Rain fell on their camp in a relentless drizzle, beads of water hitting the coals of their small fire with a sizzle, flash steaming back into the air. Burke, Erin, and a half-dozen of the green-cloaked Wardens were marching south towards Academy City, and every one of them looked miserable in the downpour. Each pulled their cloaks tight around themselves as they tried to huddle as near their fire as they could.

For her part, Erin was just glad they’d gone far enough south that snowfall had turned to rain. As she sat on a stump, her hands held out to the flames, she truly appreciated the fact there wasn’t a snowflake in sight. If she never laid eyes on another pile of snow for as long as she lived, that would be okay with her. It was only a small victory, though. As she looked down into the bed of coals, she dwelt once more on Sigrid. Her mind seemed to play games with her, skipping away to some inane thought before fixating once more on her absent friend.

“Your grasp of magic is woefully limited,” Burke told her from where he sat. Speaking into the silence as if he were continuing a conversation they’d been having, but as these were the first words anyone had said since he’d ordered them to make camp, she was confused. Though she knew by now she shouldn’t be. The Warden commander had a habit of speaking as if people could follow his thoughts, or like he didn’t know he hadn’t been speaking aloud until just that moment.

“Sorry?” she said, half apology, half question. Burke twitched his lip, a motion exaggerated by his mustache, and waved a hand at her dismissively.

“This,” he gestured toward the fire burning between them. “You set this fire with one of your spell slots. It’s the only magic I’ve seen you do.” Erin glanced down at the flames, blazing over the wood, before looking back up at Burke, her eyebrow raised. No less confused than she’d been before. She had indeed started the fire with magic. No one else in the company had a fire spell, or if they did she hadn’t seen it.

“Uh, yeah?” she agreed.

“It’s not unusual for a mage to rely on their spell slots. Especially when first starting out, but every mage gets their first rune shortly after being reborn in Academy City. It’s unheard of to get a second spell slot before your first rune, and here you are with a full set, Bronze State and all.”

Runes?

[I’ll let him explain it. Since he’s already begun.]

You know what he’s talking about?

[Well, I do now.]

You didn’t before?

[Nope.]

“Well, it wasn’t my intention to take the scenic route,” she said with a shrug, and Burke gave her a flat look. He appreciated her sarcasm even less than Sigrid had, and unlike her friend's unimpressed but tolerant air, Burke had the aura of a man who'd make you do a thousand push-ups for the crime of being annoying within the range of his senses. Though he hadn’t done so yet, his looks of censure made her think he would dearly like to.

“Yes,” he agreed after a pointed silence. “I’m aware you did not have the benefit of the education you would have received had you shown up in the correct location. A gap I’m trying to mend, unless you have more jokes to tell?”

“Well, not right now. Maybe after a nap,” she said, stretching her arms above her head, interlocking her fingers with her palms out, the picture of unconcern as a vein began to pulse in Burke's forehead.

I’m not very bright, am I?

[You don’t get points for unrepentantly acknowledging your flaws when you have no intention of changing.]

I figured it was endearing.

[Yes, well, as we’ve established. You’re not very bright.]

“Once you’re in Academy City, you’ll be enrolled in the Academy itself,” Burke said, deciding to ignore her jab. “There’s no way around that, I’m afraid. I might be able to speed things up a bit on account of your—” he paused here, as if searching for the right words and settled on “experience in the field,” but in a dissatisfied tone. Erin snorted.

“Makes it sound more educational than it really was.” Burke didn’t answer right away, staring into the flames as they crackled in the rain for a while.

“So what was that trick you pulled with the demon?” he asked. “You shouldn’t have been able to hurt it that badly, not even in Bronze State.”

[Be careful what you tell him.] Lisa surprised her by jumping in, her wariness as palpable in her tone as it was in Lisa’s emotions where they echoed in Erin’s mind.

What? Why?

[Until we know what the reaction to your Hero Soul will be, better if we keep it to ourselves. It wouldn’t serve you to end up in a lab, running tests or else a pawn in someone's schemes. We don’t know enough about this city or the Mages who run it.]

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

So what do I say?

[Tell him it was a life-or-death stress response? Maybe even pretend like you don’t remember it well.]

Not really a lie in either case.

She had been about to die, her friends had nearly died, and if they hadn’t managed to stop the monster, it would’ve laid waste to an entire village. If that wasn’t high stress, she didn’t know what was, and more than that she really didn’t remember it well. Both times she’d activated her Hero Soul’s power in moments of crisis, and both times it had been painful beyond belief. This last time she inflicted real damage on herself, some of it even lasting. It had taken three doses of her healing potion before her hearing had returned, and she found that even now, people speaking to her from that side sounded a little muffled.

“I can’t really say for sure,” she said candidly. “I was about to die, and I was doing anything I could think of.” Burke frowned, his mustache bending into a wide U shape as his lip deformed it. A look of displeasure Erin was already familiar with. He reminded her of a professor she’d had once, who admitted readily that he disliked teaching, yet despite that he was good at it, she’d learned a lot in his class. Burke reminded her of him because she got the sense that he didn’t like what he did, but he did it because he was good at it and didn’t know what else to do.

“Well, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“You should’ve seen the Sluasqa. That thing broke half my ribs,” Erin said, shooting him a grin. His eyes narrowed, and she knew that he wasn’t fooled by her deflection. At the same time, he seemed unable to help himself.

“You fought a Slausqa? An adult?”

“I don’t remember if it was an adult—”

[It was,] Lisa chimed in.

“—I just remember it was damn big,” Erin said without missing a beat. She held her hands out wide, as if she were telling a story about an extra-large fish.

“Alone?” he asked, leaning forward, his ice-blue eyes studying her face intently.

“No, no, no,” Erin said, waving both her hands back and forth in a gesture of denial. “I was with a group of Dangole’s monster hunters. If I’d been alone, that thing would’ve kicked me into goo in a second.” Erin thought about it for a moment before adding, “And then it would’ve eaten the goo.” Silence hung between them, Burke still watching her as if he were waiting for her to say more. She moved in her seat, positioning her body at an angle so she wasn’t facing him directly. “You were saying something about runes?”

“I was, but I find I can’t get through an explanation without you throwing out a dozen distractions. I pity your professors in the city,” he said, coming as close as Erin had ever heard to making a joke.

“To be fair, adult Slausqas are pretty hard to ignore.”

“You said you didn’t remember if it was an adult,” he pointed out.

“Well, I remember now. Definitely an adult.”

Right?

[Definitely.]

“You’d have liked Sigrid,” Erin said, surprising herself with this turn of the conversation. “She was more— is, more… practical,” Erin said this word with a delicate emphasis, “than I am. Much more. I’m pretty much a mess.”

“That’s your friend? The one you said got grabbed by those bald cult freaks?” This question came from one of the Wardens, surprising Erin. She’d heard them speak to one another often enough, but since she’d joined Burke and they had set off for the city, the Wardens had spoken to her only as necessary; otherwise, they pretended she was invisible. It hadn’t felt like they disliked her, but more like they were unsure of her. Speaking now to question her about Sigrid, that was odd.

“Yeah,” Erin said, not elaborating. They didn’t need to know about the deal Sigrid had made to save the village. To save them all. Erin’s gaze fell back to the fire, and she wondered for the thousandth time where Sigrid was then, and what she was doing. The whole reason she was here now, on her way to Academy City, was because Burke thought he knew someone who could use a fragment of a portal rune to track the cult’s location, or at least track where the portal had led to. She knew she had a bigger mission. Knew she should be focused on finding the everything-ending threat that Thetra had warned her about, but all she cared about was finding her friend.

“Time to get some rest. We leave at first light,” Burke said. “Bel, you’ve got first watch.” He nodded to the man who’d asked about Sigrid, who rose to his feet, giving Burke an odd sort of salute with his hand on his chest. Burke returned it, nodded to Erin, and then headed to where his tent was set up at the center of their small camp. Bel and the other Wardens said nothing as Erin rose to her feet and headed into the tent set aside for her. She barely noticed, shutting the tent up and crawling into her rough sleeping bag. As she lay there, staring at the tent's ceiling, the patter of rain falling on the canvas and what remained of the sun's light quickly fading away. She reached out across her bond with her familiar, Haxelvesterous. She couldn’t tap directly into his senses, but she could get a sense of where he was and how he was doing from the general tenor of his thoughts. He was, at present, circling high above Dangole, enjoying the cool air on his scales.

Burke had insisted that bringing a dragon familiar to Academy City was not a good idea. He hadn’t bothered to explain why, but Erin figured there was no harm in keeping Hax out of the city. So she’d had him remain in Dangole. The weather didn’t bother him, and there were plenty of monsters for him to prey upon. More than that, she hoped that if Sigrid escaped her captors, she might return to Dangole, in hopes of finding out where Erin and Liam had gone.

As her thoughts turned once more to her absent friends, her chest tightened. She was alone again, separated from all the people she knew she could rely on. Waves of support pushed to her across their connection. Hax reminded her that she was not on her own and that she would never be. Not so long as her dragon lived. She smiled a small smile in the dark, the tension in her muscles fading as she let that distant sense of comfort ease her off to sleep.