Our destination came much too quickly.

  The town was small, like so many I had visited before. Death came easily to those further from the major cities, but never so thickly- nor with as much intent- as this.

  "I think I begin to understand the Queen's anxiety," Glaive said, staring straight ahead.

  Behind us, our Inquisition Company had halted in pure silence. Hardly anyone noticed as the Doctor strode up toward the front of the command, and he stopped to take it all in himself, surprisingly silent. All that could be heard was the sound of thousands of flies, doing what flies did best.

  The road led directly through the village, but we could not follow it. Smack at the entrance, filling up the entire space between two buildings, was an enormous pile of bodies. It was, by the look of things, the entire village's population. Men, women, children- they were, all of them, piled into a heap of death, decay, rot, and festering mortality.

  Behind us, someone wretched.

  "Talk to me, Isolde," Glaive said, not looking away. "What could cause this?"

  "The Necromancer is not the first on the scene," Heiro said immediately. He was stiff and cold, his mask slipping to reveal the cold, calculating individual beneath it. "I am the first, and I will give you more answers than you can receive from any magical charlatan."

  Glaive's eyes slid to mine, and I gave a small shrug as Hiero road forward.

  "There are many in this world," I said, once the Doctor was out of hearing range, "that do not like feeling 'lesser' than anyone. For all the appearance of ease and comfort the Doctor portrays, he is uncomfortable that I can perform feats he will never be able to figure out. There are limits to his vast intelligence, and that angers and frightens him."

  "I imagine he would not like to hear so," Glaive said, turning back to watch.

  Behind us, someone gagged audibly.

  "My suggestion, Commander," I said, "would be to give orders to the Captains to set up camp, and to create a perimeter surrounding the town. We do not want outsiders wandering into such a scene as this- and the Doctor will not forgive you for such a crime, either."

  Glaive startled some, and then turned quickly to speak to the two Captains that had traveled with us. Relief was evident in their voices as they turned and began shouting orders to the rest of the Company, which began to fall into a familiar routine.

  "Thank you," Glaive said quickly, to my surprise. "I have never led something so serious as this. What is he doing?"

  I paused at the abrupt change of topic, before answering. "The Doctor will examine the bodies closely using his scientific techniques. In a... normal... case, this could take upwards an hour, but that is usually when there is one or two bodies. In this situation, I cannot say when he will be done."

  "Would it not be better for you to just... do your work?" He asked, frowning.

  "Normally, I might agree," I said mildly. "As I said earlier, however, there are times when the spirit I speak with is too degraded for me to-"

  My intuition suddenly sparked, and my head snapped around. Something pulled at my senses, and I immediately slid off the seat of my horse.

  "What is it?" Glaive was quick to do the same, falling into place beside me.

  "The dead call."

  I followed the pull away from the main body of the Inquisition, further into the woods. The smell lessened somewhat, but I could see a trail here and there of blood, thick and coagulated, in the grass. Silently, Glaive followed behind me, hand on the hilt of his sword. I wondered idly if he were preparing to fight me, or if he were simply readying himself for whatever we might find.

  We did not go far from the village before we discovered a cave set into the side of a rocky slope. Dark and cool, I flipped open the Necronomicon, the pages flying to the spell I wished for; a soft murmuring of words, and a deep, peridot green light filled the entrance. Immediately, the light glinted off of more bones than I had seen in one place in... a very, very long time.

  "Does every spell you cast result in some sort of green color?" Glaive asked quietly.

  "Yes." I turned to look at him. "I have seen this before, Commander."

  "I had a strong suspicion that you were going to say as much."

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

  "This is the work of a cult I thought I had wiped out almost two centuries ago."

  Glaive turned to meet my gaze in small understanding. "The girl."

  "She is not connected, but I do find it very interesting that so far, two pieces of my past have surfaced up out of nothing and nowhere in so short a time."

  "What cult was it?"

  "If it is indeed the very same one I dealt with previously, it was a cult that worshipped a particular creature. These villagers likely found some piece of history and began worshipping the being, too, without fully understanding what it was." I stooped down to pick up a few of the bones; etched into the side of each and every piece was a symbol like a diamond with a circle in it. Long, curling lines stretched outward from the diamond. "This symbol is that of the Deep Ones."

  "The... Deep Ones?"

  "We'll know if the cult has resurfaced if we go further into the cave." I began to step forward to lead, but Glaive suddenly stuck a hand out in front of me, expression grim.

  "Give me a light," he said.

  "I can lead perfectly well, Commander. I do not plan to lose you in the darkness."

  "That's not the point. You're too valuable to be sending head first into a cave of cultists."

  I paused. "As you wish. Lift up your sword." With another wave, the pages of the Necronomicon flashed past, flickered to a stop, and with an incantation, I ran a hand down the length of the steel blade. A moment later, green light burst out from it.

  "I suppose that works as a torch," he said, a small smile flickering into view before sliding into a somber grimace.

  He stepped in, and I followed behind him.

  The number of bones only grew as we traveled deeper into the cave.

  "Should we have brought a squad with us?" Glaive asked after a few minutes of carefully picking our way through the graveyard of death and perfectly picked clean skeletons.

  "No. It is very likely that we will find no one living here. I simply want to see... the Inner Sanctum."

  Glaive did not ask what that was. Indeed, he had no reason to, for just a few minutes later, we were in it, and I was proven quite right.

  The ritual had already been completed. Torches lined the walls and flickered an ominous black flame, which gave off an unnatural light impossible to describe. Everything shifted as we looked at it, as in a hallucination, and images of past and present danced into being around us.

  More bones littered the floor leading up to a raised dais, atop which was lain a single body. The blood had already been spilled, coating not only the altar, but the stone all around it and the body itself.

  I strode forward into the chamber, and the torches all immediately danced, the black flames struggling as my magic touched the foul magic of a false god. Green danced at the centers of the flames, eating away at the corruption.

  "Should we wait for Hiero?" Glaive asked, following behind me and raising his sword high, trying to take in the room.

  "No." I held my hands out over the girl's body; her blonde hair was matted with old blood, but the rest of her was perfectly in tact. "She does not want him. She asked for me."

  I felt Glaive's eyes on my back... until the body of the girl jerked, suddenly, and there was a wet, gurgling gasp from her throat. Her eyes blew open, lit from within by green flames, and the black filth of the ritual sprang back from the dais.

  I curled my fingers. "Come," I said softly in the language of the dead, and the girl turned unseeing eyes toward me. "Come, and tell me all."

  She sat up, and I heard Glaive swear behind me.

  "I am dead," she intoned, staring directly at me. "I am dead, and sweet O'mineh opens its doors, for the Old One Hutur is rising once again."

  "Who the fuck is Hutur?" Glaive hissed. "Is she alive?"

  "She just said she was dead," I said, trying to suppress amusement.

  "I thought you just summoned spirits?"

  "Do you truly believe I was tried and imprisoned because I attacked the Cordona with ghosts, Commander?"

  I could practically hear his jaw working as he considered this. "I... have not read of this happening since then."

  "The conditions were not right, and there was no reason to. Her spirit has been destroyed- we speak now with the remnants, an echo, the body." I turned back to the girl. "Who killed you?"

  "The village," she whispered. "We sought to appease Hutur. He is one of the Deep Ones, deep beneath the earth, deep beneath all. He slept. We thought he would come to destroy the gods, to bring an end to death and sickness and suffering."

  "I suppose he did not."

  "No. We created a Priest, a true Priest... and he sacrificed us all."

  "Imagine that," I said darkly. "You thought to control the gods and their will, to put an end to suffering, and you went about it by... killing and sacrificing people."

  Her mouth twisted. "You would not understand our pain and suffering. No one understands what we have lost in this town, the losses we have faced in our little ones. You outsiders care naught for us-"

  "No, I, a 200 year old Necromancer, certainly would not understand death," I said, furious. "You cultists all work alike. Unhappy with the workings of the world, you seek to try to bend to your will something even less in your favor, and then you are so utterly surprised when it bites the hand that fed it. Unbelievable. And now you have created a real Priest, which I worked so damned hard to eliminate just two centuries ago into this world. This has to be one gigantic joke being played on me."

  I flapped my hand, and the green flames went out in the girl, her body collapsing with a disgusting thud against the dried blood of the altar.

  "Who is Hutur?" Glaive asked, watching me carefully.

  "Hutur is a creature that believes itself a god," I snapped, beginning to stride out of the room. "He represents every horrible thing in this world that you can imagine. Longer ago than any living creature can ever remember, these Deep Ones were locked away in the darkest elemental places of the world. Hutur is the first of four that, if they return, will bring about the death of the gods, destroy all living and unliving, and eradicate all life as we know it."

  Glaive kept pace with me as we left the oppressive altar behind, the black torches giving up at last.

  "Well," he said after a moment. "I suppose we know now why things from your past are resurfacing."

  "Yes," I snarled. "I just want to know who sold these stupid fools into believing in Hutur and resurrecting a real Priest, because they most certainly did not do it on their own, and I'm going to need a spirit for that."