After the fresh scent of bread, the smell inside of the bag was a new kind of hell.

Sedgewick took shallow sips of the dank, pungent air in the sack. His guards yanked him this way and that down halls and steps toward his cell. A high cry made it through his sack, muffled and weak. Rivian?

Sedgewick didn't hesitate to double-check. He kicked the closest guard's leg as hard as he could and stumbled back toward the sound. "Rivian!"

The second guard kneed him in the stomach, and he nearly threw up the water sloshing inside him. "Stay down, you—"

Whatever insult the guard had planned died on his lips at the sound of a horn.

"She's out," one of the guards said in a horrified whisper. The guard who had kneed him jerked Sedgewick up. The pair dragged him down the hall, fear coating the panting of their breath. Sedgewick's feet stumbled every second step, still weak and wobbly from his earlier fight. His knees hit cold stone as he fell a final time.

A guard growled and yanked the sack off of him. "Run!"

Sedgewick scrambled to his feet, choosing to heed the terror in the soldier's eyes. Glancing over his shoulder, he finally saw why they were running.

The woman from his cell raced toward them. Her knotted, raven hair draped behind her and fluttering out like a cloak of feathers over her shoulders. A knife glinted in her hand. The essantium cuffs still bound her magic, but death clung to every step of her lithe stride. He stumbled again.

His captor swore. "Get up and run you useless—"

She launched herself forward and landed on Sedgewick's back. He hit the ground and rolled to the side. Blood splattered across his cheek. A guard's body slumped beside him. Above him, the woman from his cell dragged her knife across the throat of the remaining soldier. He gurgled on his own blood before life left his eyes and he tumbled down too.

Sedgewick's wrists instinctively raised to protect his throat. The woman ignored him at first, wiping the blood off of her knife using the uniform of her recent victim. "Don't look so pathetic. I'm not interested in you." She jerked her head back where she came. "The exit is that way, but don't expect to survive to the bottom floor. Whoever you were screaming for is most likely that way." She pointed her knife in the opposite direction.

And then the woman took flight.

Several heavy, confused breaths crossed his lips before Sedgewick was off after her. His ears pricked, twitching at the slightest sound. He leaped over another dead guard, splashing droplets of puddled blood as his feet landed. That earlier cry must have been another unfortunate guard. Where could Rivian be kept? The path split, one hall turning to the left and a staircase on the right leading further up the tower.

A voice—Kier's voice—shouted angrily from the left. The stairs it was. He half-ran-half threw himself up them. The wound on his leg pulsed in pain right on the thin layer of skin a healer had closed it with. He lost count of flights of stairs after the fifth one. Where the gates had Calrock hidden Rivian? Had he been down the other hall, the one Kier was coming from?

Steps blurred. His lungs burned. But finally, at long last, the stairs ended. A wooden ladder led to a circular opening in the roof. The metal hinges glinted, but the door was open already. Light spilled in and created a glowing circle where he stood. Wind whistled across the opening in a beguiling song of freedom. Wrapping his fingers around the splintery wood, he began to climb.

Sedgewick stepped onto the polished roof of the Black Obelisk and the world unfurled in front of him.

Gray swirls of fog, finally fading in the morning light, seeped over the dark forests far below and gathered over the shoreline of the Wyrd River. Creststone stood against the mountain, now looking small enough that he could have plucked it up with his hands. White-capped mountains encircled the Obelisk and the river. They loomed over the structure and formed a craggy cage. One that brought back memories of the Elberic Peaks' oppressive cliffs, the place he had once called home. Two other dark spires, like the one he now stood on, curled their way skyward. While they rose up closer to the mountains, this one was facing the river in the distance. Tracing the lines of black stone downward showed where the three met at least fifty feet down.

Sedgewick wandered to the edge of the smooth, black surface he stood on. The ground seemed to drop below him. The foundation of the Black Obelisk bled into the grey mountain before shifting into a murky steel blue that had no discernible bottom. An old mine? A canyon? Impossible to tell from here.

He wobbled at the edge. One step and the rush of mountain wind hitting his face would greet all of him. The ache in his chest pulsed again, drowning out the wound of his leg.

"I take it you gave up finding him," the woman's voice said behind him. The wind nearly drowned out her words. "You can't climb down that way."

Rivian. Sedgewick startled and shuffled back from the edge, its spell broken. "You must have had some plan of escape."

"I always have plans." She wrinkled her long nose in offense. "But you can't escape the Black Obelisk from above. Not without escaping this world entirely." She gestured to the chasm of a drop. "Did you know it's rumored that when Queen Valendra was imprisoned here, they left her cell unlocked on the night her husband was executed. She wandered up and threw herself off the edge." The woman snorted, unimpressed with this tragic devotion.

Sedgewick ground his teeth. His eyes went back to the opening leading inside. "Why did you climb up here, then?"

She fell silent. Her eyes drifted closed as another heady gust of mountain wind hit both their faces. "I wanted to feel the breeze."

"You what?" Mad. The woman was blatantly mad. He took a step back.

"Don't mock me without knowing me. I can't escape right now. Minor rebellions are the only thing that lets me know I'm still truly alive."

"Killing three men in the halls isn't minor."

Her grin was a knife. "And killing more than that at Creststone isn't heroic."

"Who are you?" he asked. Curiosity had grasped him firmly in her clutches now. He couldn't have stopped himself any more than he could hold back in his opinions.

"Bilara."

"Nothing else?"

"I need nothing else," she said with another knife-smile sharpened to perfection.

"I'm Sedgewick," he said, even though she hadn't asked.

"But not just Sedgewick."

"Hardly."

The curiosity inside himself was now reflected in her own eyes. She nodded once. "I think we might have use for each other, Sedgewick."

Kier's voice screamed from the hole near them. "But not if they suspect anything," she added. "Hold still and try to act panicked."

She was on him in seconds, a knife at his throat and her breath puffing against his cheek. "—and you'll regret trying to catch me again!" she shouted right as their captors emerged from the hole.

Three soldiers dragged her off of him. Sedgewick didn't have time to recover from the shock before he was jerked away as well. He winced at the smack of a hand hitting skin but the blow did not meet him.

Kier growled at Bilara, tugging his black sleeve back into place and admiring the red, swelling mark he'd left on her pale cheek. "Were it up to me, you would already be thrown from the side."

"Another good reason things aren't left to you, Kier," Bilara cooed.

He shook his head. "What a waste of a pretty face." Kier slid her stolen knife into his belt. "Take her and the Abreylian-lover back to the cell." He turned to the now-large group of men. "And go all together this time."

Someone shoved a bag over his head again. As a small consolation, it smelled slightly better than the last one.

Eventually, the deadly procession ended and his wrists were bound together at the chains of his cell again. "Maybe she'll kill you next time she tries to get out," Kier whispered, dropping the locked chains and letting it jangle against the stone.

"Give Calrock my regards," Bilara said sweetly.

Kier paused. His pale ears twitched. "If I thought you'd actually do it, I'd leave this door unlocked for you. Keep pressing your luck and one day Calrock's patience will run out." He turned, just slightly. "Then you'll be left to me. And you'll learn to regret that mouth of yours."

Then he turned his attention to Sedgewick. "And I'll be sure your apprentice gets what his master deserves."

Sedgewick's chest seized. "No, wait, I—"

The door closed behind him with an ominous boom.

His magic flared, heating his hands as he tugged against his chains. The essantium did its work and drained away the released energy before he could even begin to channel a spell. "This is your fault," he growled at the woman.

"Mine? Kier must have hit your head too hard when bringing you in. I could have killed you. It was your choice to follow me. You could have tried to aid Kier if you were so desperate to lick someone's boots." Bilara's lips curled.

"I was trying to find my apprentice," he snapped back. Rising to his feet, he staggered as close to her as his length of chain allowed. Bilara followed suit, and they faced each other like two rival dogs in a fighting ring. Teeth out and claws sharp.

"And what would you have done once you had found him, hmm? Do you have any understanding of exactly where you're held captive?" Her words held a condescension that set his blood afire.

What would he have done? Attempt to escape? Eldain's and Rodren's faces flashed before his eyes. He had failed them. Them and Alena. Stupid, useless... "Enlighten me, then, Miss She-who-rebels-without-purpose."

"I need no other purpose." That wicked smile gleamed in the light again. Poets compared women's smiles to the sun. Hers was a piece of sharpened moonlight. "You're in the Black Obelisk, darling. This is where Onryx puts people they want to disappear. We are far, far off the ground in a building designed to be unclimbable. The floors going down are lined with either Kier's men or spell-triggering traps of Calrock's design. And even if you were to somehow make it out, the bridge would already be raised and you'd be surrounded on every side by either a drop deep enough that it might as well be hellgates or by a mountain range so treacherous that even its safest paths are worth waging a war over a route to avoid them. Don't let what I just did fool you. Going up is far easier than going down. In some ways, they even want you to."

Sedgewick jerked against his bound wrists again. He was close enough to make out the specks of blood sticking to her dark hair and to see the color of her eyes. They were partially a clear, wintery blue, but lines of violet-purple were eating her natural color away. A fellow mage. His anger ebbed away. Here at least, was something familiar. Using magic to the extent that mages did caused the color of one's eyes to brighten or in some cases, change to match the color of one's magic entirely. His own eyes had been an ordinary brown when he was very young, but years of magic channeling had turned them to an amber closer to his orange magic essence. "I won't rot away useless in here."

He let the implication hang in the narrow space between them. An unspoken parley.

"You might die getting out," she spoke at last.

"Well, at least that wouldn't interfere with my plans to die young in a blaze of magic." His mouth tugged up, but in reflex and not as a true smile.

"Why are you here?" she asked. The curiosity in her words was tangible now.

"Why are you?"

She arched an eyebrow. "Do you believe mutual secrets are necessary for a partnership?"

"For this one, yes. On the roof, you said we might have use for each other. Tell me something. One thing." He leaned back appraisingly, no longer letting the chains dig into his wrists.

Her jaw worked. Whether it was from pain from Kier's blow or because she was considering her words, he didn't know. "I am here because I was asked to do something and I told them no."

He waited.

"Then when they insisted, I gave a more...aggressive no."

Sedgewick snorted. "That will do for now. In return, I'll say that I am here because I'm a better mage then I am a spy."

"Are we allies then, Sedgewick?" she asked, that curiosity sparking in the violet of her eyes.

His lips curled into a smirk. "For the moment. Now, I have one idea at the present..."

*********************

Author's Note: Well, between finishing school, finishing Magic's Memories, and dropping out of the ONC because I wasn't going to be finished within the deadline, it's been a minute. But we're back! Hopefully, there are still people who remember that this is a thing, haha. How will the tenuous new alliance play out? What does Sedgewick have planned? Let me know in the comments!