Olivia watched Cadence and Allana leave, quickly fading into the descending gloom of the evening, and tried to ignore her misgivings.

  Cadence was right. Even if they weren’t the sort of allies Olivia preferred, she had no real reason to doubt Allana and Tenebres. The wraith girl had a quick temper and tight lips, but that didn’t make her a bad person. Olivia couldn’t even really blame her, since they shared more-or-less equal measures of suspicion for each other. But the simple truth was that neither of the pairs had much of a chance against Xythen and these wights of his. Working together was their only option, for better or worse.

  Olivia just wished it had been Cadence watching his back, instead of this stranger.

  Once the two girls were gone, Tenebres settled on the ground with a sigh, closing his eyes while keeping his back straight. The plan called for Allana and Cadence to get into position in the ruins, somewhere near the building Xythen was holed up in. Once they were, Allana had some way to tell Tenebres that he should start moving.

  Was he even a he? Olivia couldn’t help but wonder. Tenebres was sunnier than even Cadence, with a sort of feminine frame that didn’t match his supposed gender. While they had been building up the bonfire, Tenebres had referred to himself as a boy, but then, so had Olivia. Was he maybe eclipsed too? Or even celestial, like Cadence?

  Too nervous to ask that question, Olivia instead asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Resting,” Tenebres said. “Invoking my fiends requires me to sacrifice my attributes, and resting is the easiest way to recover them.”

  “Oh.” Olivia chewed her bottom lip, not sure of what else to say. “Will you be able to summon them again?”

  “Invoke,” Tenebres corrected gently. “And yes. Most of them, at least. My green imp–that’s the one I summoned during the fight with the zombies–requires strength, and that’s one of my lower attributes.”

  Olivia recalled the crackling, gross little monster. So it was called an imp? “What about that other thing you sicced on me? With the tentacles?”

  Tenebres breathed a delicate laugh. “The tentacular fright,” he explained. “Yes, I’ll be able to call that one up again. It requires my coordination, and I’ve got plenty of that to spare.”

  Olivia nodded again, and the two lapsed back into silence. For want of anything else to do, Olivia fetched her honing steel from her pack and got to work on her runeblade, ensuring the weapon didn’t have any burrs that would affect its edge. She sat down next to Tenebres while she did, thankful that the fire had finally burnt away the corpse remains, leaving behind the clean smell of woodsmoke.

  As always, sharpening the blade felt odd, almost slick. One of the runes carved into the base of the blade siphoned some of the kinetic energy from the honing steel’s movements, storing it for Oli to release later. While this made the sword take significantly longer to sharpen, it allowed the storage runes to build up some energy too, so it was worth the trouble.

  “That’s quite the sword,” Tenebres commented after a few minutes.

  Olivia watched him study the runes out of the corner of his eye in the flickering firelight, his curious gaze reminding her of her brother the first time he had seen the weapon. “It was a gift from my mentor,” she explained briefly.

  “Ah.”

  Olivia swallowed, floundering in the awkward moment–but then, her sword was one thing she always felt ready to talk about, wasn’t it?

  “This rune stores energy when the blade hits things,” she explained, tapping it lightly. “Then another lets me release it in a single burst.”

  Tenebres’s eyes glowed with interest. The reflected firelight off of their crimson hue was unsettling, but the boy’s manner remained completely calm. “Fascinating…”

  “You said you had a Mage gift?”

  “The evoker, yes. But I’ve never had much chance to study artifice.”

  “Evocation… that’s battle magic, right?”

  “Mostly. Force projectiles and shields and the like. Not so different from these runes, in fact.”

  Olivia continued the relaxing, familiar motion of honing her blade. Force magic. Like what her rune could do, but so much more flexible, directed by the caster’s mind instead of a simple interaction of runes.

  “I wonder…”

  “Hmm?” Olivia looked back up at the boy’s musing tone, her hands stopping for a moment.

  “My force missiles are pure kinetic energy,” Tenebrtes said thoughtfully. “So, if your sword absorbs force, and I pump a spell right into your sword…”

  Olivia blinked, picking up what he had meant. Could it really be that easy to charge her sword’s rune?

  Hastily, Olivia took off her travel cloak, laying the bright gray cloth on the ground so she could place her sword down on top of it, protecting the precious blade from the dirt. “Try it,” she told Tenebres, unexpectedly excited. Olan would love this–she wondered if her brother had ever tried something similar.

  Tenebres seemed similarly excited, quickly taking aim at the sword. A flicker of concentration flew over his face, and then a bolt of dim blue light flew from his finger to strike the blade–where it simply vanished. The runeblade didn’t so much as jolt in place from the impact.

  Tenebres sucked air through his teeth. “Did it work?”

  Olivia picked the sword up, then paused, unsure of how to test it. While an artificer could no doubt check how much energy the runeblade had stored, she didn’t have the expertise to do so. Unless…

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Olivia scrambled to pull her honing steel back out and dragged it across the blade. The sound it made was the bright ring of a bell being rung, far louder than it had been before.

  “It’s not siphoning any energy from the steel…” Olivia said, breathless. “It’s storage must be full.” Of course, she hadn’t used the release rune in a while. Likely, it had more than a bit of energy already built up, but to top it off so easily…

  “Well. That’s a handy combination,” Tenebres commented mildly.

  #

  After a few minutes of testing, they came to the conclusion that four of Tenebres’s force missiles were enough to charge the runeblade from empty to full.

  “It would be a little awkward to use in battle, but…”

  Olivia nodded eagerly. “It definitely has some potential.”

  Tenbres’s smile abruptly drooped. He reached up to rub the back of his head. “Well, it’s at least a solid trick while we’re fighting together. You might need to find another source of force after that.”

  Right. For a few minutes, their shared interest had undercut the awkward energy between the two relative strangers, but at Tenebres’s reminder, the tension returned. More faint now, but still present.

  “Any word from the others?”

  Tenebres pulled a small clay tablet, slightly larger than a coin, from one of his belt pouches. “Nope.”

  “Should we be worried about that?”

  Tenebres shrugged. “I don’t think so. It’s probably just taking them some time to get into position.”

  Olivia chewed her bottom lip. She and Cadence had only known each other for a few weeks, but they had spent so much of that time traveling and fighting together that the celestial already felt like an old friend. “What if they got attacked?”

  “Then Allana would break her tab early and we’d head in. Don’t worry, we’ll know if anything happens.”

  Olivia nodded, and returned her focus to her sword. The blade was likely as sharp as it was going to get, but honing it gave her a way to burn off her nervous energy, to keep her hands busy.

  Tenebres watched her in silence as the minutes ticked by, the fire burning lower and lower.

  It must’ve been nearly ten minutes before Tenebres spoke again. “So… are you a girl?”

  Oli’s hands froze. What? “Excuse me?”

  Tenebres shrugged. “Cadence slipped up once, used ‘she’ when she was referring to you, and you didn’t bat an eye.”

  Oliver–Olivia, why was it so hard to keep that in mind sometimes?–flushed. How was she supposed to respond to that? Deny it, of course, but she needed to make some sort of excuse for–

  Her mouth moved without checking in with the rest of her brain. “Yeah. I’m eclipsed.”

  Tenebres simply nodded, no judgment evident on his face.

  “I’m sort of… new at it. Cadence only helped me start to admit it recently.”

  “I figured,” Tenebres said. The boy had reached down with one finger, absently drawing designs in the loose dirt at his feet. “Sorry if I made you uncomfortable.”

  “It’s okay,” Olivia told him, surprised to find that she meant it. Scared as she was, still looking so obviously lunar, it felt… good to admit it. “What about you?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Are you eclipsed?”

  “Oh. No.”

  A moment passed, and Olivia arched an eyebrow. Her eyes drifted down to the slender curves of Tenebres’s hips and chest, which lent his already skinny body a sort of soft androgyny. When they flicked back up to his sweet, almost heart-shaped, face, his eyes were watching her, clearly amused.

  Olivia floundered. “So… celestial?”

  “Nope.”

  “It’s just… you’re so, y’know…”

  “Sunny?”

  “I was going to say pretty,” Olivia claimed with reddening cheeks.

  Tenebres simply shrugged, a little smile dancing along his lips. “Who says boys can’t be pretty? Or sunny?”

  “I… I guess…” Olivia bit her lip and looked away, as embarrassed as when she first met Cadence. How were they so comfortable just being them? Olivia wondered. It was like a gift all its own, sometimes.

  Unfortunately (or fortunately, Olivia wasn’t sure which), at that moment, the little ceramic tablet Tenebres had placed down next to him cracked with a sharp snap.

  His crimson eyes darted down to it. “They’re in place.” His gaze darted back to Olivia, and he gave her a smile as supportive as it was teasing. “We can talk more later. Ready to do this, Oli?”

  Olivia blew out a sharp breath and packed away her honing steel. Focus, she told herself, trying to get out of the mindset of an awkward eclipsed girl. Time to be a knight.

  “Let’s go.”

  #

  Up close, Culles was in even worse shape than Oliver had thought.

  While some of the buildings showed obvious damage, as many burnt out as shattered and broken, the vast majority were simply disused. Without tending, wood and thatch quickly collapsed, leaving the village feeling more abandoned than anything else.

  “Some of this has got to be from before Xythen got here…” she observed quietly.

  Tenebres nodded. “There were some bad attacks a few years back. That’s when my family… left. Others probably did the same, went in different directions.”

  “Making it easy pickings for Xythen.” Olivia tensed her fingers on the grips of her sword and shield. This wasn’t right. Someone should’ve stopped this long before it got this far.

  But who would’ve? This was what Adeline had tried to explain to him, months before, on the day he abandoned the Dennan name. Sentinels patrolled the Wastes. Wardens maintained the trade routes. But out of the way villages like Culles were left to rely on their hunters–and what happened when those hunters failed?

  They needed someone else. A knight. An adventurer.

  “Where do we start?” Olivia asked. The town around them was quiet, without even the expected nighttime noises Oli had grown used to since leaving Correntry. It was as if everything from beasts to birds to vermin knew better than to live here.

  When Tenebres spoke, Olivia heard the sort of rage that made her own anger seem feeble by comparison. Of course, Tenebres had apparently been raised here. To him, this broken place must have been so much worse.

  If Oli’s anger was a flame, Tenebres’s was the bonfire they had left behind. “Easy. We start by making some noise.”

  The boy gestured and shadows began to flutter at the base of one of the nearby ruins, quickly coalescing into what the boy had called an imp. Like the one he had invoked during their first fight with the minor undead, it was a twisted, diminutive little being, though its hide was a sullen red rather than a moldy green.

  “Chaos,” Tenebres told the creature simply.

  The imp howled in glee, reared back, and promptly released a gout of flame on the dried out remains of a thatch roof.