Dawn came early to the foothills, standing well above the steppe of the Waste to the east. Illyxa found it obnoxious, but she kept her grumbling to a minimum (by goblin standards) and did her morning meditations early. There was extra magic to the moments of dawn and dusk, which made them both essential times for mages to recharge. They had to charge themselves on the background magic when or where it was present.

Which made it all the more interesting to see Hyi would get up and meditate as well. A cleric of the Elven moon goddess would normally hold a ceremony on the new and full moon. Clerics used very little of their own magic, after all. They were simply conduits for their gods. They only needed to channel magic, not pull it.

As Illyxa finished up her meditation, she hopped on a rock to wait for Hyi to finish her own morning rituals.

“You’re not a priestess of Luvra,” Illyxa said. “Between invoking in Old Celestial instead of High Elvish and doing all these meditations… you’re a ‘priestess’ of the Mother of Gods, aren’t you?”

Hyi stood up, walking back towards the camp. “One does not necessarily preclude the other. I am indeed a priestess of a temple of Luvra.”

Illyxa scurried after her, cursing the elf’s long legs. “Do you still mostly do white and nature magic? If I’m going to be planning for the trip I would like to know what I’m working with.”

By this point they had returned to camp, where Gragya was dumping salted meat into the cauldron to prepare breakfast. Fuan was muttering to himself, as he usually did. The elven man was not a fan of finding out their meat reserves were mostly horse, camel, and grak lizard.

“I do use white magic, as expected from any honourable priestess, but copying the domains of regular priestesses of Luvra would be a waste of the added complexity of my studies,” Hyi replied. “My secondary skills are divination and nullification.”

“Oh, so you were right about her being a priestess of the All-Grandmother?” Gragya asked, looking up from the dried hot tomatoes she was slicing.

“Of course I was,” Illyxa replied sharply. “You know I’m always right about anything I tell you.”

“Why would the Temple of Luvra have a priestess of another goddess working there?” Gragya asked, which drew a stare from Illyxa.

Her younger cousin needed to spend more time reading and less time chasing skirts one of these days. Or less time lifting weights, but her muscles were rather important to Illyxa’s cash flow, so it was the various women Gragya spent time with that felt the more pressing distraction.

“The gods were all born of the primal chaos of the First Mother,” Hyi replied in a tone akin to giving a lesson to a child. “As the mother of all the gods, servants of the First Mother are welcome in all temples, where we provide assistance akin to how a kind mother assists her children, even into adulthood.”

Illyxa took a flatter tone with her explanation. “Servants of a god can only cover the domains of that god, temples hate having to ask each other for help, and they hate asking mages for help even more. So they decided to make their own guild of mages who pretend to be clerics of the chaos the universe was born from to do things they can’t.”

Hyi let out an honest gasp at that. “Servants of the First Mother treat the magic she left our world with far more politely than any mage does.”

Illyxa rolled her eyes. “The gods were born of the All-Grandmother’s body, so there’s no one left to pray to. Which means you just do magic the same as mages.”

Gragya nodded a few times, before going back to preparing breakfast. “I don’t think I want to get into this on an empty stomach.”

“This is a rare case where we agree on something,” Fuan added.

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After a couple more days of travelling, they had at last reached their guide across the desert.

“Behold! The Nazora River!” Illyxa declared gesturing towards the flowing water.

The two elves stared ahead.

“This little trickling stream?” Fuan asked.

Illyxa narrowed her eyes. “This ‘little trickling stream’ flows into the Nordak Valley, sheltering it from the desert sun. Making it the only river this far south that doesn’t dry up in the middle of the desert.”

She turned to Gragya, who gave a nod.

The elves continued to look unimpressed, but followed the river with minimal complaints.

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The land had slowly gotten flatter as they trekked east. It was drier and hotter, though. The rocky desert landscape provided little shade.

There was nothing for it but to keep walking. Well, keep walking and be glad it was still spring, before the worst of the summer heat hit.

Illyxa was consulting the map, trying to gauge how good of progress they were making, when Gragya leaned in, her voice dropped to a whisper. Hyi was some distance away, taking a washroom break behind a large rock outcrop, while Fuan was a dozen or so paces in the other direction, pouting. Which meant they had privacy.

“Should I be concerned about Fuan serving the All-Grandmother? Since she hid it from us?” the muscular woman asked.

“Nah. It means having to rethink some travel plans, since she doesn’t have nature magic abilities, but it’s nothing big,” Illyxa replied. “Like I said, she’s basically just a mage loyal to the Temple of Luvra. She just, no doubt, knew I’d point out that she’s a really a mage, not a true priestess, and hated that.”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“Mhm,” Gragya replied.

While she didn’t do as much haggling as Illyxa, the orcish woman had dealt with enough clerics to know they made mages look modest. At least the ones serving the Eleven. Orcish clerics, or clerics for minor gods, were generally more likeable. But those of the Eleven were obnoxious, especiallyfor goblins.

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Plunging into the Nordak Valley offered shade at long last. There was always a slight risk of rockfalls, but the cooler temperatures and access to freshwater meant that Illyxa considered it worth it. Especially with Hyi around to create shield spells to protect them.

It also meant only a couple more days of hiking until they reached Zindat town. A hub of adventurers, and surely a good place to find some northern Catfolk or Kobolds to serve as guides through dragon country.

Illyxa sat down as the others began hunting for firewood, leaning back against a rock. Or, if you wanted to be a stickler for specificity, the base of the cliff. Seeing as how everything around them was rocks, an argument could definitely be made for specificity.

Not that Illyxa cared for that right now. With the often rough terrain of the valley she’d been forced to walk on her own, scrambling to keep up with the others and their annoyingly long legs. So she was exhausted. She closed her eyes, hoping to get a little sleep in, when she felt a pain in her leg.

Opening her eyes, she saw a scorpion had crawled out of a rock next to her and jabbed her thigh.

Her eye twitched, as she raised a hand and blasted it with a small burst of flame. The poison was already making her leg go numb, but, as Goblins did have high resistance to poison, she decided to consider it a small blessing. Numbing the pain in her foot.

Until she heard some small pebbles falling from above her.

Looking up, her eye twitched as she saw a six legged fire salamander. It licked its lips, before charging down the canyon wall towards her.

She scrambled out of the way, her numb leg slowing her down enough that she’d barely made it to safety before the large reptile landed where she’d been. Or was it an amphibian?

That didn’t matter. She could worry about phylogenetic classifications later; she had to deal with the creature’s attempts to eat her first. And without using fire magic. Because of course she had to be attacked by something immune to fire magic.

Sure, it made sense in the desert for things to be heat resistant, but she could still be annoyedabout it.

Scrambling out of the way again, her leg going ever more numb, she debated using more solar magic, but worried about showing off too much of that around the Elves. They’d clue into what it was if they got to see it too many times.

Well, there was always the old reliable of gravity. She gave a shout, targeting the overgrown hexapodal creature with a goblin flight spell. She watched it soar up into the air, as if thrown by a giant. There were a few moments where it seemed to hover in the air, like she’d used one of those (boringly exhausting to maintain) Human flight spells instead. Then it began to fall, bouncing along the cliff face as it did.

It lay there for a moment, Illyxa reading another spell, before it let out a wine and began limping away.

The Goblin sorceress let out a sigh of relief, before slumping against another part of the cliff. She closed her eyes once again, hoping that was that. A moment later, she began to feel oddly cool. Cool and… damp?

As she opened her eyes, the damp of the ooze leaking from the rock moved up to cover her mouth and nose, suddenly rendering her situation far more dire. Oozes weren’t known for their fire resistance, but if she couldn’t breath she couldn’t invoke a proper spell. She fought to free her hands, but found herself struggling to move, especially with the numbness from the scorpion sting spreading thanks to her exertion.

Which left one option. She opened her mouth and sucked some of the ooze into her mouth, chewing it and swallowing. The blobby creature quivered in pain, retracting away from the source out of instinct. Retreating enough to give her a change to mutter a brief fire spell, blasting a hole out the side of it.

Much like the salamander, the ooze retreated before it could suffer further pain. She, meanwhile, fought the instinct the throw up, as her stomach quivered with the flailing chunk of ooze within it. The reason why one only ate raw ooze in moments of desperation.

She let out a tired groan, lying there on the hard rock ground, her body numb and exhausted. The luck of Goblins really stank to have sometimes. No god to protect them any more had its drawbacks. She really envied Gragya and her orcish nature granting protection by Glorz sometimes.

The others arrived back with firewood in hand a few minutes later, all of them confused as to what happened to her.

“Next time we cut across the open dessert,” she groaned as Hyi healed her body of the poisons. “Sticking near the water means running into every creature for a league.

“The last time we tried that we ran out of water, you drank cactus juice, got heatstroke, and said you met a previously unknown god,” Gragya replied flatly.

“I told you, it wasn’t a full deity, it was just a powerful spirit,” Illyxa protested, still certain that the desert spirit she’d seen had been real. “But… fine. Point taken. Deserts are just terrible in general.”

“More relaxing than jungles at least,” Gragya offered.

“I would much prefer a jungle,” Fuan muttered. “This treeless land is unnatural.”

Hyi nodded.

Elves really were tree obsessed.

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Two more days of hiking at last brought them to the edge of Zindat Town. A chaotic cluster of adobe and brick buildings clustered on the side of the valley. Across the river, sitting at the top of the valley walls, in a corner where a tributary cut its own smaller gorge, stood the old Zindat Fortress. The partially crumbled ruins being the reason for the town’s existence.

“Why did we come to this forsaken looking overgrown village?” Fuan asked, lips curling at the sight.

“We need guides to the north, and there’s few better places to find rangers and their ilk in this part of the Waste. Unless you wanted to go all the way to Mazora?” Illyxa asked, grinning away.

“Why would they come here?” Hyi asked.

Illyxa pointed to the tower across the way. “During the Obliteration, the master of that fortress tried to play with magic outside his understanding. He tried to copy those fancy quivers you elves make that never run out of arrows, but with his garrison of automatons.”

“B-but… magic arrows fizzle from existence after a few tens of minutes?” Hyi asked.

“Yeah. He figured his summoned automatons would last… eh, maybe hours? Maybe days? But, an unlimited supply could hold out against the dragon armies as long as they lasted long enough to fight for a few minutes,” Illyxa explained. “Of course, the amount of magic needed to make that happen would have been impossible for a mortal to control under the best of times. Trying to use it on something already magical, like automatons… well… now the fortress is a spring of summoning magic. You never know what you’ll find in there.”

“It dissolves eventually,” Gragya added. “But most of the treasure lasts at least a few weeks. Long enough to trick someone and run away with their money. Some of it only days hours, though. So the best move is to sell it to merchants, who move it in bulk.”

“That sounds… rather illegal,” Fuan said, eyes moving slowly from the fortress back to the town.

“Probably,” Illyxa replied. “But steady money like that attracts adventurers. Plus the constant stream of beasts to fight. Anything could show up in there. It’s exciting.”

The elves exchanged glances, clearly not thrilled to bring on more adventurers loyal only to gold. But, neither had a good grounds to protest. So they sighed and followed the goblin women into the town.