The Saghred had stolen my magic, then the goblins had stolen the stone.

It sucked to be me right now.

I was going to where my worst enemy was and I had no magic. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. I had a spark, and if I held it against a wick long enough, I might just be able to light a candle. Sarad Nukpana was constructing, and about to open, a Gate big enough for an army to go through, a hundred goblins at a time—and doing every last bit of it with magic. He could teleport an army, and right now I’d work up a sweat lighting a candle. We’d love to be able to destroy the Saghred and the Gate, but our first priority was the rock.

The plan was simple—or simply suicide. Nukpana had the Saghred, but we still had the Scythe of Nen. Literally eons ago, the demon king had it forged so he could cut into the Saghred like an oyster and slurp up the souls inside. In theory, the Saghred could be destroyed if it was first emptied of souls. It was a logical solution, but this was a soul-snatching rock that had kept itself intact through the ages by making its own logic and luck. And it wasn’t exactly a solution, or even a good idea, to let the souls out. Most of them hadn’t been nice people to begin with; in fact, a lot of them could give Sarad Nukpana competition in the evil megalomaniac department.

While some would want nothing more than to float off to their great reward, others—powerful and evil others—would infest and possess the first bodies they could take. That presented two problems. One, they could possess us; the problem there being obvious. Two, they could possess any Khrynsani in the immediate vicinity of the high altar. That would be Sarad Nukpana and his craziest and most powerful black mage allies. Evil plus evil equals extremely undesirable.

The world had enough problems without that happening.

Unfortunately, even if Sarad Nukpana gave us a clear path to the Saghred, we still needed the help of one goblin in Regor to keep those souls from infesting and possessing—Kesyn Badru, Tam’s first magic teacher, the man who tried to prevent Tam from running down magic’s dark path to do the things an entirely-too-powerful young mage had no business doing.