The ride to Marr’s Torpor took three days, which the Night Hunters took at ease following a caravan most of the way. The caravan was pleased to have them nearby, though it wasn’t like they were in any danger of bandits this far into Talpidium’s interior. They parted ways with the caravan several kilometers from the ancient volcano. Falconer pulled out a map, checking it against the surroundings.

“There are mine shafts four kilometers from here, half of that down the Old Talpi road, past the Twin Magi, and in a little abandoned hamlet called,” he chuckled, shaking his head and making his leporine ears flop around. “Marr’s Shadow.”

“That’s not ominous at all,” Skylar said, her over large ears in constant movement, listening to sounds only she could hear without magical aid. “Anyone else have a bad feeling about this?”

“You have a bad feeling about every mission,” Lucien said with a laugh.

“As well I should. Every mission is ten seconds away from utter disaster,” Skylar said.

“But you’d be there to patch us up if it does, won’t you Corporal?” Falconer asked, smiling wide.

The banter continued as they marched their way up the Old Talpi Road. While they met no one, the signs of recent passage were clear. The main road ended at the Twin Magi, the two statues all that remained of Rastra and Volyn Evergold who protected the residents of Old Talpi with their dome of pure energy. Every Talpidian knows the story, but Cassanda’s parents were there when Zerahad happened. They told her harrowing tales of watching as the mage twins conjured the magical dome that protected them from the hot gasses and lava from the erupting Marr’s Torpor. They burned their souls to do such powerful magic, and now their petrified remains stood as a bleak reminder of that day. 

Cassandra squatted at the feet of Volyn, looking over the offerings of coins and gifts left at her feet. The most plentiful of these being roses carved from the obsidian hewn from the lava floes. They glittered in the sunlight the same blue-black as her skin. She pulled a pair of coins from her pocket, dropping one at the foot of each of their monuments. 

Some believed that the Twin Magi had earned the moons’ blessings on that day, becoming demigods. Many worshipped them as patrons of Talpidium, looking over the people and protecting them to this day. While Cassandra wasn’t a believer, the Twins did save both her parents and hundreds others. Patron deities or not, she still wanted to give them a little respect. She didn’t even realize the rest of her cadre had followed her action until she heard the clinking of coins joining her and muttered prayers of thanks.

From there, they turned down one of the smaller cart paths to Marr’s Shadow. Boom towns were common in the nation. Small settlements would pop up near a new mineral vein and people would flock to them for work. When the mines run dry or become too dangerous to exploit any further, the people leave looking for the next rich vein. In the past, they would leave whatever buildings and machinery they couldn’t move, leaving decaying husks of houses, refineries, and businesses. Marr’s Shadow was a ghost town, old and worn even before Marr’s Torpor had erupted and forced everyone out of the area.

The town was a single main road that led directly to the mine’s opening. The cadre stopped at its darkened entrance and waited for orders. 

“We got a map of the mine, Falconer?” Cassandra asked.

“No ma’am.”

“Then we need eyes and ears. Tamsyn?” She looked at the scribe. 

Tamsyn nodded and pulled out a clean sheet of parchment, ink, and a brush, and set them on the dusty ground. She muttered to herself, then exhaled a cloud of iridescent teal smoke. The smoke coalesced into a sphere and flew off into the mine. She breathed deep again, and as she exhaled, took up the ink and brush. She muttered soundlessly, drawing tunnels and natural cave features onto the parchment.

“There are no sounds coming from the tunnels,” Tamsyn said, moving her head around as if craning her ears to hear. “But I can feel something, almost at the edge of my senses. It’s odd though, I can’t...AH!” She shouted and fell backwards, her brush and paper flying away from her.

Tamsyn swore as she rubbed a growing red welt on the side of her face. “That was bad. I’ve never been cut off like that before. That hard. It was, well, like a slap to the face.”

The rest of the cadre looked uneasy. They dealt with powerful summoners all the time, and none of them liked when the hunted were stronger than the hunters. Brink picked up the map and looked at it. His family were prospectors, and he grew up moving from towns not unlike this. He read the tunnel map and pointed at a junction of several tunnels a few inches away from where Tamsyn’s magic had been cut off.

“I bet this is where our summoner is holed up,” he said.

“I got a voice before the spell ended. There’s something else, hold on.” Tamsyn took the map and turned it over. She quickly dipped the brush and sketched out a few symbols on the back. Voidscript. None of them knew what the symbols meant, but they were recognizable, nonetheless. Voidscript all looked the same: warped Vitrumarian lettering but the words never meant anything. While Cassandra didn’t speak it, she had a working understanding to recognize it from the otherwise random scrawling of mage writing.

“This is a summoner’s circle, and a strange one at that. These forms are some of the things found on the battlefields in Invesse, but the lettering is off, not Vitrumarian, maybe it could be Talpidian?” Lucien said. 

Cassandra swore to herself, not only were people flouting the law and doing this chaotic magic in Talpidium, but they were innovating it as well? She turned to her soldiers. “This summoner isn’t just dabbling. We’ll need hex banes.”

“Yes, ma’am!” rang the simultaneous assent of her cadre.

The Night Hunters went to work arming themselves with protective shields and weapons. The anti-magic effect was strong enough to give Cassandra a mild headache just by looking at it. She’d seen wards cut in twain from one of Falconer's twin scimitars, and ducked behind more than her share of shields. However, no amount of anti-magic would guard against a daemon. Their magic was perverse, not of this world. She hoped that they didn’t run into one.

They moved in twos, Falconer and Brink in the front, then Cassandra and two mages behind them, and Skylar bringing up the rear to keep watch over their backs. Cassandra felt a small gust of wind on her back as Skylar flapped her wings, and a swelling of hope and confidence in her heart. Skylar was bolstering them with emotional magic to make sure their courage didn’t fail. Cassandra appreciated the boost, but always insisted that she keep it marginal. Too much added courage and vigor got soldiers killed, and fear kept their eyes sharp.

They walked cautiously through the mine until they neared the junction Brink had pointed out. Here, the signs of summoning were obvious. While the void taint was minimal, she could see the signs a gate had opened in the area recently. She didn’t see any daemons, and more importantly, no summoner.

The group fanned out, looking at the connecting tunnels. A deep rumbling rose up, shaking the ground and causing fine dust to sift from the cavern ceiling.

“What was that?” muttered Falconer. 

“Silence!” admonished Cassandra. She knelt, placing a hand on the ground. She reached into herself, pulling a stand of her soul, and casting it into the earth. The rock was solid, but something deep had cracked. This mine wasn’t huge, and the crack seemed to come from far off. It rose and fell, as though something primordial slept nearby.

“The ground… it’s breathing,” she said with awe in her voice.

Everyone stood in stunned silence for a moment, digesting what she had said.

Falconer was the first to speak, his voice steady though Cassandra could see he was afraid. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know, but I’m sure the summoner has something to do with it. We press on. The sooner we find this blighted caster, the better,” Cassandra replied with a bravado she didn't feel. 

They all looked to her, hope and determination written on their faces. Her team was good, she trusted them, she just hoped their trust in her was as strong. She looked to Brink for their next move, and he pointed towards a northbound tunnel.

They started up again, heading deeper into the mine. 

As Falconer and Brink passed a stone support pillar, it uncoiled into a huge serpent-like daemon of living stone hissing like a rockslide. Cassandra was caught off guard. In all her encounters with daemons, she had always felt the bit of void that came with them into reality. She should have felt this one too, but something was dampening it.

The serpent snapped at Falconer’s hand, but the warrior skip-hopped to the side in a feat of agility only rabbit-people could master. He narrowly dodged the serpent’s fangs and the viscous black substance that sprayed into the space he had previously occupied. The fluid sizzled on the ground, acid eating into the rock.

“Shields!” Cassandra called out, moments before a screeching sound echoed around the tunnel, disorienting her. 

Lucien quickly cast a ward, which appeared as a thin shell of iridescent gas webbed with hot pink lightning and smelled of cinnamon that encased the cadre in protective magic. The ward appeared barely in time to deflect an attack from a smoldering daemon with ten spider-like legs that dropped down from above.

Regaining her orientation, Cassandra debated on which daemon to attack. Falconer seemed to have the snake’s attention, so she focused on the spider. With a bit of will, her fists ignited into violet light. She leapt through the skeins of power that defended them and delivered a one-two punch that left violet impact craters in the daemon’s blackened carapace. She tucked into herself as she came down, just missing a bit of molten webbing that fell uselessly against Brink’s shield.

“I can see the summoner!” Falconer shouted. He gestured past the snake daemon further down the tunnel.

“Push through, I’ll hold the nasties off with Lucian. Tamsyn you’re with Falconer. Brink, you’re with Skylar. Make sure none of them are on our rear. On my mark!” Cassandra called.

Falconer grunted his assent, and the rest of the team sprung into action. The daemon was not inclined to let its quarry go, though. The stone serpent lunged across Falconer’s path and coiled around Tamsyn’s feet. Tamsyn tried move away, but it moved too fast for any of them to react. With a movement so fluid it was eerie, the daemon swung Tamsyn up into the air and shoved Falconer and Lucien against the wall. The three tumbled together against the cavern wall and sank to the floor. The spider daemon skittered around to cut Brink and Skylar off from the rest.

Cassandra’s mouth formed a grim line as she glanced between them and the now open path between her and the summoners further in the mine tunnel. 

“We got this, go!” Falconer called as he got to his feet, his enchanted blades already in his hands.

She nodded, offering a quick prayer to the moons before turning and sprinting away.

The tunnel opened to a large cavern, the ancient, abandoned railways of ore movement coming to a conjunction here. A soft glow lit the chamber, filling it with an amber hue. In the center of the room, etched in what appeared to be chalk, were the unmistakable voidsymbols of a summoning circle. At the circle’s center stood a crystal-person chanting with her eyes closed. As Cassandra approached, the summoner raised her left hand, black-blue obsidian fingers clawing upward. A gate appeared with the motion, allowing a small being made of gossamer wings and too many eyes to flit into the space. Cassandra stopped in her tracks. She knew this summoner like she knew her reflection in the mirror.

While they hadn’t spoken in the better part of a decade, Cassandra would know her sister Ophelia anywhere, as they were identical. When they were young, her twin sister joined the mage’s academy and Casandra joined the military. The split created a rift between them that neither had tried to bridge. Apparently, in that time her sister had grown as a mage, and taken up daemonology. As their eyes met, Ophelia’s mouth fell open in a surprised o. The daemon took up a place at the edge of the circle, hissing a menacing warning at Cassandra.

She paid it no heed, staring into her sister’s eyes. Time seemed to stop as she took in everything around her. Her sister’s thin frame, the hissing daemon positioned to defend her, and the pack of digging tools at her feet. Ophelia just stared back at her, clearly as surprised as she was by seeing her sister.

The dull sounds of fighting behind her grew louder, but Cassandra didn’t look back on the Night Hunters, her focus drawn to her sister and the horror that was washing over her. Brink and Skylar burst into the room, fighting the spider daemon. Brink’s shout of alarm broke her from her reverie.

She called out to them, “Stand down!”

At the same time, in almost the same voice, a command rang from her sister. A word of power halted the daemons in place. It was just in time for Brink’s blade to sink deep into the spider’s thorax, or approximation thereof, which caused a cascade of glittering gold infused dust to spill out onto the cavern floor as the daemon disintegrated.

“Moons damn it all, stand down Night Hunters!” She called out again, batting away Brink’s blade with one gloved hand. Even through the leather the hand came away buzzing with pins and needles from the anti-magic effects of the blade.

“What the hell Lieutenant,” shouted back Skylar flying above the fray, “She’s right there. She’s...”

“My damned sister, stand down!” She replied, releasing the magic that she didn’t even realize she had been drawing on.

The silence in the cave was broken only by the rumbling of the earth and Skylar’s landing. All mortal eyes turned to Ophelia, then back to Cassandra.

“Hi.” Ophelia said in her quiet voice.

“Hi? You fool of a woman. We haven’t seen each other for years. You disappear into a magic school and come out the other side summoning daemons and causing mines to cave in and all you have to say to me is ‘hi’?” Cassandra all but screamed in reply.

“I’m not causing this.” Her sister said, even quieter.

“You’re…what?” Cassandra’s fury nearly sent her hurtling at her sister.

“I’m not causing the earth shakes. We’re here trying to figure out what’s going on and see if there’s anything we can do to fix it.”

“We? We who? You have other daemon summoners here?” Skylar said, pulling her dagger from her belt.

“We.” Ophelia said simply, gesturing to the remaining daemon. “They are in tune with primordial magic. They’ve told me that there’s something primordial deep in this mine, and it isn’t of this world. We’re trying to figure out what’s happening and how to stop it.”

The silence lasted a handful of heartbeats before everyone broke out into chaos. Skylar and Brink were calling Ophelia a liar, Ophelia launched into some scientific explanation of what she was saying, and Cassandra tried to ask for her to slow down. As the cacophony reached a crescendo, Cassandra hung her head for a moment then shouted, “Quiet!”

Silence fell once more.

“Does this ‘we’ include the snake daemon out there in the hall?” Cassandra asked with an edge in her voice.

Ophelia’s eyes widened with surprise and she swore before squeezing her eyes shut and snapping her fingers with a spark of blue-green light. “Yes, The Watcher Among the Stones. Sorry about them, they can be…single minded in their tasks. Had I known that you were coming...”

“Oh, so if any other summoner hunters would have come, you would’ve been fine with this daemon murdering them?” Cassandra cut her off.

“No, I wouldn’t have been fine with it. But would you be fine with your hunters murdering your sister? They are just protecting me.” Ophelia shot back.

The other Night Hunters came running up the tunnel way, Falconer at their head. 

“Good job on the summoner…” his voice trailed off as he took in the scene before him. He held his twin scimitars at the ready and before Cassandra could stop him, the rabbit-man hopped-ran to the daemon in the circle with an arcing attack. Despite his speed, the daemon was faster, bending at a ninety-degree angle to dodge the swing. It grabbed the solider by the wrist and flung him to the other side of the room. Falconer flew like a ragdoll, back striking the bare rock with a crunch, where he collapsed to the ground.

Cassandra swore. “Night Hunters stand the hell down, Skylar, tend to Falconer now!” Her command to the diviner brooked no argument, the bat-woman flying over to the fallen Falconer in two beats of her wings.

“You can’t believe a moons cursed daemon summoner boss!” Brink exclaimed, taking the opportunity to harp on her again.

“What is she even doing still alive?!” Lucien started in.

Before Tamsyn could join the fray, Cassandra shouted again. This time magic laced her words. “Silence! The next threat of violence to this woman will be a threat to myself. She isn’t the bloody cause of the instability.”

The cadre stood stunned, betrayal shining in all their eyes. Only Skylar had the courage to speak. “Why do you believe her?”

“Because she’s my sister. I know her.” Cassandra said in a defeated tone.

“You didn’t know she was breaking the Prohibition.” It wasn’t a question.

Cassandra’s glare would have withered any other member of the Night Hunters, but not Skylar. She withstood it with no more trouble than a light spring breeze under the light of the three full moons. “I know my sister, she told me she isn’t the cause of this, and I believe her. Do you want to fight about this, or do you want to find out what is really causing this problem? It isn’t like the Twin Magi aren’t here to protect us all this time.”

“I mean, we are twins…” Ophelia started before Cassandra’s glare killed the sentence in her throat. “I’m just saying.”

“Please, shut up.” Cassandra turned to each of the Night Hunters, meeting their eyes one by one. Some of them wore injuries from the battle with The Watcher Among the Stones, but all had some combination of anger, confusion, and mistrust on their faces. “Hunters, do you trust me? Have I ever given any of you cause to question me?” When none of them said anything, she nodded. “I trust you all with my exposed back, I do this every mission. Can you extend the same to me now?”

Once again, she met the eyes of each member of the cadre. They each nodded, slow begrudging nods, but assent all the same. Cassandra nodded once, then closed the distance to her sister.

“We need to get you out of here.” Cassandra said to her as she started picking up Ophelia’s pack.

“What? We need to figure out what the hell is going on in this mine.” Ophelia replied, her blue-black eyes wide.

“I can report it to the mages back home. What I can’t do is protect you beyond this moment with these people. They’ll send someone else after you.”

“I can’t leave this unsettled. This mine will collapse, and so will countless others. If we don’t investigate now, we lose our best avenue into the depths,” Ophelia pleaded, taking her sister’s hands in hers.

Cassandra sighed, relenting. “Fine, we can figure out this mess, then we are getting you out of the country.”

“No!” Interjected Falconer, rubbing his head and pulling away from Skylar’s healing touch. “We aren’t letting this thrice damned daemon summoner go anywhere. She’s a dangerous criminal. Daemon summoning is punishable by death. That’s the Queen’s law Lieutenant. You know this. I don’t care if she’s your sister or your mother, I’m not letting her go.”

“Are you going to let this situation simmer then? And what happens when mines in populated towns collapse? Are you going to tell all the families that lose loved ones that dealing with a summoner was more important than protecting their lives?” Ophelia snapped.

“This can’t stand Lieutenant.” He said, venom dripping from his voice.

“It will.” Cassandra replied resolutely.

Falconer rose, shaking the dust and dirt off of his uniform. He hefted his scimitars and stepped towards Ophelia. “Lieutenant, turn around, I can do this for you. You don’t have to watch.”

Before she could move or reply, he sprung into motion, crossing the room in a single leap. Ophelia put up a hand in a warding gesture, clearly about to slam him with a magical blast. Cassandra stepped between them, crossing her blade against Falconer’s and stopping him mid-air. Ophelia’s blast went wide, slamming amber light against the cavern wall.

Falconer struggled against her blade lock, meeting her eyes with a stoney gasze. “You’re really defending this summoner? No. I won’t stand for this,” Falconer’s voice sounded like gravel with the strain.

Cassandra gave him some slack and he stumbled forward, as he did, she kicked him hard in the side, knocking him to the ground. “Stand down, soldier.”

He looked up to each of the others. “She’s a traitor. If you stay with her, you’ll be traitors too. No better than the daemon summoner.”

He rose gingerly and gasped in pain. She had clearly broken a rib. “Fine. It’s your death sentence,” he spat as he stumbled down the tunnel they had come through. Slowly, one by one, the others followed him out of the cavern. All except Skylar.

“What, you aren’t afraid of being branded a summoner too?” Ophelia said to the bat-woman.

“I am, but I’m more afraid of letting you sink your claws into my love. I’m her only backup,” Skylar said, her voice full of determination.

Ophelia looked between Skylar and Cassandra. “Well then.”

The ground quaked underneath them. Cassandra and Ophelia swore at the same time, their voices perfectly in unison. “We don’t have time for this Ophelia. Do you really think your daemons can get us down to wherever the primordial influence is?”

“I don’t appear to have much of a choice, now do I?” She replied, running her hands through her hair. A frustrated gesture she must have picked up in their years apart. 

“Nope, let’s get going,” Cassandra said.

“Too bad they banished Seer of the Unseen. Thanks for that, Night Hunters. Honestly, what kind of name is…” A glare from Cassandra cut her off again. “Yeah, we can do this. I’ll have The Watcher Among the Stones clear the way. You two ready?”

Cassandra looked at Skylar, who had moved to her side and slid a hand into hers. She put a light reassuring pressure on it and was rewarded with a firm squeeze. “Yeah, let’s go.”