TIME August 3rd LOCATION The donjon, Lord Valden's keep
BACKGROUND:
The ambush had been arranged from the start – a wolf pack, a Lieutenant named Karver, and Overseer Kaleb’s fingerprints all over it.
The Agents woke up in chains.
WHAT HAPPENED
The cell was standard dungeon fare – stone, damp, manacled to the wall, hands bound in mitt-like restraints specifically to stop any spell that needed a free hand.
Kaleb’s first visit got him nothing; the Agents gave him no more than silence and open hostility, and he left without pressing the point.
He came back later with an explanation nobody had asked for – not out of guilt, he made clear, but because he thought they’d earned some professional respect for what they’d survived so far.
“There is a war coming. And soon. We need Troopers that don’t need to rest, that survive wounds that would leave a normal soldier combat-ineffective. Troll and lycan. A heady combination, and difficult to keep sane – but if it works, it’s decisive.”
Overseer Kaleb
The dog-soldiers, the werewolves, Devon’s stitched pelt, the troll pinned regenerating and screaming in a cell down the corridor – all of it was Kaleb’s own research, a Dranathess military program to breed soldiers that couldn’t be killed the normal way.
He seemed to take real pride in it, and pressed hard for anything they knew about the medallions they carried, and about Asquith.
Time passed with no obvious way out – until Deville arrived, unannounced, materialising in the cell out of nowhere.
Her offer was simple and entirely self-interested: help her get free of whatever bound her here, and she’d help them escape in return.
She hadn’t quite accounted for the fact that the Agents were still chained – the weapons and holy symbol she smuggled in were useless without free hands to use them.
“This is some rescue!”
she said, unimpressed.
“I bring you weaponry, but you have a plan for getting out?”
Her binding came with limits of its own, it turned out – barred from using her particular talents on anyone already inside the keep, and from enlisting any of the Lord’s own people to help her.
Strangers, apparently, hadn’t been covered.
All she was asking in return was small, by her account: break the circle scored into the floor of her own cell, and their door would open in turn.
Kaleb came back before they’d gotten far with the chains, apparently unaware anything had changed.
“I hear DeVille had visited – I believe she, ahem, saw you. Not any more… I did suggest that you be gagged, but no, Deville thought the manacles were enough. Told her so.”
He left satisfied, none the wiser about the smuggled weapons.
Deville, checking in not long after, was characteristically unbothered about how she’d gotten past the door at the top of the steps.
“Well, sugars, Kevin thinks he locked it. Maybe he was a bit distracted at the time. Just my natural feminine charms… why don’t y’all try it?”
It took a long, grinding effort – melted chain links, shattered bolts, a knife worked patiently through iron – but between Ash’s scorching rays, Krusha’s own strength, and Raven’s sheer refusal to quit, the Agents finally broke free of their bonds, howls and unfamiliar keening drifting in from somewhere else in the donjon as they did.
The corridor beyond was dim and sconce-lit, lined with cells the Agents hadn’t been shown on the way in.
One held two men bitten by Karver himself and chained for tissue harvesting, snarling and sobbing by turns behind a barred window, eyes glowing yellow in the torchlight.
Another held the source of at least some of the howling – a troll pinned to the wall by its own regeneration, metal stakes driven through flesh that had grown back around them.