Waking up in unfamiliar circumstances had never been fun for me. Generally it implied head trauma and several times had included imminent torture, neither of which was really something I enjoyed, being both somewhat sane and not a masochist. This one was pleasant enough, though, featuring what felt like an actual bed (not some slab of stone or moldy pile of straw) and what sounded like a fire, though I couldn’t see it.

Or much of anything, really.

I brought a hand up to my face and felt around, working my way up from the chin until I hit what felt like rough-edged bandages wrapped around the entire upper half of my head. Either they – they being whoever had rescued me, of course – thought I’d cracked my skull open or I actually had. I certainly wasn’t going to turn my nose up at medical attention given by someone else’s goodwill.

Very few groups of people would heal someone only to put them back into pain, and for obvious reasons, I hadn’t founded Vaz Andax anywhere near those places, not close enough that I could have flown to them in the time I had. It was always possible they’d picked up shop, but I was reasonably confident I’d have seen all the bits and bobs that sprang up around cultures like that. The lack of an arena was more or less a dead giveaway.

Wait, hadn’t I broken my legs? There was no pain from either of them now. I knew firsthand how hard it was to put all the fiddly little bits of a knee back into place after they’d been forcefully disrupted and knew equally well that there should have been something feeling off down there.

Unless I’d been asleep for months.

Oh, phantoms. Had I been asleep for months? I hadn’t bought into the claims some of the healer clans had used during the war about cocoons that would keep someone in comfort for however long their healing took, but if they’d been telling the truth or even if the idea had become truth over in the intervening years, who knew how long it could have been?

My heartbeat spiked just thinking about it. I knew how much everything I could possibly do would be built on the momentum of these opening weeks, advancement included. Even a week of stagnation could spiral into irrevocable setbacks. Maybe even…

I cast my gaze down to my ternion and was relieved to see my single Root still tinged with the dregs of the anima I’d taken in before.

Old superstition – ancient, really – held that reversion was possible early on, before a body could adjust. I didn’t know anyone that had suffered that fate, but no one was willing to risk it for reasons both obvious and understandable. It didn’t sound pleasant, not with the shape a complete drain of someone’s ternion left them in normally. Running dry and then staying empty long enough for something like that to happen sounded brutal.

The same superstition advised filling all three Soulroots at the same time to avoid it, a chance I’d already missed. I’d missed it in my first life, too, though that was an entirely different circumstance. I was picky that time and put far too much value on having unique forms of animus to use. It evened out eventually, but with the benefit of hindsight I knew that the things I’d done in search of overwhelming, hyperspecific power were not worth doing again.

Something creaked a short distance away. A door? A floorboard? I couldn’t tell either way, but someone else was here.

“Awake then, I see.” Their voice – her voice? – was kindly and tired in a way I generally associated with healers who’d been practicing for a good while. “Good omen, that. Means the bandages aren’t needed anymore.” I felt her reach up and unwind the wrappings, carefully enough that there was no eyebrow snagging.

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The firelight, dim though it would have been in any other situation, blinded me for the first few seconds after the bandages lifted. The carer was a soft woman, much younger looking than I’d expected her to be.

Or at least she looked younger. As she ducked her head to the side to make sure she wasn’t setting the bandages down on anything, I saw her ear. It was forked in two at the top, the lower half of the helix curving down until it rested behind the rest of her ear and the upper arcing up along above it. She wasn’t as human as she looked, clearly, and I wasn’t sure how I’d missed it from the front.

More interestingly, I’d hadn’t ever seen a race with ears like that. Some obscure sect of elves maybe? The isolation would fit. Maybe she had multiple nonhuman ancestries that were harmonizing somehow. Could be one of the aquatic societies, even; supposedly certain schools had various forms of fan-like ear protrusions.

I wanted to ask. I hated not knowing things. I didn’t even know her name, though, and I wasn’t eager to be rude to someone who had patched me up without asking for payment beforehand.

The rest of the room was fairly standard, with planks of wood forming a floor, a hearth with the fire I was hearing squatting in one corner, and dangling bundles of dried and drying herbs hanging from what rafters existed above. In short, it was dry, cozy, and warm, which automatically made it better than some of the places I’d lived before.

“Are you still conscious, outlander? Or dreaming, now?”

My first attempt to speak was rough and the syllable broke, warping into a coughing fit. I tried again. “Conscious. I think.”

“Good. Now,” she said, her voice becoming hard. “What did that to you? Or who, if that was the case instead.”

“The ground and myself.”

She gave me a flat look.

“I’m telling the truth,” I protested. “It was an interesting discovery of something that I should have anticipated with one of my abilities.”

“Were you too busy to read the Skill’s description before using it? Or just think you’re better than that? And what kind of Skill breaks both your legs, other than one that was improperly used?”

Ah. Right. That answered a question I wasn’t going to bother asking. She was not a cultivator. Unfortunate, really, with how uniquely potent certain isolated sects could be. “A new one. It was a trial run.”

“You must be one of those,” she sneered.

“One of what?” Clearly she’d come to some form of conclusion. Was there some stigma around testing abilities – or Skills, for the apparent majority that relied on the System – for the first time in the wild? I didn’t think the disdain was entirely warranted, at least not the degree that had mixed its way into her face at that. That level of pure disgust would require knowing me better.

“You know what I mean,” she said. And then, upon seeing that I didn’t: “Doesn’t matter. You’re healed now. This hut is yours for as long as you need it. Don’t kill anyone, don’t steal anything, don’t try to test any of your homemade Skills here, you should know the basics. Welcome to Drakebarrow.”

She strode out of the hut, then quickly poked her head back in. “And maybe drop by Roshan’s home at some point. You owe him a story for rescuing you.” This time, as she turned to leave, I heard her mutter something about “...accursed homebrewers.”

Two questions hung in the air afterwards, and I sat there contemplating them. Firstly, what in every corner of the Abyss’s ravines was a homebrewer? Secondly, how literal was I supposed to take the name of this town…compound…village…thing?

None of the drakes I remembered would have rated a burial, much less a barrow with a town built on top. They were lucky if there was enough left of them to get chopped up and thrown in alchemical supply closets. But if there was one that had rendered some kind of service, had earned the honors of a barrow…it was worth looking into.

As much as the cultivator mattered more than what was in their ternion, having a rare weapon in reserve never hurt.

Guess I was staying. At least long enough to figure out the truth and get what I could from it.