Elias Varrow had a corpse problem.
Specifically, the corpse of the most important man in the kingdom.
The body of Alric the Radiant lay on the wooden floor of the workshop, golden armor glinting in the afternoon light like it hadn't received the memo yet. The jeweled hilt of his sword still sparkled. His cape was spread around him at a dignified angle, as though even in death the Hero had managed to look like a painting.
Very dead.
Very heroic.
Very inconvenient.
Elias sat across from him on the floor, back against the workbench leg, hands resting on his knees, and stared. He had been staring for what felt like either three minutes or three years. The clock on the wall continued its loud, indifferent ticking. A surviving mouse rustled in its cage. Afternoon light moved slowly across the floorboards, dragging the shadows with it.
He waited for some part of his brain to produce a helpful thought.
None arrived.
"Okay," he said out loud.
His voice sounded strange in the quiet. Too small. Too ordinary for the size of what was sitting in front of him.
The body did not respond.
"That's fine." He nodded slowly, the way a man nods when he is trying to convince himself that his legs still work before standing up. "That's completely fine. We're fine."
He was not fine.
"Step one," he said, pushing his spectacles up his nose with one extremely careful knuckle. "Confirm the situation."
He leaned forward and pressed two fingers to Alric's neck for the third time, because the first two times had not produced the answer he wanted, and there was a small, desperate, scientifically inexcusable part of him that believed the third attempt might be different.
It wasn't different.
No pulse. No warmth. Nothing moving beneath the skin except the slow, settling stillness of a body that had finished its last piece of business.
"Right," Elias said. "Still dead."
He sat back and rubbed his temples hard enough that he could feel his pulse there, which was more than he could say for the hero.
"Step two. Think of a solution."
He stared at the ceiling. The ceiling offered exposed beams, a water stain shaped vaguely like a running horse, and no solutions whatsoever.
He thought about running. He thought about hiding. He thought about whether any known alchemical compounds could reverse death — and went through the list methodically, the way he always thought, in columns and categories — and arrived at the answer: no. Not reliably. Not quickly. Not with what he had on these shelves. Not at all.
"…Step three," he whispered. "Realize there is no solution."
Because there really wasn't.
The Hero was dead. Dead on the floor of a private workshop belonging to an alchemist who had, in the span of one afternoon, managed to turn three years of careful scientific work into a contact-based killing mechanism. The mice were dead. The hero was dead. And Elias was still sitting here, alive, which felt cosmically incorrect.
He looked slowly down at his hands.
They looked the same. That was the thing that kept catching him — they looked exactly the same as they always had. Ink stains on the right index finger. A small burn scar on the left thumb from Prototype #12. Knuckles that cracked in cold weather. Ordinary, unremarkable, alchemist's hands.
Hands that had apparently just killed the chosen champion of an entire kingdom.
"Hypothesis," he said, because speaking out loud helped him think, and because the silence in the room was starting to press against him in a way he didn't like. "The antidote turned into a poison." He paused. "A very efficient poison. Contact-based. Fast-acting. No visible mechanism of delivery." Another pause. "Probably — definitely — fatal."
He turned his hands over and back. Over and back.
"Further hypothesis," he continued, voice shaking slightly at the edges now, the scientific composure starting to wear through at the seams, "I am now the most dangerous handshake in the kingdom."
In the capital of Valenfall.
Possibly in the world.
He opened his mouth to continue his hypothesis, because there was more to say — questions about reversibility, about the curse's range, about whether it was specific to living tissue or would also affect plants, wood, other organic materials — when the knock came.
BANG BANG BANG.
Elias launched himself approximately three feet into the air.
"Sir Alric?" a voice called from outside. "Did you find the alchemist?"
The sound that came out of Elias was not a word. It was something that existed in the space between a gasp and a whimper, a noise with no real purpose except to express the specific feeling of a man whose situation has just become geometrically worse.
The party.
Of course. Of course, the party. Alric had come to the capital to gather expedition supplies — naturally, he hadn't come alone. He never went anywhere alone. The legendary companions of the Hero of Valenfall, who had fought beside him for three years through monsters and siege lines and one famously difficult dungeon that had taken seventeen days to clear.
Elias's brain, running on pure panic, produced a rapid summary.
The Knight. Sir Aldren of the Silver Shield. Decorated eleven times for valor. Had once held a fortress gate for four hours against an undead army using only a spear and an improvised barricade.
The Priestess. Sera Vane. Silver armor, silver tongue, divine healing magic potent enough to bring someone back from the edge of death. Very calm. Very devout. Very likely to notice that something in this room was spiritually wrong.
The Mage. Vex. First name unknown, or possibly just Vex, or possibly a name he'd chosen himself to be difficult. Had written six academic papers on magical detection theory. Could sense residual spellwork through walls.
The Assassin. Name unknown. Nobody knew the assassin's name. The assassin had a name, presumably, but it hadn't come up, and Elias suspected it wasn't offered freely.
All four of them.
Outside his door.
Elias looked at the body.
The body, with the dignity of something that had stopped caring about problems, offered nothing.
Another knock. Louder this time, with a different quality to it — less cheerful inquiry, more the beginning of concern.
"Sir Alric?"
Elias was on his feet before he'd decided to stand, moving in a low, useless circle around the workshop. He couldn't hide the body — it was the Hero, in full armor, taking up a heroic amount of floor space. He couldn't move it without touching it. He couldn't touch it because — he stared at his hands again — he couldn't touch it.
He couldn't open the door because four legendary warriors on the other side of it would immediately want to know where their companion was, and the answer to that was lying on the floor behind him.
He couldn't climb out the window because the workshop was on the ground floor and the window faced the main street.
He couldn't—
"Strange." The voice from outside was calm, female, and precise. "Sir Alric never locks doors."
The priestess. Elias recognized the quality of that calm. It was the calm of someone who had trained for years to remain composed in the presence of terrible things, which was, right now, an extremely bad sign.
Then the mage: "I sense… something odd inside."
Elias's soul made another attempt to vacate the premises.
The odd thing the mage was sensing was, he suspected, either the lingering alchemical resonance of a failed prototype, the curse currently living in his hands, or the entirely mundane but extremely significant presence of a dead prophesied hero. Possibly all three. The mage had written papers on detection theory. He would be thorough.
"Stand back," the knight said, in the voice of a man who had already decided what came next.
Metal scraped. A sword being drawn — the specific sound of good steel against a quality scabbard, the kind of sound that meant business in a way that cheaper swords didn't quite achieve.
Elias looked around wildly one more time. The broken bottles. The spilled reagents spreading a dark stain across the left side of the floor. The cages. The notes. The dead mouse on the workbench.
And in the center of everything — the hero. Still dead. Still heroic. Still deeply, catastrophically inconvenient.
There was nothing to do.
The door exploded inward.
Not locked carefully and broken with effort inward. Immediately, fully inward, hinge screws and all, the way a door opens when a knight has decided to be done with it. It hit the interior wall with a crack and bounced.
All four of them came through at once, spreading out with the practiced efficiency of people who had entered hostile spaces together many times before.
Nobody moved.
The afternoon light fell through the ruined doorway across the workshop floor.
Across Alric.
Across Elias, standing behind him with his back to the workbench, hands at his sides, spectacles slightly askew.
The four members of the legendary party looked at the floor.
At the body.
At Elias.
The silence lasted exactly as long as it needed to for everyone to understand what they were looking at.
Then the knight spoke.
"…Explain."
He was bigger than Elias had expected, up close. The Silver Shield wasn't here — he'd probably left it somewhere — but the sword was out, catching the light, and Sir Aldren's expression was the expression of a man who was giving exactly one warning before he stopped giving warnings.
Elias raised his hands slowly.
"I can explain," he said.
The priestess moved past both of them without hurrying. She knelt beside Alric with the fluid efficiency of someone who had knelt over wounded people too many times to count, and her gauntlet came up and touched his neck. A soft golden light spread from the contact, washing across the armor, running up the curve of the pauldron and down along the breastplate in thin, searching lines.
Looking for life.
Finding none.
The light faded.
Sera's face went still in the way that things go still when the person behind them is holding something very large and very carefully. Her eyes moved from the body to Elias. They were very dark, and very level.
"He's dead," she said.
The room absorbed this.
The mage turned his head — slow and deliberate, the movement of a man cataloguing rather than reacting — and looked at Elias. Then at the body. Then back at Elias. His expression was the detached, almost clinical expression of someone who had seen strange things before and was currently deciding which category this one fell into.
"You," the mage said, with the careful emphasis of someone constructing a sentence they hadn't needed to construct before, "killed the Hero."
Elias opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Swallowed.
"Well," he said, in a voice that could most charitably be described as diminished, "when you phrase it like that—"
He did not finish the sentence.
Because the assassin vanished.
Here. Then not here. No transition between the two states. The spot where she had been standing simply contained air now, and Elias had enough time to process that's bad before the dagger appeared at his throat. Cool steel. Exact placement. The blade resting against his pulse point with the precision of someone who had done this before and was not currently sure whether to continue.
Hot breath on the back of his neck. A voice, quiet and close.
"Don't move."
Elias did not move. Elias did not breathe. Elias strongly suspected that moving would result in him having a significantly shorter problem to deal with.
The knight stepped forward. Sword still raised, arm steady, his face carrying the particular look of a man who had been patient for a long time and was reaching the end of it.
"You will explain," he said.
"Now."
The word landed like a door closing.
Elias looked at the sword. At the body on the floor. At the priestess still kneeling beside it, her expression unreadable, watching him. At the mage standing very still with his hands at his sides.
"Okay," he said. "That's fair."
He took a very careful breath through his nose.
"So, technically speaking." He paused. He thought about how to phrase what he was about to say. There was no good way. There had never been a good way. "I think I accidentally turned myself into poison."
Nobody spoke.
The mage blinked — just once, slowly, like a man whose processing had briefly fallen behind his hearing.
The priestess stared.
The knight looked like he was performing a rapid internal calculation of how many pieces were appropriate under the circumstances, and settling on several.
From behind him, the assassin asked the obvious question.
"…What?"
It wasn't really a question. It was more the sound of someone's understanding arriving at a wall.
Elias gestured carefully at his hands — small, controlled movements, because there was still a blade at his throat.
"I drank a potion," he said.
"Yes."
"It went wrong."
"Yes."
"And now," he said, with the resignation of a man reading aloud from his own disaster, "anything I touch dies."
The room went completely silent.
Sera looked down at Alric's shoulder. The exact spot where Alric had clapped Elias on arrival, friendly and golden and entirely unaware.
She looked back up.
"He touched you," she said. Still that same level voice. Still holding everything very carefully behind it.
"Yes."
The mage took one full step backward. His heel hit the doorframe and he stopped there, caught between instinct and academic interest, the two things warring visibly in his expression.
The knight did not step backward.
The knight was not the sort of man who stepped backward.
He crossed the remaining distance between them in two strides and grabbed Elias by the collar with one gauntleted fist. The sword came up.
"Liar," he said, with the finality of a verdict.
"WAIT—" Elias screamed. "DON'T—"
Sir Aldren froze.
Not because of the scream. Because his hand had gone numb.
It happened the same way it had happened with Alric — the fast, quiet spread of it, moving up through the gauntlet and into the palm and wrist, the color changing in his face, the sudden, bewildered wrongness crossing his expression as his body stopped being entirely his.
His eyes widened.
"Oh," he said.
The sword hit the floor. The knight followed it — not a controlled descent, not the kneel of a man choosing to sit, but the full, complete collapse of a body that had simply stopped. He went down sideways and landed half across Alric with a resonant clang of armor on armor that rang through the workshop like a bell.
Elias stood where he'd been standing and stared at what he'd done.
Two bodies.
The hero and the knight, side by side on the workshop floor, golden armor and silver armor, both of them still, both of them wrong, both of them the direct result of his own hands.
From behind him, in a voice barely above a breath, the mage said:
"…What in the.."
Elias closed his eyes.
He breathed in through his nose. Out through his mouth. In again.
"Good news," he said, in the flat, exhausted tone of a man who had run out of the capacity to feel new things about his situation.
"My theory was correct."
Outside, the city alarm bells began to ring. Not the three measured chimes of the departure signal — these were fast, overlapping, the kind that meant something had gone wrong. Someone in the palace had noticed the Hero hadn't returned. Someone had started asking questions.
The bells rang and rang over the rooftops of Valenfall.
Elias opened his eyes and looked at his hands.
Still ordinary. Still his. Still ink-stained and burn-scarred and completely, irreversibly wrong.
The assassin's dagger had moved away from his throat at some point — he wasn't sure when — and when he turned around, she was standing exactly where she'd been, looking at the two bodies, and then at him, with an expression that was not readable but was also, somehow, not the expression of a person who had made a decision yet. That was something. He wasn't sure what.
The mage had his notebook out.
Elias almost laughed.
He didn't. He looked at the ceiling instead, at the water stain in the shape of a running horse, and thought: three days until the expedition. Three days until the kingdom needed its hero and its knight both, and found neither, and started looking for the reason.
Three days.
He had killed two people in eleven minutes.
"I'm going to be executed," he said, to no one in particular.
Somewhere far below the mountains, in the dark that had been dark since before the kingdom had a name, something ancient turned over in its long sleep.
Because the balance had shifted.