If I thought that the reveal of the lesser enchanting stones would earn me a reprieve from Flynt's ire, I was wrong. He takes the lead as we head back to the road to continue on our way to the ruins, and doesn’t say anything to me as he does. Which, whatever, if that’s how he wants to play it then I can’t stop him, but it’s hard not to be a little hurt at it. I didn't do anything wrong.

“He’s really angry with you,” Tyrus comments, joining me in the back. “I didn’t expect that.”

“Me either. I think I scared him though.” I adjust my bag to my other shoulder and try to shrug it away. “But we took a vote. It’s not just me who wants to continue.”

“You are championing it, though.”

“You weren’t exactly opposed.” I glance at him and raise an eyebrow. “I think both of us are a bit on the shit list.” I nod up toward where Jonas walks with Meg, the two of them exchanging soft conversation.

In the end, we did take a literal vote, and Meg was the deciding voice. I was a little surprised it came down in favor of continuing the quest, but I think she’s ultimately curious—and, for her own mysterious reasons, seems as driven to level up as I am.

There’s something else, too, but I’m not sure what. It has something to do with the necromancer, and I wonder if it connects to the realities of Jonas’s power. The fact that both she and Jonas wanted to know if the necromancer had said anything to me… I’m not sure what to make of that.

Tyrus follows my nod and then shrugs. "I've never heard it phrased quite like that, but maybe. He and I will talk and sort it out. I’m not worried.”

“Oh, to have that confidence.”

“It’s not confidence. It’s trust.”

“To have that trust, then.” I wince. “I don’t know, Tyrus. I still feel lost so much of the time. And maybe I’ve been leaning on Flynt too much to help me figure it out.”

“Maybe, though he hasn’t done much to discourage that, has he?” Tyrus smirks briefly, then shrugs again. “It’s as he said, though. It hasn’t been that long, Keira. Especially for someone like you.”

“It feels like longer.”

“In some ways. But you got to give yourself time. You don’t seem to do that much. You may feel lost, but we feel lost around you too, you know that? Your references, your turns of phrase, but also the way that you are.”

“What do you mean?”

“You act like there’s one shot, like today is all you got. You have hundreds of years, yet you move faster than those of us who have a fraction of that. You can take your time. I think sometimes we just don’t understand your urgency. It’s not very elf-like.”

A lump forms in my throat at that, I’m not sure why, and I try to swallow it away. “It’s how I’ve always been. It always feels like it’s all or nothing.”

“And like everything is out of your control.”

“Exactly.”

“Sometimes a little deliberateness is okay.”

“I know. Believe me. And I try. But it’s easy to get caught up in an analysis loop, too. Too much reflection can lead to too much doubt and then nothing actually happens. Once I make a choice about something… I’m not good at re-evaluating. Decision is made, so there’s no going back. For better or worse.”

He nods vaguely. “Flexibility is also okay.”

“I know.”

“Sometimes it’s even necessary.”

“I’ll try to be better at it.” I sigh. “Thanks for backing me up.”

He shrugs. “I’m just not ready to get back on a boat.”

“Whatever the reason, I appreciate it.”

He’s silent for several steps and then draws a breath. “I understand a hunch. I think Meg does too. Jonas and Flynt, they had different lives before this.”

“Believe it or not, I did too…”

“Maybe. But whatever it is that happened to you to bring you here, it changed that whole outlook for you. Meg and me, and I think you, we didn’t choose the adventuring life, it chose us when our worlds got unexpectedly turned upside down. Flynt and Jonas?” Tyrus shrugs. “They haven’t had that yet. Not really.”

I think about what I know about Jonas’s powers, and about Flynt’s mother and what he’s said about his childhood. “I’m not sure that’s true.”

“I don’t mean that they don’t have their own setbacks and challenges. Of course they do. But they both still have their safety nets. Worse comes to worse, Flynt decides this isn’t for him and he settles into his life as a shop keeper who tells his patrons about his dalliance of being an adventurer. Jonas can go back home and be a small-town healer. There’s nothing bad about either choice. But we don’t have those.”

“Don’t you have a big family?”

“I do. Not an especially well-off one, though. We’ve had a lot of lean years, and my skills aren’t meant for service or trade. I’m either adventuring, or I’m running from a jail cell.”

“You could join the Kartesians.”

Tyrus scoffs. “I suppose that’s an option, now. Maybe. Doesn’t address that jail cell issue though.”

“It’s pretty brave of them, if you think about it. Putting themselves on a collision course with change and consequences. Before… everything that brought me here, I don’t know that I’d have had the courage to do it.”

“Don’t disagree,” Tyrus says. “It explains their hesitancy, though.”

“True. And I don’t blame them. I see their points. I even agree with them.”

“But you have a hunch.”

“I have a hunch.”

“Well. We’re going to see if it pans out.” Tyrus grins at me. “It’ll be fun.”

“May not be the word I’d choose, but sure, let’s go with that.”

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We walk most of the day along the road. It makes it a relatively easy trip, all told, even though it is much more of a dirt path than a road and it isn’t even marked on the map except in pencil by Jonas’s farmer friend from the Salty Sea Witch.

We make good time, and it doesn’t feel like we have to worry too much, though Meg tenses whenever we end up passing another group of travelers. We warn every group we pass about the mountain goblins and tell them about the carnage at the camp site for them to communicate to others. We hope it will help get the information back to the crossroads tavern, the smaller nearby mountain townships, and maybe even over to Marrin in the east.

The atmosphere starts to get heavier when we reach a couple miles out from the ruins. The sun is getting low in the sky, and the trail becomes rockier. Eventually, we come to a fork just as we were instructed. One direction continues down along the foothills and the other, an overgrown path that looks almost forgotten, winds into the tree line and higher up the mountain. We share a look between us but wordlessly press onward, taking the left fork.

As we move, I realize how wide the path used to be. It’s so overgrown that it was hard to tell at first, but the trees are significantly smaller the closer to the path they get. In the height of its use, it had to have been more than a dozen feet across—perfect for a giant.

The realization pricks at the back of my neck as I step down hard into an old, deep indentation. I twist my ankle as I land, ending up on my ass in the middle of what I’m pretty sure is an ancient footprint. Tyrus grabs my arm, not that it does a lot of good given our height differential, but he helps me up. The others pause, glancing back but I wave it away, limping a few steps before walking it off.

The sun is nearly set when the remains of a stone gate appear, rising up in front of us within the tree line. It was once an archway, but the arch itself fell in probably centuries ago. The stone is mottled with lichen and moss, and the fallen pieces are all but hidden in foliage. On what remains, hieroglyphic writing proclaims… something. The [System] does not give me the ability to read Giant, apparently—or whatever the hill giant language is called.

The gate itself is at least twenty feet wide, and what remains of it is the height of a two-story building. The remains of a ruined wall speckle through the woods, hidden within trees and undergrowth.

“I wonder what this looked like when it was alive,” I whisper. The eerie unease continues to hang over us, and I’m sure we’re closer to the danger than we think.

“We should backtrack.” Meg’s voice is hushed as we gather up together, staring up at the gate—though we don’t dare approach it yet. “Find a sheltered place to rest for the night, then we can venture in come morning.”

“Undead are stronger in the moonlight,” Jonas says. “I really don’t like being this close…”

“I know.” She rests a hand on his shoulder. “It’ll be okay.”

“You can’t promise that.” Flynt’s voice is low, and he looks across her toward me.

“Tyrus and I are still up for doing some scouting.” I glance over at my dwarven companion who nods solemnly. “Perhaps we should do that before we set up camp? It could give us an idea how far afield we want to go.”

There are some straight expressions from our colleagues, but they slowly seem to agree.

“Who wants the other stone?” Meg asks, nudging Flynt to pull the ‘rockie-talkies’ out of his back pouch. He holds them out in his flat palm.

“Keira should.” Tyrus elbows me in the hip. “Unless we think this is an especially bad idea.”

“It is an especially bad idea,” Meg says. “But I don’t have a better one if we’re going to do this. So let’s just… get it done. Keira, promise you will report back in a bell’s time.”

I cringe. “I still don’t have a time piece.”

She sighs and fishes in one of her pouches to pull out two small hourglasses with rings on each side. She taps each of them to initialize the magical enchantment and then hands one to me. “Put it on your belt. When the sand runs out, contact us and get back here or I’m going to come looking for you, and I won’t be happy.”

I’m not sure whether to laugh or protest at the child-like treatment, but choose to nod instead, attaching the device to my belt and glancing at Tyrus. “You go that way, I’ll go this?”

At my gesture, he glances to the right of the gate, and nods, quietly spinning one dagger out from his belt.

“See you in a bell,” he says, and slips into the shadows.

I glance back at the others, and then do my version of the same, though I know I’m nowhere near as hidden as Tyrus is. I assume my points in [Ranger] help account for some of my deftness and quiet, but my skills aren’t as strong (or as cinematic) as his are.

I head to the left, carefully climbing the mounded dirt and slipping through the crevice between two massive stones that were once part of the fence structure. There’s a steep drop off on the other side into what looks almost like an overgrown moat and, peering across it, I really don’t want to struggle up the muddy slope on the other side. I walk along the edge of it for a good hundred feet or so before I find the remains of a tree that’s fallen over the gap and provides a good bridge across to the woods on the other side.

Mist hangs low on the ground and pools around the base of trees, swirling in light eddies that glimmer as they catch the twilight. I crouch low, moving between the trees, careful where I step, especially as the air begins to feel heavier and the twilight darkens. It’s not because of the time of day—though it certainly doesn’t help. This darkness feels artificial, like I’m getting closer to the edge of something. It reminds me of coming up on the necromancer.

I step wrong and my foot falls through a covered hole; I sink up to my knee, the edges scratching me even though the heavy cloth of my trousers. I catch myself before I sink deeper, realizing that it’s a hollow of bone belonging to some huge creature.

Pulling myself up out of it, I follow the length of it, quietly tracing its shadows in the dim lighting, and come upon the moss-covered skull of a literal giant. The skin and sinew are long gone, leaving nothing but a pockmarked skeleton covered in dirt, detritus, and lichen. Moss grows in the rib cage and the skull is partially crushed, leaving only the lower jawbone and half an ocular cavity really discernible. I shudder.

Movement catches my attention.

The trees fall away up ahead, revealing a wide sunken clearing some twenty feet below the edge of the woods. Dozens of dilapidated stone buildings peak out in the dimness. They look like versions of the famine cottages that still dot parts of Northern Ireland, but five times larger and significantly older. They’re crumbling and overgrown, but organized in careful circles throughout the area below, reaching from the edge of the trees to the banks of a small stream probably half a mile away— a stream that probably gets a lot wider during certain months of the year, judging by how the remains of the small village are arranged.

I pull my scarf over my mouth and nose to hide my breath in the chilly evening, and then lower myself slowly to the forest floor. Army crawling toward the edge, I try to keep myself safely in the shade of the undergrowth, ignoring the spiderwebs that catch in my hair. Jonas assured me a while ago that the only poisonous creatures in Qeth are those big enough that you’ll see them coming.

The slight elevation difference is enough to give me a relatively good view of the dozens of undead gathered in what was probably the center of the giants’ village. Most are normal sized as far as I can tell, and they stand there like the Terracotta Army, silent sentinels in the dying twilight. Some appear completely skeletonized while others still seem to have something like flesh on their bones.

It’s harder for my brain to process the fleshier ones; my awareness keeps wanting to slip over their existence, to pretend like I’m not actually seeing it. I have never liked zombie movies, and it’s difficult to force my brain to focus on them enough to get a real count.

That’s when I see her. She’s at least two football fields away, probably more, but I’d recognize her shape anywhere: it’s seared in my memory from when she tried to siphon the life out of me.

The necromancer.

She stands on an edge of what looks like a dilapidated fountain, staring down at a large, crumpled form spread out in front of her. It’s hard to tell exactly what it is, but I only need a handful of guesses.

Her hands glow a sickly green, which bites through the distance like a super strong LED bulb. The image exists in a weird middle ground between Disney villain and Diablo cut scene, but either way it raises goosebumps and pricks the hair at the back of my neck. The energy swirls around her hands, spiraling in a mesmerizing pattern before settling over the mound in front of her and sinking down to it, getting absorbed. I can’t see the details from this far; the mound itself is dark and partially obscured behind the rise of one of the ruins.

Silence settles and then the darkness in front of her shifts. I almost don’t see it—again, my brain struggles to process the imagery—but it slowly begins to rise, that green light appearing again and pulling pieces of the form together like visible magnetic energy that slowly shifts into a dim purple glow. There’s a low rumbling in the ground, which makes my heart skip a beat as a wave of terror strikes through me, and the figure just keeps building.

A giant. She raised a fucking giant.

Flynt is not going to like this.