“She can’t be serious!” Bea muttered irritably as she thrust open the door to their home. “Junebug, I love you, but have you lost your mind?”

A familiar citrus fragrance greeted them as they filed into the foyer, but it seemed more sour than usual with the horrible mood following them in. Bea kicked off her white sneakers and stomped into the living room, leaving the rest of them to follow after her. 

Ori and her friends had lived together since their first year at Dikai. They had started out as dormitory neighbors who shared a hallway, and their friendship had developed from there. Once they had aged out of the dormitories, the group had moved into a spacious apartment near the waterfront on campus.Bea had personally financed and designed the interior of their unit with the money she had inherited from her late mother. She had made sure that each of them was represented in their home and had a space where they could be comfortable. Bea went to great lengths to create a home for her friends who, sometimes, didn’t have anywhere else to go. So, when they returned at the end of a long day, each of them had a safe and familiar place to return to. 

“What the hell was that?” Cece groaned and collapsed onto the long sofa, stretching her long, muscular legs out in front of her and resting her head on the back cushions. “Let’s review what happened last year, shall we? Right after welcome week, an amateur seance club at Praxi pulled Valere, the most accomplished Umbra that Apollyon ever created, out of the Underworld. He attacked them immediately, used whatever necromantic magic he had to drain them, turned them into husks,  and continued on his way. Then, he stormed the first year exposition and raided the Central Archives in the city because he saw something that he wanted. Need I go on?

“I think I will! He brainwashed Bea’s deadbeat monarch of a father into giving him authority over Hillion and ransacked the temples on Tricria for fun. He exploited Ciel’s relationship with you to incite a conflict with Rasennoi that trapped the Rhomaions in the empire. Oh, and he tried to kill us! Multiple times! He stuck his claws into Ori’s chest, June! We cannot trust him!”

 She held up a finger for offense, gesturing wildly to illustrate her points, and by the time she was done with her examples, both of her hands were open and stretched towards the ceiling.

 “That’s not even all of it!” Bea criticized, turning sharply on her heel when she got to the line between the kitchen and the living room. “The repercussions of his actions are still plaguing the two empires. Not to mention, Hillion’s no longer considered a neutral territory.”

Ori nodded along and recalled how the demon had also extracted power from Calpurnia and turned her into a husk with his necromantic abilities. Juno and Minnie had spent a quarter of the school year trying to figure out how to bring her back without delving into necromancy themselves. The students he had turned into husks were still in recovery at a monastery in the ruins of the Acropolis where Cosmic Divinity flowed most potently, and Rhomai’s peace balanced precariously on an ever faltering alliance between a mediocre king, a stubborn monk, and an overbearing emperor. 

“So, what? He slashed himself across the back with his own talons?” Mads asked in a flat voice, offering her doubts for the group’s consideration.

Nobody answered, and Bea’s pacing came to an abrupt halt.

The astromancer had a point, too. 

Apollyon might have gone mad in the Underworld, but self-mutilation wasn’t something a vain demon like Valere would do. The short haired woman tucked her bare feet under her, curling up in the corner of the sofa and burrowing into a plush throw blanket like a tired kitten. “Minnie, what do you think?” 

Minerva swiveled her chair back and forth at the desk as she pondered the situation. Infomancy defined a broad scope of magic related to knowledge. Some infomancers could extract information at will. Others could immediately comprehend any language or concept presented to them. Minnie excelled in two particular areas - infoscopy and infography.

 She could detect the existence of records related to and verify any information that she consumed. However, she didn’t simply acquire the knowledge. The magic manifested as an ability to intuitively recognize falsifications and a vague awareness that somewhere, records of the information existed. Minnie had once described infoscopic magic to Ori as a “tip of the tongue” sensation, and her infographic magic was realized as the Cosmically-powered runes she could write into existence.

“The last thing I want to do is place any blind faith in him,” she finally replied after a thoughtful silence. “He’s telling the truth, but I don’t know how much of a truth it is. I’m absolutely sure that there are records of a third deity, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard of it. We saw the Locusts chasing him out of the forest. I think that’s enough evidence that the Deathbringer’s powerful enough to create more of them and try to find a way out.” 

“I agree,” Juno spoke up for the first time since they returned from the chancellor’s office. She sat upright between Mads and Cece, resting her elbows on her knees and massaging little circles on her brow. “There’s something unsettling about all of  this. I was so sure that I cast him out, but if he’s here, then there’s no telling what’s out there now. I can feel something looming over us. It’s dark and dangerous, and I think it’s coming.”

“It’s probably Valere,” Bea grumbled. 

Ori agreed silently, but she wasn’t entirely convinced. The other girls had been in their graduating year when Calpurnia had tasked the Aretes with fortifying the barriers between Chthonous and Ierpo, the physical world they resided in. They and the gladiators had been skilled and gifted upperclassmen at the time, but they had still been young students with limited experience. Their excursion to the Necropolis hadn’t gone as smoothly as they had planned. Juno had been the only one who possessed enough Cosmic Divinity to hold off Apollyon, and Ori had been forced to face the painful truth of recognizing that she was the girls’ weakest link.

Without magic, she couldn’t wipe out as many enemies as her friends. Her arrows couldn’t strike the Shades down in one hit. She needed a precision that she hadn’t yet mastered at the time, and it wasn’t just her. The gladiators had been outmatched in the Necropolis, and they leaned heavily on the Aretes and the Tricrian priestesses for support. Ultimately, that had been what led to their defeat.

 Apollyon had slaughtered the priestesses who had accompanied their team, defeated their entire team, dragged Juno through the barrier, and held her captive in the Underworld. Ori, the Aretes, and the gladiators had descended into the pits of hell to save her against the chancellors’ orders. 

They had come face to face with the Deathbringer for the first and last time in the Necrotheion, his palace of death where hellfire licked at onyx walls and the screeches of evil Locusts and Shades filled the hazy air.

Ori’s stomach churned at the memory alone, and she could almost feel the burns where tongues of fire lapped at her skin as she crept through the haunted corridors. 

Apollyon had sat on a throne of bones and wore a white cloak that covered him from head to toe. He was shrouded like a corpse. They never saw his face, just a menacing red light of Chthonic Divinity gleaming under the hood, threatening to reap their souls if they dared to challenge him on his own plane. 

Ori remembered how she had faltered.

The Locusts found their targets by identifying concentrations of Divinity. Since she had so little within her, Ori was able to sneak away from the hordes. Her smaller frame allowed her to slip through combat unnoticed while her brothers in arms and oath drew attention away from the archer. She was the first one to find him in the throne room. 

She had aimed her bow, arrow drawn, and…the crimson light flashed. She could have sworn that he saw her crouched against the wall. It had felt as if Apollyon’s gaze burned upon her.

 Ori had frozen. Her heart stopped in her chest, and her blood ran cold. That ominous flash of red had promised death and despair. It had doused her in fear like prey that dared to stand against a predator. Every muscle in her body had begged her to run, because if she didn’t, he would kill her. 

Then, her heart picked up and thundered in her ribcage, pumping ice through her veins painfully. A sense of impending doom clawed at her consciousness like the very talons that had hooked into her flesh when she had fallen during their first battle.

Ori’s stomach turned with a wave of nausea, and bile rose in her throat. She wanted to wretch. 

“You’ve been quiet, Ori,” Cece commented, and the gladiatrix returned to their living room. “What do you have to say about this?”