#zanner toobin

Gortash scoffed at the sight of her, but he couldn't hide his concern at the presence of her oversized cohorts. “We could have been allies, powerful ones, and yet… your actions sparked the fall of my Steel Watch—” 

“Your Steel Watch? Technically, I'm responsible for blowing up what I built,” came a slightly distorted interruption from the watcher to her left, “but I couldn't have done it without Mara. It still feels odd saying her name in front of anyone else…” 

“Toobin? HOW?!” 

“How do you think? I've worked on the Auto-Guard for longer than you've been alive,” Zanner retorted, sounding every bit the gnome he was when Gortash first met him nine years ago, not the broken wreck who only yesterday had still been his slave. “For every shoddy, ill-conceived upgrade you tacked onto the design, I implemented a fail-safe to rapidly undo it, but I never had the chance until now. I also allowed for a few theoretical changes my partner and I didn't have the opportunity to test out before she disappeared.” 

“This time, instead of being the one conducting it, you're part of the experiment, pumpkin,” Mara grinned devilishly. “Won't this be fun?” 

At a flick of her wrists, Aurelia and Violet charged forward, one wielding daggers and the other a longsword, squaring off with two of the soon-to-be ex-Archduke's bodyguards. She kept her hands out, summoning dark orbs that Zanner and Lowa each thrust a Watcher fist into. Inky tendrils shot out into the few traps that had been repaired since Mara's last visit, zipping through and disabling them.

Gortash instantly activated a single-use explosive that deployed a kinetic shield around him and then fired his crossbow at Zanner, aiming for one of the few weak points in the armor. The infuriating gnome moved the watcher's arm at the last second, and Gortash snarled to himself as the bolt splintered uselessly against heavily reinforced steel.

Aurelia slid left as a Banite lunged, avoiding a spear strike as she pirouetted around behind him and sprang at his back. One dagger came down in the space between helm and breastplate, behind the clavicle, and the other went in up under his ribs, pincering the heart from two directions at once. 

Mara felt a sudden pang at the sight. 

She moves just like goose does, she thought. Did… She moves just like he… did.

Grief will still be there when this is done, she told herself, as Violet's scream pierced her thoughts, radiant magic scorching her undead flesh. The Banite in the larger, golden mask had either guessed the nature of her companions or simply had very few spells in her repertoire. Shrieking as her skin curled and peeled, still Violet slashed away at the cleric, driving her back toward a pillar. 

Mara glanced at Gortash. As satisfying as it would have been to defeat him with cantrips alone, she remembered his clever little barrier. It reflected projectiles, magical and physical alike. She could almost see the gears moving in his mind as he computed how to inflict the most damage as quickly and as efficiently as possible—now that he'd pushed past the emotional outburst that had him targeting a lesser threat out of sheer spite. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction of dragging this out. 

She merely thought their name, and her stone and crystal sword was in her hands, blade pointing at the ceiling. The Archduke frowned momentarily, and then he fired his arbalest. Mara smirked, disappearing into the ground in a dusty blur as the bolt puffed through nothing and clattered to the floor of the anteroom. She did regret that she couldn't see the look on his face. 

Gortash watched the two vampires tear out the throats of his remaining guards, bright red glistening from their noses to their chins as they locked their feral eyes on him. Two Gondians he'd enslaved, whose families he'd held hostage and threatened to maim or kill for the slightest inefficiency, advanced on him in the very inventions he'd forced them to construct. 

He did not want to call on Bane for aid. He knew the price if he failed. Die valiantly for his god, or stand a better chance at living through the day?

In the same second that Gortash questioned why he was debating what to do at all, the throne behind him exploded as Mara burst up through it just as if she'd been traveling with her xorn, but that was… impossible. They were dead. 

He was in mid-whirl, still dumbfounded as she drove the blade into his lower back. The second the tip of the sword touched his skin, Gortash heard Da'arr hiss in his head, “Vaárkh!” 

Bane arrived unprompted, ripping his mind like tattered shreds of flayed skin, and his consciousness fell into a void.

As Gortash plummeted into the dark, suddenly something caught him. It felt like a web. He could see nothing, but the threads vibrated.

In their motion, he heard Mara whisper, “Perfect.”

[👇How he feels about what I put him through]

Gentle tags for: @litsenn, @carnivaley, @elinorbard, @defira85, @afilmnoirdetective, @gortashsrighthand, @flamemittens, @echoechowhiskey, @bladesingerlily, & @woundedsoul12.