May 13th, 1615

  It had just rained heavily in this small village, somewhere in the northwest part of Spain. Water was still pouring off the corners of the rooftops to form deep puddles through the mud. Standing in front of one of those puddles that was actually relatively still, as the water from the nearby barn had slowed to a bare trickle, a dark-haired older man frowned at his reflection. “I hate this.” He murmured the words so that only his companion, a handsome woman, slightly taller than he was, and taller still when her beehive-fashioned graying hair was added in, could hear. “This isn’t me. I don’t like not being me. I hate hiding like this. I want to find a way to fight that beast.”

  “You will always be yourself,” the older woman assured him, running a hand across his back in a display of affection that was politely ignored by the group of churchgoers passing by just then, on their way to the next service. The woman didn’t bother waiting for them to get out of hearing range. The privacy spell the two were using would prevent any incidental eavesdropping, and if someone were around who was using more powerful means of spying, they were already in far more trouble than some random person overhearing these words. She could speak plainly.

  “Whatever disguise you wear, whatever disguise either of us wears, you are my sister, Theda.” Denuvus, wearing the form of the older woman with beehive hair, allowed herself a soft smile of encouragement toward the only living person she still cared for in this world. “But we must be careful. We must remain free, that’s the important part. We’ll never have our revenge if we’re caught before we can put it into action. Aldrich’s spies are looking for twin sisters, siblings, not a married couple of advanced age. As long as they are out there, we must be diligent and careful.”

  Theda’s old man face twisted in annoyance and frustration, as her foot kicked the puddle to break up the reflection of her disguise. “How long must we be careful? He stole our lives, Den. He stole our family, decades of our existence, even your child. He stole our innocence, and your baby in almost the same breath. What more can we possibly allow him to take from us before we say enough and flay that monster where he stands? If a sense of justice and decency cannot reach his heart as it is, I say we just rip the skin from his flesh and see if it can find its way then.”

  Chuckling softly, Denuvus took her sister’s hand. Another sign of affection that wouldn’t even be questioned by anyone who believed they were husband and wife. “That is a fine image to hold in my mind, Theda. And it is one we will see someday. But we must be very careful. You saw what happened when we went to others for help. We trusted them to aid us in bringing him down, yet the only thing they accomplished was getting themselves killed, and us nearly captured again. We came this close to being trapped in his service again, because we weren’t careful enough. Because we went to others for help instead of only relying on ourselves. That is a mistake we cannot make again. We rely on no one but each other.”

  Together, the two turned away from the puddle and made their way past the old barn. This small Spanish village would do as a place to stay for the evening before moving on when the sun rose. Disguises or not, they had to keep moving as far as possible from the site of their would-be allies’ failed attempt to put an end to that monster. The arrogant fools had walked right into a trap, their confidence blinding them to the true scope of his threat despite all the warnings Theda and Denuvus had given them. They insisted they could handle it, and in the end they had paid for that ignorance. But these two had no desire to pay along with them. They had already spent more than enough time under that beast’s thumb. After their mother had taken them to him in a simple attempt to plead for him to save their father’s life with his great power, the man had done just that. He saved their father. Then he erased the memories their parents had of one another and of Theda and Denuvus themselves. He turned their mother into his own possession and sent their father out as a servant. When he found that the twins could be physically controlled by his power but were immune to his memory or mental manipulation, he kept them around out of amusement. He truly enjoyed the simple challenge of maintaining control over two people--two young children at the time, whose identities and thoughts he couldn’t simply wipe away with a word. Or a few words, rather. ‘I heal you.’ Such simple, deceptively innocent-sounding words. With them, this Aldrich Gaudin, or Asclepius, had been capable of committing so many horrors. And they had been privy to a large number of them.

  The village was too small to have any sort of inn, but there was an older widow who was more than willing to let a married couple sleep in the room her son had used before moving on. She shared her soup and bread with them, insisting the two take as much as they could keep in their stomachs. She was accustomed to making food for a much larger family, and had yet to adjust to her son and his wife moving away, or to the death of the man she had partnered with for several decades. Above all else, she was grateful for company, talking with them late into the night.

  Eventually, however, even the talkative old Leonor had to get her beauty rest (a claim made with the broad smile from a face quite thoroughly lined with wrinkles), so she escorted the two up to the room where they would be staying. This despite Theda and Denuvus (or Pascual and Costanza respectively) trying to insist that she didn’t need to take those stairs with her leg so weak she had to rely heavily on a cane to walk anywhere. Leonor, in turn, had demanded to know what the point of even having both a cane and stair railing were if she didn’t use them.

  Once they were safely in the privacy of the room, and had put an assortment of spells up to warn them if anyone approached either from within the house or outside, Denuvus and Theda finally dropped their disguises. The identical twins looked to one another as soon as they were themselves once more, exchanging a pair of smiles before producing their respective familiars. Or what they called their familiars, in any case. The two of them were Vestil-Bonded. While actual Vestil were formed of colorful magic smoke that was contained within glass-like bodies they created for themselves, a human bonded to Vestil instead created a separate body, a separate creature out of that glass-like substance. That separate creature, essentially created from and connected to the Bonded themself, contained all of the extra magical energy that being Vestil-Bonded afforded them. And it was from that creature, that familiar, that they pulled the energy in order to perform the vast magical feats that they were capable of. In essence, they created this extra body, which acted as an extension of themselves, and it carried their magic within itself. The familiar was both an extra set of eyes and other senses, and a source of power.

  At the moment, Denuvus’s familiar was in the shape of a frog, which she pulled from her pocket. The familiars could change shape at will, and they’d needed to be able to stay out of sight. Its deceptively fragile-looking glass body swirled with red-purple-yellow smoke as it sat in her palms. Carisuc, as she called the thing, was the closest to another being she could say she loved, though she tended not to count that because he was essentially just a piece of herself.

  Theda’s familiar, meanwhile, looked like a slightly oversized glass mouse with its own bright blue and pink smoke interior. Her name was Simmikic. Neither name actually meant anything, as far as the twins knew. They had very deliberately made them up on the spot, years earlier when Aldrich had first bonded them to the Vestil whose job it had been to teach them letters and numbers. He’d asked what the two would call their familiars, and they made up the names right then so he could take no credit for them. They had been afraid that if they used real names, he would be able to point to that name in some book or scroll around the palace and claim that they had taken the name from that, thus giving him some measure of magical ownership of the creatures. Which might have seemed like something of a reach, yes, but that was how he worked. It was how he lived his life, and they had grown accustomed to working in his rules.

  Now they were free from those rules, free from his tyranny, and they were going to stay that way. The close call they had experienced after trying to get help had been more than enough to convince the pair that they could only rely on one another. No one else would take the threat seriously enough. If they were going to kill that monster the way he deserved, they couldn't get help from anyone else. They had to find the right spell, the right power, to put him in the ground.

  The room wasn't much to speak of, but it was enough for the night, especially now that they had lined it with protective spells to ensure their privacy and safety. They could stay here until the sun rose, then it would only be a few hours of walking to reach a city with an active port. There, they could take a ship to the new world, and put an entire ocean between themselves and the man who was hunting them. Or having his enslaved minions hunt for them, at least.

  Just as Denuvus was starting to peel the blanket back to lay down, wanting to get as much rest as possible before what would be a long and difficult hike the next day, Theda spoke up from the nearby window, where she had been taking one last look out at the small village. “Hey, I think there's people out there, walking around in that graveyard we saw on the way in here.”

  Denuvus shook her head a bit dismissively. “It's probably just a family paying their respects.”

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  There was a brief pause as her sister considered that while watching the group in the distance. It was outside, but the two of them had a long-since taken to giving themselves a plethora of important magical enhancements every day, and seeing in pitch black environments was one of those. It might as well have been broad daylight out there. Really, the only reason they were stopping for the night, besides still needing rest, was to avoid drawing unnecessary attention.

  In the end, Theda shook her head. “I don't think they're supposed to be in there. They have a lookout watching the village, and they put up warning and privacy spells like the ones we have. Not to mention, they're not using any lights. It seems like they're looking for a specific grave. They keep reading every marker before moving to the next one. Whose grave do you think they're looking for?”

  Denuvus shook her head while stepping over that way to look for herself. “I don't know, but ugh. Sounds like graverobbers. The village probably had someone rich pass away recently. We don't need to get involved in that. It'll just draw attention that we don't want. Let them take whatever they're looking for and we'll move on in the morning before anyone goes to the graveyard and finds out what happened. Come, let's get some sleep while we still can.”

  She had already started to put that group out of her mind. From the look of things, there were six or seven people out there. As long as they weren't looking for Denuvus and her sister, she really didn't care what they stole from the graves. It wasn't as though the dead would be using it.

  Theda finally turned away from the window, but she didn't come to the bed. Her hand rose, holding a small coin between her fingers. “I think we should investigate and find out what they're doing. You think we should stay here and ignore them. You know what this means.”

  Denuvus sighed. Of course she knew. When they couldn't decide what to do any other way, the pair simply flipped a coin and followed the choice of random fate. So that was what they would do now. When her sister looked to her questioningly, she gave a nod and replied, “Bird side.”

  Theda turned the coin in her hand. “Bird side for you, snake side for me. Here we go.” With that, she gave the coin a flick with her thumb, sending it flipping through the air. Rather than catch it, she stood back and let the thing fall. Both sisters watched as the coin bounced and spun noisily across the wood for a moment before gradually coming to a stop between them.

  In one world, one reality, the coin on the floor would show the etched image of a hawk. With Denuvus the victor, the sisters would go to sleep and put the sight of the graverobbers out of their minds. They would leave the next morning, hike to the next city, and take that ship to the new continent. In a few months time, Denuvus would make the choice to sacrifice her sister for a chance at gaining enough power to one day carry out their revenge on that foul monster. Her love for her sister was greater than almost any force on the planet. Any force other than her hatred of that man. He had given her child and then taken that child away from her. From what she had heard the other servants say, he never allowed one of his children to live. There was too much potential for one of them to eventually challenge him. So every child was put to death.

  She had no hope of finding her stolen child. That potential had been ripped away forever. Now, no matter what or how long it took, she would see that man suffer and die at her hands. In that other world, she would, rather soon, go as far as sacrificing her own twin to gain the power she thought she needed to one day make that happen.

  But that was another world, a world in which the coin came up with the hawk showing. In this one, in this world, the coin hesitated there on its edge while they were staring at it. The sisters felt something pass through the room, the brush off very light wind, a draft of some sort. It was gone as soon as it had come, possibly a breeze that made it through the cracks in the building. Whatever its source, the breeze touched the coin, which came down with the etched viper looking up at them.

  Both women took a moment to absorb that before Theda exhaled. “There. We're going to investigate.”

  Fair was fair. Denuvus could have questioned the breeze, but she knew her sister had not summoned it. Neither of them would do that. Not when it came to this sort of thing. They put too much stock in allowing fate to choose when they couldn't agree. They wouldn't sully that with any sort of cheating. The breeze had been random, odd as it was.

  With a thought, each woman turned their familiar into a bird, their glass-like bodies shifting instantly. Denuvus’s Carisuc was an owl, while Theda’s Simmikic became a hawk. Both flew out the window, even as the twins cast a pair of spells to transform themselves into dark smoke-like fog shapes and slipped out through the cracks to follow their bird forms into the open air. They blended into the dark night, as they floated toward the graveyard in the distance. All they had to do was drift close enough to get a look at what was actually going on down there. Between their own fog forms, and the fact that their familiars looked like nearly invisible birds (the once-colorful magic smoke within them had turned clear for stealth purposes) with their glass bodies, it was incredibly unlikely that anyone would--

  “Spies!” A loud voice called out, startling both women as a small, pink-skinned figure leapt up out of nowhere. Wait-no, they didn’t leap. They were carried upward by a ghost given tangible form. The pink figure was riding on top of the ghost, one hand outstretched while the other held a crystalline scepter with an amber stone within. The diminutive stranger sent a bolt of energy from the scepter that wrapped around Carisuc, yanking the owl to the ground, before leaping off the ghost to grab onto Simmikic with a loud cackle. She shouted something about having told them all that field trips were fun, before riding the hawk familiar straight toward a tree.

  That, of course, only lasted for a second before Simmikic changed shape to become a large monkey. Suddenly, she was facing the pink figure while nearly as large as her. In that same moment, Theda, still in her fog form, used a trick the two of them had learned long ago. When they pulled a small amount of the magical energy held within one of their familiars as though to bring it to themselves for use in a spell, but then immediately triggered that energy without giving it an actual spell to fuel, the energy would explode. They could direct the force and general effects of that energy, making it hotter or colder, pushing more of a concussive force into it, and so on.

  It was the concussive effect Theda went for in that moment. The blast caught that pink figure and launched her away from Simmikic. She tumbled end over end with a squeal that sounded… oddly like she was quite enjoying herself. Before she could hit the ground, an incredibly large hand that appeared to be made out of about a dozen different dead bodies, rotting skin and bones alike, pushed its way out of the ground. The bodies had all simply been mashed together into the vague shape of a hand for the figure to land on.

  She began casting what seemed to be a very powerful spell from the power she was pulling together, even as other figures appeared on the hand as well. More Necromancers, obviously. This was getting out of hand. Even if there was a very large hand involved. Theda and Denuvus were going to have to put an end to this before these death-mages could pull together too much of an army. Fortunately, the figures down there seemed to see their familiars as the threat, and hadn’t even noticed the shapeshifted fog. With a little effort, they could--

  “Stop!”

  The voice echoed through the graveyard, clearly magically enhanced. A male figure in some sort of flashy, dark suit with long coattails appeared between the giant hand and the spot where the two familiars were, his own hands raised in either direction to make both sides come to a halt. His short hair was dark, while his skin was pale white. “Everyone just stop.”

  “Jacob!” The small, pink-skinned figure jumped down next to him, leaving the other figures up there. “I had the situation completely under control, and the students are safe. The intruders--”

  “We’re all intruders, Laein,” the man noted calmly before looking to the glass figures. “And Story says these are Vestil-Bonded familiars. Which must mean…” He paused, looking around. “Ah, it’s okay, you can come out now, whoever you are. We don’t mean you any harm. The privacy magic we have up around the graveyard obviously didn’t affect you, so I guess you came to check what we were doing here.”

  Denuvus wasn’t sure how to respond to that. She started thinking quickly, reaching out through the mental connection she shared with her sister to suggest they simply back off and leave this group to whatever they were doing. But Theda, always the more impulsive one, was already floating down there. Her fog-shape transformed, until she was standing in front of this stranger. With a mental sigh, Denuvus followed suit.

  Just like that, the two of them looked like themselves once more. They hadn’t returned to their disguised husband and wife forms, but appeared as who they really were. A limitation of this fog-shifting spell they had been using. They were quite adept at magic, but they couldn’t activate a new disguise spell in the midst of coming out of their fog-forms.

  “Jacob?” her sister was already saying, squinting at the man curiously. “We’ve heard of you. You… you’re a Necromancer, a powerful one. My name is Theda. This is Denuvus.”

  Oh lord, Denuvus realized belatedly, her sister was going to ask this man for help. She still didn’t accept that they were on their own, that they couldn’t depend on anyone else.

  Jacob seemed to do a quick doubletake, as though he recognized their names, which immediately put Denuvus on guard. “Wha--” He started before clearly catching himself. “You’re--oh. I uh, I think we need to--”

  “Jacob!” A new voice called out, as a small blonde boy came to the edge of the giant hand made of dead bodies, then jumped down, landing beside Laein and the man himself. “They’re here! We finally get to meet them!” He brightened, giving Denuvus and Theda a happy wave. “Hi, Aunt Den! Hi Uncle Theda!” Leaning closer, he put a hand to his mouth to stage-whisper conspiratorially. “You told me I should say that when we finally got to meet you. I guess because I did say it the first time we met? I mean from your point of view, this is the first time, I mean… huh, time travel is weird.”

  “This is the strangest trap I’ve ever heard of,” Denuvus murmured under her breath with a confused glance toward her sister. Theda seemed equally clueless.

  Jacob, meanwhile, was gaping at the new arrival. “A-Ammon? Wha--how are… why are… oh…. oh god. I think we just changed the future.” His voice shook a bit, obviously affected deeply by this. “You were--you… weren’t… here before.”

  The boy, Ammon, looked as confused as Denuvus and Theda both felt. “I wasn’t? That’s weird. Why would I be anywhere else? We haven’t split up since I was bonded to you. We have to stay together.

  “Like I said before, I’m not leaving your side until we find Fossor, and make him pay for killing Mom.”

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