I slashed at the semi-corporeal, blue-tinged throat of the last wolf remaining in the strange pack which had attacked us. The creature's body flickered as it died, collapsing into a pool of mist. The ten other lupine bodies that encircled the protective ring we'd made around Anderson had also met similar fates. The monster cores of the creatures rolled out of, or rested sill within, their dissipating fog-formed bodies.

"Are you alright to continue?" Arthic asked the man we protected.

Anderson was untouched. We'd made sure of that. "I'm fine. We're almost there. I found Cindi around here. She said the monster's lair is just over a nearby hill, in a large glade ringed by stone."

We'd been assailed by all manner of strange creatures, each teaming with natural mana, since entering the woods nearly an hour and a half before. Humanoid masses of vines, flickering will-o-wisps that were hard to concentrate on if you stared at them directly, and now the pack of wolves made from the fog itself. Thankfully, all of their cores had been easy to extract so as to not slow us down, with all of the monsters dissipating as the wolves had. None had been more than novice tier.

All in all, including the wolves whose cores we now collected, we'd each gained ten magic-control cores each. Mana-aligned cores were rare, even ones of the copper variety, and, while Garron and I immediately absorbed our cores, Arthic and Rosaria would easily be able to trade each of their cores for three more that would increase their brawn, dexterity, or endurance.

My mana-control stat reached one hundred points as I absorbed the last core, and I was glad of it because I had a feeling I'd need all the strength I could get.

After we'd collected our loot from the forest floor, Anderson continued to guide us. We travelled for another twenty minutes or so.

As we crested a particularly large mountainous hill, we only had to press through a few trees at its crest to know we'd found our destination.

Ominous, ancient-feeling energy seemed to emanate from the depressed glade we stared into. A large pool of shimmering water caught the sunlight in the center of the clearing. A ring of weathered, smoothed stone monuments lined the edges of the glade where lush, knee-high grasses met sturdy and towering trees.

We didn't see the spirit, but the air around us seemed thicker, almost like we were walking through a curtain of some kind.

"I don't see it," Rosaria said.

"Could it be hiding?" Arthic asked.

"No. The air is infused with mana," Garron said. "Pery, I know little of wild spirits, but the numina were said to be able to dwell in-between the grey-ethereal and the living world. Do you believe we are about to enter one such place?"

"The life force of the forest is stronger here, like that glade is one of its vital organs," I answered. "You might be right. I've never seen a wild spirit's place of power, but my father said once you entered them that you would know it quickly unless they didn't want you to."

"So when we go down there, we might see the spirit?" Rosaria asked. "Will we be able to leave?"

"Most likely only after we kill it," Garron said.

"Anderson. I'm not sure if it'll be safer for you out here or in there," Arthic told the man.

"I'll just get in your way," the man shook his head. "As much as I want to kill that monster myself, I'll wait for you here."

He was staring at us. His eyes held an unspoken request.

"We won't fail," Arthic promised him. "Cindi will be saved, and so will the other children."

Anderson lifted his arm up for Arthic to grasp. The squire-captain grasped his back. And we each then did the same in turn. It felt odd having a man so many years older than me looking into my eyes with such solidarity and hope, but I didn't deny him when he offered his forearm to me.

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"We should be careful; he'll be strong here," I warned everyone. "But he won't be able to run. My father told me that wild spirits are as much part of their sacred places as they are separate from them."

"Then our foe is cornered," Arthic acknowledged.

"And perhaps only we or he shall ever emerge from this glade again," Garron added.

"It'll be us," Rosaria said.

"It has to be," I agreed with my friend.

The world shifted as we descended into the depression. Shapes moved. Shadows elongated.

By the time our feet touched upon the long grass of the glade proper, every step revealed new realities. Flowers, pristine and porcelain white, wisped into existence all around us as if slipped into view from in-between sections of the thicker, and almost sacrosanct, air.

The sunlight faded into an in-between twilight, filtered through lengthening tree canopies that rose higher with our every step. Canopies that belonged to trees which began to shimmer with a ghostly glow, with vibrant molten amber heartbeats appearing and flashing between their now more-cracked bark.

The glade itself grew both imperceptibly and quickly in its own width and length, and a soft, ethereal moss appeared under our boots beneath the gently drifting grass that caressed our trousers.

The stone monuments ringing the glade, in the few moments where I'd been too distracted to focus on them, had risen to be nearly half as tall as the towering trees from some angles, yet shrunk and shifted when viewed from others; inscriptions that were deeply carved existed on their faces in one moment and then smoothed over in the next, while thin and twisting moss grew and receded at random over them.

A fog that was neither cold nor warm seeped and rolled from nowhere I could pinpoint, wrapping around us as if it had been there all along.

The crystalline pool in the center of the strange glade sparkled brightly as we approached it. The eerie mist was strongest over its waters, swirling around an unmoving figure that was both barely visible and yet unmistakable.

The Horned Man loomed half-submerged in the pool’s depths, still as stone yet somehow vast, his presence felt in every breath of the glade. Wisps drifted lazily around him, pulsing in soft greens, whites, and the faintest lavender, casting an otherworldly glow across the water.

"I have troubled your path to this place, yet still you come, though no invitation has been granted," he rumbled, his voice a low, rolling thunder. "By stepping here unbidden, only even being able to by your foreknowledge of its location and your will, you stray from the old agreements your kind once minded with mine. You walk within my very self; your feet press upon my spirit. Tell me, do you come with the same violence you gave to those who served me?"

We stopped at the pool's edge. The Horned Man did not move. He seemed altogether greater and lesser now, his voice both a threat and a lamentation of his fading influence. I realized now that, had the spirit been at the height of his power, we very well may have been fools to hunt it. But now? I saw only weariness in its eyes.

“You are old,” I spoke in Druidic, the ancient language of the wilds slanted my speech to be more archaic by its very nature, drawing uncertain glances from my party who did not understand my words. “Ancient, yes. But you are no god. I have seen gods. You are a spirit, worn thin, one whose people have turned their backs upon him.”

The Horned Man lifted his head, his dark eyes piercing through the mist, heavy with unspoken memories. “You speak the first tongue, as did those who made their covenants with me. They who honored and kept to them, year upon year, until their ways were so quickly shunned by choice. Yet you raise your magics and blade in the service of oath-breakers?”

“They have made no oaths to you,” I said, steadying my voice and forcing my tongue to shape the complex syllables of druidic. “Their ancestors whom you condemn did. These people seek freedom from you, freedom for their children. Lift your curses, release their blood, and there need be no death here this day.”

The air around us seemed to warp and tremble, the very fabric of the glade disturbed by the spirit's anger in response to my words.

“Their covenant was forged in bloodlines, for only blood could bind across time to one such as I,” the Horned Man rumbled, his words rolling through the glade like distant thunder. “I will not unravel what was agreed upon nor lessen the weight of promises known by their forebears. Their neglect and forgetting changes nothing.” His eyes darkened, glinting with a primal strength. “I may be diminished, yet I am more than any I see before me now. And I will not make myself an oath-breaker to forgive those who have broken faith with me. Promises of bounty and retribution were made clear. They shall be kept."

The waters surged as he moved, each step echoing like a drumbeat through the glade. He reached the edge of the pool, lifting his heavy hooves onto the glade’s earth, his horned head towering above us.

“You presume to chastise me in the first tongue—my own tongue—as though I am somehow lesser?” His voice deepened, resonant and cold. “You trespass against me, in a place that is mine and of my spirit, and that trespass will be met as it was bound to be. The just curses upon those who turned from me will remain by their own choosing and forsaking of my mercy, and your arrogance here shall be repaid in blood.”