Methodically, he moved through the rooms of each floor one by one. He easily countered the defensive wards cast on the doorways of important chambers. He found a few guardsmen and a wizard seeking to hide, and two guards trying and failing to squeeze out of an arrow slit. He touched them all with his void orb, reducing them to dust. He also used the void orb to disintegrate the various religious icons and statuary that he encountered. Slowly but inexorably, he was effacing Cyric from his own temple.

When that work was done, he floated through the ceiling and found the next floor abandoned. As he had surmised, the survivors had gathered on the fifth floor, in the sanctum of Cyric. Again, he took time to destroy the Cyricist iconography and ensured no one was trying to hide from him. He found no one.

Only a single stairway led up to the fifth floor, into a foyer with double doors that led into the sanctum. Vhostym hovered near the base of the stairs. He could hear chanting leaking down from above. He studied the stairs, activating a permanent dweomer on his eyes that allowed him to detect and analyze magical dweomers.

The surviving priests and mages had been busy. Several glyphs warded the stairs, as did a firetrap. Should anyone ascend, they would cause an explosion of fire, lightning, acid, and cold, and trigger an unholy symbol that would wrack the body with agony. Of course, Vhostym did not have to ascend the stairs. He could simply float through the floors. The tower's defenders had not anticipated that.

The wizard concentrated for a moment, took control of the arcane sensor he had created, and sent it up through the floor.

Though the eye, he saw that the armored skeletons he had seen in the room earlier now stood assembled around the top of the stairs, just before the sanctum's double doors. They were designed to slow him, nothing more. Behind them, just within the sanctum, stood nearly a dozen priests and mages, including Olma Kulenvov in a hurriedly donned breastplate and vambraces, and fully two score guardsmen. The priests and mages held wands and staffs pointed at the stairs, and the warriors held bare axes and swords. One of the mages turned to silence a warrior with a glare and his gaze fell upon Vhostym's sensor. His eyes widened and he gave a shout. Clearly, the wizard had magic that allowed him to see invisible objects.

Olma whirled around, brandished her platinum holy symbol, the jawless skull, and cast a spell that attempted to counter Vhostym's sensor. The priestess's magic met Vhostym's and was overpowered. Her lips peeled back in a snarl and she shared a look with the other priests and the wizards. All of them visibly tensed. They had an inkling of the power of their foe and it visibly frightened them.

Vhostym decided to give them another inkling.

Still standing near the bottom of the stairs, he summoned arcane power, pictured Olma in his head, and softly whispered a single word of power. "Die."

In the room above, Vhostym watched through his sensor as the priestess grabbed her chest and paled. The other priests scrambled about, looking for the source of the attack. Vhostym expected Olma to fall over dead, but the attack passed and she grinned fiercely. She must have protected herself with a deathward.

Prudent, Vhostym thought.

A shout of challenge rang out from the assembled troops.

"For Cyric!" they called, and "Come up, wizardling!"

Vhostym supposed he would need to use blunter tools. He softly intoned the words to a sophisticated glamer and crafted a highly detailed illusion of himself. He structured it around his annihilating orb, masking it. He sent orb and illusion up the stairs and into the foyer. For good measure, he caused the illusionary Vhostym to incant a spell as he ascended.

The entire stairway vibrated with the impact of spells and wand fire as the defenders let fly with wands, staffs, and evocations. Smoke, flames, and green energy poured down the stairwell. A scream suggested that at least one of the defenders tried to touch the illusion, encountered the orb instead, and was reduced to nothingness. Vhostym floated away from the stairs, estimated the position of the middle of the Sanctum, and floated up into the room.

The illusionary Vhostym advanced up the stairs and through the foyer, seemingly unharmed by the storm of arcane and divine power. The illusion continued to incant a spell that would never be cast. A soldier lunged at him, blade extended. When the blade hit the orb, man and weapon turned to dust. Two skeletons, mindless automatons, did the same and also turned to dust.

The defenders fell back before the illusionary juggernaut.

Behind the defenders, the real Vhostym began to cast one of the most destructive spells he knew.

"A ruse," Olma shouted, finally recognizing the illusion for what it was. She ordered the skeletons to cease destroying themselves on the illusion and turned around. Her vision must have been magically augmented, for she saw the real Vhostym.

"There!" she shouted, and pointed at Vhostym.

The wizards whirled, ignoring the illusion, leveled wands, and fired. Lightning and a green beam ripped paths toward Vhostym. His wards absorbed both as though they had never been.

"It's a ghost!" shouted one of the priests.

"An invisible wizard in ghostform," corrected a mage. She attempted a spell to counter Vhostym's incorporeality. It failed.

As one, the guardsmen rushed in Vhostym's direction, blades bare, snarls on their faces. Unlike the mages, they could not see him. Still they charged.

Vhostym finished his spell, adding a final vocalization that allowed him to sculpt the spell's effect around his person. When he pronounced the final syllable and held forth his hand, four fist-sized spheres of superheated, glowing rock flew forth. Two he directed past the charging soldiers at Olma, and one each he directed at the two wizards who had fired their wands at him.

The spheres slammed into their targets, knocked them from their feet, and exploded into an inferno of red flames that blanketed the entire sanctum in fire. The explosions overlapped, intensifying the heat. Soldiers, priests, and mages burned in the conflagration. Their screams lasted only moments.

As Vhostym had intended when he sculpted his spell, the explosions spared the space in which he floated. Clouds of flame circled around him but he stood untouched in the eye of the inferno. Burning men staggered through the island he had created, fell over, and died. Black smoke poured from their corpses.

Then it was over.

Vhostym surveyed the smoky room.

The soldiers' bodies were so consumed by the flames that they were barely recognizable as men. They lay curled on the floor before him, lips burned away to reveal blackened teeth. The skeletons looked like little more than piles of charred sticks. The protective spells on the wizards and priests had shielded them from some of the damage but the inferno had been so intense that it had overcome even their defensive wards. Almost all of them lay prone, motionless. Only the chest of Olma rose and fell, and her breathing sounded as labored as Vhostym's.

The pedestal, tiles, and murals depicting Cyric or his iconography had been burned away or reduced to shapeless chunks. The temple was Cyric's no more. It was Vhostym's.

He floated over to Olma, looked down on her blackened face, the charred, tangled mass of her hair. One of the priestess's eyes was little more than a seared hole, but the other stared out from the charred ruin of its socket. It focused on Vhostym, saw him.

"What are you?" the priestess whispered. "Why have you done this?"

Vhostym frowned. Humans, more than any race he had encountered in his travels, always sought to know why things occurred.

He answered, There is no reason that you would understand. And I am what I am.