Zorea followed, her raptor responding almost before she had begun to move the reins. These were remarkable steeds, powerful and swift, untiring, fearsome in a fight, and as intelligent and responsive as the best-trained horses. It took years to train a Raptor Rider completely, and the bond between rider and steed was a deep and powerful thing, but equally the raptors could be asked to bear new riders quickly.

The understanding between Saul and his raptor might not be as deep or profound as that between a raptor and a trained Xornian rider that had been training together for years, but Saul still felt that the steed understood him as well as—if not better than—many humans he had known.

They were almost silent and understood the value of quiet. The only sound in the forest was the faint swish of the wind in the trees, and the stealthy footfalls of the two mighty steeds.

It was just after midwinter, and though they had not been out long, the light was already beginning to fade. The snow was thick on the ground, and the black pines were interspersed with skeletal oaks, dormant until the spring.

“A portal,” Zorea said wonderingly as the two of them moved through the thick powder snow. “I never thought such things were possible in this age despite all the strange things I’ve seen in the world. There’s no end to the surprises, it seems.”

“I never did either,” Saul agreed. “It was a long-lost magic back in my old timeline. And we explored it, too. We looked into doing it, and we searched for old texts and legends about it, but we found nothing. That was a magic that would have been mighty useful for a battle commander.”

“I still find it strange, you know,” she said thoughtfully after a moment. “I mean, I understand what you say, that you were a mighty general and were reincarnated back in time, but it still bends my mind sometimes. Who would have thought such a thing possible?”

“If you find it hard to get your head around, imagine what it’s like for me,” Saul said with a dry chuckle. “It’s been two years now, and I still can’t quite accept it. But we’re here, and we’re doing it, so I guess that will have to be enough for us.”

Half an hour later, he knelt in the snow before the two weathered curving columns of stone that stood in the portal clearing. With his gloved hands, he pushed aside the thick snow and examined the base of the pillars.

“What are you looking for?” Zorea asked.

“Runes, markings, anything like that. Some clue to the mechanism of the magic they did here.”

“I feel nothing present,” Zorea said, “but there’s something that’s not here, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t, actually,” Saul said, standing and looking at her with keen interest. He brushed snow from his gloves and pulled his cloak a little more tightly around himself. “What do you mean?”

Zorea frowned hard, trying to put it into words. “Since the end of the battle, when my sense of magic drew us to the Body Sigil in the dead warlock’s hands, I’ve been trying to hone my sense of magic, and to make it something I can do at will. And I’ve been trying to use it in such a way that I don’t have to go into a deep trance when it happens. I’ve been getting better at sensing magic, and I can now detect your spells at a distance when you’re using them, or Brand’s when he’s experimenting with his Firebrand spell.”

She smiled a small, private smile at the thought of Brand, then returned her attention to the topic at hand.

“So, I can now feel the presence of magic much better than I ever could before,” she continued. “But there’s a difference here.”

She raised her arms and turned in a slow circle, her head up, indicating the whole clearing with a wide sweep of her hands. Saul smiled as he watched her, a dark-clad, dark-haired, pale-faced figure in the snow.

“In this place,” she said, “I feel an absence of magic, as keenly as I can feel magic’s presence at other times.”

She dropped her hands and padded through the snow to stand beside Saul. The two raptors, waiting by the edge of the clearing, watched Saul and Zorea with a detached curiosity, their many-colored scales glimmering in strange contrast to the monochrome world around them.

Zorea pulled her heavy riding gloves off one by one and stowed them in a pocket, then placed the palms of her hands against the cool stone of the tall, weathered columns. She sighed and bowed her head, closing her eyes.

“There’s a magic that should be here but is not,” she said after a long silence. “That’s as clear as I can say it.”

“Well, it’s a magic I cannot do,” Saul said. “Perhaps one day I will be able to, but I don’t know how to do it now.”

“The stones, this place, must be connected to the existence of the portal spell,” Zorea said. Somehow, the magic is anchored to the location.”

“There must have been ancient, powerful mages in the world to do that,” Saul said thoughtfully, “and I’d dearly love to know how those two warlocks managed to learn the spell and create a portal here.”

He sighed. “Well, I think we’ve seen all we are going to see here today. Thanks for coming out, Zorea. It’s been really helpful to have your take on this. I’m glad you’re refining your magical sensing ability. It’s a valuable skill. Keep at it.”

They turned to begin returning to their raptors, but suddenly a sudden growl from their left froze them.

Their heads turned toward it. Something dark moved among the trees.

“Easy,” Saul said to the raptors, who were both on edge and ready to fight. “I want to see what it is before we take action.”

A moment later, an enormous, emaciated creature with staring red eyes and long, grasping limbs crept warily out of the tree line. It was hairless, dressed in the rotting remains of a grave shroud, but with a leather harness wrapped around its narrow, caved-in chest, and the handle of some large weapon protruding over the edge of one bony shoulder.

Outsized hands and feet pawed the ground as it entered the clearing hunched over, almost on all fours, sniffing from a flattened nose as it came on. Its skin was gray as wet linen, and its long jaw hung open to reveal a pale yellow tongue and rows of incongruous bright, white, sharp teeth.

“A forest ghoul!” Zorea breathed to Saul. “They’ve not been seen this far from the mountains for years. What’s it doing here?”

“My guess is that the warlocks kept them in check,” Saul replied. “Now there are no more warlocks, the foresters of Harkin’s Holdfast might find they have new threats to contend with that they are not used to.”

The ghoul’s head snapped up and it fixed Saul and Zorea with its beady, red, lamp-like eyes. There was no sign of pupil or iris, just a flat, blank space of red light, but Saul had no doubt the creature could see him perfectly well.

A moment later, the ghoul slowly raised itself up onto its legs. It reached over one shoulder and drew a massive wooden cudgel from a harness on its back.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Zorea was tense, her hand on the handle of her longsword at her belt. Saul, however, saw the opportunity for an experiment.

He called up his System and found the Activate Workshop option. It was unavailable, with that strange, gray, dull appearance that he had seen before when he was not able to use a particular option.

When he tried to select it anyway, an explanation flashed across his view.

Workshop unavailable: Combat initiated

Dispatch hostile enemy to unlock Workshop access

The ghoul charged.

Saul and Zorea each leaped to different sides as the creature came on, then whirled and attacked.

Zorea’s strange longsword flashed out of the sheath in the gathering gloom of the clearing. The pale sunlight was reflected in the blade as she spun on her heel, a cloud of fine powder snow flying up behind her as she engaged. The steel of her blade darted out and connected with the ghoul’s right arm, tracing a line of blood across the skin just above the elbow

A flames flashed along the blade as it connected. Saul’s eyes widened in surprise. That was new!

He had never seen any fire effect on Zorea’s weapons before, but he was certain that it was an effect of the fact that they were now all members of the School of Fire Squad. Fire magic was a part of them now, in a way that it had never been before.

Saul was carrying a Xornian shortsword, but he did not draw it from the sheath. Instead, he backed away a few steps, ready to cast a magic spell, while letting Zorea take the lead.

The young healer’s face was a mask of pure calm as she feinted and then slashed in again with her enspelled blade, this time cutting the ghoul across the back of the leg just below the knee.

Her eyes flickered to Saul, then back to her enemy, and a faint suggestion of a smile crossed her lips. She knew he was letting her take the lead. He wanted to see what she could do.

Saul circled around behind the ghoul as Zorea fought it from the front. The ghoul, a dull creature without much intelligence, but with a bit of cunning, concentrated entirely on Zorea as the enemy in front of it.

Saul could probably have finished it off with a single blow of magic, but he chose not to, and he felt Zorea’s gratitude flowing along the line of magical connection between them.

His own pride in her progress as a fighter flowed to her as well. She danced with the ghoul, leading it away from the raptors and nearer to the portal stones.

The ghoul was quicker on its feet than it looked. It swung a series of crushing blows toward her head with its massive wooden club. The strikes were too powerful for her to have deflected with her sword. She did not try to.

Instead, she ducked left, then right, then dropped and rolled forward, coming up under the monster’s guard.

Then, with a lightning stroke, she planted her feet and slammed her blade through the monster’s heart, her body twisting behind the blow to drive the blade home.

The ghoul let out a ragged scream and staggered forward as Zorea whipped her sword out from its chest and leapt to the right. The ghoul stumbled, its blood jetting out from the wound and splattering on the weathered stones where the portal had been as it fell forward and died.

All was quiet in the clearing. Zorea breathed smoothly and slowly in and out through her nose as she crouched and used handfuls of wet snow to clean ghoul gore from her fine blade.

“An impressive kill,” Saul said appreciatively, moving forward to examine the corpse of the ghoul. “You’ve come on as a fighter. Your swordplay is really excellent.”

She glowed with pride at his words as she straightened up and sheathed her blade. “Thanks for giving me the space to work,” she said.

They crouched by the corpse of the monster and quickly rifled through the pockets of the leather harness that had held its club. There was not much here, but in one pouch Zorea found a little red gemstone. It glinted strangely in the sun as she held it up.

“There’s something inside it,” she said. “I can’t tell what it is.”

Neither could Saul.

“Perhaps with better light…”

Saul conjured the recently upgraded Light Globe spell and sent it sailing up above them. The strange, ethereal sphere bathed them with an otherworldly radiance. Saul held the gemstone up to inspect it in better light.

“The crystal is cut in a good pattern,” Zorea said, “definitely the work of a skilled gemcutter.”

“I still can’t see what’s inside,” Saul said, squinting.

The gemstone was not large, no bigger than the joint of his thumb, and as Zorea said, it was cut into a complex, multi-faceted shape as if by an expert jeweler. In the center of the crystal loomed something dark curled up on itself. There was almost a suggestion of limbs, and a head, but…

“No,” Saul said, abruptly closing his fist around the stone. “I can’t tell what’s in there.” He reached out to Zorea. “Will you take it?”

She shook her head, slowly. “I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s odd, but I have a strong feeling that you need to hang onto that for now.”

“You don’t feel anything from it, do you?” Saul asked, but Zorea shook her head.

“Well, I guess it’s time for us to go,” Saul said. They both felt oddly dissatisfied, like there was something more for them to discover here that they were both missing.”

“At least you discovered that the transit to the Workshop does not work while you’re in combat, as you thought,” Zorea said.

“That’s true,” Saul agreed. Experimentally, he pulled up the options for Workshop transit again. “Now the enemy has been killed,” he said, “we should see the option available again.”

Select: Activate Workshop (Location-Specific crafting available)

“Oh, hey, what does that mean?” Zorea said, sounding excited. As before, she was able to see Saul’s System options while they were operating together as a Squad. “Location-specific crafting? I’ve never seen that before.”

“Nor I,” Saul said, looking around.

“I wonder what it means?”

“I’d say it means there’s something I can craft in the Workshop that is only available if I transit there from this location.”

They looked at each other, and Saul grinned. He glanced at the sky. “I think we have time, don’t you?”

The sun was descending, and the shadows gathering, but Zorea laughed. “Not really, but I think we should do it anyway.”

“We’ll be back shortly,” Saul told the two raptors, who were still waiting patiently by the trees.

They regarded him calmly. He had no doubt that they would be fine while he and Zorea traveled to the Workshop and back.

The transit was far less uncomfortable than he had been used to in the past. There was a sense of speed, and of wind on his face, and then Saul and Zorea landed in a very different-looking Workshop.

“What’s this?” Zorea asked, amazed. She and Saul had landed together in a space similar in ways to the regular Workshop, but very different.

Instead of a cozy, wood-paneled room, they stood on a circular space of ground under an open sky. Stars gleamed high above, and darkness was all around them. It was very cold.

“We’re on some kind of platform,” Zorea exclaimed, “or on the top of some immensely tall column of stone.” She moved to the edge and peeked over. “I can’t see the ground,” she said quietly.

The floor was black stone, perfectly circular, perhaps fifty feet across, and covered in a light dusting of snow. Here, there were a number of familiar sights.

In the center, the Skill Tree glowed, but it seemed bigger than usual. The upper branches with their shadowed and mysterious undiscovered spells reached up toward the sky, and the tree’s faint, steady radiance illuminating the space.

To one side, the Resources Table lay, with a generous collection of Arcane Dust, Gold XP, Squad XP, and even Glade and Builder XP glowing on the black velvet of the table.

Casting his eye over the Gold XP, Saul saw he would soon be able to craft a level up, perhaps even two. He felt that he might soon be ready to open a new School of Magic as well. The Glade School was still locked, but he could feel its presence nearby and its potentiality growing stronger with every level he gained.

Near the Resource Table, the Sigil Crafting Table stood with its red crystal ball in the center. But nearest to Saul was the marvelous crystal Anvil, on which he had been able to craft the unique body magic sigil.

The Anvil had remained available in the Workshop since the day when Saul crafted his first Squad, but the Squad Sigils—the ones to upgrade the inventories and to share potions—had all been crafted on the Sigil Crafting Table rather than the Anvil. Saul thought it most likely that the Anvil was for unique or rare crafting, not the day-to-day Sigil creation that was at the heart of the System.

Now, the Anvil glowed with pale light, as if a flame burned within its clear crystal. The crystal had not glowed like that since the day he’d first used it to create the Squad.

“That’s the one you want to use today, I’d say,” Zorea said, pointing to the Anvil.

“I’d say you’re right,” Saul agreed.

Together, they approached the Anvil, and Saul focused his attention drawn to it.

This time, to the surprise of both Saul and Zorea, the crafting options appeared not in their vision only, but directly above the Anvil itself.

“Remarkable!” Saul exclaimed. “That must be because we’re in Squad together.”

“How come it never happened before, then?”

“I don’t know exactly, but I’d guess that it’s because we’re getting more experienced as a Squad. With all my other magic, the effects have grown steadily better and stronger as I’ve practiced. I suspect this is a similar effect.”

They moved forward and examined the options, and then they both looked at each other in amazement. The options were as they had never expected to see.

Location-Specific Crafting Available

Elements required:

Portal Stone: Present

Blood of the Enemy: Present (Time Limited)

The New Moon: Present (Time Limited)

Select: Craft Portal Sigil