The darkness coalesced in his hand — drawn from the ambient elements, shaped by the new precision the Will Realm had given him — into a spear of night, black and crystalline, spiraling to a point so dark it seemed to pull light toward it rather than simply absorb it. The legendary weapon was called Hedi's Spear, after the Death God who carried its original. What Evan held was an imitation, as all such magic was an imitation. It was still the most concentrated expression of dark-element force he could produce.
He threw it.
Rafael and Shorn moved together. The red dragon accelerated past what the eye could track, and the collision came from the side rather than the front. Black spear met crystal-red lance in a detonation that cracked the lapis lazuli floor to a depth of several inches and sent a shockwave in every direction. The skull-shaped black cloud that formed at the impact point expanded outward and was consumed by a column of holy light from Rafael's armor.
Evan's Sea of Mind rang. He had spent more than half his reserve in a single casting.
But Rafael was slower coming out of the smoke.
Sophina launched herself the moment the impact landed, dispersing into white bats — her form was different from Robert's, the bats pale as polished bone — and reformed twenty feet behind Rafael's position, already in the middle of the Void Shatter incantation.
The space around Rafael fractured. Not metaphorically: the air cracked into visible fragments, planes of distorted geometry spreading outward from a point, the perspective inside them shifting as the local space lost its coherence. Rafael's lance turned chromatic inside the distortion, the crystal-red light refracting into components. Shorn pulled upward and back, the dragon's sensitivity to spatial distortion registering before Rafael consciously processed the change.
The Undead Calamity rose from Evan's hands.
He had used it before as a threat, as a diversion, as a large-area denial. Now he used it with the precision the Will Realm provided — not a flood but a current, directed, controlled, aimed at the specific point where Rafael's defenses were thinnest. The black smoke came alive with it, the undead shapes within pressing forward with genuine hunger.
The dragon's wordless roar — not its voice but its resonant frequency, the subsonic and supersonic output of a creature whose vocal apparatus could destroy architecture — met the Undead Calamity at the midpoint. Stone turned to powder in a ring extending twenty feet from the collision. The black smoke was pushed back, slowed, and held.
But it kept moving.
Rafael, within the dragon's sound field, was protected. Outside it, the Void Shatter had compromised his spatial reference. He drove the lance forward into the smoke — into whatever was generating it — and the holy light blazed and consumed.
And then the floor lit up.
A five-pointed star, drawn in light that came from inside the lapis lazuli rather than from above, blazed at the center of the room and resolved into three pillars. The moment they formed, Evan felt the world tip sideways, and then corrected, and then he was outside.
Night air. The castle grounds. The smell of cooling rock.
He looked around quickly. Sophina, ten feet away, still blinking. The vampire contingent clustered at the edge of the lava zone. Winser, pale and upright, a hand pressed to his ribs.
In the distance, a red dragon's cry — and the shape of it banking away, high and fast, disappearing over the ridge. Rafael, it seemed, had been deposited elsewhere. Or had chosen to leave. Evan exhaled.
The castle vanished from the hillside while he was watching. There and gone, in the time it took to look away.
Sophina turned to him and smiled with her teeth. It was a real smile, not the cold management of expression that had covered her face through most of the night. "You didn't get what you came for," she said.
"I got considerably more than I expected." He paused. "The Book of the Dead. You memorized it."
"All of it." A flicker of something — not quite pride, closer to wonder that it had worked. "And you?"
"All of it." He matched her expression. "We seem to have that in common."
Duke Winser gripped his daughter's shoulder when she told him, his color rising despite the injury suppressed beneath his composure. "Not the book itself — but the contents. You have the contents."
"Yes, Father."
He looked at Evan. "You also."
"Yes."
A long pause. Then Winser produced something from inside his coat — a pendant, a teardrop-cut ruby, with a trace of magical resonance inside the gem that told Evan it was more than decorative. "If you need anything on the West Tyrone Continent. Kansa City, Grolu Street, number 203. Show this to the barkeeper." He tossed it across.
Evan caught it and put it away.
The vampires said their goodbyes, unfurled their wings, and went up into the remaining dark one after another. Sophina went last, turning back once at the height of her first wingbeat, and smiled again — the real one — and was gone.
Evan stood alone on the hillside as the eastern sky began its first grey suggestion of dawn.
Thirteen floors. He had covered two, Sophina two, Rafael two. Nine remained. He filed the number and turned west.