“An Embercore won the Bâllenmarch Valley Classic, sir. There’s a very angry racer spreading the word all around. He says this Embercore rode a gnatsnapper, and that just hours after he won, he climbed aboard an airship and left. They were spotted sailing on the westerly winds—slightly northwest, according to the note I was given.”

An Aerdian rider had met the Red Hand and his disciples along the road to Bâllenmarch, astride a powerful white horse. The rider had dismounted as soon as he had met them, then knelt on the path and bowed his head.

At first, the Hand had mildly miffed that a rider had stopped them. Now, after hearing the news, he nodded with relief. There was no reason to ride all the way to Bâllenmarch, chasing a tail and arriving when his prey had already left.

“Thank you,” the Hand said. “You may leave us, if that is all.”

“That’s all, sir.” The rider dipped his head once more, then ran back to his horse and climbed onto its back. With a click of his tongue, he turned the horse away and rode off down the slushy path.

A chinook wind blew over the low eastern mountains—an arch of cloud even hovered in the sky—and the bout of warmth started to melt the snow in preparation for spring.

The Hand slipped off his horse and landed in the muck of melting snow, then stepped off the path to the side. He scraped his boots off, but nothing would get this insidious elven mud off his feet. This land was horrid, just horrid. Cold in the winter, barely pleasant in the summer, and rife with backwards, ancient cities. Their little civilization was spread so thin across the wilderness that journeys took forever. Worse, most of the cities were puny. Even Vēl Aerdiel, capital of the Aerdian elves, couldn’t come close to rivalling the metropolises of the Mainland…

All the more reason to be rid of this exile sooner.

He cleared the disgust from his face and looked at his disciples. “We make camp for today. Tomorrow, we will change our route.” The sun was an hour above the horizon, getting lower every second, but there was no use riding any further than they had to.

Nael and Khara both dismounted. Khara led the Hand’s horse off the path as well. For a few minutes, they trudged across the snowy, tree-dotted plains. When they arrived at a small stream, the Hand was satisfied. He sat on the exposed gravel shore, on one of the few patches of dry land for miles in any direction; it had been rotting in the sun all day.

“I will find us a new heading,” said the Hand. “Practice your exercises, and I need both of you to fell a tree for firewood.”

His disciples hadn’t been terribly powerful by most standards, and certainly not special—not before they had begun their training under him. Their natural talents, though one-in-a-million, had been so plain and inconsequential that no one had even known they had magic before they formed a Reyad bond.

That was the way most wizards began. They didn’t get the ability to twist minds from birth, they couldn’t bend special fabrics to their will, they couldn’t form fire out of empty air or move the water in rivers. If they had failed to form a Reyad, or if they had been Embercores, no one would have cared. No one would have known, and they’d have gone on as mortals.

But these two did form a Reyad, and a Familiar was where a wizard’s true strength came from. They, like the Hand, would have to claw their way up in the world.

With an angry huff, the Hand retrieved a map from his horse’s saddlebag, then set it on his lap and unfolded it. By his estimates, they were still a few days north of Bâllenmarch. The heir had already left the canyon though; there were no clues for the Hand to find in that wretched crime haven.

The Hand traced a line along the map, away from the Bâllenmarch Canyon and slightly to the Northwest. Another few days by air, and his prey would arrive at a small city. A few days after that, they would arrive at an Ichor spring and its fortress shrine.

The Hand smirked. The wraith guarding the shrine would do most of the work for him—it would kill the Black-Haired elf. But they still had to arrive soon enough to salvage the elf’s remains. If he couldn’t show the elf’s head to the Emperor, he’d never be released from exile.

If they left in the morning and rode hard, they could arrive at the temple at the same time as the Black-Haired Elf.

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Pirin dreamt, but it didn’t feel like a dream. A faint, invisible, massless wind washed around his soul, tugging him into the past. Auras flooded around body, and he called them in, his lungs heaving with effort.

A cloud of unpurified, un-integrated Essence floated around his body, begging to be used, and he focussed on it…

And he focussed too hard. The formless wind washed through the keyhole in his mind, and a vision sprung into his mind.

He walked along a gravel beach. To the left was an empty, open ocean. Dark clouds bloomed on the horizon, but they were far off. Closer, gulls whirled and cried. Even closer, a single water-borne cargo hauler sailed by.

To his right was a wall of sheer rock and stone. A cliff, ten fathoms tall, and atop it, tufts of thick green grass. It wasn’t the Sirdian Sheercliff; it was too short and it was right next to an ocean.

When he inhaled, he tasted a salty sea breeze, and it smelled like the past. It felt like pleasant memories and simple times.

Instead of wearing regal blue or something stolen and tattered, he wore a woolen coat with buttons. In his pockets, he carried pouches of herbs that he had painstakingly gathered from the upper plateaus of…well, it was an island, wasn’t it?

No, this was the island in his memories.

The cliff wall beside him peeled away, revealing a deep, covered cove. Houses and hovels filled it. Some clung to the rock walls like barnacles, and others perched on the shore on stilts. Candles and torches guttered all throughout the day, incensing the entire cavern with burnt lard and smoke.

This was home.

Pirin stepped onto a wooden walkway. It lifted out of the shore and wound along the rocky wall, connecting all the houses and hovels. He glanced around, head whipping back and forth to take in all the sights of this quaint village. A single bakery, a cooper, a general store, and plenty of houses filled with purposeless villagers. In the pool of water at the center of the cove, the skeleton of an old whaling boat waited. Its boards had been scrapped and used to patch the decaying village.

His body had been here hundreds of times before, even if he couldn’t remember it.

Then, his legs took control. They carried him to a hovel at the back of the cavern, perching precariously on stilts and overlooking the small town like a mother hen protecting a clutch of chicks.

Pirin wanted to look around, but his body had other ideas. He pushed open the hovel’s door and stepped inside. Anatomy charts lined the walls, not to mention ointment shelves, and small boxes filled with other medical equipment. It was a healer’s hut.

Even worse, there was a hammock in it, and Pirin knew exactly who it belonged to. It was his. He had lived here.

A single desk occupied the center of the room. A middle-aged dwarf in an emerald-green coat sat behind it. Or…a half-dwarf. Though he might have only been half as tall as a man, his beard wasn’t nearly thick enough to be a dwarf’s. He shuffled papers across his desk, then began mashing a mix of berries in his lap with a mortar and pestle.

“Mr. Regos,” Pirin said. The words left his mouth before he even considered what he was saying.

“Back already?” Mr. Regos asked. He placed the mortar and pestle back onto his desk and stood up. “I hope you didn’t forget anything.”

Pirin produced all of the pouches from his pockets and placed them down on the table. “Tallmynë, Bright Harrow, and Brandroots. And there’s some razorweed thistles in the last one.”

“There are,” Mr. Regos corrected him. He opened each pouch and sifted gently through the contents. “Very good, boy. That’s quite enough for today, and Tanillar was asking for you. You’d best go see what he wants.”

“Yes, sir,” Pirin said, beaming. He turned away, towards the door, and—

And he woke up.

He sat up slowly, rubbing his head. One of the Featherflight’s cots cradled him, rolling with the slight shudder of the airship.

Pirin had slept in, and they were already moving. Throwing the covers off, he yawned, then jumped up and tried to cling onto the dream as best as he could, to cherish it.

Dream? No, it had been a memory.

Then, he realized. His mouth was parched, and his lungs ached. He had been cycling Essence all night, and judging by how full his core felt, it had been incredibly efficient. He ate two more of the manabulbs he had earned from the wraith-bears.

He inhaled slowly, trying to resume the breathing pattern. It felt slow and weak again, and he exhaled quickly in frustration. Had cycling improved his ability to recall his past, or had recalling the past improved his ability to cycle?

He suspected it was the latter. But he wasn’t tired, nor was he in the mood to try again. He would have to be content with this current, less-effective breathing technique until he could control his memories better.

He stood up and climbed down into the Featherflight’s gondola. Alyus and Brealtod had kept the airship on course. There wasn’t anything new to report, only that they were halfway to their destination. Pirin gulped. He hadn’t made any progress on the mask, yet.

Once he had woken up just a little more, he climbed back up to the crew quarters and filled a bowl with oatmeal from the stove. He ate, cleaned his bowl, then climbed up to the upper observing platform with the Sparrow Path manual in hand.

As the clouds whirled by, he opened the book. It seemed like mostly just hand-scrawled notes from one of the few wizards who had managed to form a Reyad with a sparrow in the past. The Path was unique, taking into account the sparrow’s agility and speed and turning it towards movement techniques. But, being a rare Path, there would be very few people who knew how to fight against it. Combine that with Pirin’s natural Bloodline Talent, and he figured he could start putting together a specific Path for gnatsnappers.

He started to read.