“I think I missed something,” Elin announced, cutting the silence.

The group – Team Fluffy Bear – and Elin were sitting before the red, crackling hole in reality, feeling the breeze of another world against their skin. Here, in their world, the temperature was nice. Despite the sand, the sun had yet to make the place into a proper desert. Rain clouds hung overhead, dotting the landscape with plenty of shadows.

“Missed what?” Glenny asked, pulling his head up from the orange he was peeling with a pocket knife.

“Just… W-well. I guess… I guess I missed why you five are so special.”

“What do you mean?”

Elin shifted in her seat – a chair Leland had provided from his inventory ring. “Things like this chair? Normal people don’t have that.”

Leland gave her a strange look. “We’re special because I had an extra chair? Would you rather Gelo make you one out of ice?”

The Legacy of the First Druid shook her head, the gesture as unconscious as her thumping leg. “See, that’s another thing. You have a talking bear with you! That’s very stra—”

“Don’t listen to her Gelo!” Jude interrupted, his voice carrying across the empty, dark sands. “You’re not strange!”

Elin ignored the stare the cub was giving her and said, “That’s not what I meant. Gelo isn’t strange, the fact that she’s with you four is.”

“If you remember,” Isobel added, “I was here before they arrived.”

“You three then.”

“Why is that strange?” Leland asked, tearing his gaze from the overhead clouds. Some were moving too fast, he had noticed.

“B-because it is? How many people do you know who travel with talking beasts that have no Legacy connection? Beast tamer or beast companion? Because I know of none.”

Gelo considered this, the right side of her snout hiking back. She hummed a bit, saying, “How many people do you know who’ve met Guardian Spirit Beasts?”

“Y-you’re a Guardian!?”

“No, but my mother is. Was. It’s complicated.”

Elin glanced at Glenny, who shrugged. “Don’t ask. We won’t answer.”

“Rule three of being a rogue, Glenny, information is always accessible. Always,” she said.

“Not in this case. There’s what? Us four and a few others who know Gelo’s history. Suffice it to say, there are very few people who could get that information from us.”

“But it’s not impossible to get that information from you? It would just be difficult.” Elin smiled at Glenny. “See? The rules always work out.”

The young man cloaked in shadows rolled his eyes. This wasn’t the first over encompassing “rule” the thief had spouted about rogues. And just like the first few, this one had a technicality that only proved Elin “correct.”

“If you tried to get that information from one of us, we’d kill you instantly,” Leland announced blankly.

Elin slowly stared at him, understanding and disbelief both showing across her face. “Aren’t you here to protect me?”

“Not when my friends are on the line.”

“Dude, you are like way too scary. Mother issues?”

Isobel snorted.

Leland looked away from the sky. “Yeah, yeah. I’m the one with issues here. Remind me, why are you still here?”

“Because I can?”

“Even when battle is surely happening in the next hour? Still have time to run.”

Elin shook her head. “That’s another thing. Why were you five given this task?” She quickly shook her head, retracting the question. “A better question would be, why did you accept this task?”

“Because I could.” Leland answered, mimicking her own answer.

She rolled her eyes. “Even though you understood Seer is most likely to come here and ignore the fight at the bastion, right?”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“That’s what I’m counting on.”

“That’s what you’re—” Elin collected herself. “You’re suicidal, that’s what you are.”

Leland gave a great, long sigh, the clouds shifting overhead until they were thick and bloated. “Last chance to leave. They’re here.”

Gelo and Elin both flinched, the rest of the team having slowly come to the same conclusion already.

Jude, axe already in hand, stood from his chair, stalking a dozen or so steps to the side of the makeshift camp. Jude Two appeared from a faded section of air, walking another dozen steps further. Each froze over in frosted armor, Floe’s blessing roaring with authority and anger.

Glenny went invisible, shadows consuming him not a second later. He shadow stepped across the area, appearing from the shadow of a training sword he had stolen from the bastion. He looked around his prepared death trap, finding similar swords, spears, axes, and shields planted firmly into the sand at set intervals. If he had to, he could be anywhere within the potential battlefield within moments.

Isobel unfurled her dragonfly wings, her parasite weapon coiling around her arm. Like a bolt of lightning, she kicked backward, flying into the Tear. With a red sky above her, she took aim across worlds, ready to snipe at any and every enemy that came into her line of sight.

Gelo, despite the suddenness of everything, prepared her defenses just like Knight Grain at the Sand Castle. Starting from a simple shard of ice, teal magic pumped through her body and into her creation. At once, bricks of size-augmented ice appeared around her, each moving into formation. Within moments a thick wall of pure conjuration magic took hold over the dark, sandy landscape, cutting in half like a frontier city’s foundation.

Lastly there was Leland. His preparations were far less impressive. He simply stood, flipped through his grimoire, and stepped up to Gelo’s wall, looking over it on a prepared staircase.

“Last chance,” he said to Elin, the skies overhead now rife with malevolence “From the look of it, Seer brought friends.”

“I count six.”

The voice came from neither Leland nor Elin. Lodestar appeared from his host’s back in a flash, darkness and pure white metal rounded the area beside Leland like a stencil cut piece of paper. He spun slowly, a black darker than any within a buried coffin presenting itself front and center. Resentment filled the air, chilling the souls of those present with tingling frostbite.

Leland, having experienced both Lodestar and soul damage before, ignored the strange, horrid feeling. Instead, he glanced at his reflection in Lodestar’s center, finding the entrance to Oblivion quiet. A gentle wind pulled his attention away from the parasite, drawing his focus to the horizon. The pathway to his heart’s desire was before him, wherever it led.

Cursed contract of the Lord of Pathways:

The Lord of Pathways has augmented the parasite, Lodestar, with a pathway.

He shook his head, ignoring the thread of fate. It had been awhile since he saw his pathway – it linked to Lodestar making things difficult. Wherever it pointed had to be for later. Because right now, there was no chasing the wind like a little kid. Right now, there was only war. There was only Lodestar and Seer.

As he looked away from the horizon, winds of fate urging him to follow, things shifted for but a moment. The breeze changed into a brief tempest, fate avalanched as if someone cut a thread. In that moment, Leland’s pathway shone brightly only to be consumed by pure darkness. He traced the path, finding Lodestar’s entrance to Oblivion.

Leland froze, the path shifting back toward the horizon. What— did he see wrong? How could—

“What are you?” Elin asked, her voice cutting the tension in Leland’s shoulders.

The flat halo of metal floated beside his host silently, ignoring the girl’s question.

“You’re what caused the Captain to clam up… not that I was any different…”

Leland glanced back. “Ignore him,” he said. “You’re time is up. There’s no leaving now—”

Above, the sky finished darkening, thick drops of water falling not a second later. One landed on Leland’s head, stinging him as if a wasp had bitten him. He grunted, pulling up his hood and reading his magic. The deluge continued, growing in size and scope with every passing second.

Elin let out a pained cry when the bombardment of rain reached her. Growing from her pocket, twigs and roots bloomed up, growing their way up her torso and neck, wrapping around the top of her head like an iron helm. She swayed a bit, her abilities ill suited for this kind of work.

“I can’t stay here like this!” she shouted to Leland, the rolling rain drowning away most sound. “My Vine Armor can’t withstand it!”

As if an angel heard her prayers, a block of ice in the shape of an “L” extended into existence beside her. It buried itself in the sand, acting like an umbrella. Elin turned her head, finding a similar shape of ice protecting the frost cub.

A shrieking call sounded from above. Zeke dove through the air, landing perched on Leland’s shoulder, the rain phasing through his body. The bird gave his summoner a blank stare.

“I know,” Leland muttered. “The rain’s going to be annoying—”

“There.”

Lodestar’s cold tone seemed to bruise the storm, the single word battering against the harsh rain and howling winds. Anger filled the immediate area, a lifeless, eternal anger.

This time Leland did stop and stare. Only once had he felt something remotely similar to the emotion pouring from his parasite – the Undying Lord, Vile to his core, trapped for the rest of his miserable, immortal life. But while the Undying Lord felt as though the sky itself had been ripped apart and replaced with fire, Lodestar felt contained, not chained.

Lodestar did not glow with cursed aura, he bathed in it. Energy transcended the boundary between his portal to Oblivion, cruel, confronting energy. Like flares stuck into the folds of reality, vivid bursts of consciousness pounced from the other side, the being beyond life and death looking for a way to crawl back.

“He’s there.”

Again, Lodestar spoke, an unknown history marching his parasitic hand across a world befallen by time. Lodestar was once a human, a living breathing human. And while he chose to become a parasite to help an appointed partner, scorching the world had felt like true invincibility. How long had it been? How many had fallen to his hand? How many had he killed and yet failed to properly take over?

That gloved parasite had done it, so why couldn’t he?

The question nagged in Lodestar’s mind as he fired off a single attack – a beam of unrestrained darkness. It sliced through Gelo’s wall, splitting the sandy ground asunder. The attack neither drew blood nor left a body, only the void of where a person once approached.

“Seer is dead.”