Ser blinked a few times, clearing the blur from her vision. A quick assessment of their gear—an instinctual first reaction at this point in her career—revealed, to their surprise, she was unrestrained. Her sword was missing from its scabbard, as were the axe and dagger at her belt. Whoever this mage was, they didn’t want them armed but felt confident enough to keep her hands free. Stupid.

The room, wherever it was, was dimly lit by a smoldering fire pit in its center and a handful of candles on a distant desk or table. Musty, stale air and the coolness of the stone told Ser that she was underground, possibly under the house itself. They found Rowan, laying in a heap and similarly disarmed, a few feet away. The steady rise and fall of her chest meant she was still alive, at least. Ser moved to check on their companion but froze in place once the noise began.

A moan, hollow and dry like nothing Ser had ever heard before, echoed through the room. It cut through Ser like a winter’s wind, sending a primal, instinctual fear down her spine. The firepit sputtered, sparks crackling, before dimming to a barely visible glow. On either side of the flames, a sickly, transparent hand clawed its way through the floor, the rotten, spectral flesh dotted with visible streaks of bone. Pulling itself up within the dying embers themselves was the rest of the spirit. Its nose and ears sloughed off to reveal pieces of the skull beneath, it was a sight Ser could only hope would, against all odds, not take up residence in her nightmares in the years to come. Worst of all was its eyes. Sunken, hollow pits with little more than pinpoints of green flame, darting around in their sockets with a frenzied, inhuman speed.

“She always greets our guests,” said a far more human, and upsettingly calm, voice from the other side of the room. “Manners persist beyond the grave, it seems.”

A shadow passed in front of the greasy yellow candlelight before stepping into the eerie, pale light cast by the room’s spectral intruder. A woman, of average height and build. The slight wrinkles around her eyes and visible grey streaks running through her pulled back dark hair placed her in her middle years. Her clothes were of fine quality, cut in what Ser guessed to once be a fashionable style, but stains, tears, and frayed sleeves gave a distinct impression that these had not been a fashion statement for some time.

“I, however, forget myself,” the woman said with a smug smile as she offered the slightest of bows. “Jadia Kenholtz, scholar. A pleasure.”

“I didn’t expect the village to hire a proper sellsword, I must say. Must have pooled together every clipped coin those mud-farmers had stashed away.” She absent-mindedly raised her right hand, rotating rings of the same sickly green light manifesting in her palm, pointed at the spirit. 

“I took the liberty of relieving you of your…tools of the trade,” the self-proclaimed scholar said, with the flat disdain reserved for speaking to a lesser intellect. “Judging from how many you had, I assume you know how to use them and there’s no need for this to get messier than it has to be.”

She turned to examine the ghost as if verifying the effects of whatever spell she was casting on it.

As Jadia’s attention shifted to the spirit, Ser quickly ran their index finger beneath the vambrace on her right arm. A brief flash of pain and drop of blood confirmed that their captor hadn’t caught quite all of Ser’s weapons. Good. 

Whatever spell the mage was casting at the spirit, it wasn’t a pleasant experience to witness. The fiery dots forming its eyes spun with renewed frantic energy, mouth stretched into a wail of silent pain. Rotten incorporeal hands tried to latch onto anything, flailing and clawing but found no purchase in the cold, lifeless stone.

“What are you doing to…it?” Ser asked, partly out of mounting horror and partly to give her more time to formulate a plan.

Kenholtz shot Ser a sideways glance, eyebrows raised in aloof disbelief. “The spirit? Nothing you would understand.”

“You’d be surprised,” Ser fired back.

“I would, actually. Your hedgewitch may have explained a crumb or two of magic to you, sellsword, but this is something else entirely. The spirit is simply a guard dog, for lack of a better term. A convenient cover for my studies.”

A wave of her hand caused a ring of torches around the room’s circular wall to alight. Not bright enough to fully rid the room of ink-black shadows but enough to illuminate the horrors they previously hid. Desiccated corpses lay piled together like refuse outside of an inn, their skin grey and paper-dry as though they had been left in the desert sun for weeks. Ser had seen corpses before, freshly dead and filled with putrid rot, but she had never seen ones with eyes like this. Despite being dead, every single corpse sported wide-open eyes, swirling with faint magical light. Like a cruel imitation of Rowan’s when she cast certain spells. 

“As you may know, magic is fueled by the body’s life force. Just as you burn your fuel swinging those heavy swords around at…trolls?—I don’t know what you lot do—a mage burns their reserves casting magic. If you exhaust your energy, no more magic until you’ve recovered and rested. Infuriating.”

Jadia walked over to the pile of corpses, pulling and prodding their faces with the detached manner of a butcher inspecting a cow before slaughter. Her stomach turning, Ser averted her eyes to look back to Rowan. She still seemed unconscious, and Ser wasn’t even sure if Rowan had ever been knocked out before. Just as she began to worry, Ser noticed the slightest of movement. Rowan’s left hand, hidden away from Jadia and the spirit by her chest, slowly curled into a fist with the thumb tucked tightly inside. 

Ser’s heartbeat picked up. Rowan remembered. Weeks back, after yet another attempt to cash in on Rowan’s bounty ended with them in chains, the two of them worked out some contingency plans. One of them was the hand signal that Rowan was currently executing. It relayed, “I’m awake. I’m playing possum. I’ll follow your lead.” Ser cracked the heel of their boot against the stone floor twice in quick succession, an acknowledgment the message was received, playing it off as a failed attempt at standing. 

All the while, Jadia continued on with all the self-confidence of someone certain they’re the smartest one, and therefore the only one worth paying attention to, in the room.

“You can supplement with potions, of course, but using those as a natural practicioner, as someone used to real power, is demeaning. Having to drink some noxious brew like I’m a farmhand hoping to be with child? It’s worse than having nothing at all.” 

She pulled back the lips of a corpse, examining his blackened gums. “What I’m attempting to do is create a sort of arcane storage. If I can draw upon my magics to cast spells, it should be possible to place my own energy in another being until I need the use of it.” Dropping the corpse without a moment’s care, she wiped her hands on her stained skirt before turning once more to Ser with a sigh. 

“Thus far, no results. The magic goes in, but every host has died shortly after. Once death has occurred, what energy has been provided is locked away. Useless things. But you look of hardier stock. Hopefully I see improvement.”

The simmering rage in Ser’s gut boiled to a cold, quiet fury and determined focus. “They aren’t things. Those are people,” she said, hand slowly drifting to her vambrace and its hidden dagger. 

Jadia sighed. “They were people. Now they’re just waste,” she said, rubbing the bridge of her nose with a free hand. “This is what I’m talking about. My theory could revolutionize the magical community, unlock whole new fields of study! And all you care about is some forgotten sods who would have died from plague in a year or two regardless. Typical.”

She finished her sentence and looked up at Ser just in time to see the small, weighted throwing dagger hurtling towards her. 

The mage managed to dodge just swift enough, her reflexes surprising Ser, to turn the intended knife through her heart to a blade lodged in her left shoulder. The moment she howled in pain, Rowan burst into action, golden-white whips of fire cascading from her hands to ensnare the spirit as she leapt to her feet. 

“I’ve got the ghost!” she yelled. “Take care of the monster.”

The ghost’s dry, hollow wails still sent chills down Ser’s spine as it struggled against Rowan’s spell. She turned her eyes back to Jadia, still stumbling back from Ser’s surprise assault.

“You little bitch!” Jadia screamed before raising her right hand.

The tiny sparks cascading between her fingers gave Ser warning, having seen Rowan cast similar spells dozens of times. They sprinted and rolled out of the way as a gout of flame blackened the stone she was just standing in. Not hesitating for a moment, Ser bolted out of her roll, heart pounding in their ears as she closed the distance between her and the rogue mage in seconds. Before Jadia had time to react, Ser was on her and drove their leather-gloved fist right into the sorcerer’s gut, driving the wind out of her lungs. Jadia doubled over gasping as Ser spun around and caught Jadia in the back of her skull with an elbow, colliding with a sickening crack that echoed through the room. She dropped to her knees, blood dripping from her fresh wound. 

As Ser spun around, the hairs on her arms stood at attention, another sign of spellcraft they had learned from her time with Rowan. The split-second warning gave her enough time to leap backward just as the earth erupted into jagged spikes of stone and crystal. While not the lethal surprise Jadia had intended, the assault still knocked Ser across the room, colliding with the wall with a thud. Shrapnel had carved a dozen different cuts across Ser’s arms and face, and judging from the pain as she gasped for air at least one rib was cracked, but she was alive.

Rowan saw Ser crash into the wall and instinctively wanted to run to her partner, but the berserk ghost threatening to rip her throat out made a more pressing argument for attention. Ser trusted her to do this. She had to trust Ser to fend on her own, even against another mage.

The binding spell she had cast was beginning to fray, but faster than it should have. There was more than the usual necrotic energy within a spirit here, and it was eating away at her spells at an alarming rate. Rowan lashed the tethers to the stone floor, buying her a few moments to cast a spell of true sight before the magical chains snapped. 

The ghost lunged at Rowan, its hollow rasping howl growing more and more frayed. Despite her vision being consumed with the kaleidoscope of arcane signatures and residues that coated every inch of the room, Rowan’s years of swordplay gave her an instinctual level of spatial awareness and reflexes that kept the ghost’s wild swings at bay. It wouldn’t work forever, especially not if Jadia got back on her feet and became involved, but she needed time to untangle the knot of spells surrounding the spirit.

Groaning as they rose to her knees, Ser’s blurred vision cleared enough to see Rowan, eyes alight with some sort of magic, dodging the ghost’s attacks. In spite of a jagged stab of pain that tore through her side with every breath, Ser couldn’t help but be impressed by her form. Rowan was already a talented swordswoman when she and Ser had set out together all those months ago, but she had incorporated her years of fluid fencer’s training into the more practical, focused form Ser had offered a few lessons in during their evenings at camp.

The woman moved like flowing water, her long legs and arms moving with a fluidity and grace that Ser could only compare to a dancer mid-performance. Given room to maneuver and a single opponent, Rowan might be able to avoid being struck for hours, cutting and stabbing away at them between each missed swing. Unfortunately, between the size of the room and Jadia seemingly recovering her breath and fixing her eyes on Rowan, she had neither.

Ser closed their eyes. The pain stabbing through her side wasn’t important. The ache in her bones wasn’t important. The chill that still hasn’t left her spine since the ghost arrived wasn’t important. 

Rowan needed her. So they would be there. That’s all there was to it.

As Rowan opened her eyes, Jadia began to raise her shaking hand towards Rowan. Ser had no idea what spell the mage was conjuring, not that it mattered. Ser had a job to do.

Focusing her breathing, she forcefully exhaled and gripped where she assumed the broken or cracked rib was. Immediately, she broke into a sprint. Quick, shallow breaths. Anything more and the pain would have driven the air out of their lungs. Her bootheels pounded on the stone floor, echoing off the walls with each step. With little room to build up pace, Ser had to shove themselves as fast as she possibly could from the first step. 

The pain, the lack of air, none of it was on Ser’s mind. They only saw Jadia’s face, slowly turning away from Rowan and the spirit to the swiftly approaching Ser. The mage’s hand swam through the air, sparks beginning to crackle between her fingers,  but not fast enough. The distance between the two closed in seconds. On the last step, Ser lifted her left boot behind her, swinging it forward and catching the mage on the chin with its steel toe. A sickening crunch of bone rang out through the room followed by a spray of blood and a half-dozen teeth. Jadia slid across the floor, slumping against the wall, motionless.

Rowan, at the same time, had kept pace with the spirit. Each dodged swipe gave her another half-second to cut through a layer of Jadia’s spellcraft. The magic’s purpose had become clear and frighteningly cruel. The spirit had been in this house for years, the folk tale seemingly having some worth and, while cursed, did not appear to be harming anyone but itself. Whenever the supposed scholar discovered its presence, she had bound the spirit to her will and forced it to serve as her weapon and scapegoat. Any attempt to deny or defy Jadia would end in searing torment, even for a spirit beyond the veil of life.

With each new section of the spell burned away, the spirit’s attacks grew slower, less focused, in turn giving Rowan more time to unwind the spell itself. Finally, after a swipe slow enough to dodge with her eyes closed, Rowan raised her hands to the spirit’s spectral head and wrenched, shattering the invisible wards that had bound it. The spirit froze mid-swing and remained in place for mere moments before bursting into a gout of blue flame and vanishing from sight. 

Sweat pouring down her face from the combined physical and magical efforts, Rowan granted herself a brief smile before slumping to the floor, breathing heavily. She and Ser lay there for a few moments, their breaths the only sounds in the room.

Finally, Ser spoke first, breathing with great effort through the pain. “Got the ghost, then?” she asked, not moving their spot on the floor. 

“Uh-huh,” Rowan replied, still trying to catch her breath.

“How’d you do it?” Ser asked.

“Had to unwind the binding,” Rowan responded, absent-mindedly talking with her hands despite the lack of light. “She had been layering the spell for who knows how long, and the original curse was ancient, so I had to render each layer inert. In order. It took a bit of work.”

Ser waited a moment, processing the information and understanding little of it. “Makes sense.”

“How’d you handle Jadia?” Rowan asked.

“I kicked her in the face. Very hard,” Ser said.

“Ah,” Rowan replied, unsurprised. 

After another few minutes of silence, the two got to their feet and walked over to Jadia. The pool of blood that had formed beneath her head gave the impression that Ser’s kick may have killed the sorceress, but the rattling wheeze through her shattered teeth confirmed she was still alive. Ser prodded her with the same blood-stained boot that did the damage and got no response

 She turned to Rowan, shrugging. “What now?”

The swordsmage’s brows furrowed, biting her lip in thought. “I could keep her under, given enough time and energy. But we have no idea when she’ll wake up, and I’m, frankly, not in peak form here, Ser.”

Ser began to reply but was abruptly interrupted by a burst of blue flame behind them.

Leaping forward, she shouted at Rowan, “I thought you got rid of it!”

The flames flared brightly before vanishing, leaving behind a very different spirit than before. The former monstrosity was now far less horrifying. Its rotten features and talons were gone, looking every bit the human it once was. A woman, only a decade or so older than Ser and Rowan. Her clothes were fine, if outdated by a few centuries, matching her beautiful hair drifting as though she were underwater. The only indications that she was not simply a woman like any other were her translucent frame and the same burning pinpoint pupils in the center of her eyes.

Rowan hadn’t stepped away. Her eyebrows furrowed, captured by curiosity more than fear. “I didn’t banish the spirit, Ser. I just undid the bindings. Both Jadia’s and the ones from whoever cursed the family so long ago.”

Ser remained wary, inching away from the spirit. “Then why is it still here?”

Rowan’s confusion deepened, rubbing her face with a hand in frustration. 

“It should have dissipated. Without anything binding it to this plane, it would just scatter into ambient magic. The curse and spells are gone, I’m sure. What could…” Rowan followed the spirit’s fiery gaze and realized it wasn’t looking at either of them. It was fixated on the comatose mage lying between the two mercenaries.

Ser followed suit moments later. “Unfinished business,” she replied. Her fear fled, recognizing an all-too-human motivation. “I can respect that.”

The spirit looked up at Ser, emotionless, but offering a nod. Rowan cocked an eyebrow at Ser, unsure how to proceed. “Should we…let it?”

Ser shrugged. “Could we even stop it? The witch tried to kill us, did kill a dozen poor villagers, and tortured her. Justice, I think.”

“I suppose so,” Rowan sighed. “Let’s just get out of here. Where do—”

The ghost raised her hand, and the torches surrounding the room flared with the same blue flame that the spirit arrived with. They were swiftly joined by a trail of newly lit torches, illuminating an exit previously hidden by shadow that led out and up, presumably out of wherever Jadia had taken them.

Ser nodded her head towards the path, but Rowan hesitated, still looking at the spirit with a burning curiosity.

“Should we stay?” she asked. 

Ser placed a hand on Rowan’s shoulder, firm but gentle. “Whatever it—she—is going to do…it seems like something we don’t need to see, Rowan. Come on.”

Rowan sighed, but patted Ser’s hand and turned to leave. 

As they started to go, pausing to collect their confiscated weaponry piled on Jadia’s work table, the rasping wail of the ghost returned but slowly shifted. From hollow, dry howls it gained substance, focus, until it sounded almost human. A familiar noise.

The long-dead woman was laughing.