The wight was hard to look at. It was something like the scarecrows they had fought earlier, an unnatural fusion of dead flesh with equally dead plants, but rather than lightweight straw, the corpse in question was entwined with the splintered remains of a rotting tree. Moss and mushrooms were coated with dried blood, and heavy nails held bits of the corpse in place.

  Worst of all, Allana recognized the corpse used to make the wight. She had her suspicions after Tenebres had explained how the undead were made, but it was still hard to see the stocky young warden Siroh so horribly mutilated.

  As the wight staggered away, Allana started to rise, but Cadence lifted a hand, settling it on her arm.

  Allana shot the girl a questioning look. Cadence’s only response was lifting a finger to her lips and shaking her head.

  A long minute passed, then two, before Cadence dropped her hand and relaxed. “I think it circled another building nearby. It’s gone now.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I can hear it coming from a block away,” Cadence reassured her. “Let me get ready.”

  Allana arched an eyebrow, but waited as the other girl requested. It didn’t take long–Cadence closed her eyes for a moment, then something changed. Though still crouched, the energy of the stance changed. She no longer wavered side-to-side at all, and her body tensed with perfect precision. Familiar precision, in fact–when Cadence stood up, she did so with the same causal grace Allana moved with. She wasn’t quite as smooth as the older girl, given her Initiate level gifts and lifetime of practice, but it was impressive nonetheless.

  “Ready,” Cadence told her.

  Allana nodded without another word and slipped out from their hiding place.

  The shadowed, ruined streets of Culles were quiet–too quiet, in Allana’s opinion, compared to the seemingly endless bustle of Emeston. The closest the coastal city got to this level of silence was when the fog set in deep at night, soaking in the errant noises of the busy city. Here, she didn’t have the advantage of that visual deterrent, but she didn’t need it. There were no eyes in Emeston to see her or Cadence except for the necro and his wights, and she trusted Cadence’s ears to pick them out before they could get too close.

  So though the two stuck close to the broken buildings lining the roads of Culles, they moved quickly, with little time spent sneaking. Twice more, Cadence hissed a warning and the two ducked into one of the crumbling hovels before a wight could see them. The first time, it was Siroh’s corpse again, but the second time, it could only have been Sartoh. The tall warden was unrecognizable, his features bloated and melted like candle wax, his corpse having apparently been soaked in water after his death.

  Allana thought of Algus the chandler, the first necromancer she had killed. Given time, this may have been the kind of thing he would’ve created.

  She had never felt bad about killing the old candlemaker, but after seeing the wights, she only felt that much more grim determination to deliver Xythen the same fate as Algus. She may not have been an assassin anymore, but she didn’t need to be a professional killer to want to bring an end to the man responsible for all of this.

  After what seemed an eternity of quickly but carefully picking their way through the ruins of Culles, Allana finally indicated the manor house the necromancer had taken for himself. It may have once been a lovely building, but now, after months without properly being maintained, it stood out like a rotting bouquet in a graveyard. “He was in the parlor last time I was here,” she explained to Cadence. “Right side of the house, ground floor.”

  “Right.” Cadence gestured at a mostly intact house not too far away, where they’d have a clear view of the large residence. “That work?”

  Allana nodded, and the two set out once again. Only once they had both snuck inside, Cadence having given the all clear that it was empty, did Allana relax. Cadence immediately slumped to the ground. The pace had gotten more difficult for her as they moved, as her buff hadn’t lasted the whole trip, but she had still done a decent job keeping herself moving without giving them away.

  Allana settled next to her, pulling out a little tab of ceramic and promptly snapping it. “That’ll tell the boys to move,” she said. “Now we just wait.”

  “Fine with me,” Cadence said. One of her hands drifted to her belt, but when she felt the leather canteen there, she stopped and self-consciously lifted her hand away.

  Allana had seen the girl trade her companion for that before they left, giving the big swordsman an odd silver flask in exchange for a full skin of water. Allana didn’t understand the gesture, but she didn’t pry, besides making a crack about the boys not getting too drunk while they waited for the signal.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Cadence answered, her voice tired. “Just need to recover my stamina and focus before the fun starts.”

  “It’s somehow reassuring to me that your insane gift still has some drawbacks.”

  “Allana, you can teleport.”

  “Yeah–and now you can too.”

  Cadence cracked an eyelid to reveal a slip of mischievous blue. “Good point.”

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  Allana huffed a little laugh. Now that they had a little time with nothing to do but wait, Allana found herself liking the blue-haired celestial. Her willingness to be open reminded Allana of Tenebres, and she found herself just as willing to trust Cadence after a few exchanged jokes. The girl just didn’t seem to have much deceit in her.

  In Emeston, that would’ve been a weakness, a concern, just like it had been for Tenebres. But out here in the world, the girl had a straight-forward, blunt optimism about her that made it hard to dislike her.

  Unlike her friend, Allana groused to herself.

  “So… Are you and Oli an item?” Allana found herself asking.

  Cadence gave the best response: a quiet chuckle, without opening her eyes. “Heh. No, no we most certainly are not.” After a moment, she did add, “Sorry about him. He comes off… Well, you know how he comes off. But he is a good person, underneath all that.”

  “I might just need to take your word on that,” Allana replied dryly, not sure why she cared. The celestial was cute, Allana supposed, in her own way. She had a rawboned androgyny that was somehow completely different from Tenebres, a wiry slenderness Allana couldn’t help but find interesting. Tenebres was a particularly sunny boy, but Cadence wasn’t simply a waxing girl. It was more like she wasn’t particularly solar or lunar.

  Hence, celestial. Allana had heard the term before she met Cadence, but nobody she met had ever seemed to embody it quite as much as the blue-haired teenager.

  “How about you?” Cadence asked with an air of casualness that Allana might not have noticed was feigned, if not for the charm boon she had received from the gift of the trickster. “Are you and Tenebres together?”

  Allana paused before answering. Lately, that question felt increasingly hard to answer. “Sort of,” Allana finally said, rolling one shoulder. “We started as just friends, then became more than that, and now…” Allana shrugged again. “He’s important to me. He’s my best friend. But I don’t know if I’d consider us exclusive, you know?”

  “Okay.” Cadence smiled a little at the answer, and Allana suddenly realized what she had said. Why had she said all of that to a practical stranger? That was way too much information! “Then maybe we should go out for a drink once this is all over.”

  Oh. Right. That’s why.

  Allana raised an eyebrow at the celestial. “Aren’t you a little daring? We literally only just met.”

  Cadence shrugged easily, but she couldn’t quite hide the nervous blush on her face. “Seemed worth a shot anyways.”

  “Yeah?”

  That little smile danced across her lips, teasing despite her deepening blush. “I mean, you might actually be the most attractive girl I’ve ever seen. And there’s at least one noble sentinel who would be upset to hear me say that.”

  Allana arched an eyebrow at the brag the celestial made of the last few words. “You expect me to believe you bagged a noble? Is that how you met Oli?”

  Cadence shrugged. “Believe what you want. And no, that was before we met.” She started to go on, then paused, clearly thinking better of what she was going to say.

  Allana smiled wider at the celestial’s boldness. She was clearly nervous, but she was going for it anyway. I mean, it would be rude to just turn her down, right?

  “How about we get through this first, then we’ll talk, okay?”

  Cadence pursed her lips–then nodded eagerly, finally leaning forward and opening her eyes. “That reminds me, actually.”

  She reached back to her belt, and this time she slid out the weird shortsword she had wielded against the zombies. Allana had never seen anything like it, a couple jagged shards of black glass bound to what looked like a long carved bone.

  “Do you think you can wield this?”

  Allana blinked. “What?”

  “I know this is a little bigger than your daggers, but is it comfortable for you to use?” Cadence held the blade out to her.

  Still confused, Allana took up the weapon, surprised at how light it felt in her hands. Experimentally, she swung the blade a couple times, then stood and took a combat pose. It was a little awkward–she had to adjust her stance to keep the longer blade from cutting her other arm–but it was serviceable.

  “I guess so,” Allana finally answered. “Why?”

  “You said your biggest weakness is a lack of special attacks, right? You don’t have any potency?”

  Allana frowned. “I mean, yeah.”

  “Well, I took that raidblade from a gnoll I killed once. It has some potency imbued right into it–just one tier, but that might make all the difference.”

  Allana blinked again. “But that’s… you’re just giving it to me?”

  Cadence shrugged. “Of course. We’re fighting together. And I’m sure you’ll get more use out of it than me.”

  “What are you going to fight with then?”

  Cadence patted the quiver slung across her back. “I’ve got some magical arrows too, made from life-aspected wood. Should be plenty good against undead.”

  Allana couldn’t quite believe her ears. Not only did Cadence have two gifts Allana had never even heard of, she had not one, but two different sources of potency among her gear? Who even was this girl?

  Suddenly the idea of her having slept with a noble didn’t sound so far-fetched. In fact, she could be a noble, for all Allana knew.

  “How much longer, do you think?” Cadence asked. The girl looked towards the empty window on the house’s front wall, as if expecting to see a flare of light.

  Allana shrugged. “Soon. It’s been about five minutes since I snapped the tab, and it couldn’t be more than a fifteen minute walk to the edge of town.”

  “How will we know when they start fighting?”

  “Trust me. You’ll know.”

  In the meantime, Allana began manifesting her poisons. Before her gift transmutation, she had always taken advantage of her old augment. Being able to conjure her weapons already poisoned had been a powerful advantage and a significant convenience, but without her gift of stealth, Allana didn’t have the option anymore. Instead, she ran a finger along the blades of Cadence’s raidblade and one of her own daggers, lacing them with a slick sheen of emerald liquid.

  Cadence watched with obvious interest. “What kind of poison is that?”

  “Resilience,” Allana replied. “The last necro I killed, Sloan, had a decent resilience boon, so I’m betting this guy does too.”

  Cadence nodded seriously. “Do you think you can lace a few of my arrows too?”

  Allana grinned. “Of course.”

  The two girls spent the next several minutes with their heads together, reviewing their abilities, their skills, what they knew of their foes and what they could do to fight them. It was two-on-two, but they both knew that it wouldn’t be a fair fight. Allana would be lucky to be even the same level as Xythen, and was likely lower than him, while his wight, according to Tenebres, would be at the top end of lesser rank, likely a match for both of them by itself.

  Despite that, when the gleeful howl of Tenebres’s red imp lit up the night, they were both ready.