at redirecting her fears back at him. “I am.” His voice was still a little weak, but he met her eyes as he said it. “You said yourself that Emeston is going to be a bad place to be for a while. It’ll be good for us to get out of here before everything goes to hell.”

  Allana shifted away, knowing Tenebres would pick up on her anxiety but desperate to hide it anyways. “I just… if… if you say so?”

  Tenebres cocked his head at her, worry starting to overwhelm anxiety on his face. “Lana? Are you okay? I’m not like… I don’t want to force anything. It just seems right to me.”

  “I… I guess you’re right.” Allana’s cheeks heated up, and she hurriedly looked away. Her mouth was dry, throat closing up. The thought of stepping foot outside the city…

  Tenebres waited for a baffled moment, and Allana knew he had seen her flush when she heard the laughter dancing in his voice. “Okay… Okay then, let’s go. We’ve left Alleghy waiting long enough.”

  Allana nodded, trying to regain her balance, trying not to think of the shockingly large amount of anxiety that the thought of leaving Emeston sparked in her.

  “Yeah…” A thought crossed her mind, and a notification appeared before her eyes. A gift offer she had been pushing away in all the chaos.

  Her voice got firmer as she accepted where things were going from here. “Yeah. Let’s go. I have some questions for Alleghy.”

  #

  “We’re going to do it,” Allana told Alleghy as they entered the workroom.

  The healer turned from the massive map of Lowrun that Geoffrey had spread across one wall, arching a drooping brow at them as they entered. “Is that so?”

  “Yes.” Tenebres’s voice wasn’t quite as bold as Allana’s, still shell-shocked as he was, but he stood next to Allana and faced the healer.

  “Excellent. Then I believe–”

  “No,” Allana interrupted him. “It’s still our turn. I have some questions for you.”

  Alleghy’s face remained impassive, but Allana thought she noticed something belligerent enter his posture. The thought made a smirk dance across her face. The healer had seemed so impassive throughout the morning, it almost felt like an accomplishment to wear through his patience.

  “Ask then,” Alleghy told her.

  “First,” Allana picked up the abandoned letter as she spoke, “tell us what you know about this ‘Sebastian Freehold’ person.”

  “In that, I fear I will need to disappoint you. I know he has a Rogue gift, and that he was a high level and extremely capable battle-gifted. I know he knew Geoffrey before I did, and that they had a level of mutual respect. I met Sebastian years before, when he was trying to break a fetter ring, and he introduced me to Geoffrey in the aftermath, and inducted me to his network.”

  “His network of adventurers?” Tenebres asked, his voice deeply skeptical. Everyone knew stories about adventurers–but everyone also knew they were just that. Fun little tales of heroes slaying dragons and bargaining with elves and saving princesses.

  Allana huffed. “Oh yeah. Walked right out of a storybook, these guys.”

  “I was never sure if the stories birthed the reality or the other way around, but yes.”

  “Mhmm, sure. Next are you going to reveal you’re actually an elf?

  Alleghy gave Allana a flat look. “Is this a time for sarcasm?”

  Allana blushed in embarrassment at the man’s incredulous tone. “You tell me. You’re the one trying to act like my dead mentor was some sort of storybook hero!”

  Alleghy blinked. Slowly. “Mmm. A refined gentleman master assassin, a kind soul who only killed those who deserved it, who pulled you from the streets and gave you training, confidence, and freedom.”

  Tenebres huffed a dry little laugh. “He sort of has a point, Lana.”

  Allana whirled on him. “Not you too?”

  Tenebres shrugged. “Remember the first time you told me anything? Before we went after the chandler? I said the same thing–it sounded like something out of an overwrought ring novel.”

  Allana narrowed her eyes at him, remembering his reaction months earlier. He had merely teased her for it then, but she had to admit… he wasn’t wrong. It was all a little dramatic.

  Allana turned back to Alleghy. “So what? Geoffrey and this Sebastian were actually adventurers? Like from a children’s story?”

  Alleghy shrugged, the motion vague under his voluminous gray robes. “Perhaps. I never fully understood it myself, but I know Sebastian and his whole network were firm believers in the power of those stories.”

  “That’s why he took the jobs he did,” Tenebres mused out loud. “Monsters and forbidden gifted. The only kind of adventurer Emeston could tolerate was an assassin.”

  “Perhaps so,” Alleghy agreed. “I know more of the adventurers than most–but I still only have a peripheral understanding. I supported them, but I am no battle-gifted. My exposure to their network was limited.”

  Allana nodded along, frowning–but she was thoughtful. As absurd as Alleghy’s claims were, Tenebres seemed to be taking them seriously. And she couldn’t deny that there was some sense to what they were saying…

  “Okay,” Allana said, “let’s say I believe you, just so we can move forward. I have another question.”

  Alleghy frowned, the expression making his drooping face wrinkle even more deeply, but he nodded for her to continue.

  Allana felt the notification she had been actively trying to push aside force its way forward in her perceptions again, as it had done multiple times since she had killed Telik.

  Until that morning, when she had finally resigned herself to reading the message, Allana had expected it to inform her that the death of the crimelord had earned her the gift of the assassin, the same gift both Telik and Geoffrey had been guiding her towards - and a gift representing a life she was no longer sure she wanted to live.

  Of course, when that turned out to not be the case, it hadn’t even been the most surprising thing about the notification.

  In defeating a superior foe through cunning and guile, you have accomplished a feat of the Rogue. In recognition, the Rogue has offered you the [Gift of the Trickster].

  You cannot accept a third gift at this time. Reach Initiate with both of your gifts to open up your third gift slot.

  Ensouled [Gift of Stealth] is compatible with the [Gift of the Trickster].

  The Rogue has offered gift transmutation.

  Do you accept?

  Yes/No

  Once accepted, gifts can never be relinquished.

  “What can you tell me about gift transmutation?”