IGMS Issue 22 Read Online Free

tavern, the kind of dead that even an epic quest to the heavenly dimensions or selling your true name to a forgotten god might not save your daughter from. I mean it. Stay away. We'll fix this on our own.
    6) Having said that: YOU DIDN'T KILL IRIX FELLSHADOW DEAD ENOUGH.
    Everybody else got flattened to paste in that temple on Cwrele Syg.
I?
Got my soul stolen. We're heading south from Ahuatepec into Sheshab (which is not
quite
a completely uninhabited wasteland since Fellshadow came back from the dead, bound Saskarezoen into his service, and made it build a city there for his new followers) because the demon told me to come fetch my soul if I could. Which is obviously a trap. I'm not dumb enough to miss that. But what else can I do? Fellshadow knows who we are, and he
definitely
remembers how you guys killed him, and if you show up he won't give you a second crack at finishing him off. He'll obliterate my soul and vanish, and then he'll hunt Shariel and Bjartald and Urgoth down one by one and do the same thing to them, and maybe Maggie too just for the fun of it, and I don't want to see who's quicker on the draw, you or him.
    It's all okay, though. Yeah, we're walking straight into the bad guy's lair, and yeah, he knows we're coming, and yeah, I'm pretty sure he's a match even for you guys (at least in your mildly paunchy retired state -- don't glare at me, Dad, it's true), which means we don't stand a chance.
    But don't worry. We Have a Plan.
    Totally not going to die,
    Cayce
    Dear Mom and Dad,
    Greetings from sunny Shadyvale! By now you'll have heard whatever mangled version of the story Shariel gave her mother via the mirror-chat they had, so let me clear up a few things. To begin with: yes, the Plan did in fact involve dressing Urgoth in drag.
    No, this wasn't Maggie's idea of a joke. Urgoth swears blind it's some incredibly sacred orcish tradition; you'll have to get independent confirmation of that. It got him past Fellshadow's sentries, though, because they were looking for a big guy trying his best to look human, not an orc woman come to join the Wacky Cult o' Demon-Worshipping Fun. As for the eagle, that was
my
idea, even if Shariel's the one who seduced Six Flower into teaching her the spell for controlling them. But I am not to be blamed for the whole "death from above" part of the Plan, and whatever Bjartald claims, him breaking his fall on the weird sculpture in the courtyard was pure blind luck. We didn't even know until later it was the framework for a spell Fellshadow was perfecting, that let him drain souls to fuel his own power. I hear Liraiel aged a century when Shariel told her that: apparently one of the first things they teach you in Wizarding 101 is never to dispel a major enchantment by smashing it with a free-falling dwarf.
    Which is a warning I generally endorse. Having a score of shrieking souls suddenly whizzing around the courtyard, playing slalom with random bolts of arcane lightning, isn't a situation most sane people want to be in. But chaos is a great way to level the playing field, and it took us from "almost certain doom" to "fifty-fifty chance whether you live or die," and we won the coin toss. Urgoth had found the statue Fellshadow bound Saskarezoen to, and I managed to knock it down a staircase (even if I did dislocate my shoulder in the process), which according to Wizarding 102 is the recommended way of freeing a demon. Then it was all up to Maggie and her incredibly fast-talking silver tongue. (You always make getting a demon to drag its master off to hell sound as easy as picking off goblin villages, but -- well, okay, given our experience with goblin villages, maybe the two
are
 comparable, just not in the way I thought.)
    And yes, we got my soul back. Fellshadow had been waiting on feeding it to his spell-machine until I got there: the benefit of having a sadistic enemy. Though I must say, his taste in jewelry was
atrocious
. The ring he stuck my soul in is one of the tackiest