"Rats are somewhat paradoxical on first examination. They're one of the more magically adept species, but they also have very few dire specimens. This is because the canny little bastards are clever enough to use any magical knack they have for something more impressive than just getting bigger. Which, I mean, is fair, as a giant rat is far less discreet and mobile than a normal one. So instead of being dire, magic rats often get smarter, or gain odd little arcane tricks, and occasionally even both. So keep this in mind, and don't ever underestimate the little bastards." - Denwell Alhoun, priest of Aunt Huntress, and head of Vindabon's pest control office, speaking to some new subordinates.

Cole moved quickly towards the collapsed tower, halberd in hand. Streamers of ice billowed off of him as he filled his body with magic. Destructive as Mak's bomb had been, there was no telling if it was strong enough to eliminate the tower's defenders. Looking up at the billowing cloud of dust produced by the blast, Cole's grip on Requiem tightened to the point his fingers hurt even through the protective cold filling him. Mak had agreed to their plan and said the explosive would just punch a hole in the bell tower's structure, giving Cole and Natalie an opening to bypass whatever defenses were in the way, while letting them get the literal drop on any defenders.

Mak had lied.

This put the other paladin in a much worse light. Instability could be handled, paranoia could be soothed, but lying about the details of a life-or-death mission was unacceptable. Ironically, it was Mak himself who taught Cole that back when they'd worked together on the White Isles. The Mak Murtrey he'd known then had a knack for communicating his meticulous plans in an understandable fashion; a required skill considering how often he relied on others to help him execute his schemes. But was there anything of that Mak left? Were they dealing with a broken husk containing all the huntsman's skills but none of his merits? Cole wanted to believe otherwise, as surely Master Time would have conveyed some form of warning if Mak was truly as unstable as he feared. Right?

Cole had read the stories, the ones the Temples kept hidden in their archives, of paladins who'd gone rotten. Despite being an agent the gods could influence the world through, paladins were also something of a blind spot for the Pantheon. They were such an investment on both a personal and metaphysical level that the gods often struggled to condemn them until it was far too late. Was this one of those cases? Master Time had put Mak in the situation that broke him. Did he now hope to put him back together with Cole's help? But what if that wasn't possible?

Not for the first time, Cole was frustrated with how little his god spoke to him. Master Time was known to be a fairly silent deity, preferring to communicate through coincidences and portents. Yet, Natalie had spoken with him even before bearing a stigma, and while Mak had always been private about it, Cole had witnessed him"praying" in a rather conversational way more than once. Did Master Time simply think Cole didn't need such direct influence, or did Cole's own nature force his god to keep him at arm's length?

Such concerns would have to wait, though, as he'd reached the debris. For now, all he could do was carry on with what scraps of the plan remained, and hope his worst fears weren't realized. But, even if they were, Natalie's wolves would alert them, and buy Kit enough time to cast a certain spell he'd been working on

Speaking of Natalie, her voice helped banish the last of Cole's grim musings. "Hey, do you smell that?"

She stood maybe two meters behind Cole, and was looking at the building's ruined front while sniffing the air like a curious feline. "It… it kind of reminds me of the pig farm."

Eyes widening, Cole spun back to the ruins and drove Requiem's tip into the rubble pile, and channeled a surge of killing cold into the debris. Icy vapor steamed out from the slope of debris like an inverted hot spring. A second later, hunks of masonry and flakes of plaster exploded forward, as five shapes erupted from the ruin.

Leaping backwards, Cole swung wildly at the nearest shape while blinking away the dust in his eyes. His blow struck flesh, and an ear-aching shriek cut through the plaza. Wincing from the noise and the grit obscuring his vision, Cole barely noticed one of the other shapes was lunging for him. It was already past his halberd's guard, so instead, he hammered up with his fist, punching the second attacker right in its gut and sending it sprawling away from him. Before the rest of the foiled ambushers could pounce, five spectral wolves flowed around him and drove the enemy back with snapping jaws and echoing growls.

After finally escaping the debris cloud and wiping the dust from his eyes, Cole found Natalie. Blade in hand, eyes flicking from him to the bell tower, she asked. "What's happening?"

As the plume of dust kicked up by the ambushers' emergency finally settled, Cole gestured at the newly resolved figures, all perched on the building's half-collapsed roof. "Keep that odor in your memory. It's the smell of demons."

Now, having gotten close to the demons, Cole could also smell the strange hollow stink of Hellkyn. A stink born of a Mundane mind trying to interpret the presence of something from the Beyond. But, at the very least, the odor's faintness spoke to these demons being unestablished in this side of reality. They were faint shades of malice compared to the ancient evil he's faced beneath Vindabon.

Scuttling back and forth on the roof's edge, the demons hissed and clicked at the growling wolves below them. Hunched over and grey-skinned, the hellkyn were roughly dwarf or goblin size, and at cursory inspection appeared to be hybrids of humanoid and bat features. But the more one looked, the less this initial impression held up. Each demon's body was mutated in some horrific way.

One had an extra clawed wing growing from its back like some deformed sail. Another's head was actually two heads badly fused into one, with a single monocular eye staring out from a conjoined forehead. Nearly all of them possessed additional mouths, drooling, malformed things that stuck out of bellies, armpits, necks, and groin. Lines of pus-shaded slobber leaked from these chimeric maws, splattering the dusty rooftop beneath them. Another commonality between them was the red-hot lines that ran through their flesh like heated copper wire, each giving off a seething vapor as warped tissue struggled against the darkness inhabiting it.

If Cole had to guess, the lines correlated to major nerves in the hellkyn's distorted anatomy. Which made sense, considering what he suspected his foes to be. These were rabies demons, but thankfully weak ones inhabiting weaker hosts. Born of the suffering that disease caused, the hellkyn were vicious exaggerations crammed into bat flesh; flesh that was mutating and degrading. A process that hadn't been helped by having a building dropped on them, as each of the demons sported numerous lacerations that dripped oily blood; one was even missing a leg, and another, with a partially caved-in skull, was frantically chewing on a winged arm. Not all of them had survived Mak's blast.

Before the stand off between ghost wolves and demon bats could escalate into violence, another party lit the match. A streak of silver, trailed by frost, cut through the air almost too fast for Cole to see and struck the largest demon right in its flabby belly. The hellkyn tumbled backwards, but caught itself on the roof's lip with one clawed limb. Yet just as it started to pull itself up, the demon let out a surprised chirp and its lower torso violently exploded. Ripped in half by the blast, its top section tumbled off the roof and rolled to Cole's feet with a series of wet slaps. The terrible wound it had suffered was colored shades of grey, the flesh having been flash frozen with enough force to make the body rip itself apart.

Cole didn't even spare a glance behind him; he knew Mak's handiwork when he saw it. Where Cole himself was developing a knack for channeling a large amount of power into himself, his former mentor had always specialized in infusing small but stable paladin spells into objects. In this case, it had been a crossbow bolt, one packed with a highly focused charge of cold. Water expands when it freezes, and flesh is, by its nature, very damp, so if enough blood and other bodily fluids turned into ice near-instantly, the results were spectacularly messy.

For a single beat, the demon bats stared at their destroyed kindred, then they leapt down at Cole. Their numerous maws sprayed showers of fetid drool as they descended. Cole swung his hand through the air before him like he was swatting a bug, and a cloud of frost billowed out, turning the worst of the spittle into flecks of ice that clattered harmlessly off him and the plaza floor. Those droplets beyond his spell struck the polished stone and started melting holes in it.

Grasping onto Requiem with both hands, he swung up at the nearest demon bat, but it flapped its wings, sending it shooting up and to the side, just in time for a ghost wolf to leap up and sink phantom jaws into one of the bat's legs. Another bat landed nearby and charged towards Cole on all fives, its oversized mouth snapping and slobbering as it came. Using the momentum of his earlier missed blow, Cole spun about and brought Requiem's haft up to bear, catching the demon right in the face. The blow shattered teeth, tore skin, and knocked one of the creature's eyes straight from the socket.

Sparing a glance at Natalie, Cole found her guarding his back, while directing her wolves to tear apart the bat they'd caught, and harry the rest. Noting her silver-tipped blade and the magic flowing through him, Cole had a sudden idea. He'd been trying to master the purer form of paladin magic, Deborah taught him, but so far his current foe didn't require that more focused and currently specialized type of spellcraft. He could afford to experiment, to be a little sloppy while figuring out how to balance the different forms of his power. The first of those forms was one he'd practically stumbled onto in the prelude to facing the Buried Knight.

Holding one hand before him, two fingers raised up as if pointing at the sky, he focused on old memories and experiences. First, he remembered the time he'd gotten rabies. It's ugly symptoms, as his unnatural body let him die quickly, and return to life perfectly cured. Holding onto that moment where lethal sickness was replaced by perfect health, he channeled metaphysical cold into his fingers and daubed them with the memory. Next, he conjured the vivid memories of Vindabon's quick and decisive reaction to the screaming plague, and let it freeze into a new layer on his fingers. Then finally, he called upon the joy and pride he'd seen in Isabelle when she'd found the plague's cure.

With all three frozen memories coating his hand, he ran his fingers along the side of Requiem's blade, leaving a trail of frost that sparkled strangely, with unnatural colors and patterns. Once his halberd was coated in this most unique of poisons, he gestured to Natalie, "Hold out your blade."

She raised an eyebrow, but did as he requested, letting him smear the remainder of the crystalized recollections on her shortsword. As she stared at the blades flat, now glistening with holy hoarfrost, Cole offered a quick explanation. "Now, our weapons will maim them spiritually, and maybe even kill them."

Natalie's lips quirked in a small smile, and without a word, she pounced on the bat caught by her wolves. Silver and memory-coated steel plunged into the demon's throat, and the blade fulfilled its purpose. Following behind her, Cole attacked one of the more cautious bats who'd tried to sneak up on her while she was distracted. Requiem struck right in the armpit, cleaving the demon's limb off and sending a splatter of corrupted blood onto the dusty ground. But blood wasn't all that came from the wound; tendrils of shadow vapors slithered out of the injury, their tips dissipating with a sizzling hiss. The demon had been injured both in flesh and spirit.

Beady bulging eyes stared at the wound for a second, then the bat started violently convulsing. The seething red lines within the mutant bat were trying to pull themselves free. It wasn't a pretty process, as inflamed tissue split and roiled from the demon's efforts. If Cole had to guess, the rabies demon was sealed into this stolen body by its summoner, a method that, if done correctly, offered excellent control over the hellkyn. But now, when facing true death, the demon was willing to risk ripping itself out of the body and suffering whatever backlash its bindings might inflict.

Cole didn't give the demon the chance to struggle. He drove Requiem into its heart and pulled upward, splitting it from ribcage to skull. As the mutant carrion bat died, the demon within unraveled. Streams of fell magic flowed out of hellkyn and into the local Aether. Untethered and unsupported, these pieces of demon melted into the city's miasma like a chamber pot's contents entering a polluted river. Cole grimaced at this; he'd killed the demon, but he hadn't fully cleansed its taint. It would take some time for him to master the bane freezing technique. But odds were, Harmas would give him plenty of opportunities to practice.

Wrenching Requiem free of the demon's half-frozen skull, Cole looked up to find Natalie in the process of driving her blade into a crippled demon's windpipe, as her wolves fought each other for places to bite onto the unlucky hellkyn. The demon Cole had struck earlier, the one with the dangling eye, was creeping around the mauling, clearly looking for an opportunity to strike Natalie. Before Cole could move to intercept the demon, a second silver bolt cut through the air and hit it right in the side of the skull. The paladin flinched as frozen brain matter, blood, and spittle splattered the plaza.

After wiping a bit of the debris from his armor before it could properly stick to him, Cole stabbed Requiem into the demon's headless body and collected Mak's crossbow bolt. Much as Cole expected, the extra strike with his halberd into the mutant carrion bat did nothing, as the demon had already been banished; still better to try and wound the thing on its way out than let it escape uncontested.

Now, only a single demon was left, the one with the fused heads. Having seen what had been done to its fellows, it had scampered back to the ruined building and climbed to the roof. As for why it didn't flee elsewhere, the bindings on it had to be responsible. Perched like a particularly wretched gargoyle, the demon started wretching violently, its body gathering up corrupted drool to launch at them. A fist-sized gob of filth sailed through the air towards Cole, but he side-stepped it easily.

As he eyed the new pot hole created by the gobbet, Natalie came to his side. After flicking her blade clean of hellish viscera, she gestured at the sole survivor. "Should I climb up after it?"

"No need," replied Cole, prepared to hurl Mak's bolt at the demon. Putting all his monstrous strength into the throw, he sent the length of wood and silver-dipped steel right into the bat demon's torso. There was no explosion of cold this time, the magic having been spent, but the bolt still got stuck in one of the creature's lungs, which would keep it from spitting effectively. But that was ultimately a nice bonus, to what Cole really intended. Yanking his hand backwards, he triggered the enchanted stone on his wrist. Telekinesis pulled the bolt and the body it was stuck into off the roof and down onto the rubble. Before the demon could recover, Requiem took its head.

Looking around at the five destroyed demons, Cole said. "Let's find those vampires."

Natalie stared down at the trio of rats before her. Fur rendered grey by the crumbled plaster, the rodents were small and skittish, but still answered her questions. Well, perhaps question wasn't quite accurate, as she was actually rooting around in their memories. These three rats were exemplars of their kind, having persisted in and around the plaza market their entire lives; surviving vermin catchers, cats, dogs, the plague, the ghouls, and even the carrion bats. In part, this survival could be credited to the near encyclopedic knowledge of these few acres of Harmas, a knowledge now at Natalie's disposal.

She'd called upon these three in hopes of locating the bell tower's basement, to save her and Cole the effort of digging fruitlessly through the rubble. But to her surprise, the trio's memories reported a complete lack of any such hidey hole. There was no basement, no cellar, not even a sewer connection; the building was completely above ground. Which the more Natalie thought about it, made sense, as a tower that big would need a sturdy foundation. Still, it left the location of the vampire's lair undiscovered.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Reaching down to the dusty plaza floor, Natalie coaxed the three rodents up her arm. Lifting the limb up, she examined the trio and found herself smiling. As a human, she'd loathed rats and mice, with the zeal common to any who worked with food and cleanliness. But now, as a vampire, she found an odd appreciation for these hardy rodents. Their beady eyes and twitching noses were actually rather cute, especially when she could sense the emotions and thoughts behind each little gesture. The rats were shockingly intelligent, with a simple but well-developed sense of camaraderie and inquisitiveness.

Rodents in hand, she started clambering up the bell tower's collapsed front, heading for the gash Mak's bomb put in the structure. With every step over piled debris, the air grew noticeably cooler, and the sound of shifting wreckage became clearer. Cole stood atop the section of bell tower that had collapsed onto the guard station's roof and was using a mix of preservation, entropy, telekinesis, and his own strength to move the rubble.

Glancing up from his effort, and then doing a double take upon seeing the rats perched on her, Cole asked. "Any luck?"

"They say the building lacks anything underground, and I'm inclined to believe them."

It said an awful lot about the life the two of them shared that Cole didn't doubt the testimony of vermin. Instead, he asked. "Do they know anywhere else they might be hiding? Another building around the plaza? Somewhere more subtle?"

After a moment of memory sifting, Natalie shook her head. "From what I can discern, the rats were only avoiding the bell tower. They saw too many other rats never come back from it, and a few more that did come back different."

Probing a little deeper, she plucked on more primal experiences, flashes of sensory information, and animal intuition that drove split-second decisions. The rats had felt something in the tower, a presence both terrible and alluring, like a baited trap. This was different from the blind terror any hint of the bat demons evoked in them. No, whatever had attracted and repulsed the rats in equal measure reminded them of Natalie. Well, at least in part, as when Natalie called out to the plaza's resident rodents, these three found her much more appealing than what hid within the bell tower itself. A strange compliment for sure, but one she'd take over a direct comparison to their quarry.

"I'm more certain now, the vampires are somewhere in the tower," Natalie muttered as the flashes of foreign memory faded.

Letting out a weary breath, Cole turned back to the debris and then looked up towards the shattered spire of the bell tower. "I'd hoped to avoid going inside, just in case the damned thing finished collapsing with us inside."

Natalie started to wince at that notion, but then an idea struck her. "You know, with your magic and strength, you might just be able to hold it up if it does fall on us."

After a moment's silent consideration, Cole started climbing up over the debris mound and into the torn-open tower. Natalie set her three informants down and then followed after him. Much of the structure's lower half was standing, resembling a tree that had been split by lightning then hollowed out by decay. A steep ramp of debris offered a precarious path down into the tower's bottom, and Natalie danced down the stable portions, while Cole managed a controlled slide to the cracked floor. The floor in question was remarkably intact, as most of the tower's bulk had fallen onto the guard station.

Standing at the ramp's bottom, Natalie stared up at the structure's inner walls. Her vampire eyes picked out thousands of tiny scratches where so many carrion bats had once clambered and crawled. In contrast, her vampire nose tried desperately to ignore the discolored splotches also adorning the walls. Cole's crunching footfalls pulled her attention down to ground level, and she watched as he cautiously stepped between bits of masonry and splintered wood. He was approaching a large dusty mound close to the tower's center, halberd at the ready. Natalie joined him, shortsword drawn.

"What is it?" she asked, pointing the blade at the meter-and-a-half hillock.

In answer, Cole brought Requiem's hooked side to the mound and started scratching off the layer of stone and plaster dust covering it. Sheets of loosely stuck powder sloughed off the object, revealing dented verdigris that shone dully in the few rays of sunlight coming through the tower's broken top. It was the bell tower's bell. Having fallen from the now missing belfry, it had somehow landed here intact. Well, mostly intact, as Cole finished uncovering the huge bronze instrument, an ugly chip in its bottom rim became visible.

After taking a moment to examine his handiwork, Cole looked around and muttered. "There should be two of them."

"Could it be under the debris or-" Natalie paused as something occurred to her. Going to the bell they'd found, she peered at its top and the knot of old rope still tied there. The rope had been cut cleanly. Slowly looking down, she examined the myriad dents marking the bell, many of which allowed flickers of fresh bronze to find sunlight. Then, on the floor, there were no cracks radiating out from the bell's rim, but there was a collection of debris, some bearing smears of verdigris. The bell had been on the ground before the tower was destroyed.

As realization grew like burgeoning fire inside of her, Natalie looked towards Cole, who was prodding an odd lump on the far side of the ramp. The paladin stuck his weapon's beak into a crack in the mound, and with a grunt of effort, he levered up a section of thick bronze. Natalie came over and stood beside Cole as they looked down into the broken second bell. Part of the tower had smashed the bronze object's top, knocking it on its side and cracking it like an egg. Inside the now pried-open bell lay a pile of soot-stained bones and scorched cloth.

Cole and Natalie craned their necks up to the tower's remaining structure and traced a shaft of sunlight down to where the bell lay. In half a whisper, Natalie asked. "That's all it takes?"

"Yes," Cole replied with a nod. " The vampire couldn't wake up in the day without help. So a little sunlight through a crack in the bell burned it to death. Mak's right, this is the easiest way to kill a vampire."

"Which is a problem since we told him we wanted to capture these two."

"It is."

After a moment of grim contemplation, Natalie added. "Neither Yara nor my wolves have seen him do anything yet."

Cole slowly forced some difficult words from his lips. "We need to keep our guard up around him."

"Well, with the bat problem solved, maybe I can go grab Deborah, Mina, and the others," offered Natalie. "I'd feel a bit better with them watching our backs, even if they're pissed we ran off."

Cole grunted his agreement, then gestured at the intact bell. "Taking the power of whoever is inside that should make getting them easier."

There was a note of grim resignation in his tone. He didn't like the idea of Natalie committing Molek, but necessity was ever a cruel mistress. Personally, she was finding the prospect more and more appealing now that the Reaper's taint was gone. The initial rush of strength and pleasure wasn't just exhilarating, it was empowering. Riding that wave, she'd torn apart monsters by the bushel and saved Pantheon knows how many lives. But now that she was getting better at tapping into the Alukah curse, Molek was more than a temporary boost; it was a long-term investment. With every wretched leech she consumed, she gained strength and knowledge. Just how much Molek would it take for her to challenge the true elite of the Duchies?

Pushing this grim little fantasy aside, Natalie approached the other bell alongside Cole. Squatting down, he ran a hand along the cracked rim and muttered. "I don't know if I can lift this, and even if I could, the sunlight would kill our quarry."

"Mak said the vampires were a Moroi, Strigoi couple, right?" Natalie mused while prodding the crack with the toe of her boot. "Then I imagine they could both turn into something that could fit through gaps like this."

"A mouse for one, a fog bank for the other," replied Cole. Looking up at her, he added. "Could you do either?"

"No, or not easily. I'm still a bit iffy on transformations of either kind."

If push came to shove, Natalie could maybe use the skills of her previous vampire victims to solve this problem. But she worried about what might happen if the malice her curse unleashed was allowed to comingle with the mania brought on by Molek. They'd need to try other options before giving that one any real consideration.

Just then, such an option made itself known through the scratching of tiny claws of unstable rubble. Glancing back up at the rubble ramp, Natalie found the three rats scampering down towards them.

"What's wrong with the rodents?" asked Cole while brandishing his weapon at the trio.

Kneeling down, Natalie reached out to the approaching trio psychically and was greeted with a burst of panicked emotions. A threat was coming, and for some bizarre reason, the rodents had come to warn her. No, not so much warn her, the more she filtered through their thoughts, the clearer it became they'd come seeking protection. Natalie was more than a little befuddled by this, so she dug deeper into their minds and found something a little surprising. Just as she could sense the rats, they could feel her power. To them, she seemed a storm of shadow and blood wearing the face of a human. But more than that, this titan of shadows, this paragon of all they were and all they feared, had been kind to them. She did not devour their blood and souls, nor had she broken their minds to use them as disposable pawns. All she'd done was call out to any rat who would listen, ask some questions, then let them go.

To these three rats, she seemed a goddess, a great and terrible deity, who might just be kind enough to save them from the oncoming swarm. For the reason they'd come to her was the ghouls, the hundreds and hundreds of ghouls that were steadily approaching the bell tower plaza. Mak's explosion had indeed caught all kinds of attention.

Natalie relayed this to Cole, who cursed and jabbed the bell with Requiem. "By the time they've dispersed, it'll be nightfall, and our quarry will flee. If we're going to do this, we need to do it quickly."

Glancing down at the rats, Natalie realized the easiest option before her would be to just consume them and use their soul hollows to turn into a rat and slip into the bell. But that felt like a betrayal of both the rodents and herself. Or at least it would be if she forced it upon them…

Reaching out through her link to the rodents, she made her offer, carrying with it as much information about bone-bound familiars as she could. Two of the rats recoiled from the deal, but the third, a large male with grey around his muzzle, agreed. Picking up her newest familiar, Natalie turned from the abstainers and consumed the old rat. In the process, she took more than the rodent's life; she plucked at its memories, its perspective, and within her mindscape, molded them into a small statue to join her cabinet of psychic curiosities. After her twin prizes settled into her psyche and soul, she got to work, using her claws to do the messy part of the ritual.

Holding the rune-marked rat head in one hand, she chanted its new name, a title she'd read in a history book. "Triarch! Triarch! TRIARCH!"

Bloody flames bloomed in her hand, and she let the defleshed rat skull fall to the ground. But before it struck the dirty stone, phantom bones of glowing red grew from its neck, and an envelope of ectoplasm solidified around its new body. Unlike her previous familiars, Triarch's form was slightly blurry, the ectoplasm appearing less like a simulacrum of living flesh and more a faint cloud swirling about its bones. Which, Natalie thought, might be an actually useful side-effect of the corners she'd cut in the ritual. As she'd needed to spare some of Triarch's soul hollow for other uses.

The newly dead and reanimated rat looked up at her for a moment before scampering over to its colleagues. As the other two rodents came to grips with Triarch's new form, Natalie got busy using what she'd taken from the rat to finagle a new transformation. When she turned into a rat before it had been Isabelle who handled the process, meaning her experience with this was not quite first or second-hand. Still, with the Triarch's memories and part of his soul hollow at her disposal, she was hopeful it would work.

"I'm going to transform into a rat, head into the bell, and consume the vampire. Can you protect me until I'm done?" She said to Cole. But before he could answer, Natalie added almost sheepishly. "And them as well?" while pointing at the two surviving rats.

Cole let out a noise between a sigh and a snort. "Don't take too long, and don't let the Molek make you do something stupid."

As her partner clambered up the rubble ramp, ready to hold off any incoming ghouls, Natalie took a deep breath, then quickly exhaled the fetid air, and a cloud of dark red mist flowed free from her mouth and nose. The shadowy fog grew into a small cloud and started swirling around her until she was utterly swallowed by it. Eyes shut, ignoring the red tears leaking from them, Natalie called upon all she'd learned and all she'd taken.

The cloud started to squeeze her, not enough to be painful, but enough to be uncomfortable. Trying to ignore the constant claustrophobic pressure, she immersed her mind in what it meant to be a rat, to be a living shadow that scurried between patches of darkness, always on the move, always looking for the next meal. The more she delved into Triarch's memories, the more she understood why rats were among the creatures kindred to vampires. They may not be fearsome nocturnal predators, but they were pragmatic survivors who feared the light.

Slowly, the line between herself and the red fog thinned and then vanished. The squeezing sensation ended, and now the crimson mist started to condense into new flesh. As the last of the vapors congealed onto her as thick black fur, she opened her eyes and stared up at a world turned giant. Quickly coming to grips with a rat's senses, she scuttled along the debris-strewn floor, passing by pebbles that had become boulders, and through dust thick as snow.

Upon reaching the cracked bell rim, she poked her bewhiskered head into the gap, sniffing at its contents. Old blood, tarnished bronze, and another odd, earthy stink filled her nose. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness within, she made out a curled-up form at the center of the bell. A goblin, small even by its kind's standards, sat wrapped around the dangling clapper, trapped in deep torpor. The vampire was painfully thin and clad in stained, torn garments that might have once been fashionable. Judging by the garb's make and the shape of the goblin's face, this was Feodosiya, the Moroi mind magic expert.

Emboldened by this discovery, Natalie wriggled into the bell, her body squeezing in a profoundly unnerving way to slip through the small crack. Once she was free of the entrance, more light could shine in, and faint glimmers caught her focus. Sparkling specks were marking the inside of the bell's structure. After forcing a little blood into her eyes to refine rodent night vision into something supernatural, Natalie understood what she was looking at.

The bronze interior was covered in interlocking runes and sigils of unnerving complexity. Even looking at some of the larger symbols for more than a few moments actually made her head start to hurt. Wherever two of the symbols overlapped, a polished gemstone had been embedded into the bronze, giving the whole array the feel of some twisted night sky filled with blasphemous constellations.

Sniffing at one of the lower symbols, Natalie understood they were painted using a mix of clay and blood (both human and vampire). While she wasn't a shaman by any stretch of the imagination, it seemed a good guess that the clay was from the Alidon River's banks. That seemed the exact sort of symbolic goatshit magic liked. She'd found the spell responsible for the psychic barrier inside Harmas; now all she had to do was deal with its caster.

Natalie cautiously approached the slumbering vampire, expecting the leech to wake up and attack her any moment now. So, fur standing up all over her new body, she crept up onto the goblin's dress and clambered up the sleeping body. While climbing, she noticed the vampire's thin, six-fingered hands were wrapped around the clapper's throat with a literal death grip. Where cold flesh met worn bronze, the runes were particularly dense, forming into patterns that reminded her both of blood vessels and ripples in water. Was the vampire doing something to the spell even as she slept? Well, it ultimately mattered not; both monster and working would meet their end in mere moments.

Having finally perched herself on the torpor-bound vampire's shoulder, Natalie stared at its exposed throat and felt a rush of desire flare within her. There was no apprehension in her anymore, merely a mix of hunger and spite. This monster had helped murder an entire city; nothing could ever right the scales, but using the vampire's power to avenge Harmas seemed a step in the right direction.

The Alukah lunged forward and bit into her latest victim's neck with sharp rodent teeth. Black blood and darker power spurted into the Seventh's mouth like water into a leaky ship. Her worm tail thrashed back and forth as Molek brought forth incredible pleasure. The mouldering fabric of the dying vampire's dress sagged inwards as dead flesh turned to ash. Soon, the greater monster sat atop the remains of the lesser, a pile of bones and stained fabric, all that now remained of Feodosiya; well, except for what the Alukah had consumed.

Natalie fought to contain the spasms of energy and pleasure filling her. Her mind bounced between thoughts and notions like oil on a frying pan. Yet through great effort, she managed to focus on one particularly oddity, a sensation felt not through flesh but soul. Something all around her was snapping. Immaterial strings were breaking by the dozens, each a thread in a spider's web, a web whose weaver lay dead at Natalie's paws. The psychic blocking spell was coming apart.

Leaping down from the dusty bones, mind heady with pride and pleasure, she headed for the gap in the bell. After squeezing through the opening just as the last threads came apart, Natalie was greeted by the uncanny stench and constant groans of ghouls. It was time to put this stolen power to use.

Red fog swirled around her rodent form, and with a sensation like taking a deep breath, her body swelled back to its normal size, and the mist reformed into her proper shape. Looking around the ruined tower, she spotted the three rats just as they frantically ran up to her. Through her link with Triarch, she felt his fear, so she offered soothing thoughts and a promise to protect them from the ghouls. But to her surprise, Triarch's mind didn't calm at all, for the ghouls were the least of their problems; something else was coming.

A distant rhythmic sound caught Natalie's ears then, a familiar drumbeast that felt alien and unsettling inside the dead city.

Hoofbeats, fast hoofbeats.

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