With her eyes squeezed shut Leona focused on her souls space. Entering into a deep meditative state, all of her senses faded away. From here, nothing could break her concentration, not even the stinging cut on her arm.

  In the absence of sensation, Lev’s closed eye appeared, directing the flow of the Void around it. She ensnared the whole Dread Sea. Her eye opened, orange and bright. A blue jet-stream of energy spiraled up around it.

  “Lev, I need your help,” Leona conveyed.

  “I already know what needs to be done, but you are asking for too much.” Bladed tendrils slithered out from Lev’s eye. “This will be costly.”

  There was little time to weigh any other options. Leona was stuck in the Void with powerful mages seeking to take her life. Survival was all that mattered.

  “Will we live?”

  “It won’t hurt.”

  “Do it.”

  Various blue dots popped into Leona’s soul space. At her order, Lev sought them out and attached herself to the blue tear gems. The gems shown and other nearby souls were revealed. The pin-prick stars inside the Voidlings hovered in the air where the arena stands were. Ozceron’s soul rested behind them at the top of the stands. His supernova soul was bound in chains leading towards other great stars burning free far behind him. The sword that he had wielded against Leona appeared as pure white-hot magic, threading through a damaged overseeing eye.

  Lev’s tendrils drew taught against the tear gems, snapping them to bits and leaching all of the magic from them. Eye tightened, Lev took the full strain of the spell.

  Leona opened her eyes. All three eyes, two blue and one orange on her chest. A deep shadow was pooling under her feet. In the stands, black liquid dribbled then coursed out from the stone bricks. Sharpened ribbons sprung from the flood, wrapping around the Voidlings. Lev’s ribbons sliced thorough the Voidlings like a cord through clay. They dissipated instantly and dozens of their essence flowed back into Lev. It was only a drop into her sea of dark magic.

  Far above the arena, unseen ribbons bound the sources of the most powerful souls. Lev held them in place, but they were too strong to absorb.

  Leona was in awe at the display. She had never see a spell affect such a large area. Even Monarch’s needed days to set up their casting networks without risking their curse. Lev had drawn on such a deep and potent source of magic, that lethal results had been obtainable in an instant.

  The tendrils on Leona’s back pushed her along, causing her to fall off balance.

  “Leona, you need to run!” Lev shouted in her mind, giving Leona another push. “This won’t hold!”

  Sparing no time, Leona ran for her life. There was nowhere to go in the depths but up. She flapped her wings, as the wall rose before her. Flying in the Void was like trying to fly underwater.

  “Don’t stop!” Lev encouraged.

  When Leona reached the wall Lev manipulated the tendrils on her back like the limbs of a giant spider. She skittered up the wall and into the stands. Dark circles marked where the Voidlings once sat. Flutter jumping and galloping over their seats, she was unstoppable.

  Her ribbon arms hooked into the next wall behind the stands and pulled her up. Gaining some air, she could see Ozceron’s face. Her ribbons were covering his mouth and head. blood was dripping from his white hair. There was no pain on his face, only muffled rage.

  Above him, a fairy woman was wrapped like a fly in a web to the back of Ozceron’s throne. Brown feathers from her wings bent up out of the tight cords. She was flustered, eyes darting between her and Ozceron. Leona could still see the faint outline of her soul, larger than her foot-tall body. If Leona was ever unlucky enough to be caught in her arena again, she would know better than to underestimate the fairy.

  Leona continued to rappel herself over the wall and up to the arches behind the throne. Lev wrapped her ribbons around the arches and sling-shotted Leona out of the arena. Gliding through the air, she laughed with reckless joy, having escaped by the tip of her tail.

  Beyond the arena, sheer cliffs rose indefinitely. Leona’s ribbons cushioned her crashing against the rocks. Before she could fall, they then launched out to grapple the neon corals hanging above her.

  Along for the ride, Lev was not disappointing Leona. Her ribbons traced a perfect path between the faint, unfocused souls of the plants. It was like a high speed lift. As she climbed, the arena shrank into depths. It’s bright sand reflected through the miasma of the Voidlands. She tried to get a look at her shadows who had been lurking in the sky above Ozceron, but she could not see any distinct shapes and their souls were gone.

  Leona had imagined that the incline would continue all the way up to the Emerald Coast, so she was surprised when Lev anchored herself to a cliff shelf.

  “You must continue to run. I won’t be able to help you for some time,” she said, her voice growing faint. “Your ability to control things may still be limited, but I trust you will find a way to apply yourself.”

  Lev went silent. Her orange eye on Leona’s chest would not shut or blink. It was like she was dead. Even worse without her, Leona could not get her shadow tendrils to retract. They remained at her sides like eight crooked cat tails. That was not the end of it. Like a broken teapot, what was inside was spilling out. Between her pale scales, the sticky tar of the Void shadows trickled down her arm. The cool liquid would not wipe off and poured out like blood from under her wrapped cut.

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  “Tell me Lev, what cost is this?”

  Leona watched in horror as the cracks spread up her arms. To Lev’s truth, it did not hurt, but it scared her. She wanted to shed it all off and be herself again, but the change went deeper than that. She tried to enter her soul space to get answers, but Lev had it sealed off.

  “What do I do, Lev?”

  With a weakened control of her magic, the extra limbs on her back had become weights. Leona attempted to climb the wall again. She dug in her claws and pulled as hard as she could, but with her stinging cut and her useless limbs, it was hopeless. She slid off the wall and slumped to the ground. Far above her, the surface light taunted her; it was smaller than a coin.

  All Lev had done was buy Leona more time. The shadows would soon pursue her again and the death games would be back on.

  Leona put her hands around her necklace. Her claws had turned black and grown long, and not for a lack of filing. The glass pieces clinking was the only thing she could hear. That and her growling stomach. With that, the sharp coral on the cliff was starting to look pretty appetizing.

  “Please Lev. Whatever more it costs. Don’t leave me here alone.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Ever since his monster encounter on the train to Twilight Town, Hawk had been knocked unconscious. His spider companions had rigged him up like a puppet using some sticks and their weaving skills. They had successfully piloted him into town. Posing as a drunken traveler, and with more than enough money to force their way past any questions, the Silkins were able to get Hawk into a local inn. There, the mage drifted in and out of nightmares for days.

  Spinner worked alongside his clan’s medical specialists to heal Hawk. They tasked him with spinning lines that ran into his mage, keeping him asleep using Silkin venom. The other’s wove complex hexagonal patterns that they laid over the sleeping mage. Each pattern moved magic through Hawk, reversing the damage that was done. Still, it would take more time for him to recover completely, maybe even longer considering that his soul to needed settle back in.

  Without his friend and mage to talk with, Spinner felt aimless. He spent the first day at the inn skittering anxiously about Hawks bedroom. The clan dropped enough money at the front desk to pay for the monarch suite. It was a massive suite taking up the whole top floor of the inn. As the elders explained, if Hawk would be spending an extended amount of time in bed, they may as well get him the best one. The silence and minimal intrusions was justifiable enough.

  There was not much more venom the clan needed from Spinner after the first day. The other Silkins had already set up shop throughout the suite. In the kitchen, they had rigged up various systems to operate the over-sized appliances to cook bugs. The rich smell of carapace wafted into the living room where other Silkens were sewing goods to sell in Twilight Town. In a nearby audience room, clan elders were accounting wings and scales for their journey ahead. Spinner could not rest while the others were working so hard. He needed to feel useful. There had to be something else he could do for Hawk, so he asked his elders.

  Upon Spinner crawling up onto the table one of the elders greeted him. “Ah, Spinner, we were just talking about you!”

  Spinner moved his orange, yellow, and brown striped limbs to perform a greeting dance.

  The elders on the table danced back in acknowledgment. “How is Hawk doing today?” They asked him.

  “He’s doing much better, but we are still having difficulties.”

  One of the elders was weaving a tally onto a web sheet. “It’s nothing serious, I hope.”

  “No elder, nothing serious. It’s just that we have not been producing enough venom to keep him in deep sleep. When Hawk sleeps light, he gets terrible nightmares.”

  The same elder rubbed his hands together, contemplating. “That extra movement must be interfering with his soul-binding.” He looked at the others on the table. “It would be no trouble for us to contribute our venom.”

  Spinner waved his hands, “no, please, it’s our job. We are doing well enough.”

  A larger hairy spider bore her fangs. She was the head elder and the oldest member of the clan. “Don’t let your time among the culture of the giants confuse you,” she said. “Under the Law of the Web we are all connected. Do not let your failures weaken this clan.”

  Spinner was ashamed.

  She continued, “if you really want to help dear mage, you should help us first.”

  “Yes elder,” Spinner said bowing his head. “What do you need of me?”

  Three Silkens pulled Hawk’s purple amulet in front of the elder.

  “Hawk is keeping some things from us and we need information.” She climbed on top of the amulet and began tracing her limb along a thin crack in the gemstone. “Those who were soul-weaving Hawk discovered something unusual.”

  Spinner tilted his head. “What would that be?”

  “A disproportionate amount of Hawk's soul is sealed within this amulet and cannot be manipulated. Do you know what that means?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “True magic can only be manipulated by our kind, so how did he trap his soul inside this item? He had no clan before us, so how is this possible? And the worst thing is about it all… why am I not turned to ash right now? He put his soul in to an item with not a single ward on it!”

  Spinner could see the looks on the elders faces. This was a complete collapse of their security. A common thief in Verlass would have stolen it if it wasn’t for that dragon girl.

  “I don’t know what to do about this, ma’am.” Spinner said, shifting his weight.

  “I’ll tell you what,” the elder said. “You are going to get the truth out of him. The Spix clan is not going to suffer the loss of another mage because he is being an idiot.”

  By herself the elder hopped off the amulet and shoved it across the table to Spinner.

  “Take it back,” she ordered.

  Spinner attempted to move the amulet. He thought his arms would pop out if he pulled any harder. The elders were watching him. He just wanted to get off the table fast, so he called for help. Other Silkins swooped in to tie ropes around it and pull with him.

  The head elder who had been looking at him like hunting bird smirked.

  She always had her way. Her way was law.