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Crastor collided with the ground in a blaze of pain. He saw lights. No, it was just light. It was daytime. Groaning, he rolled onto his back. Above him was a clear blue sky. As the pounding in his head receded, he could hear birds singing unfamiliar songs. His mouth was full of dirt. Raising a hand to the cavity where his left cheek had long ago rotted away, he spat as he tried to brush some of it out.

Just then, someone appeared at his side. Crastor glimpsed white hair and a familiar look of concern through wrinkled eyes. Duinn had materialized right next to him, almost on top of him, but was still standing.

“Need a little help?” Duinn asked, extending a hand. Crastor took it and hoisted himself up. His hands and face still stung, but he was not really hurt. He looked around. The place was warm, and sparsely populated with strange trees. They had hairy trunks and a crown of enormous, waxy leaves. Perhaps these were something like palm trees, which he had learned about in his bible study. The ground was decorated with exotic shrubs and ferns. Far off in the distance, he saw the ocean. Or, an ocean anyway.

Just then, a girl screamed. Crastor tensed and turned toward it. Rheol was there, just behind a nearby tree. He looked around for the source of Rheol’s distress. Then he remembered with a sinking disappointment that it was him. He waved. She did not move.

“It’s alright, Rheol, it’s just Crastor,” said Duinn.

She eyed him with disgust. “What’s happening? Where are we?” she demanded.

“We’re on another plane.” Crastor had known this the minute he’d opened his eyes.

“What does that mean?” asked Rheol, who did not come near him.

“Planes are what you might call other worlds,” Crastor explained. “Other planets, maybe. I don’t really know how it works. They’re connected by portals. People who use the portals to travel between planes are called planeswalkers.” They both stared at him, apparently absorbing this. “I used to know a planeswalker,” he added. He sighed. “I was raised by one.”

“How do we get back home?” asked Rheol.

Crastor shrugged. “I don’t know. He never taught me how to do it. But I know it’s not easy. It’s dangerous. And timing is critical.”

“Did you do this?” she asked accusingly.

“Fuck off. I just told you I don’t know how it works,” snapped Crastor. Then, he heard footsteps. Looking around through the trees, he saw some people coming toward them from a long way off.

“Can you learn quick?” asked Rheol.

“No,” said Crastor flatly.

“Should we run?” she asked.

“Let’s not, please,” answered Duinn, who still looked winded. “Besides, where would we go?”

“At least this one’s a smaller mob,” said Crastor, “and they don’t seem angry.”

It was true, there were only three or four, and they weren’t running, they were just walking toward them. But there was something strange about these people. They were… blue.

“What are they?” asked Rheol.

Crastor shrugged.

Rheol leapt toward Crastor and Duinn, onto the spot where they had materialized. She walked back and forth across it. Nothing happened. She let out a frustrated grunt.

“Bad timing, perhaps,” said Duinn. She glared at him.

Suddenly the people approaching stopped. They appeared to be talking to one another. They drew their weapons and took on an aggressive stance.

“So much for the friendly mob,” said Rheol.

“If you’d had a weapon when you saw Crastor like this, you’d have drawn it, too,” said Duinn.

The four blue men approached. Actually, their skin was more of a bluish-green. They had long noses and extremely long ears, and each had two large tusks jutting out of his mouth. Two of them had wild red hair, one had green hair in braids, and the other was bald. One of the red-haired men wore a cloth robe bearing an intricately woven pattern. The others wore pants and leather jerkins. One bore a sword and shield, another a large hammer, and another a bow. The robed one did not carry a weapon, but he held his large hands up as if they were blades, in a practiced fighting stance. They were all tall, muscular, and intimidating.

“Jo thurak zalagha v’kalosbir?” one of them called.

It was nonsense to Crastor. Desperately, he called back in Planeswalkiri, “Hello! Do you speak Planeswalkiri?”

They did not give any indication that they did. They were muttering amongst themselves. They kept their weapons raised.

“Do you understand them?” asked Rheol.

“No, nor they me,” said Crastor.

“Kaldash sothrok, e mantu na?” They tried again to speak to him. Crastor shrugged.

“Show them that you haven’t got any weapons,” he told the others. They all showed their empty hands.

The robed one spoke to the others. One by one, the blue-green men lowered their weapons slowly. Crastor heard Duinn sigh with relief.

The robed one approached them. He folded his arms into an X across his chest with his hands balled into fists, and then bowed formally. Crastor and Duinn just bowed. Rheol curtseyed. He eyed them curiously. After conferring again with his fellows, he waved his arm in a “come with us” gesture and stepped back. He signaled for Crastor, Rheol and Duinn to walk ahead of him. They looked at each other and obeyed. And so, not sure whether they were prisoners or guests, they set out toward wherever the blue men were taking them.

As they made their way down a gentle slope, the coastline sprawled out before them. A sparkling blue ocean kissed white sand. They saw more of the funny trees, but there were stands of more ordinary-looking trees, too. Some of them had thin, curling bark. Down below near the beach, where the dirt and patchy grass became sand, there was a swath of simple homes made from wood and leather, each one on raised wooden legs. At one end of the village there was a great long building in the same style, and near it there was a large fire pit. As they approached, Crastor could see blue-green people moving about. Some people chatted. Others carried baskets to and fro. There was a circle of women working on some projects Crastor couldn’t make out, and about them flitted playing children.

“This is incredible,” said Duinn in an awe-struck voice.

Crastor nodded. He looked over to Rheol, who seemed as sulky as ever.

When they came near the edge of the village, their escort halted and began to talk amongst themselves.

“Perhaps they are deciding how they will cook us,” said Rheol. Duinn looked shocked.

In all seriousness Crastor asked, “You’re not like other little girls, are you Rheol?”

She grinned.

One of the blue-green men went ahead into the village. When he returned, he was accompanied by several men, an elderly woman, and a young woman. One of the men was big and broad-shouldered and more elaborately dressed than the others, in a fine tunic and beaded necklaces and an arm band of animals’ teeth. Crastor tried again to speak to them in Planeswalkiri.

“Hello. Do you speak Planeswalkiri?”

“No,” the young woman said in Planeswalkiri. Crastor cocked his head to one side, confused.

“Sorry,” she said, stepping forward. “Small Planeswalkiri. Hello, goodbye, yes, no, thank you.” She held out her empty hands.

“Ah,” Crastor said, understanding. That was apparently the limit of her vocabulary.

“You, Aezerothi?” she asked.

Crastor did not know what this meant. Presumably Aezeroth was some nation or group. “No,” he said.

“They, Aezerothi?” she pointed at Rheol and Duinn.

“No.”

“You,” she pointed at him. “They,” again, she pointed at the other two. She brought her hands together and interlaced her large fingers. She cocked her own head to one side.

“Uhh, yes,” said Crastor. “We are friends.” He could not tell whether she understood the word ‘friends’. Then, remembering that he was still in his undead body, he added, “One plane. Same plane.” She nodded. Then she turned and began talking to her people.

One of the leather-clad men who’d found them seemed to be worked up about something. The young woman became worked up, too, and soon they were bickering. It looked like they were each trying to persuade the big man of something. Crastor looked nervously at Duinn and Rheol. “I told you”, she mouthed. Crastor narrowed his eyes menacingly at her. Duinn looked at Crastor reprovingly.

The big man spoke. He was looking at the old woman. All the blue-green people looked to her, too. She spoke slowly, her calm voice plodding with the leisurely steadiness of a grazing animal. The big man said something, and then the young woman turned back to Crastor.

She made a sweeping gesture toward the village, but seemed to be at a loss for words. “Mmm… yes! Hello!” She said. She was blushing.

In that moment, Crastor noticed that she was beautiful. She was more human-looking than the males, with smaller ears and nose, and tiny tusks protruding from her lower jaw. She stood tall and proud. Her eyes were like ordinary human eyes, but the irises were red. They reminded Crastor of a dramatic sunrise. Her hair was white as snow, and the upper part of it was gathered in a ponytail. When she turned, it swayed behind her like an elegant cape, shining in the sun.

“Shall we?” asked Duinn. Crastor had not noticed that the crowd was already walking toward the village.

~

The night of Crastor, Duinn and Rheol’s arrival, the village held a celebration that was apparently in their honor. They sat near the big man they’d met earlier, who seemed to be the chief of these people. There was a bonfire in the central pit, and lots of food and music and dancing. They sat on pillows and woven mats on the ground.

Crastor watched dreamily as Lobi danced. He’d learned that that was the young white-haired woman’s name. She saw him watching and motioned him to join. He laughed and shrank back. She smiled and took his hand, pulling him up. She led him toward the other dancers. As they began to dance, Crastor stepped on her toes. She laughed and grabbed his hips, and he felt a jolt of energy course through him. She directed his hips, showing him how to step in time with her. Then she demonstrated how her people stretched out their arms, and how they turned their wrists. When the next song started, a couple of older women joined in, taking turns leading him through the dance. Lobi laughed and clapped her hands. Her joy was contagious, and Crastor felt so light he might have been floating. He could not believe that people were smiling at him and touching him, even though he was still in his corpse form. He began to wonder whether he already loved this place more than gloomy, rainy Ireland, and whether he loved these warm, friendly folk more than his own people, who were, on the whole, as cold as their homeland.

Eventually, Crastor returned to his seat, panting and smiling. Duinn was sitting next to him, cross-legged, tapping his hand on his knee to the music. Rheol was next to Duinn, frowning and sitting as still as a statue.

“Having fun?” Duinn asked him.

“Yes,” Crastor grinned. “You should try it.”

Duinn laughed. “No thank you,” he said. “As a monk, I’m not supposed to have too much fun anyway.” He winked at Crastor.

Crastor leaned over toward Rheol. “Hey you! Looks like they haven’t eaten us yet!”

“No,” she replied without looking at him. “Not yet.”

“Then what’s all this for, they’re just fattening us up first?”

“Perhaps.”

“Oh come on,” he said impatiently.

Rheol turned toward him, and spoke sharply. “You would be wise not to trust them. And they would be wise not to trust us.”

Crastor furrowed his brow. “You’re not making any sense. If they wanted to hurt us, they’d throw us in jail, not throw us a party.”

“I hate parties.”

Crastor shook his head and leaned back onto his elbows. Rheol stood up and walked toward the dark beach.

“Hmph.” Crastor grunted. He and Duinn continued to watch the dancers whirl and undulate. Milky clouds streaked across the night sky, but they did not obscure the dazzling show of stars. The warm night baffled Crastor, so different was it from what he knew. He’d always thought of darkness as cold, but now the warm night hit him like a great idea, like someone showing you a better way of doing something you’ve always done. Crastor picked up the plate of food he’d left behind earlier, which was not a plate but a very large leaf. As he popped bits of fried fish and some kind of purple vegetable into his mouth, tilting his head to accommodate his missing cheek, Duinn asked,

“So you don’t know how to get us home?”

Crastor chewed slowly, then swallowed. He answered, “No. Not yet. But I’ll figure it out.”

“But you’ve never done it before, this, what do you call it, planeswalking?”

“I have done it,” said Crastor defensively. “I just never opened the portal myself.”

“Mm-hmm,” said Duinn politely. “Have you never tried to open the portal yourself, then?”

“Well, I never needed to,” said Crastor. Seeing concern in Duinn’s face, he added, “I’ll figure it out. I’ll find a way. Hell, getting here was easy enough.” Duinn nodded and shifted his crossed legs.

“You’re not in a rush, are you?” Crastor asked. “I mean, surely you don’t want to go home right this moment. This place is amazing,” he said, gesturing at the dancers, whose pace had picked up and their laughter with it.

“No, not right this moment. It is beautiful here. And the people have been very gracious,” Duinn paused.

“But…” Crastor encouraged him.

“But I am an old man, and I am set in my ways,” he said. “All this magic and planeswalking, this is a young man’s game.”

Crastor had not thought about it that way. He’d been thoroughly wrapped up in the excitement of planeswalking again, and of finally making contact with the local people, which Illyrio had never permitted him to do. The sights and sounds of this place, and probably the smells too if he’d had a nose, were so foreign, yet this very foreignness was somehow familiar. He’d missed the thrill of planeswalking, the danger, the mystery. But Duinn was right, he was thinking like a young man, and not thinking about Duinn. People were creatures of habit, and monks moreso than most.

“I’ll get us home.” Crastor reassured him. “I just need a little time.”

“How much time?” asked Duinn. “Weeks? Years?”

“I…” Crastor hadn’t the faintest idea. The truth was, he was not entirely confident that he could ever learn to planeswalk. But he didn’t want to admit that to Duinn. “I don’t know,” he said.

Duinn looked ahead, frowning. He watched the fire but he was no longer moving to the music. Shadows danced across the lines of his face.

“What?” asked Crastor, sensing that Duinn was holding back. Duinn waved a hand dismissively.

“Whaaaat?” Crastor pressed.

Duinn sighed. “It’s nothing. Just, you know,” he paused. “Some of us have less time than others.”

A wave of emotions hit Crastor. He wanted to say something petty, that he would do his best, and it’s not like he was planning to just laze about, and he had important things to do back home too, and why didn’t Duinn try opening the portal if he was in such a goddamned hurry. But Duinn had touched a nerve and Crastor was still reeling. He hated thinking about his own immortality. He didn’t even like the word. He did not like to wonder whether he was really human anymore, or how he long he would go on living while everyone around him passed away. It was always the same old maddening questions that no one could answer. Why did Duinn have to go and bring up death? For God’s sake, they hadn’t even been here a whole day.

Duinn must have sensed something of Crastor’s inner turmoil, because he said, “I didn’t mean to worry you. I know you’ll do everything you can.”

“I will,” Crastor insisted vigorously. Even though Rheol had fallen through the portal first, he felt guilty that she and Duinn were here, as if it were somehow his fault that they’d been dragged into this. “I watched Illyrio open the portal plenty of times. He had a little, er, apparatus he used. A couple of rods connected by a wire. They were made of stone with little characters engraved on them. And he used the rods to write characters in the air.”

“Hmm,” said Duinn. Crastor looked down and absently stroked the cloth mat beneath them. Now that he was describing it out loud, he realized that it was a rather complicated ritual. The stout blue-green woman who’d been singing, her voice deep and honeyed, reached the end of her song, drawing out her final note over a graceful flourish of the drums. The people all around them clapped and cheered and whooped. Soon, she began again.

Duinn spoke next. “You say your planeswalker worked with rods. Are these like wands?”

Crastor did not like where this was going. “No, no, I don’t think so,” he said dismissively.

Duinn did not look convinced. “Perhaps Rheol might know something about it.”

“They weren’t wands. Illyrio didn’t need wands to do magic.”

“Are you sure?” asked Duinn.

“Of course I’m sure,” Crastor snapped. “I barely even know what a wand is.”

“All the more reason to ask Rheol about it,” Duinn urged him.

Crastor scowled, annoyed that Duinn had seized upon his admitted ignorance. “Fine, fine,” he mumbled.

“Why do you dislike her so?” asked Duinn. “You know you two have more in common than you’d like to admit.”

Crastor scowled even more deeply. “We do not! What do you mean?”

“Let’s see,” said Duinn, “you’re both social outcasts. You’re distrustful. You’re disobedient. And…” Duinn trailed off. He smiled and waved at a little boy who had been staring at him wide-eyed for some time. Startled, the boy turned and ran away. “And,” continued Duinn, “I get the sense that for both of you, magic is much more than just conjuring tricks. It’s who you are.”

“Yes,” said Crastor. “That’s what worries me.” He sat up, drawing his knees in front of him and hugging them close to his chest. “Did you see how she looked at me when we first met, when I told her that I do magic without a wand?” He spoke in a conspiratorial whisper, as if Rheol might be skulking in the shadows, listening.

“She did seem to think it was rather important,” Duinn replied.

“Apparently there are people called wizards and they do magic with wands,” said Crastor gravely. “Meanwhile, young magicians are dying mysteriously and suddenly.”

“Oh dear,” said Duinn. The happy music and laughter was an odd accompaniment to their conversation. “You think wizards are behind it? Why should they want to kill magicians?”

“I don’t know. But what kind of person says, ‘you do magic without a wand, so I don’t want to be rescued by you’?” remarked Crastor.

“We don’t know for a fact that that was her reason.”

“It was. I could see it in the way she looked at me.” Crastor remembered how her eyes had searched him. When she’d determined that he was ‘not a wizard, but not a muggle either,’ she’d looked at him like he was a piece of meat and she’d found signs of rot.

“She is hateful, Duinn.”

“Crastor,” said Duinn reproachfully. “You have no idea who she is, or what she’s been through.”

“And you have no idea-” Crastor snapped but then he stopped himself. He bowed his head and balled his hands into fists.

“It’s true. I know very little. Less and less all the time, apparently. But I do know that if Christ had taught us that we only need to have compassion for kind, beautiful people, then we’d all be good Christians.”

Crastor sighed. “Damn it, Duinn, do you never get tired of being good?”

Duinn only smiled, and went back to tapping his fingers in time with the drums.

~

The next morning, Crastor woke with a start. He had been dreaming of a cave that opened onto the ocean. Lobi was in the cave with him, her firm, supple body next to his. Then came caressing, then kissing.

Now Crastor was again in the hut they had offered to him, and one of the blue-green people crouched over him. Crastor rubbed his eyes and saw that Duinn was there and so was Rheol, who had appeared late last night. Both were still asleep. Then he suddenly realized that he was in his human form. So much for any attempt to try to keep his two faces a secret.

The man gestured for Crastor to follow him outside the hut. His expression was hard to read, made harder by the large tusks protruding from his mouth. Crastor stepped out through the flap. It was early morning, and the sun had not yet completely risen. Lobi was waiting at the bottom of the stairs to the hut. She did not look happy. Crastor came down to her. She grabbed his wrist and led him roughly to the beach.

“Hey, hey!” said Crastor. Being led to water by the wrist brought back bad memories. His heart began to pound and his throat grew tight. “Stop! What are you doing?” he cried.

She flung him toward the water. He wobbled on his feet. She said some words he did not understand, and then her hands became filled with lightning. Crastor gaped. Then she threw a ball of lightning at him.

“HEY!” he called as he dodged it, narrowly. Then she threw another, and he dodged again. She threw another that collided with his shoulder. Pain surged throughout his whole body, and his heart stopped for a moment. She drew in nearer to him, and he backed up until he was wading into the water. She pulled a hammer from her belt, and with her free hand she made a beckoning gesture. She seemed to want a fight. Crastor cocked his head, trying to communicate his confusion. She charged at him. He backed away from her, but not quickly enough. Her hammer collided with his ribs. He fell onto his back, momentarily paralyzed with pain. As he lay struggling to regain his breath, the tide rolled forward, lapping his head and torso. Lobi stood over him. She was more than a head taller than he was, and from this angle she was positively menacing. She raised her hammer. Desperately, Crastor waved his arm toward her. A few sparks shot out from his hand. Lobi laughed. Again he tried to throw a fireball, but nothing happened. She raised her hammer higher. Then with both his hands, he threw something cold at her.

“Aagh!” She grunted. Her arm was covered in frost. Smirking, she shook it off. “Yes! Good!” she said. “Farzaja okuleme ni ro takasou.”

Once more she raised her hammer, and then she swung it down across his face. The pain was overwhelming. For a moment, Crastor could see nothing. Then, gradually, Lobi swam back into his vision. He cried out as the tide surrounded him again and the salt water stung the throbbing wounds on his face.

“Sifiraka, ni bolu jo!” she said. He didn’t understand it, but she seemed to be goading him. He was sick of this.

“Alright, Lobi, you want a fight?” he spluttered through blood and saltwater. “Let me introduce you to a friend of mine. Her name’s Chaos. Do you hear me, mistress of mayhem? I’ve got a live one for you! Give us what you’ve got in store today!” he said. He raised his fist and then released it, letting loose whatever was meant to come. Lobi turned around. Then something big and dark swept her away. Crastor sat up unsteadily, lurching as the blood rushed from his head. He turned around and saw a great black bull in the water. Lobi was just in front of it, looking weak. She slumped forward onto the bull. As the tide receded, Crastor saw that one of its horns had gored Lobi’s stomach and was protruding out through her back.

“NO!” he cried, scrambling onto his feet. The bull flung her down. “Get away! Get away!” he yelled at it, shooing it away. He scooped her up and began dragging her away from the water.

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck,” he said as he brought her toward the sand. “No no no no no.” He laid her down. “Oh God, Lobi, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so so sorry,” he said through tears. She was still conscious. Her ruby red eyes were peaceful. She put her hands over the gash in her stomach and closed her eyes. Tremulously, he whispered, “No, please, God, please don’t die, Lobi, please don’t die.” She lay as still as a statue, and her stillness only made her more beautiful, like a holy idol worthy of a fine cathedral and the veneration of pilgrims. She whispered some words in her own language. Tears streamed down Crastor’s face as he watched helplessly. A white light began to glow under her hands. She went on whispering.

“… ro kulo akwame, zik ahamet manna, …”

Her voice was growing stronger. The white light was bright, and the wound was disappearing. Crastor held his breath. Finally, she stopped her prayer. She lifted her hands, and wiped off the blood from her stomach. The wound was gone. She looked up at him.

“You, Aezerothi. Wei, you no Aezerothi.”

Crastor stared at her, dumbfounded. Then he scooped her up in his arms and embraced her tightly. “I’m sorry,” he whispered in Planeswalkiri.

She was tense at first, but then she returned the embrace. “Yes,” she said. “Sorry.”

~

If Lobi had been testing him, Crastor had apparently passed, because he and his companions remained in the village for several more days. Crastor went about in his living body during the day and his dead body at night, for the simple reason that that was his custom. The village people had apparently gotten used to his switching. However, Crastor thought he perceived from them a new coldness, and a suspicious look from time to time.

Duinn was content to sit by the ocean, or to watch the villagers go about their business. Rheol appeared for meals, but otherwise she was nowhere to be seen. Crastor was not sure if he was more angry that the girl would not stay put, or more relieved to be free of her gloomy presence.

Meanwhile, he spent most of his time following Lobi around. He was still shaken and upset by the events at the beach. He instinctively jumped whenever she made a sudden move. Nevertheless, he could not bring himself to avoid her. Every night in his dreams he went back to the cave—their cave—and all his fear was forgotten. She must have had a good reason for attacking him. She’d probably been testing the limits of his powers. Maybe she’d felt betrayed by the discovery of his second face. She was kind to him now, at any rate. He followed her around like a puppy, watching her elegant movements, enthralled by her husky voice. She let him inspect her weapons and tools and let him sit in on her meetings, even those that were exclusively among women, in which he sensed that his presence was highly unorthodox.

Duinn asked him daily whether he’d spoken to Rheol about Illyrio’s planeswalking ritual. Crastor had the easy excuse that Rheol was usually hard to find.

“You could speak to her at dinnertime,” Duinn suggested helpfully.

“I won’t press her to talk if she doesn’t want to talk,” Crastor countered. It was true, she was always silent at meals, speaking only when spoken to, and usually in one-word answers.

“Alright,” Duinn conceded, “but you could give it a try. She does want to get home.” She’d made that clear on the first day.

“I’ll get to it. I will. But I don’t think she knows anything. I’m learning a lot more from Lobi than I’ll bet I could from Rheol.”

Each day, Lobi took Crastor back to the spot where the three of them had first appeared. He had not shown it to her, but she knew where it was. Each time, she sat before the spot and unrolled an ornately woven mat. On it, she laid three wooden wheels, flat on the ground, side by side. Scattered within each wheel were a variety of feathers, shells, stones and strings, the strings being held taut by notches in the rims of the wheels. As she prayed, chanted, or sat silently, she would gradually rearrange the trinkets and the strings. Crastor had no idea what any of it meant. Her ritual didn’t seem to bear any resemblance to Illyrio’s. He tried to track her little stones and strings, noting which one came after which, but he could not see any pattern at all.

Meanwhile, he tried opening the portal himself, but his chaos magic was of little help. He tried to open his mind, to alternately call upon and curse at his goddess, but it was to no avail. Now and then he managed to summon a little sprite or goblin but these immediately faded away. He conceded that this was no great surprise since chaos magic was notoriously fickle, and he had no reason to believe that he could ever use chaos magic to open the portal.

On the fourth day, Lobi led him eagerly to the long hut at the edge of the village. Crastor felt a bit wary, remembering the beach, but she had been angry then, whereas now she was brimming with smiles. Together they climbed the little wooden stairs of the long house and entered. Sunlight streamed in through gaps in the leather walls and roof. The chief and several others were sitting in a semi-circle on low stools. Crastor swept his gaze over them and then he froze. At the end of the semi-circle sat an animated corpse with glowing yellow eyes. Crastor stood there stupidly, his mouth hanging open. The dead man turned toward the others and said something Crastor didn’t understand. They nodded. Then the dead man said,

“You must be Crastor. Chief Koyembe tells me that you all have much to discuss.”

Crastor was so taken aback that his legs felt weak. He put a hand to his chest. Lobi indicated that he was to sit on the lone stool that faced the semi-circle. He slumped down into it. Then she sat at an empty stool within the semi-circle.

The dead man had not spoken in any language Crastor recognized, but nevertheless he’d understood it. He spoke again.

“Do you understand me?”

Crastor nodded weakly. Each word was a revelation, like a very old memory that he had not thought on since he was a child. One after another, the words clicked into place. Each string of words made sense, yet the words themselves were totally foreign.

“Say it. Say that you understand,” said the dead man.

Crastor simply stared at him, wide-eyed. It was too much to take in. He could not think. He blinked slowly.

“Come on,” said the other, snapping his fingers. The tattered, decaying flesh gave the snap a dull, rasping sound.

Crastor shook his head and searched for the words. Clusters of consonants and vowels flitted through his head, and he tried to fit them together. Finally, he croaked, “Yes,” in the foreign language.

The dead man smiled. “Good. That’s a start,” he said, leaning back in his stool. Crastor took a good look at him. He looked very much like Crastor’s corpse body, with the same hunched posture, the thin frame, and the sagging, torn flesh. This fellow had more hair though, black hair, and greenish-white skin, and he still had most of his face. Only the tip of his nose was missing. The man continued, “This is your first time hearing the Language of the Dead?”

The phrase ‘Language of the Dead’ hit Crastor like a familiar tune. Yes, he’d known about the Language of the Dead all along. He just hadn’t known that he’d known.

The other waited for a response. Again, Crastor said, “Yes.”

The dead man nodded. “All the living dead are reborn with an innate understanding of this language. For the living, it is essentially impossible to learn. For the dead, it is essentially impossible to forget.”

Crastor nodded, marveling that with each sentence, he could understand more clearly.

“Come on, try practicing some real sentences now,” said the dead man.

Crastor took a deep breath. Again, the sounds of the language bounced around in his mind, gradually coalescing into meaningful words.

“I feel… strange,” he said lamely.

The dead man smiled. “Good,” he said. “You’ll get used to it. Give me one more sentence. A longer one.”

Crastor furrowed his brows, searching for the words he wanted.

“It’s easier if you don’t think too much,” said the other. “Just speak as it comes to you.”

Crastor nodded. Then, slowly, feeling uncertain of each word, he said, “I never knew there were others.”

“Very good. And yes, there are others. Many thousands of others.”

Crastor tried to absorb this. For more than twenty years, he had skulked in the shadows in his dead body, sleeping wrapped in blankets from head to toe, dreading that anyone should discover his secret, cursing God for having cursed him. Now, here was another dead man telling him that there were many thousands more. Crastor had so many questions.

The dead man had turned back to the others in the semi-circle and was exchanging words with them in another language. Suddenly, Crastor blurted out, “Do you also have two faces?” As the foreign words rushed out of him, he felt like he was running downhill. The fellow was right, the trick was to go fast without stopping or thinking about it.

The dead man looked at him in surprise and then said something to the semi-circle. The chief, Koyembe, said something to him. The dead man bowed his head to Koyembe, and then turned to Crastor.

“No. We have humans here, and we have undead here, but we do not have creatures like you with two faces. We have magic that can disguise one as the other temporarily, but it sounds to me like you are not using such magic.”

“No,” said Crastor. The word ‘undead’ hit him with that same odd familiarity. He knew it referred to the many thousands, the race of living corpses.

The undead man was speaking to the elders in the semi-circle again. The elders and Lobi, that is. Being the youngest in the group, her youthful energy was accentuated. Her brilliant red eyes were kind. Her white hair sparkled in a shaft of sunlight. Crastor was grateful that she was here. The chief spoke to the undead man at length this time.

When the chief had finished, the undead man continued, “You have never been to Aezeroth before?”

There was that word again. Crastor asked, “What is Aezeroth?”

The other looked at him in surprise. He said, “Aezeroth is, well, the world.”

Crastor guessed that the undead man was not familiar with planes or planeswalking. So he said, “No, I have not been to the plane of Aezeroth nor have I heard of it,” using the Planeswalkiri word for plane because nothing else came to mind. The undead man translated it for the others, awkwardly copying the word that Crastor had used for ‘plane’.

Lobi said something then. The elderly woman said something, too, in her unhurried voice. Then one of the men chimed in. Chief Koyembe said something last, and then the undead man continued.

“The trolls,” which Crastor gathered was the name for the blue-green people, “the undead, and a few other nations are allied with one another,” said the undead man. “We are a nation of nations known as the Horde. Meanwhile, the humans, elves, and several other tribes have their formed own alliance which is called, rather unimaginatively, the Alliance. The Horde and the Alliance are bitter enemies. You are in Horde territory now. That means that but for the mercy of these trolls, you and your friends should have been killed as soon as you arrived here.”

Crastor felt like he had been punched in the gut. He swallowed. The undead man was speaking slowly for his benefit, but it was not the language that baffled Crastor but the implications of his words. Trolls, elves, Horde territory. He thought he understood. He asked, “So, it is customary to kill humans here?”

“Customary, indeed,” responded the undead. “It is honorable and profitable. To protect humans is a serious crime.”

Crastor let this sink in while the undead man reported back to the trolls. One of the troll men said something. The chief nodded. The undead man said, “If you had been three humans, instead of two humans and an undead, the trolls probably would have killed you immediately. You must understand it is nothing personal. Any member of the Horde who ventures into Alliance territory would meet the same fate.”

Crastor felt very small. Duinn and Rheol had come so close to being killed. It was mere lucky chance that Crastor had used his undead face to distract the angry mob, and so he had arrived on this plane as an undead. No wonder the people had seemed friendlier to him on that first night.

The undead went on, “Your ability to change between an undead appearance and a human appearance, of which I am told, is extraordinary. You would make an excellent spy. And frankly—this is me speaking for myself now and not for the trolls—you would be foolish not to use it as such. Assuming your loyalty could be proven, the Horde would reward you handsomely.”

Wild fancies flashed through Crastor’s mind. Fame and glory, Lobi’s respect, the respect of nations could be his, and not despite his curse but because of it. Perhaps Aezeroth was where he belonged. He could make a new life for himself here, one with dancing and warm nights, with people who looked like him and, yes, perhaps even with Lobi. But he must not think this way. He had the chaos magicians to think of, his silly, bumbling students. He could not simply abandon them. Could he?

Crastor’s first priority had to be getting Duinn home, and Rheol, too. Sitting up straighter and taller than he felt, he said slowly, “I am grateful to all of you. So grateful. We were already honored by your generous hospitality,” he said, looking at the trolls, “but now knowing what a risk you have taken for us, I truly have no words to express my thanks.” Crastor waited while the undead translated his message. Then he said, “But we did not come here to stay. We did not intend to planeswalk at all. Our coming here was a pure accident.” Again the undead translated, tentatively repeating the word ‘planeswalk’, for which Crastor had again used the Planeswalkiri.

Crastor continued, “My companions wish to return home as soon as possible. For their sake, I ask if you could tell me about the portal.” The undead translated rapidly, and then the chief spoke a brief sentence.

“First, tell us about your companions,” said the undead.

“Ah, well…” Crastor hesitated. “Duinn and I are friends. We saw that the girl was in danger and so we saved her. Then, we just appeared here in Aezeroth.”

Translating for the chief, the undead said, “What kind of danger? None of you opened the portal? You say that you came here by pure accident, yet you speak Planeswalkiri?”

So Crastor related the story, in broad strokes. He left out the fact that he and Duinn had been estranged for fifteen years, or that Rheol had been so suspicious of him from the start. But he did share that he’d been raised by a planeswalker who had not taught him the craft. So yes, it really was just a coincidence that he happened to speak Planeswalkiri. He told them about the witch hunt, how magic was reviled on his plane, and how they had stumbled onto the portal in the forest. Crastor had not opened it, certainly Duinn hadn’t, and presumably Rheol hadn’t, or else she was a very good liar.

When Crastor finished on this note, the chief nodded. Then he asked through the undead, “The girl wanders far, alone, every day. Why?”
“I do not know,” said Crastor.

“Do you trust her?”

Crastor wanted to say no. But then he reflected that they were in Horde territory, and he remembered what Duinn had said about having compassion for her.

“I do not know her,” he said.

~

“So, how was your planeswalking lesson?” asked Duinn amicably.

It was dinnertime in the large common house, and most people in the village were here. The room brimmed with warmth, laughter and good food. The evening’s golden sun poured in. The people sat together on stools at long, low tables. The room buzzed with the energy of their conversation. Duinn and Crastor sat together at one of the tables. Lobi and the undead, whose name was Kazma, sat directly across from them. Next to Duinn was an empty stool for Rheol.

“Much better with Kazma there,” said Crastor, beaming. Since meeting Kazma with the elders earlier that day, Crastor had been inseparable from him. Of course he had immediately relayed as much information as he could to Duinn, as quickly as he could. Then he’d gone on learning as much as he could about Aezeroth from Kazma and Lobi. He was amazed to learn how magic works here. Apparently, there were nine different kinds of magic, and everyone was born with a proclivity for a certain kind. Apparently Crastor was too, or at least he had been ‘reborn’ with it, as Kazma would say. His proclivity for fire and ice magic was apparently characteristic of one of the nine types. This type was called a mage.

The three of them had just returned from the portal, where Lobi had begun to explain her system of trinkets, which helped her to “listen to” the portal. It was a complex system, and not as organized as it looked. It was a lot of listening, sensing, and improvising. Crastor had thought that with Kazma translating, he could surely learn to planeswalk easily enough. But Lobi insisted that it would require many lessons, and that it would take years to become skilled. “The portal has moods,” she’d said, and each configuration of trinkets represented a different mood. But with all three wheels and her many trinkets, it seemed there were infinite possible moods.

With food still in his mouth, Crastor said, “Lobi thinks the portal will open back up any day now. She says there is some, er, ‘dark energy’ blocking it, but she thinks that will go away very soon.”

“That is good news,” said Duinn. Then he added jovially, “I want to hear what Lobi thinks of you as a student.”

Crastor relayed the message to Kazma, who relayed it to Lobi. It was a bit odd when Lobi and Duinn talked to each other this way, as each message had to go from Irish to Gutterspeak—this was the common name for the Language of the Dead—to Orcish, which was not even Lobi’s native tongue. Then her Orcish went back to Gutterspeak to Irish. Still, they were all so grateful to have a translator that they hardly noticed the inconvenience.

“Crastor has a natural talent and curiosity,” said Lobi, smiling. “If he practices, someday he will be very good. But he is too impatient now.”

Duinn bellowed with laughter. “He was exactly the same way when he was my student!”

“Oh!” she said. “I did not know you were his teacher. What did you teach?”

“You mean, what did I try to teach,” he said in an exasperated voice. “I tried to teach him about our religion, but I don’t think I was very successful.”

Crastor translated, adding, “It’s true, he was a poor teacher of religion. But he is an excellent teacher of faith. The best I’ve ever met.”

Lobi nodded. “The best teach by example,” she said.

Crastor translated this for Duinn, adding, “I don’t know if I told you that Lobi is a sort of spiritualist to her people. Or, apprentice spiritualist, to…” Crastor pointed out the elderly woman from the meeting earlier.

“Wonderful,” said Duinn. “I would love to learn more about her people’s beliefs.”

Lobi gestured around the room. “You are seeing our beliefs here,” she said. “Yes we have many gods, and there is our one Creator. But the heart of our traditions is the harmony you see in this room. Nothing is more important to us than good relationships. We take care of our elders, our neighbors, the land, and our gods. And they take care of us. All the magic in the world is no substitute for a healthy, happy community.”

Crastor translated her beautiful words. Yes, they were beautiful. But they made him sad, too, and he was not sure why. He felt a sudden stab of longing, a wish to be part of a community like this, where people were loyal and kind and caring. Such love among chaos magicians was hard to imagine. If one tried, it might look like something like several rats calmly dividing a piece of cheese into equal pieces.

“I would like to show both of you something tomorrow morning,” she said. “At sunrise. Something that is very, very special to us. Will you come? I want you to meet our ancestors.”

Crastor did not even bother translating, since he already knew Duinn’s response. “We would love to,” he said.

“Good!” said Lobi. “I would invite your young friend, too, but she is not here. If you see her, you may invite her.”

“We will,” said Duinn. “But I haven’t seen her since this morning, and she usually comes home late at night.”

“But that’s no matter,” added Crastor as he translated to Gutterspeak. “She wouldn’t want to come anyway.”

~

It was indeed late at night when Rheol returned. Crastor had been asleep. He was in his undead form, lying on his side, when suddenly he woke to find Rheol directly in front of him. She was lying on her side also, with her face close to his. She was wide awake, staring at him. He looked at her in alarm.

“Don’t speak,” she whispered. “Just listen. But first, I would speak to a human.”

It took him a moment to realize what she meant. Then, he understood. He tried to will himself into his human form, but it was not his routine to change in the middle of the night like this. It was rather presumptuous of her to be giving orders, he thought. He tried to concentrate on changing. But the intensity of her gaze made him nervous. He could not guess what she might want at this hour. He took a long, slow breath. He tried to focus his energy at the top of his head, and then let it sweep down through the rest of his body. He felt his frame filling out. His living flesh and all the sensations of it returned.

“That’s better,” she whispered. He looked into her violet eyes. There was an eerie steadiness about them this evening.

Suddenly, like lightning, something silver flashed toward his throat, and he felt a burning there. He wanted to react but the pain overwhelmed him. He gasped for air. He tasted blood. Rheol was standing over him.

“There is only one right way to do magic,” she whispered into his ear.

He was choking. He could not move. Everything went dark.

~

Crastor felt very cold. He was standing in a gray place, and a whiteness obscured his vision. It took him a moment to realize that the white things were snowflakes on a fierce icy wind. Cold penetrated his shoes and stung his feet. He took a few steps forward, and the snow crunched beneath him. The snowstorm was so thick that he could not see more than a couple feet in front of him. He wandered through the storm until he stubbed his toe on something hard, nearly toppling over as he did. He looked down. It was a headstone. He could not read it. The inscription was written in characters he did not recognize. He looked around. There was another headstone a few feet beside this one. Peering through the snow, he saw a row of headstones stretching forever into the distance. He looked to the other side, and saw more headstones stretching out in the other direction. The torrential wind began to abate, and as Crastor could see more clearly, he saw rows upon rows of headstones. Hundreds, no thousands of headstones, all around as far as the eye could see. He felt overcome with grief, though he did not know who he was mourning.

He turned around and found Rheol standing right behind him. She glared at him, and then plunged a knife into his heart. A red stain blossomed on his monk’s robe. He looked up, but it was the abbot who stood before him now. He pushed Crastor to the ground. The knife wound blazed with pain. Blood dripped from his chest onto the pure white snow. Crastor put a hand to the wound to try to stop the bleeding. Then the abbot was gone, and Illyrio was standing over him. Illyrio offered him a hand. Crastor started to reach his bloody hand upward, but then, looking into Illyrio’s eyes, he pulled back in fear.

Suddenly, he was not in the snow anymore. He was lying on his side in soft sand. He was in a huge cave that opened onto the ocean. The floor of the cave was mostly deep blue water, except for the little beach at the back of the cave upon which he lay now. He was facing the mouth of the cave, and through it he saw a showy pink and purple sunrise. Or perhaps it was sunset. He could not tell. A gentle hand caressed his shoulder. He closed his eyes, and that was when he realized that he was naked. A warm, naked body came up behind him and pressed against his. He felt a lap cradling his buttocks, and breasts nestling into his back. He looked up and back, and saw Lobi smiling down on him. Gently, she slid her large hand along the side of his body, from his shoulder to his hips and then to his thigh. A warm and pure relaxation came over Crastor. He could feel her soft, easy breathing, and he synchronized his breath with hers. He flipped over so that he could kiss her. But as he drew in close to her, something got in the way. A knife handle was protruding from his chest. They both looked down at it in confusion. Crastor tried again to kiss her, but again the knife handle came between them, and he was prevented from getting any closer.

~

The first rays of morning pierced the hut. Crastor stirred slowly. For a groggy moment, he thought he was still in the cave with Lobi. But then he felt the irritating roughness of his monk’s robe. He fidgeted on his straw-stuffed mattress. Wearily, he opened his eyes. The hut was barely illuminated by the blueish light of pre-dawn. Still lying on his side, he looked down. Dried blood was everywhere. It stained his sleeping mat, and it had run from the mat onto the floorboards. Crastor surveyed the bloody mess, and panic rose in him. In his mind’s eye he saw Rheol lying beside him, and a flash of silver at his neck. That had been no dream. He felt his neck. His hand came back smeared with brownish blood, but he could feel no wound. He was in his human form. He sat up and looked around. Duinn was behind him on his own sleeping mat. Crastor watched him steadily to make sure that he was breathing. He was. That was good. He looked down at his own robe and saw that it was covered with blood. Frantically, he kicked his sleeping mat aside so that it covered the stained floorboards. Then he stumbled out of the hut and down the little stairs, and mechanically wandered toward the beach.

His mind raced. He thought of waking the whole village, of sounding the alarm that a little murderess was on the loose. But this was Horde territory. They would probably kill her. Perhaps she deserved it. A fresh wave of shame broke over him at this thought. She was just a little girl. Wasn’t she?

He took a deep breath. Somehow his feet had carried him to the waterline. At first, the frigid water stung them. After a few moments though, it felt refreshing. It had been hours since Rheol had slit his throat. If she had gone on a killing rampage, she was probably done by now. Crastor had time. He needed to think. Impulsively, he pulled off his monk’s robe and waded into the water in his trousers. He began washing the robe, scrubbing at the blood with his hands. Somehow this comforted him, as if by washing off the blood, he might erase the whole event. He knew he ought to tell someone, but he didn’t want to get Rheol killed nor did he want to explain how he’d survived. Lobi knew that he couldn’t perform healing magic. If the trolls found out he couldn’t die, who knows what sort of superstitious reaction they might have. He cursed Rheol. The wicked little wizard brat. Surely that was what she was—a wizard. Or witch, or whatever. If she’d had a wand, she’d probably have tried to kill him sooner.

Crastor looked down at his robe. The stain looked exactly the same. He swore. The flaccid rag hung limp in his hands. He tossed it onto the beach behind him, and it landed on the packed sand with a wet thwack. He closed his eyes and immersed himself in the water. He wiped off the last of the blood from his neck. He came back to the surface and sat down at the edge of the water, so that the incoming tide came up to his waist.

Dear God, what had he begun? He’d only meant to grow a movement, not start a war. Rheol’s strike all but confirmed that wizards had been behind some of the more inexplicable attacks on magicians. He felt sick. Guilt churned in his stomach like a bad meal. His goofy band of mischief-makers was no army. A clown army, perhaps. The principles of chaos magic—freedom, silliness, nakedness—these were no defense against a knife in the dark. No chaos magician had a soldier’s steely determination. Rheol’s determination. Magicians stood no chance against whatever mad ideology these wizards stood for.

And now what had he unleashed on Aezeroth, bringing her here? No, he didn’t bring her here, he had to remind himself. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that he had. He felt he was meant to be here, that this place was already a kind of home to him, and somehow Rheol and Duinn had been dragged into his destiny. But if this place was home to him, then what would become of the chaos magicians? He felt torn between the community he’d created and the one that had shown him so much love.

The problem was that chaos magic was not like any of these other disciplines of magic. Greystone had warned him that chaos magic could not be taught, but Crastor had tried to teach it anyway, with mediocre results. His students had enthusiasm and work ethic, but most of them simply weren’t very good at magic. Chaos magic was individualistic and rebellious. It was the opposite of discipline, of movement-ism. It had to be spontaneous. It was only ever meant to disrupt structures, but it could never build anything. Trying to establish chaos magic as an institution was like trying to build a house out of fire. Crastor had wanted it to be something it wasn’t. A family, perhaps. Or maybe just something that would last. That was the crux of it all. He was a man who could not die, in love with a kind of magic that could not last.

And so when he should have been raising the alarm, Crastor sat shivering in his trousers in the shallows, paralyzed with indecision, his darkest thoughts pulling him down into misery like a riptide. He could not tell the others about Rheol, thereby unleashing the very witch hunt he’d sought to thwart. She was too much like him, as Duinn had said. Her rebelliousness was as admirable as it was terrible.

He did not know how long he’d been sitting there when he heard someone call his name. He turned to see all three of them approaching: Lobi, Kazma, and Duinn. The knot in his stomach eased a bit at the sight of them well and unharmed.

“Sta gurach,” said Lobi.

Crastor responded, “Sta gurach,” which meant good morning. It was one of the few Orcish phrases he’d learned. Lobi wore a long skirt and midriff-bearing leather top as was her custom, but today she also wore several woven and beaded bracelets and shell necklaces, and gems glittered in her pierced ears. A sweet floral scent wafted from her.

“Are you ready to go?” asked Kazma dubiously.

“Uh, yes, yes,” said Crastor as he stood, the water cascading off of him.

“What happened to your clothes?” Kazma asked.

“I, uh, made a mess of them,” Crastor replied, and he felt his cheeks grow hot. Kazma translated this for Lobi. She raised an eyebrow and looked down at the brown, wet rag by Crastor’s feet. She said something not unkindly and then strode away, her steps graceful even on the loose sand. Kazma did not bother to translate, and Crastor presumed gratefully that she was going to fetch him some new clothes.

Duinn, who’d been watching patiently, asked, “Are you alright, Crastor?” The pink light of early sunrise tinted his white hair and gave his skin a warm, rosy look.

Tell him, Crastor thought. Tell him!

“Fine,” he said. “Just had a bad dream.”

Duinn nodded. Then he looked at the robe on the ground dubiously. “Out of curiosity, why were you still wearing that old thing?” he asked.

Crastor looked down sheepishly. “I don’t usually wear it,” he said. “Just once in a while. When I’m passing through a new town. People are usually kinder to a drifter when they think he’s a man of the cloth.”

“Ah,” said Duinn. Of course that was only part of the reason, and Crastor hoped that Duinn did not guess the other part. The truth was he still liked to play the monk. He liked that Greystone still playfully called him Father Crastor. Perhaps he merely liked the title, the authority, and the respect. Or perhaps deep down, a part of him still loved the church. Though for this, he despised the church all the more.

As they waited, Crastor felt a familiar lurching inside, like a sleeping beast waking up. He’d been in his human form most of the night, and the undead form was beginning to feel neglected. He ignored it. Of course, none of them would care if he switched now, but the change to his routine might arouse even more suspicion than his odd behavior already had.

Lobi returned with a purple garment in her arms. She said something and tossed it to Crastor. Kazma said, “She says purple is a good color for a mage.”

He put it on. It was a simple robe, not like the showy embroidered robes that some of the trolls wore. However, the color was a magnificent, royal purple. A monk’s robe, in a color fit for a king.

“She says, hopefully it is sufficient,” said Kazma.

Crastor smiled. “It is perfect,” he said.

~

Lobi paddled their narrow boat with remarkable speed. Crastor could not tell whether this was simply her regular speed, or whether she was in a hurry to show them whatever she had in store.

When she had first reached for the double-headed oar in the docked boat, both Crastor and Duinn had instinctively offered to help. Straightening up, Lobi had said, “You think I am too weak to row my own boat?” Just as instinctively, they apologized profusely, but Lobi merely laughed and shook her head.

Now, she sped through the gently rocking ocean that glittered with the early morning sun. She sat at the head of the boat, with Kazma behind her, then Crastor, then Duinn behind Crastor. The cool wind and the occasional gentle spray cleared his mind. Perhaps everything was fine. Would be fine.

Then Duinn’s voice came from behind him. “I’m beginning to get a bit worried about Rheol.”

Crastor swallowed. “How do you mean?” he asked.

“She wasn’t at dinner last night, and I don’t think she ever came back to the hut either,” he said. Crastor was silent. The knot in his stomach was tightening again. “Do you think she’s alright?” asked Duinn.

“I’m sure she’s fine,” said Crastor brusquely.

Duinn paused, then he asked, “Are you alright?”

Crastor bit his lip but did not turn around. He didn’t like lying to Duinn. He felt the undead inside him lurching again. Then he spotted what he expected was their destination. There was a cave ahead, a huge gaping mouth at the bottom of a rocky cliff, swallowing the ocean water. It looked very much like the cave of his dreams, though he would have to see it on the inside to be sure. He tried to reassure himself that it was just a coincidence, but his panic was resurfacing, exacerbated by his confusion. Finally, he made a decision. Priests were good at keeping secrets. Especially when nobody around spoke their language.

“Rheol tried to kill me last night,” he said.

“WHAT?” Duinn shouted. Lobi and Kazma turned around to look at them, but Crastor kept his face neutral. Duinn spluttered. “Why? What did she do? What did you do? Crastor, you have to tell someone!”

“I’m telling you, aren’t I?”

“I mean one of them!”

Crastor turned around to face Duinn. “The trolls can defend themselves,” he said. “They are strong. Rheol is just a little girl.”

Duinn hesitated. “So you think she might want to hurt others?” Crastor shrugged. “Crastor,” said Duinn sternly, “if there is any chance she might hurt others…”

“What difference does it make?”

“It could make all the difference!”

“Will you calm down,” Crastor snapped quietly. “I’ve got it under control. I’m handling it.”

“Are you?” asked Duinn hotly. “Or are you just afraid to ask for help?”

Lobi clicked her tongue. Crastor whipped around, thinking that she was expressing disapproval, but then he realized that of course she was only trying to get their attention. She had stopped paddling, and now they were drifting near the mouth of the cave. She had assumed an air of solemnity. Crastor tried to compose himself and focus his attention on her. Lobi began to speak, and Kazma translated.

“We are about to enter the House of the Ancestors. This is the most sacred place for the Toluma people. We come here often to honor our ancestors, to make sacrifices to them, and to remember their names and deeds. Practically every Toluma child can recite their lineage back ten generations, and more importantly, we strive to remember what kind of people our ancestors were.

“The ancestors, in turn, provide for us, they bless our rituals, and they whisper good advice in our ears. No Toluma man, woman or child is ever alone, for our ancestors are always with us wherever we go. Still, it is here, in this house, that we feel their presence most strongly. Please treat this place with the respect it deserves. If you pay careful attention, you may hear our ancestors, and you too may benefit from their gracious wisdom.”

She turned, and began to paddle slowly toward the cave. Crastor and Duinn waited in humble silence. As the little boat passed through the mouth of the cave, Crastor felt the energy of the moment shift. He suddenly felt that he was indeed in the presence of history, of ancient powers. Yet he felt disquiet, too. A sense of tragedy.

The cave was large, and it was just as he’d dreamed it. Or, almost as he’d dreamed it. As his eyes adjusted to the shadows that played on the walls, he saw lots of shelves. Some of them were in low places and some in high places that could have only been reached with very tall ladders.

Something was amiss. Most of the shelves were empty. Some were strewn with bits of broken glass and pottery. Long scarves and strings of beads crossed the roof of the cave, but there were also naked strings and torn scarves that dangled forlornly. Scenes had been painted directly on the cave walls, but some of them were smeared with a reddish substance that looked like blood. Flowers, feathers, papers, dolls, scarves, bowls and jars bobbed at the surface of the water.

“AYYYYYYAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!” Lobi screamed. Her wail pierced the bloody morning and resounded off the walls of the cave. It was not the cry of a single woman, but the agony of generations. It seemed to reach into Crastor’s chest and rip out his heart.

Then she began talking rapidly. Whether it was prayers, curses, or incoherent babble, Crastor did not know. In a few swift strokes, she directed the boat to the little beach at the back of the cave, and as soon as it met the sand, she leapt out. There was a huge rock at the back of the beach covered with engravings. It looked like an altar. There was nothing on it. The beach around it was littered with sacred relics. There were more flowers and scarves, as well as candles, jewelry, statuettes, and even bones, a braid of hair and a couple of skulls.

Lobi crouched in front of the altar, muttering and crying. She pulled out the band holding up her ponytail, and as her hair hung loose about her shoulders, she tugged on it as if to rip it out. Then she crawled toward a red and gold cloth that was lying in the sand before the altar, and held up one piece of it with each hand. It had been roughly cut, or torn, in two. She wailed again, the soft, mournful cry of a wounded animal.

Crastor looked away. As he swept his gaze over the massacre, something floating in the water behind them caught his attention. He grabbed the oar.

“Crastor,” whispered Duinn sharply.

Crastor ignored him. Gently, he pushed off the beach and paddled over the still water. The floating thing was large and black. It was no scarf nor doll. They reached it, and Crastor clumsily stopped the boat by leaning forward and grabbing onto the wall of the cave. Before he’d even flipped the thing over, all three men could tell what it was. He reached the oar out and prodded the thing until it flipped, revealing a bloated white face and two empty violet eyes.

Behind him, Duinn begin to pray in Latin. Crastor stood unmoving, unthinking. Kazma grasped Rheol’s wrist. “Bring us back to Lobi,” he said.

Crastor obeyed. He drove the boat onto the sand, and Kazma stepped out and did likewise with the corpse. When she had finished bowing and wailing before the ruined altar, Lobi stood and turned back toward them. Her hair was tousled and her face was swollen from crying. Her red eyes blazed. She looked at the corpse but her expression was unreadable. Then she looked at Crastor.

“Whoever did this has raped our ancestors. Did she do this?” She asked through Kazma, pointing at Rheol’s body. Then, “Did you do this?”

Crastor reeled, realizing that Lobi had inadvertently echoed the same question Rheol had asked him when they’d arrived here. Then he felt angry, though he was not sure whether it was because Lobi thought him responsible for this crime, or because he felt that perhaps in some way he was.

“Of course I didn’t!” Crastor protested. “She did.”

“Why would she do this?” asked Lobi, and though Crastor did not immediately understand her words, he felt their ferocity. She spoke with more fury than she’d had that morning she attacked him on the beach, and none of the playfulness.

“Because…” he was too nervous to think, and the truth began tumbling out of his mouth. “Because she believed that there is only one right way to do magic.”

Lobi’s face grew hard. Her lips became a thin line. “You knew this?” she asked.

In his own mind, Crastor swore. He should have kept his mouth shut.

“No, I didn’t. I only learned it last night.”

“Last night? What happened last night?”

Crastor was digging himself in deeper. He felt like his plan was falling apart, and then he remembered that he’d had no plan.

“We just had a little, uh, a disagreement, that’s all.”

Lobi’s eyes narrowed. The malice in her expression was more than he could bear.

“I had no idea she was dangerous, I swear!”

“So you two fought, then the girl did this desecration alone, and then she killed herself?”

“Yes, exactly!” said Crastor.

Lobi took a deep breath and brushed back a bit of her wild hair. “This is a matter for the elders and the ancestors to judge.”

This was exactly what he had hoped to avoid. A trial, questions about what happened, superstitious people reacting to things they didn’t understand.

“Look,” said Crastor, “you said there was a dark energy blocking the portal, but that it would open up any day now, right? Might it be open now? Is it possible that the dark energy was… ?” and he nodded toward Rheol’s body.

“It’s possible,” she said.

“So let’s try it. We’ll just go. Duinn and I will leave your people alone.”

“No,” she said firmly. “If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear.” Crastor had nothing to hide, except the fact that he could not die. And the fact that he’d protected the girl who’d raped the ancestors.

Then Lobi leaned in toward him, and pressed a finger into his chest. “And if you helped her with this, or if you drove her to it in any way, I will lay you on this altar and I will cut you into little pieces myself.”

In that moment, Crastor realized that he’d never had the slightest idea who Lobi was. Right before his eyes, the Lobi he thought he knew was disappearing, replaced with a religious zealot who defended her culture with the fury of any abbot or witch-hunter. This was who she’d always been, of course. Her religion of light and love and harmony was the opposite of everything that chaos magic stood for. It was the kind of house that chaos magic was born to burn. And her loyalty to it terrified him.

He had been so wrong about everything. He’d been a fool to think that he and Lobi might belong together. And he’d been a fool to save Rheol from the witch hunt only to spurn her afterward. What he’d written off as gloomy aloofness was actually a deep, secret pain. She had been rejected by society and abandoned by her friends, and perhaps this is why she had chosen death. Perhaps wandless, powerless, and friendless, she decided she would rather die an iconoclast than linger, purposeless, among her enemies. Crastor could respect this. In a way, he almost envied it, this fantastic display of the same hopelessness and rage that forever drew him in to chaos magic like a moth to blinding light.

His part in Rheol’s choices was irrelevant. He’d learned a powerful lesson in the monastery. In the eyes of a zealot, it doesn’t matter whether he’s really committed any crime. Being what he was was crime enough.

Suddenly, his undead body forced its way out. He did not even try to stop it now. He let the change complete, which only took a moment. He accepted that this was the direction things were heading.

He turned back toward the water, and began to wade into it. “So you’re saying it’s possible, eh?” he said in Irish. “I’ll take my chances with possible.”

Duinn asked, “Crastor? What are you talking about?”

Crastor opened his mind. It was easy to do in this place. For better or for worse, chaos magic always worked best in sacred spaces. “Duinn,” he said, “I don’t know what’s coming, but brace yourself because it’s probably going to be uncomfortable.”

A moment later, the entire cave began to tremble. The beaded strings and scarves above them rattled. The last remaining trinkets on the shelves fell into the water, which itself began swaying violently side to side. Lobi shouted something. He ignored her, focusing on inviting whatever was approaching. “What is this? Stop this immediately!” came Kazma’s voice. Then something collided with Crastor’s back. He fell forward into the shallow water. When he righted himself and sat up, Lobi and Kazma were standing over him. Lobi held a ball of green light between her hands, aiming it at him menacingly.

“Stop what you’re doing!” shouted Kazma over the din. Crastor laughed, a wild, half-mad laugh.

“It’s not me! I’m not doing anything!” he said, showing them his empty hands. “You can’t stop it now!”

Then Lobi looked out toward the water, and her eyes grew fearful. She backed away from Crastor. Kazma followed her. Crastor turned, and he caught only a brief glimpse of an enormous red creature just beginning to breach the surface. Before he could get a good look, a tentacle shot out toward him and wrapped itself around his torso. Then he was abruptly pulled under the water.

Water filled his mouth and nose. Panic mingled with suffocation. Pain was shooting through his face and down his throat. He was being pulled along fast. The thirst for air was unbearable. Crastor clawed wildly at the water, as if that might help him breathe. Finally, the tentacle shot up and penetrated the surface. He coughed and choked. He rubbed his stinging eyes, and caught sight of land. Desperate as he was for each gulp of air, he took one last ragged breath and held it. He’d bet correctly. The tentacle plunged him back underwater. Again, he was racked with the stinging pain and the agony of drowning. Again, what felt like centuries later, he was lifted to the surface. He looked through the pain for land. To his horror, he saw that they were farther from it now. He tried to take another big breath, but he coughed halfway through. Plunged underwater again with an unsatisfactory supply of air, Crastor used his lucid early moments to concentrate on chaos. Anything is possible, he thought. Anything!

On his third time up for air, Crastor’s head was pounding and he did not see land. But he did spot something else. The largest bird he’d ever seen was careening toward him. It dove downward and then streaked above the surface of the water. Still coughing and gasping, Crastor maneuvered himself out of the tentacle. He hung from it with both hands, clinging to the slippery surface as his legs dangled. The bird approached. Just as it came sailing under Crastor, he let go of the tentacle and awkwardly landed on the bird’s back, facing backward, clinging to its hindquarters to steady himself. The bird immediately made a sharp turn, and Crastor nearly fell off, but he managed to hook one foot where the bird’s wing met its neck, and so he stayed on, clasping its lower body tighter. The bird slowed, then hovered as it flapped its great wings once or twice, and then it was off, soaring upward. Crastor’s head was spinning, and it took him several moments to feel certain which way was was up and which was down. Once he’d gotten his bearings, he looked down.

“Duinn!” he cried ecstatically. Duinn was dangling like a rag doll from the bird’s talons, which were clasped around his shoulders and armpits. If Duinn responded, Crastor could not hear. Duinn was not facing him. Crastor sized up his own position on the bird’s back. Then in a swift and terrifying move, he turned himself around and wrapped his arms around its neck. He looked down again.

“Hey!” he shouted down at Duinn. Duinn looked up at him. He looked dazed and weak, but he was alive. Crastor was so happy to see him that he laughed in spite of himself. “You alright?” he called. He could not tell if Duinn heard him. Crastor waved. Duinn waved back, and made a grimace that was not a smile, but might have been an attempt at one.

Sighing with relief, Crastor looked at their surroundings. They were rapidly approaching land. He could not see the village, but the landscape looked familiar. They soared above the treetops. In spite of the fire in his chest, flying was delightful. He’d forgotten the joy of well-done chaos magic. In fact, his magic had never worked this well before. Like a man with nothing to lose, he wrapped his legs around the bird’s neck so that they met in front of its breast. Then, after a few wobbling attempts, he spread his arms wide, savoring the effect. The bird did not seem to appreciate this, because it squawked and made a hard turn upward. Crastor was thrown onto his back, and he struggled to hang on by his legs. He took the hint, and did not play around on the bird after that.

Suddenly, the bird dove toward the ground. Then it hovered. It released Duinn from its talons and roughly tossed Crastor forward. For a second time, he collided painfully with the ground at the site of the portal. As he lay reeling, he heard the flap of wings recede.

Exhausted and racked with pain, Crastor heaved himself up. He turned toward Duinn, who was still conscious, though he was pale and trembling. Crastor stood over him.

“Uncomfortable?!” Duinn barked. “That’s what you call uncomfortable?!”

“Sorry,” Crastor grimaced sheepishly.

“Damn all this magic!” roared Duinn. Crastor was shocked. He’d never heard Duinn swear. “Trolls and wizards and magicians, alright fine. But now this! All this adventure will be the death of me! I want nothing more to do with it!” Duinn’s face was pinched as he tried to sit up, but then he fell back down.

“I’m sorry,” said Crastor firmly. “I told you I was handling it, and I’m still handling it. I’ll get us out of here.”

“Must handling it involve nearly killing me?”

Crastor didn’t answer. He offered Duinn his undead hand. Duinn sighed, and grasped it. Groaning, he pulled himself into a sitting position with Crastor’s help. Then Duinn’s face, which was already pale, turned positively white and a look of terror came upon it. “Who…?” he asked in a shaky voice.

Crastor turned around. Behind him, very near the spot where they had all first appeared in Aezeroth, stood a man wearing an ornate purple robe. He was holding a pair of stone rods. Each one had a perpendicular wooden handle, and the handles were connected by a string. The man had purple skin, black hair and a pointed black beard.

“Oh. It’s you,” said Crastor flatly. Then he turned back to Duinn. “You’re alright, then?” he asked. Duinn nodded, looking weak and terrified and not at all alright.

“Good,” muttered Crastor. Then he turned back toward Illyrio.

“Hello Crastor,” said Illyrio.

Crastor did not pause for niceties. “Teach me to open the portal,” he demanded.

“Don’t be absurd,” replied Illyrio. “You know I’m not real, don’t you? I’m just a figment of your imagination. I can’t teach you anything you don’t already know.”

With determination, Crastor repeated, “Teach me to open the portal.”

Illyrio chuckled.

“Come on!” Crastor urged.

Illyrio crossed his arms, with the pair of rods in one hand. “You weren’t ready to learn then, and you aren’t ready now.”

“We don’t have time for this,” said Crastor.

“You don’t remember, do you?” Illyrio asked. “I tried to teach you planeswalking once, when you were still young and loyal to me. But you couldn’t follow my instructions. I tried to get you to start at the beginning, but you were always rushing ahead, mucking things up or doing them your own way, and as a result you never got anywhere.” He shrugged. “I decided it was not worth the effort. Then as you grew older and grew apart from me, I decided it was not worth the risk.”

Crastor hesitated, then said nothing. Old memories were coming back to him.

“Planeswalking requires discipline, Crastor,” Illyrio continued. “It takes time, and practice, and a good teacher. This is why you were only ever a passable potion maker, because you could not follow instructions.”

Crastor sighed, exasperated. “What do you want from me, Illyrio? Do you want me to grovel, to say that I’ve learned my lesson, that I’m ready to be a good student? That from now on I’ll ask for help instead of trying to handle things on my own?”

“That would be a good start. But we both know it’s too late for that.”

“Yes,” said Crastor thoughtfully. “I suppose that’s true. I am beginning to see your point. It’s always been too late for that.”

Crastor languidly waved his decayed hand, as if the whole matter were behind him now. “Alright, I’m never going to learn my lesson. So what? Lessons are made to be forgotten, and promises are made to be broken. Why bother with the fucking pretense? Oh, right, I know, because it gives us a warm fuzzy feeling that doesn’t last.

“I don’t care if Lady Chaos is dangerous and unreliable, as disloyal to her followers as they are to each other. Chaos magic is who I am. It’s the one thing I can do well. If I can’t planeswalk your way, or Lobi’s way, then I’ll have to do it my way.” His eyes flicked down to the apparatus in Illyrio’s hand, then back up to Illyrio’s eyes. “The way out is not through, but under. Under your traditions and lessons, under the education that I thought I needed, down to the chaotic heart of this portal. Yes, that’s the trick, isn’t it? This portal and I already speak the same language.”

Crastor grabbed the rods from Illyrio’s hand, and said, “I don’t need your lessons to do magic. I am magic.”

Then he brushed past Illyrio, and walked toward the portal. He looked down at the rods. Each handle was at a right angle, so that when he held the handles vertically in his fists, the rods pointed away from him horizontally. They rotated to and fro on their handles. Eventually, they settled on a position, both rods pointing parallel and to the right. He gripped one rod tightly and began to draw golden characters that hung in the air for a few seconds before disappearing, as he’d watched Illyrio do many times. He drew a few nonsense characters that looked like letters, but upside down or backwards or with extra lines. Nothing happened. He held out the rods again and they rotated on their handles again until they settled, this time crossing over each other. He drew a few more characters that looked like letters again. Then, feeling suddenly inspired, he drew some shapes that looked a little more foreign, with circles and squares. He went through this a few more times, each time feeling more and more like something outside of him was guiding his hand. He drew elaborate characters that looked like trees, like houses, like people holding hands, and so on. He did not think. He barely breathed.

Finally, a great golden circle the size of a doorway appeared in front of him. The space within it shimmered with a golden light. A moment later, it was gone. The spot looked just as it always had. However, he was not dismayed. This is how it had always looked when Illyrio had managed to open a portal. The portal was invisible, whether open or closed. Crastor looked around triumphantly. Illyrio was gone. He must have disappeared some time ago.

He turned to Duinn. “It’s open,” he said.

Duinn, who was still sitting on the ground, looked up at him, confused. “So the lesson you learned was that you didn’t have to learn your lesson?”

Crastor smiled. “Exactly,” he said.

“But you did have to learn it,” Duinn countered, “because you weren’t able to open the portal until you did.”

Crastor shrugged.

Looking dissatisfied, Duinn asked, “Why do you love this nonsense?”

“God, I wish I knew,” sighed Crastor.

Just then, down below through the sparse trees, Crastor saw trolls running toward them. Lobi must have made it back to the village.

“Time to go,” he said, offering Duinn his hand again. Duinn took it and hoisted himself into a standing position, grunting and puffing.

“Are you sure this is safe?” he asked. In the next moment, an arrow whizzed past his ear and struck a tree beside him with a thump. The sound of the quivering arrow reverberated. Looking around and spotting the trolls, Duinn said, “Right, time to go.”

Crastor grasped Duinn’s hand in his own undead one. He said, “You know I love you, right Duinn?”

“I know,” he said, exuding his usual kindness again. “It’s just that you love chaos, too.” He smiled. Crastor wanted to embrace him but there was no time. So, hand in hand, they went into the portal together.