The Third Known Death of Ephesia of Skoura

Got another Ephesia story for you! This story takes place around sixty years before Mage Errant, and two years after Fool’s Silver. It runs a bit over 5500 words.

----------------------------

Archmage Gantzen Friss, protector of the Garnet Citadel and Alikean border lord, appeared to be deciding whether to be infuriated, enraged, or wrathful. Not that he was probably thinking about it in such clear terms, but his servants had long since identified, labeled, categorized, and taxonomized each and every one of his many moods. 

There was significant debate among them whether he had two emotional states that weren’t some variant of anger or three. Most of the debate centered around whether asleep counted as a mood.

Hana couldn’t particularly care whether it was a mood or not, so long as she could work night shift as often as possible.

Gantzen’s anger this time was a bit more pronounced than his usual background level of irritation. It was, in all probability, the angriest he’d been since he’d received news that a caravan he’d invested in had been lost to a marauding dragon last week. Thankfully, still not as bad as when he’d found out his niece eloped with a traveling musician. 

The target of Gantzen’s anger sat, seemingly unconcerned by the archmage’s presence, right behind the mage’s desk. She was quite casually flipping through the papers atop the desk, looking quite bored. 

The intruder was a severe looking young woman of average height, with a truly astonishing number of bracelets, earrings, and necklaces, all in silver. 

Hana edged farther off to one side of the room, and cursed having walked into the room in front of Gantzen. The instant the mage was out of the doorway and not paying attention, she’d be right out the door. She wanted none of this.

Gantzen turned redder and redder— enraged, it was looking like— but before he could start yelling, the woman spoke up.

“Archmage Gutsen Fuss, I presume?” she said.

“It’s Gantzen Friss,” the archmage hissed.

“That’s what I said,” the woman agreed, still reading through the papers. “Archmage Gutter Fleas.”

Hana pressed back against the stone wall even further. The Archmage had killed people for far less than that insult. 

Despite her fear, Hana had to struggle not to giggle.

“You know what, Archmage Glutton Farts?” the intruder asked. “You’ve stolen a lot more money from the capitol’s taxes than I even expected. You’re filling your pockets deep, aren’t you?”

At that, Hana’s blood ran cold. If the archmage really was stealing, he’d kill Hana himself just for overhearing. He’d…

With a bellow, Gantzen lifted his hand, lightning crackling above his fingers.

Almost casually, the intruder lifted her hand and pointed it at the archmage. Her jewelery melted in an instant, and shot forward like a lance.

The lightning above Gantzen’s hand collapsed into actinic sparks, and he collapsed, the thin metal rod pulling out of his throat as he fell. The liquid metal lance drew back to the intruder, reforming as large, chunky jewelery.

“Pity,” the woman said. “I still had several more childish nicknames lined up.”

Hana fainted.

-------------------------------------------------------

Ephesia finished tucking the balled linens beneath the servant’s head, then exited the store-room and strode down the hall. She’d moved the poor woman far enough away from Gantzen’s office that she wouldn’t get implicated in the assassination, at least.

Well, certain others might just consider it a murder, not an assassination. Strictly speaking, Kanderon had ordered her to keep Gantzen alive if possible, and just to retrieve the package. 

Gantzen, however, had been a truly pustulent ruler, far too ready to abuse his power. Ephesia had just made sure that it hadn’t been possible to keep the man alive.

Archmage, her ass. The old bastard hadn’t been in a proper battle in decades. He’d actually been making hand gestures to cast spells, like a poorly trained apprentice.

Ephesia trailed her hand along the wall. The Garnet Citadel wasn’t made out of garnet, or carved out of a single colossal garnet, like some of the more foolish rumors made out. Instead, the pale, wave-patterned rock of the citadel was filled with tiny, dull garnets, like currants in a pastry. 

She resisted the urge to check her storage tattoo to make sure the package was still there. It was a bad habit of hers, one she was trying to break.

The urge to check the bundle of papers she’d also appropriated in addition to the package was even stronger, but it was even more important she not give into that one.

Thin lines of fool’s silver rippled and crawled across the walls, ceiling, and floor near her. Several shot forwards, crawling ahead around corners. Ephesia cast her vision forwards through them, checking intersecting hallways for guards and mages in her way. Her scrying through the fool’s silver with her light affinity heavily distorted the image, but not to the point of uselessness. Long practice helped her parse the images the trails of liquid metal brought to her.

Unlike a quicksilver mage, fool’s silver tended to wet surfaces they touched, leaving a residue behind, unless Ephesia accounted for it with her spellforms. Another disadvantage of a fool’s silver affinity. 

Even the scrying method she used was more effective when used by quicksilver mages who had the same combination of affinities as she did. It often seemed like nearly everything she could do was an inferior version of a quicksilver spell.

On the other hand, quicksilver mages universally died before their thirties, poisoned by the metal they controlled, unless they almost entirely foreswore its use. That did tend to make up for fool’s silver’s advantages.

The hallways, however, remained thankfully empty, most of the fort’s inhabitants long since asleep.

As she walked, she began pulling out more and more chunks of fool’s silver from her storage tattoo, melting them with a cantrip, then coating herself with fool’s silver. It took more chunks than one might expect— fool’s silver, strangely enough, actually took up more volume in solid form than liquid form, which was the reverse from most metals and other solids, save for water. 

She could alter that expansion and contraction with a spell, but she didn’t usually bother with that— there wasn’t much point to doing so.

Ephesia had almost reached her exit when the fort's bells started ringing.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Ephesia sprinted down the last stretch of hallway and clambered out the window she’d entered by. This particular keep window was one of those architectural oddities that seemed to crop up in every building above a certain size, where a corner and a brace recessed the window out of visibility of most of the castle wall, with a narrow chimney leading down to the ground. 

While she could easily magically conceal herself, one of the first lessons taught regarding stealth by the Librarians Errant was to always be redundant when concealing oneself. There was something of a constant arms race in magical concealment and detection, and you could never entirely count on magical means concealing your presence. Mundane methods were just as important— magic might be more effective in many ways, but neglecting your other capabilities was foolishness.

The outer walls of Fort Garnet’s keep and walls had been magically polished to mirror smoothness, with seams invisible to the naked eye. Standard practice for most stone forts. Ephesia suspected that there would be delicate spellforms grown just under the surface of the stone as well, that would trigger an alarm if a stone mage tried to reshape handholds. 

Ephesia simply glided down the walls. 

As she finished wrapping most of her body in fool’s silver, more of the silvery liquid flooded onto the walls from her hands. It rippled outwards, like a spiderweb made of ocean waves, then formed a simple handhold in the center for her to grip. As she placed her feet against the walls, the process repeated itself, forming footholds. 

The fool’s silver coating her body and clothes, interacting with her light affinity, shifted colors, crudely mimicking the patterns of the walls. She could do a better job than that, but only with an object she was well familiar with. Light affinities in general weren’t the most spectacular at illusions— dream mages were, by and large, their superiors there, having more realistic illusions that took less precise spellform work, as well as requiring less mana use. Anchoring her illusions in the fool’s silver, however, rather than projecting them in the air around her, allowed her to simplify their construction and reduce their mana consumption.

The webs of fool’s silver slowly crept down the walls as the alarm bells rang and people began to shout. While the walls might be mirror smooth to human hands, to a liquid, they were as rough as ever, providing countless holds. The seemingly invisible seams acted as quite effective anchors. 

Ephesia withdrew her fool’s silver from the walls as she reached the ground, and turned to survey the grounds. If someone was close-by, they might be able to notice her, but from a distance, she should blur into the stone behind her quite effectively. 

It was around five hundred feet to the outer walls, but the grounds were hardly empty dirt— there was plenty of cover along the way. Ephesia began to glide across the grounds, keeping her body relaxed and motionless as the fool’s silver rippled beneath her feet, carrying her forwards. She made sure to keep her pace unhurried— slow, steady movements where the least likely to be noticed. Faster movements and changes in speed were much more likely to be noticed, even while camouflaged. 

About halfway across the grounds, behind an old wagon with its wheels removed, Ephesia stopped, frowning. Guards were rushing about, but not to the keep— they were rushing to the walls. What’s more, they were readying bows, crossbows, and ballistae, not looking inwards to search for an escaped assassin.

There was also a faint glow rising from beyond the walls.

There was definitely something strange going on.

Ephesia completed her crossing, and ascended the inner wall at another near-blind spot. She carefully poked her head above the edge of the wall, glancing both ways down the path at the top. There were soldiers in either direction, but none were looking her way— all were staring out past the wall.

Ephesia frowned, and glided across the pathway on her belly. She wouldn’t have to try and mimic the soldiers standing on either side with her camouflage that way. She could do that, but it both increased the risk of exposure and used more mana.

She slowly clambered to her feet and looked over the wall.

Where, sitting on the road leading to the front gate, were a pair of hundred and twenty foot-long dragons, lit by burning fields to either side.

“Bollocks,” Ephesia muttered.

-------------------------------------------------

Arric Zhent, Guard-Commander of Fort Garnet, was having an exceptionally bad morning. He’d been woken in the middle of the night by his terrified guardsmen, babbling nonsense about a pair of dragons at the gate.

Unfortunately, it hadn’t been nonsense, and it was followed minutes later by the news that the archmage had been found dead in his study. 

Any other night, and if it had been by natural causes, Arric might have privately celebrated the old man’s death, but there was no way his murder tonight of all nights was a coincidence. The dragons had to have a mole inside the fort.

The dragons hadn’t approached or attacked, yet. They just sat in front of the gates, waiting for dawn, only moving to periodically reignite the fields near them.

Arric muttered to himself, mentally reviewing his resources. He had perhaps a dozen mages of middling quality. A border fort this size should have five times that number, but Gantzen supposedly made up for that. Arric was fairly sure that was inaccurate— Alikea’s Parliament had likely been looking to exile the abrasive mage as far from the capitol as they could, and looking to save a little coin on top of that.

Half the mages he had were stone or wood mages— not really renowned for their dragon-slaying. Two fire mages— next to useless against dragons. Their brewer was a fermentation mage, but fermentation magic was, for obvious reasons, seldom overly useful in combat. There were some notable exceptions, of course, but the brewer was assuredly not one of them.

Really, out of the whole list, only two mages would be particularly useful against a dragon— an artillery mage with an frost affinity, and a mage with twin lightning and shadow affinities. Of course, the artillery mage would likely be only good for one major spell every few hours, like most siege mages, and the other was still young and inexperienced.

Few of the others would be useless, of course— the wood mages would be quite dangerous in combination with their ballistae, the stone mages reinforcing their walls— but none of that made him feel particularly optimistic. 

There were also a few dozen guards and other residents of the forts who knew a spell or two, but nothing that would change the course of the battle. Hell, he knew a small handful of cantrips, including an especially useful water purification one. None of those would change the course of the battle, however.

Things didn’t look good, even if neither dragon was a mage. If they were, well…

As the sun fully crested the horizon, the dragons shook themselves, rising up onto their haunches. The sleek green creatures were clearly siblings, likely from the same clutch. They were lean and vicious looking, with particularly long, tooth-filled snouts.

“You have until noon to surrender,” the dragons said, in perfect sync. “You have until then to leave our new den. Anyone still inside at that time will die.” 

They began circling the castle in opposite directions.

“We will not harm anyone leaving, nor will we pursue.” Their voices stayed in eerie harmony as they passed out of sight of one another around the castle walls.

“We only stay our talons to avoid damaging our new home.”

Arric shuddered. He’d met dragons before, of course— half Parliament by number was draconic, and the overwhelming majority by weight— but something about these two unnerved him. He’d encountered much larger dragons before that didn’t alarm him half so much.

The dragons stopped to either side of the fort, then settled back down and curled their tails around them like cats, staring unblinkingly at the fort.

“Well, this is a pickle, isn’t it, Captain Arric?” an unfamiliar voice said.

-----------------------------------------------------

Ephesia blocked a sword-blow from the surprised captain with a tendril of fool’s silver. 

“That was rude,” Ephesia commented idly. “I’m here to help, after all.”

“Identify yourself,” Captain Arric snapped. 

“No, I don’t think I will,” Ephesia said, examining her fingernails with a deliberate excess of care. She was actually checking to make sure that the wards she’d created around them with lines of fool’s silver were stable and concealed, but it was best not to give those away.

“What do you mean, you’re here to help?” the captain asked, suspicion growing stronger on his face.

“Well, I feel rather responsible for your predicament, since I was the one who assassinated Archmage Grimy Flaps,” Ephesia commented, as though it were obvious.

Predictably, Arric immediately swung his sword at her again. Partway through the motion, however, the blade simply fell apart, like a soggy cracker. Shards of crumbly sword bits sprayed across the walltop.

Ephesia smirked at that. Fool’s silver’s effects on other metals never failed to cheer her— especially when magically accelerated.

“I don’t feel that responsible, of course,” she said. “I doubt Greasy Fork could have taken handled a dragon. Still, it would be rude of me not to help.”

“This is a violation of Alikean sovereignty,” Captain Arric said, “and it will be met with…”

“Mild reprovals and nothing else,” Ephesia interrupted. “Glutto… no, I’ve used that one already. Archmage Gushing Flips was wildly unpopular in the Parliament, and most people will probably consider this an actual favor done for Alikea.”

Arric just glowered at her. 

It was probably for the best that she didn’t mention the fact she’d mostly circumvented her orders, or how many favors Kanderon and the Skyhold council would likely have to burn through to deal with the aftermath.

“Do you want my help with this dragon or not?” Ephesia asked. 

Arric’s glare faded as he thought, then was replaced by a scowl. He might have served an awful, entitled leech like Gantzen Friss, but Ephesia tried not to hold that against him— he seemed to be genuinely concerned with his duties and responsibilities.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” he said, “but there are two dragons out there.”

“Nope,” Ephesia said, cleaning beneath one of her fingernails. “Just one.”

“Are you blind?” Arric demanded. “You can clearly see both of them!”

“I’m not blind, but I am in awe,” Ephesia said. “There aren’t many draconic illusionists, and I’ve only ever heard of one other with skills surpassing this one. Even if our new friend weren’t a dragon, I’m not ashamed to admit he’s a better illusionist than I am.”

“Are you saying that one of the two dragons is an illusion?” Arric said. “That’s absurd.”

Ephesia rolled her eyes. “That’s the easy part. Illusory copies of yourself are one of the easiest illusions to accomplish, given that you can simply use your own body as the spellform’s frame of reference. Even getting the copies to move independently isn’t that impressive— most illusionists can master that with a few years of hard work.”

“But both bodies are leaving footprints and damage,” Arric said. “Are you saying that’s an illusion as well? And how do you know it’s male?”

Ephesia sighed. “Dragons are like birds of prey— females are always larger and bulkier. And yes, I’m saying that the footprints are an illusion. In fact, I’m saying that all of this is an illusion, including you, me, and the castle.”

Arric just blinked at that.

“Our bright green friend has created a massive overlay illusion,” Ephesia continued. “In the same way you’d tie an illusion spellform to yourself as a referent, he’s tied this spellform to the castle and the grounds around it, then perfectly overlaid it over the actual castle. He’s not creating new illusions, he’s manipulating the one he already has.”

Arrick blinked at that. “How… how would you even beat something like that? That would make him unstoppable. He could be controlling everything we see and hear around us.”

Ephesia chuckled at that. “I did wonder why you had so many warts all over your face.”

Arrick’s hand shot up to his wart-free face, then he scowled at her. 

“Sorry, couldn’t resist,” Ephesia said. 

She wasn’t sorry.

“It’s not unbeatable,” Ephesia said. “There are ways to handle any illusionist. First, we need to figure out what sort of illusionist he is.”

“Aren’t illusionists just light mages?” Arric asked.

“They’re the most common sort,” Ephesia said, “and I’m one of them, but they’re far from being the most effective illusionists. They’re fairly easy to spot if you know what you’re looking for and have time to observe in detail— their illusions cast light, and can wreak havoc with shadows. A small, human-sized illusion doesn’t project enough light to be especially noticeable, but an illusion this large would cast a lot of light. They could be a hybrid illusionist that combines a physical affinity with an illusion affinity, like myself, but I think we’d notice if the entire castle and ourselves were coated in a physical substrate for an illusion.”

“So what kind of illusion are we looking at, then?” Arric asked.

“There are about a half-dozen to a dozen other major illusion affinities,” Ephesia said, “and numerous idiosyncratic approaches to illusion. I’ve even heard of one illusionist with cloth and pigment affinities. It’s clearly none of the physical illusion schools, however. It’s clearly not one of the hallucination schools of illusion, either, whether pharmacological or pure hallucination. Those are intensely disorienting. This leaves us with three other major candidates. Dream, mirage, and perceptory.”

One of the dragons stretched and yawned, revealing a mouth full of neatly lined, razor sharp fangs.

“We can rule out perception magic,” Ephesia said. “Perception affinities are extraordinarily rare, and they’re technically flawless. You don’t spot flaws with them, because the illusionist is actually altering what your mind perceives. And since I do see issues with this illusion, I can safely rule that out.”

“Maybe he inserted those flaws deliberately to mess with us,” Arric said.

She grimaced. “Down that line of thought lies madness, Captain. Besides, there’s a major downside to perception magic. Within a decade at the most, usually sooner, perception mages become irrevocably trapped in countless levels of their own illusions, rendered permanently incapable of telling what’s real or not. Most mages with perception affinities deliberately neglect them.”

She tapped her fingers on the ramparts.

“Dream’s a tricky one— like dreams themselves, dream illusions are, by their nature, intensely compelling. Your mind absolutely wants to believe they’re real. There are some other technical issues with them, but simply speaking, I’m not feeling any sort of compulsion like that.” 

“So mirage, then?” the captain asked.

“Mirage,” Ephesia said. “It’s closely related not only to light affinities, but to air and heat affinities as well— it warps and refracts light by creating layers of different temperature in the air. A mirage illusion is far more convincing and effective than true mirages, thanks to their ability to fine-tune the heat layers, and generally more effective than light-based illusions. There are two main ways to spot them— there will be a faint distortion around the edges of the mirage, and any mage with affinity senses related to heat will be able to make out the spell if they know what they’re looking for.”

Ephesia nodded out towards the fields. “You can see the faint mirage distortions about a mile out.”

“Are there any other weaknesses to the method?” Arric asked.

“It takes much longer to set up than most other illusions, and generally needs to be anchored in one spot. This one probably took weeks to prepare. If I had to guess, our new friend hadn’t even finished it entirely— he probably moved early to take advantage of Grunty Phlegm’s death.”

Arric’s face tightened at that, and his fingers drummed on the curled horn at his side. 

“It’s curious,” he said, “how quickly the dragon learned about that.”

“It is, isn’t it?” Ephesia said quietly.

One of Arric’s eyebrows lifted a little at that.

“Mirage illusions are also easier to disrupt than dream or light illusions,” Ephesia continued, in a more normal voice. “Fire, ice, or any other mage with a temperature affinity can do the trick, but… we’ll only get a brief moment of disruption, so we’ll need to act fast. Mirage illusions tend to disrupt light illusions by disrupting the air they pass through, so any light mages you have won’t be particularly useful here. I doubt they’ll be able to even formulate a coherent illusion at all with the mirage up. Wind mages can also disrupt mirages to an extent, but skilled mirage mages can allow all but the most powerful gusts to pass through the mirage with minimal disruption.”

“We don’t have any illusionists at all,” Arric said, “but we do have a few fire mages and an artillery mage with a frost affinity. We’ve also got a battle mage with lightning and shadow affinities.”

Ephesia nodded, her mind racing. Frost would be perfect at disrupting the mirage, even moreso than an ice or fire affinity. Frost mages forced solid objects to expel heat into the air around them, which would wreak havoc on the mirage.

Hitting the dragon with a blast from the frost mage might wound it, but almost certainly wouldn’t kill it. Dragons this large were exceptionally difficult to take down.

But…

“I’ve got a plan, but we’re only going to get one shot at this,” Ephesia said.

------------------------------------

Battling an illusionist was, in many ways, closely related to the con known as a shell game. Since illusions of yourself were the easiest to create, one of the basic tricks of any illusionist was to create multiple copies of themselves. If you want to beat them, you need to know which illusion to hit— just like, in a shell game, you had to guess which moving cup has the ball beneath it. 

The answer was, of course, almost always none of them. Why give your target a chance of choosing right, when you could guarantee that any choice they made would be wrong? The ball wouldn’t be beneath any of the cups, and the illusionist would be invisible.

So no matter which of the two dragons they tried to disrupt the illusion around, Ephesia was sure it would fail. 

So: If Ephesia had been a dragon waiting in illusory ambush, where would she hide itself for maximum advantage?

The answer to that question, of course, was why she was scaling back up the side of Fort Garnet. 

This whole plan was filled with dangerous assumptions and huge risks.

Fighting a dragon in the first place was always a risky proposition, even if they weren’t a mage. Being the size of a building did tend to give one a significant advantage in battle. 

Fighting an invisible dragon with complete illusory control over their surroundings? Even more risky, for obvious reasons.

On top of that, there was the dragon’s voice. Mirage illusions couldn’t project sound, so there were two major possibilities. The ideal possibility, of course, was that the dragon was just using a massively overpowered cantrip to project its voice. Inefficient, but workable. The less ideal possibility was that the dragon also had a sound affinity.

In which case, they were all dead. Not simply because of the sheer offensive power of sound affinities, but because that meant the dragon already knew all their plans. Not even Ephesia’s anti-scrying wards would have stopped a sound mage from listening in.

Ephesia held motionless as she slid up the side of the fort, listening carefully. 

As she approached the top, she slowed, and extended tendrils of fool’s silver up to the top of the tower, infusing them with light illusions. She’d lied by omission when she told Arric that mirage magic disrupted light illusions. They did, of course, but only when the illusions were projected in air.

When they were projected through a solid medium, now that was a different story. 

That, of course, was another complication. She needed to be camouflaged in case the dragon looked down, but visible to soldiers below. She didn’t want to give away her light affinity if she didn’t have to.

The being visible part wasn’t hard all— liquid metal in the daytime made that part easy. Staying concealed, while still being able to see through her strands of fool’s silver, now that was a challenge.

She couldn’t see anything at first, but as her camouflaged metal tendrils crossed the roof, they started picking up telltale mirage distortions concealing something huge.

She smiled, then focused on the chunk of fool’s silver she’d left with Captain Arric.

------------------------------------------- 

Events proceeded rapidly after Arric received the signal.

The liquid metal in his hand- something called fool’s silver, apparently, not quicksilver- cooled and hardened abruptly, expanding in his hand. 

Arric sounded his horn, and the two fire mages, stationed on opposite sides of the fort, detonated bursts of flame above its roof. They weren’t particularly dangerous— they were large, diffuse blasts of flame that would probably barely singe a person.

But they weren’t meant to injure anyone.

The mirage wavered, then collapsed. A huge green form wavered into sight atop the roof. Facing it was a glittering, metallic humanoid form, tendrils of metal stabbing out towards the dragon’s face.

At the same moment, the dragon’s own shadow seemed to erupt in tendrils, wrapping themselves around the great beast.

Neither of which stopped the dragon from closing its jaws around the metallic figure.

The instant it did so, Arric signaled the frost mage.

It normally wasn’t possible to see the spells frost mages cast, except by the effects they left on solid objects, but Arric could visibly see more of the mirage collapse as the wave of cold hurtled forwards, slamming into the dragon’s head.

The dragon’s head seemed to simply… expand, visibly deforming. Its jaw popped open, revealing a mouth full of crumbling metal. The creature held still for a moment, then slumped bonelessly down to the roof.

When she had started explaining her plan to him, he’d expected it to involve her using her metal as a lightning rod for the dragon or somesuch, but apparently fool’s silver conducted electricity quite poorly. 

No, she’d wanted the frost mage instead, for a much more interesting reason. 

Fool’s silver expanded when it froze. Not by much, normally, but as the mysterious mage had explained to him, magic was strongest when emphasizing and exaggerating behaviors that its subject was already prone to.

In this case, making it expand much, much more than usual. Even as weak as solid fool’s silver was, its rapid expansion had, well… pulped the dragon’s head from the inside.

The entire fort and the land around it seemed to waver and shift as the mirage collapsed. Arric just stared stared pensively at the dragon as his troops started cheering.

“Pity about the quicksilver mage,” one of his men said. “She was probably already going crazy from her own fumes, though.”

Arric didn’t bother correcting him about the woman’s affinity.

----------------------------------------------------------

Ephesia had to wait several hours in Arric’s office before he could escape the clean-up efforts.

“My men all think you’re dead,” Arric said, idly glancing at her.

“They were supposed to,” she said.

It hadn’t been Ephesia on the roof at all— she’d stayed camouflaged on the side of the fort, sending up a full-sized fool’s silver puppet to attack the dragon instead. It had used up half her current supply, but if she’d sent a hollow simulacrum, there wouldn’t have been enough to kill the dragon.

That was the trick when fighting illusionists— never pick an option they offered you. Ephesia might be a fairly weak illusionist, but she’d taken out more than her share of other, more powerful illusionists before. She doubted this dragon would be the last, either.

Never assume that you were the only one in a game trying to pull a con.

“You’re still sure there’s a spy among my men?” Arric asked.

Ephesia shrugged. “Not for certain, but it’s the most likely explanation for how the dragon knew about Gurkle Funk’s death.”

Arric winced again.

“Why’d you serve that piece of trash, anyhow?” Ephesia asked. “He was a power-mad petty tyrant.”

The captain sighed. “Not like I had much choice. I could leave and be tried as a deserter, I could just follow orders and betray my own conscience, or I could stay and do my best to mitigate the damage he did. I don’t know how much I succeeded, but I hope things didn’t go quite as badly as they could have if I hadn’t.”

Ephesia frowned at the answer, but shifted the spike of fool’s silver forming beneath her arm back into her storage tattoo.

With any luck, Arric would get the command of Fort Garnet and do a much better job then Gantzen Friss.

If he didn’t do a better job, Ephesia might have to pay him another visit.

“Part of me really hopes that the dragon’s arrival was purely coincidence,” Arric said.

“That would be one huge coincidence,” Ephesia said. “Weirder things have happened, though.”

“Try not to be seen on your way out,” he said. “As far as anyone else is concerned, you died on the roof. That’s what my reports will read as well.”

Ephesia winked at him as she strode towards the window. Liquid metal began crawling across her, completely coating everything but her mouth and nose by the time she reached the window. 

She could see the man shudder as she projected her camouflage illusion through the fool’s silver, making her vanish. 

As she stepped out of the window, she once again resisted the urge to double-check her storage tattoo. The mysterious package Kanderon had wanted was still there, she knew.

As were Gantzen Friss’ research notes. He might have been a pitiful excuse for an archmage, but he was a top notch researcher. And, without a doubt, one of the foremost leading scholars on magnetism.

Ephesia smiled to herself. Kanderon definitely didn’t need to know about those research notes. That was the useful part of having a reputation for hating the rich and powerful— when she acted against one of them, no one assumed she had any ulterior motives.

Shell games were fine and good in the short term, but for a con like Ephesia was running…

Well, you needed to think a lot farther ahead than that.

--------------------------------------------------

Fort Garnet follow-up report, twenty-one years later:

Ephesia’s mission to Fort Garnet was, so far as I can tell, where her plans began accelerating. 

I’ve often pondered whether relying on her so heavily was a mistake. She was, without a doubt, one of the most effective agents I’ve ever fielded. In her years working for me, she only failed twice, and both times were due to inaccurate intelligence reports on my end, not to any fault of her own. She had a brilliant mind, a deep ruthless streak, and a terrifyingly effective combination of affinities. 

On the other hand, there was the massive, deliberate collateral damage. I’m not even sure how many of the wealthy and powerful died at her hands— I have no doubt that she participated in extracurricular assassinations of which I knew nothing. She was no wildcard— she was always an intensely careful agent, who left no traces unless she chose to. So far as I know, no one other than myself even suspected that she was behind the murders. 

I chose not to stop her. I’ve often been accused of not caring about human life, but in Ephesia’s case, she was specifically targeting the most egregious abusers of power. I… I think I allowed a more idealistic part of myself, one unsullied by the acceptance of the need to compromise with monsters, to reign rampant over my good sense. 

I had thought that part of myself to be long since dead.

If only I’d suspected her of more than a few assassinations, I could have altered the course of history on the Ithonian continent. The Havathi expansion could have been slowed drastically, even halted entirely.

What does it say, however, that part of me is glad I failed to stop Ephesia?

—From the private journals of Kanderon Crux, High Librarian of Skyhold