After Thar’s little adventure to the pillar a few days ago and the fact that nobody noticed he was gone, D’Argen decided it was his job to keep an eye out for the others. Not that he was in a much better state than most of them.

“I wonder how high it goes,” Lilian voiced the question right beside him.

D’Argen had to grit his teeth to stop himself from snapping at them. Lilian had not spoken much but every time they did, the pillar was somehow involved.

“We have to get out of here,” D’Argen muttered under his breath.

Haur giggled from his other side and D’Argen could only groan in annoyance. Abbot’s herbs did not look like they would end soon and Haur, as the leader of their expedition, was definitely unable to give them orders to continue. Next in rank were Nocipel and D’Argen. Unfortunately, the two could not agree.

“I need a few more days,” Nocipel argued, as he had done the last few days since D’Argen returned with Thar in tow and demanded that they break camp.

D’Argen groaned in annoyance.

“Do you think we can climb it?” Lilian asked.

Haur giggled.

Abbot snorted before bursting into laughter that startled a few of the mortals not too far from them. Yaling tried to silence him with a glare and failed.

“How many more days?” D’Argen asked, ignoring the others and focusing on Nocipel instead.

“A few.”

“A few means…?”

“A few means a few, what are you in such a hurry for?” Nocipel snapped.

“Di-did you really just ask me that?”

Nocipel gave him a look that clearly called him an idiot.

D’Argen could barely keep his mouth from dropping open. “Okay. No. Whatever the fuck is going on here, we have to go. Now.”

“I said I need—”

“He is right,” Thar interrupted Nocipel’s rising voice.

D’Argen was so glad to hear agreement that it took him too long to realize who he said it. His smile faded away and he looked warily at Thar. What was he playing at? The way the man had sat still and only stared at the pillar, his eyes never wavering, made him seem more unhinged than Lilian and their obsessive babble. Agreeing with D’Argen to leave the pillar be?

Nocipel grumbled but did not raise his head to meet Thar’s eyes.

Thar may have been a lower rank than both of them, but he still inspired respect. Especially in those that once followed him into battle.

Haur giggled once more and rolled over. D’Argen reached out with a foot and kicked the man’s leg, stopping him from rolling all the way into the fire. Haur did not thank him and instead started rolling in the other direction. D’Argen felt the tension from his jaw as it vibrated down to his shoulders. He was wound so tight that everything was hurting. He had not stopped grinding his teeth in days.

“One day!” Nocipel tried to bargain.

“Is that today or tomorrow?” D’Argen gritted out.

“Today,” Thar answered for them both.

Nocipel glared at Thar, grumbled a swear under his breath, and then nodded. He stood up quickly, gathering a wooden box filled with jars, and made his way down the hill. Toward the pillar. Some of those jars already had water in them, some of them had snow, some of them were empty, and some had dirt and rock. They were the specimens Nocipel had been gathering since they left the ship and had stopped the moment they made camp.

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Finally, Nocipel was returning to his job. But not where D’Argen wanted him.

D’Argen rose to follow him and stop him, take him back to camp and away from the pillar. Thar’s hand on his shoulder stopped him.

“Get the others. Have them start packing everything up.”

“Why are you agreeing to this?” D’Argen asked. Thar, the second of them to touch the pillar. The one who said he did not remember even walking to it, let alone what he felt or saw when he interacted with the strange stone.

“None of us are equipped to deal with this,” Thar responded. He sounded too reasonable.

D’Argen was immediately suspicious. He had kept a close eye on Thar but even D’Argen liked sleep. He scanned the man’s entire body as if he could see something past the clean robes and figure out what exactly made Thar act differently.

“We leave tonight?” Lilian asked, finally asking a question not related to the pillar. The moment D’Argen nodded though, they returned to their previous task. “I want to record some of the markings.”

“Why haven’t you done so until now?” D’Argen snapped.

Lilian shrugged, grabbed Nocipel’s wooden tablet and sheets of paper, and walked off.

D’Argen crossed his arms over his chest, trying to keep himself still. Trying not to open his mahee and run after Lilian.

Thar had been the second one of them to touch the pillar but that was only because he reached it before D’Argen did. The runner had gone off to search for those animals the scouts had mentioned. His mahee, however, had other plans. The snowy landscape had disappeared and instead, two black silhouettes appeared. One was so tall that he could see neither edge of it, the other had a hand out to touch the first.

At that moment, D’Argen felt an inexplicable jealousy, something hot burning inside him that told him to act fast. It was when he stopped, Thar’s hand in his own, a few meters away from the stone pillar, that he realized what happened. Or at least, part of it. He still did not know how he ran to pillar without meaning to.

D’Argen shook his head to shake the thoughts away. Lilian was already down the hill. Nocipel was already halfway between their hill and the pillar. With a grumble, D’Argen kicked at Abbot’s leg. “Go with them,” he ordered when Abbot turned heavy-lidded eyes toward him.

“Huh?”

“You’re an artist, no? I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to record the markings better.”

Abbot was slow, his head on a swivel between where D’Argen spoke and where Lilian was walking away.

D’Argen let out a heavy sigh and said, “They didn’t even take ink with them. Go. Help them.”

Abbot grumbled, nodded, and stumbled his way into a standing position. He did not, however, move away until he had his pipe lit and stuck between his teeth. With another grumble, he nudged at Yaling as he passed her. She shook his arm off and scowled at him. Abbot did not prompt her further and walked away.

Haur started rolling around once more.

“Is this what being a parent is like?” D’Argen questioned under his breath.

Thar chuckled, the sound surprising enough to startle D’Argen out of his annoyance and to face the other man.

“I will start packing. Send word around,” Thar ordered though it sounded more like a suggestion.

D’Argen nodded and when he nudged Yaling, she stood up to follow him.

By the time everyone at the camp was informed, half of them were either at the pillar or on their way toward it. D’Argen started walking down the hill multiple times and only stopped when someone either bumped him or Thar stopped him. In return, he stopped Thar and Yaling from walking down the hill. None of them thought to stop Haur until he had rolled himself almost halfway there.

“You know,” Yaling started, stretching out her jaw in a mockery of a yawn. It cracked twice and she snapped it shut with a hard clink of her teeth, “the more they are there, the less I feel its effects.”

“Somehow, I agree,” Haur said, sounding sober for the first time in days.

Thar nodded with a hum of agreement.

D’Argen started bouncing on the spot. He agreed with them but also… there was something off. Something strange. He could finally look at the pillar without his vision blurring or his entire body vibrating to run off either toward the pillar or away from it. He could see its black surface though was too far to see the markings. But there was something wrong.

“Something’s wrong,” he decided to voice it, hoping that giving the repeated phrase sound would either finally make it show itself or disprove him.

Yaling glanced at him. Haur stared down at his lap. Thar did not look away from the crowd gathering around the pillar. All three of them, however, opened their mahee. The scents mixed in the air around D’Argen and he opened his own mahee to join them. They searched. They were all wary and though he felt paranoid, repeating the phrase over and over in his mind and out loud only twice more, he searched for it. The others trusted him enough to search as well.

Finally, whatever was wrong decided to show itself.

There was a sound so loud that it was absolutely deafening. It was like a slap against cold skin. Like lightning striking an old tree in half. Like a boulder falling. Like a wave crashing. It sounded like metal had hit metal hard enough for sparks to fly.

Or for stone to break.

D’Argen found his eyes focused on the pillar and though it was too far to see the engravings on it, he knew, deep down, that some of them were broken. As he watched, it was not his vision that blurred but the pillar itself, shaking so minutely that it would be invisible if not for the fact that each shake caused the split inside it to widen and get louder and louder, like consecutive cracks of the whip.

Then the ground started shaking.