"What do you mean?" I demanded, resisting the urge to grab onto the cell's bars. "What do you mean I'll have to die?" 

Cage pressed a finger against his lips, either to indicate that I should lower my voice or to suppress further laughter. "Did you think the solution would be easy? If it was easy, you dolt, you would have heard of it before!" 

I searched the pockets of my borrowed coat for the square piece of runed shale Lucian had handed me. It would unlock the cell—and the sooner I unlocked the cell, the sooner I could strangle Cage. 

"The soul of a person is not a dog," the black mage sneered, tone dipping into aggravated octaves I hadn't heard him use before. Outside this place, Cage was a jovial, ambivalent man with little care for rules or societal norms—but here, bound in this cell not fit for a rabid animal, he was considerably less cheery. "It does not come when bid. When a person dies, their soul doesn't remain here, Darius. It's gone. They're gone."

My breathing was loud in my ears. "What do you mean?" I repeated as a sharp, prickling pain seeped through my chest. "Are you saying it isn't possible?"

He shook his head and shoved a hand through his matted hair. "No. I'm illustrating the enormity and the unpredictability of the task before us—and trying to impress upon you the urgency of getting this godforsaken door open!"

I found the cut bit of shale and laid it within the corresponding slot on the cell door. The space was snug, and the stone snapped into place, the colored veins worked within the minerals spiraling outward into the barred door. This odd "key" worked to disrupt the magnetic mechanism sealing the mage's confinement. My ears popped as the air pressure changed and the solid metal of the door leaned its weight on rusted hinges.

Cage pushed his branded hand against the script-covered metal, grinning as it swung outward—but that grin swiftly morphed to a grimace as I grabbed the man by the collar of his ridiculous coat and slammed him into the wall.

"Darius, don't do this now—!"

I growled, the sound more animal than man as I pushed on my arms until the flexed muscles trembled. "Tell me how!"

His hand moved and I reacted, slapping the appendage away, sending the invocation born by Cage's discreet finger motions flying. The invisible blow hit the bars of an adjacent, empty cell, and sung through the long corridor. 

Cage choked but didn't attempt another spell, instead holding his hands prone at his sides in show of his cooperation. "Listen to me. Explaining the process will take time—time we haven't got at the present. Release me, Darius. Release me so we can retrieve the witches and leave this absurd place."

I didn't let up. If anything, I pushed harder, unable to see past the red clouding my vision. He'd lied. He'd lied to me, and there was no hope of ever—!

"Retrieving the girl will take a guide, of sorts," the man rushed to say as he sensed my mounting fury. "A guide to return the metaphysical to a source of energy capable of manifesting a physical form—or have you forgotten that she hasn't a body anymore? That her body is dead and rotting in the graveyard at Crow's End?"

How could he possibly know that? Amoroth had informed me that everyone who'd died that night—Cuxiel, Balthazar, and Sara—had been interred in the manor's cemetery by Lust and the Baal. As surprising as it was for the Baal to stoop to such cheap ceremony, it hadn't taken more than an iota of thought and effort for the King Below to break the earth and place the bodies in its cold embrace. 

Amoroth had noted how he'd lingered at Cuxiel's grave the longest—but this was information Cage shouldn't be privy to. The man had a knack for knowing things nobody else should.

The mage was speaking, half of his statement falling on deaf ears. "—get out of this passage before it is sealed."

"What?"

"Triggering the cell's release won't have gone unnoticed by the men upstairs. Much like a mundane prison that surveys the electrical power to each block, the presence of a script's integrity within a cell is noted and monitor by one of the syndicate's scribes. The Facility will go into lock-down, it is only a matter of time. We need to get out of this passage before it is sealed, Darius!" 

I stepped back and released the man because my desire to throttle him was less than my desire to escape that wretched mage dungeon. Cage slid down from where I'd pinned him to the poorly cut wall and set off without another breath, pausing only to adjust the ribbon at his throat and the lay of his coat. I followed.

In the lift, the black mage went to the interface and found what he sought far quicker than I had. No sooner had my feet touched the metal than the thing began its rapid ascent, the abrupt impetus of gravity straining my knees and my ability to stay upright.

"You used to be a member here, didn't you," I said without inflection. It wasn't a question.

Cage sniffed. He lingered at the console, flicking through the listed names as we rose and the rails rattled. "Not Blue-Iron. If you mean Blue Fire, then yes. I was a member before receiving this." His fingers played across the brand fouling his left palm. "Not an easy thing, getting kicked from your syndicate. Revoking a membership card just doesn't have the same panache as viciously scarring a man."

"You're familiar with the Facility."

"I've been incarcerated here more than once, boy." His jaw tightened as he admitted, "I also helped design it."

We were slowing. The lift had risen farther than the level I had entered from, and at this height the ominous crush of the older, more intricate magic covering the cells below dissipated. It was replaced by an itchy sensation, not unlike stepping into a grove of writhing brambles. If I struggled, I could be ripped to shreds by the thorns. 

"It's better for containing witches and the Aos Sí," Cage said with a grin when he noticed my discomfort. "Mage spells are hardier and more heavy-hitting, the energy composing them summoned and bound in very straight-forward, reproducible manners. Witches see the pattern and are more adapt at tearing it apart, hence why the Blue Fire boys had to furnish a more autonomous spell capable of adapting and refuting their abilities. Feels a bit like shoving splinters under your skin, though."

Cage was the first to disembark from the lift, taking the left path without sparing the opposing route a glance. Our joined footsteps were silent on the catwalk as we all but ran along its length, and I watched the vibrations travel through the metal cables stabilizing the walkway against the cavern's natural form. We broke through several spells, though I couldn't be certain of their meaning. Cage was unconcerned. 

We came upon the witches soon enough. The women weren't afforded their separate quarters, simply corralled into a large, freestanding cell with little space or blankets to share between them—and they were loud. These were normally passive women, motherly women, the majority in their fifties or above, and being shoved into a cage like birds with clipped wings had riled them into something like a riot. There was a hundred or so of them in there. If not for the spelled iron pinning them and their spells in place, this place would have been a battlefield. 

The three mages set to guard them had their hands full with the infuriated Mistresses. They were so intent on ignoring the slew of taunts and jibs and fiery insults, the men never saw Cage come through the glass archway. His hands danced in rapid, silent formation, and the three mages fell, scrabbling at their necks as if invisible nooses had tightened about them. I didn't care if he'd killed the mages and didn't stop to check. I went to the cell where the wide-eyed Mistresses were subsiding into a begrudging silence as they watched the black mage and me with wary suspicion.

I found a second shale rune in my pocket and one of two heavy, marble rocks granted to me by Lucian. I hadn't the faintest idea what to do with the latter, so I handed it to Cage. He accepted it with a close-lipped smile and a suppressed laugh.

"Seems you had more help than I'd expected...."

I held the shale rune up and saw how the Mistresses followed it with undisguised intensity. They'd seen how the wardens opened the door to their confinement and knew I held their salvation in the palm of my hand. Some cries of "Let us out!" filtered through the crowd before the witches smart enough to know I wouldn't be plied by angry shouts quieted those women.

They waited, breath held.

As Cage set the rock on the floor and began enticing strange energies from the rune marking its face, I lifted my voice and said, "You're all going to walk free of this place, but I require Mistress Nataliya Voronin. She'll be coming with me."

Jostling occurred, but soon a stern-faced woman stepped forward. Her black hair was plated but frazzled, her red sun-dress wrinkled and torn. Dried blood stained the fabric, giving evidence of how the woman had fought before being carted off by the Blue Fire mages. She was younger than many of the others, but old enough to have a few hard lines in her face and silver streaks in her dark hair.

"I am Nataliya Voronin," she announced, squaring her shoulders. Her voice held the barest influence of an eastern accent, as if she'd been raised in an immigrant household and had gradually lost the soft rolling "r" over the years. "Do what you will with me. Let the others go."

Clever enough to know her freedom doesn't come without a price. I pushed the shale rune into the slot and waited for the door to unlock. Somewhere out there in the yawning prison, I felt a disturbance rippling through the magic worked into the cavern's foundation. Cage felt it too, if the quickened pace of his spelling was any indication of the man's unease.

The mages knew something was awry. We didn't have long.

The witches came out of the cell one by one and acted with more decorum than I would expect from a mob of wrongly incarcerated inmates. I attributed their restraint to their individual standing: every woman here was the leader of her own coven, and if I remembered witch custom correctly, each had taken the life of her predecessor. They felt the weight of responsibility keenly.

"Hello, lovely ladies!" Cage said with forced cheer, holding the rune steady between two posed hands. "If you'll each touch the rune I've got primed here, you'll be transported outside the city limits. Sorry to say, but we haven't the time to be more specific in location, so you'll have to make your own way home from there. Just keep your wits about you, your head down, and give the finger to any of my mage brethren you see and you'll be fine!"

I was of the opinion that giving the finger to any mage wouldn't benefit the witches, but said nothing. I was in no mood to play Cage's games. 

They disappeared swiftly after that, vanishing in gentle puffs of displaced air as the rune in Cage's hands crackled and the man winced. Voronin remained next to me with her arms crossed and her head inclined. 

"Why have you singled me out?" she muttered as she watched the others leave. "Why not allow me to return to my coven as well? Why risk yourselves to free us?"

Lip curled, I retorted, "Don't mistake this for an act of compassion. I've little interest in your kind—but I do have a rather stupid priestess in tow who wishes to see you personally freed."

Voronin's voice softened as her hands fidgeted. "Saule?"

"I find it amusing you knew exactly whom I meant by 'stupid priestess.'"

"Did she...did she really come all this way?"

I grunted. "Complained the whole blighted journey."

In a few moments, the Mistresses were almost gone. Each transport took a visible toll on the mage as he sent every witch out beyond the boundaries of the Facility and refreshed the energy held inside the rune. Sweat appeared on his brow and shone on his neck. My sense of discomfort compounded with every passing second.

When the last Mistress—the youngest of the group who'd waited for her elders to escape first—was gone, the faults within the marble stone expanded, then the rune disintegrated into a phosphorescent dust that slipped between Cage's fingers.

I thought I heard the mage mumble, "Leave it to him to be precise," before he glanced up at an unseen cue, and the diffuse blue lights of the Facility's interior turned a blaring, molten red.

"Break me twice—you'd better have another one of those in that ridiculously small coat!"

I did, and I threw it to the man as a baritone alarm rung at the volume of a foghorn, and the crash of running footsteps filled the hollow void left by the sound. The mages weren't visible yet, but their approach was audible in those shivering metal cables I'd studied earlier, shouted orders drifting to us like the voices of an approaching army. There wasn't that many mages in the Facility, but I knew whatever number they sent would be enough to incapacitate or kill a tired black mage, a coven Mistress, and an ex-Sin.

Voronin retrieved a decorated pocket knife from a stitched pleat in her dress' folds. Either the syndicate had been lazy in their search of the woman or they hadn't cared what weapons she carried given the futility of casting inside the iron cage. She opened the blade—and the black mage snatched it from her before she could decide what to do with it.

He swiped the sharp edge against his cheek, creating an uneven line among the similar scars there, and said, "Let's hurry this up, shall we?"

The blood flowed, and the man used the fresh drops to expedite his preparation, breaking protocols and inherent structures like an errant child hopping the ropes composing a waiting line. The rune was primed in seconds and the witch, sensing the hum of the warped magic, touched it. She vanished as the others had and Cage's gaze flicked to me in silent urging. I extended my hand toward the rune, fingertips nearly brushing its warm surface—when something struck my back and pain lanced through my heart.

I blacked out for an instant, because—next I knew—I was prone on the floor with the black mage swearing above, the shouting of his brethren swimming about my head, muffled by another blast from their alarm. Cage managed to duck another hurled spell as he wrapped both our hands about the buzzing rune, and suddenly the noise was gone.

Blinking, I looked at the carpet scratching my cheek as the last echo of the Facility dwindled from my ears. It was replaced by the patient ticking of a wall clock, the murmuring of casual voices. I smelled parchment and lavender, and something astringent like furnisher polish.

"What happened to you? Were you successful?"

Someone wrapped a hand above my elbow and hefted, raising my head enough to take in my surroundings. We'd arrived in Lucian's study, as planned. The black mage himself was the one who had a grip upon my arm, his wife and Connie hovering in the doorway with Cage and the witch standing by the wall of strange mirrors.

We'd escaped. The prison break had been a success.

"Nothing," I managed to force through clenched teeth as my feet found solid ground. Pain radiated through my bones and I laid a hand against my ribs, willing the ache to ease as it squeezed about my racing heart. I was familiar with pain, but this was egregious. A lesser man would've been unconscious, or dead. I was only breathless.

"Luke!" Cage crowed with open arms, grinning from ear to ear. "It's been too long, my friend!"

Swiveling, the silent black mage reeled back his fist and threw it straight into Cage's face.

"Christ!" Lucian swore as he bent over his hand, rubbing his red knuckles. Marian ran to him, worried, as Cage held his bloody nose and smirked.

"For once, I wish someone would be glad to see me!" the black mage complained with an indignant air as he realigned his nose with the sickening crunch of shifting cartilage.

"Who do you think you are! Getting yourself captured again—!"

"Where is Saule?" Voronin interjected, looking about the room with clear unease, surrounded by mages as she was. Her eye lingered upon Lucian's wife, a fellow witch, with confusion.

"About that, David," Connie piped from the archway. "Saule called and she's coming—."

"David? Is that what you told her your name was?" Cage snickered.

"It's not his name?"

"Not one of his, at least—."

"Where is Saule—?!"

"Lucian, your hand—!"

They were all speaking at once, the words meeting in a jumble inside my bruised thoughts and I couldn't sort through the malaise. I kept hearing it again and again—"You're going to have to die"—like a macabre choir singing death knells in my honor. So many questions, so many evasions on the black mage's part, and now too many voices demanding too many things.

"Shut up!" I snarled, silencing the mismatched group. They looked at me as I ground my teeth and loomed above Cage, who had the good grace to be nervous under my scrutiny. "Tell me what I must do," I demanded. "No more evasions, mage. No more half truths. If I must die at the end of this road, I will gladly tear you to shreds before I go. Tell me how to bring her back."

Quiet dominated the cramped study and stole exclamations from the mouths of my audience. I didn't care who heard, didn't care who realized I sought the impossible and had driven myself half-mad to attain it. All other goals were secondary to this. Had our situations been reversed, perhaps Sara wouldn't have placed me first in her itinerary. The woman had been too selfless in her odd way, and would have done whatever she could to save Terrestria—but I wasn't Sara, and I wasn't a man of this world. The witches meant nothing. The syndicates meant nothing. The Absolians, the Baal, his threats, and this realm's destruction meant nothing.

Sara was the only thing that mattered in this fucked up reality.

"As I said, a guide is require to lead the immaterial to the material." Cage held up both hands, palms prone, one bloody and the other disfigured. "The spirit must be led to a source of energy capable of manifesting physical material for the spirit to be bonded to. The only such source of energy available to us—to you—is the Seat of a Sin. Your Seat, Darius."

A wave went through our spectators and Connie let out a shocked gasp.

"I told you I wouldn't see her returned as a Sin!"

"And I heard you!" Cage swallowed, flinching at the obvious dryness of his throat, and leaned upon the mirror at his back. His reflection was a mixture of mine and Lucian's: the man himself a blurred glare ensconced in a wavering corona of black shadows. "There is a slim pocket of time in the interim between manifestation and a Sin's ascension. For that time, a Sin is not a Sin, only a body and a soul coexisting, their bond unrealized. In that interim—with some outside assistance—you will be able to tear her from the Seat, and she will not be a Sin. She will be a mortal."

My fists eased from white-knuckled tension to a looser, more anxious hold. His explanation had the ring of truth to it, but it sounded theoretical. There were many what ifs floating about unsaid in his plan, and I was unhappy with their presence.

"Any being return in such a manner would lack cohesion," Lucian said from behind us. I turned to see his eyes narrowed at Cage, his knuckles still red and swollen. He may not know the entirety of our discussion, but the man knew enough to understand its meaning. "This...woman would die within hours."

"I wasn't finished with my explanation, Luke."

"Do not call me Luke."

I slammed a hand against the glass next to Cage's head, and the black mage frowned.

"Though he is impatient, Lucian is correct," he continued, easing from the mirror to Lucian's desk chair, into which he sank with a delighted groan. "She would lack cohesion, and would die. In the ascension of a Sin, that bond forged by the Seat between soul and body is the source of their immortality, their curse, if you will. That strand of power keeps the two together, and so retrieving a being before that bond is created would be like trying to stick two halves of a cut watermelon together. Sure, they fit perfectly—but they won't stay that way, now will they? That is where you come in.

"With a...ah, spell of my creation, you will be able to pull her spirit to the Seat of Pride, allow her to manifest, and then enable us to summon her to this realm. The empty Seat will create a vacuum of power—one that you will fill, Darius. You will become the Sin of Pride once more, and as the Sin of Pride, you will be able to make Sara shadeborn again. That bit of your soul will create the bonding agent necessary to keep her immaterial and material being together, and thus give the girl life."

My brow rose, and I crossed my arms. "Sins are not made in this manner. It does not work that way."

"It will work."

I was skeptical, because though a concrete reason for my negation didn't exist, the idea was simply too abstract. It'd taken a vast amount of power to twist Kyra's soul to the resonance of the Seat of Lust's power and to summon it forth from the void, and Cage was suggesting he could do the same with a spell. Such a spell couldn't exist. It would have to be massive to hold so much energy.

His reasons for stating my death was required were evident now. As a spirit, I could—hypothetically—reclaim my Seat and travel to the currently inaccessible Realm of Sin through the void. Spirits didn't behave in predictable ways, however. Many lost all memory of self within minutes of death, or so I'd been told. Some lingered, some didn't. Whatever plans or goals or dreams a person had while corporeal disappeared when they died.

Orange color glinted in Cage's eyes as he reiterated, "It will work."

"This plan is idiotic." I glared at my own mirrored image, longing for the truth of it. To return Sara, and to be a Sin once more...such a thing shouldn't be possible. "You would kill me without result, mage. I would simply be dead. My spirit would not have knowledge of my quest, wishes, or...desires. I could not cross the void."

Cage smiled as he kicked his feet onto Lucian's desk. "And that is where we'd require some assistance, my dear boy."

A noise from the hall brought our attention up. Two women had appeared in the doorway like apparitions stepping through the veil, silent and shadowed by the dimmed lights. The taller of the two was unfamiliar to me, a witch of middling years with a deep complexion and uncanny eyes. The other was Saule Oslin.

"My, my. What devious magic you are discussing," the first witch purred. She folded her long arms together and I noted the presence of several slender cuts on her hands. She was a sorceress. "A wonder in and of itself. Here I'd thought my night simply couldn't get anymore...interesting."