It was apparently a cultural taboo in Mornlunn to leave a dead body unburied and without the ‘fifth rite’ ritual for any length of time; funerals were therefore meant to be held immediately and were typically brief affairs. Thus, they set to the grim task of gathering the remains of the dead while they still had sunlight.

Lucas’ stomach churned throughout. Blood and viscera coated the grass, and the smell of decaying flesh would surely never leave him. It was a genuine miracle he didn’t puke. He fashioned a set of tongs out with his magic, unable to bring himself to touch the bloody pieces.

Digging the actual graves was a simple enough task with the four of them wielding wooden shovels augmented by Lucas’ floramancy. With the excess mana packed into his pathways, he’d been able to make them strong as steel.

Night was just falling by the time they were done, and they ended up carrying out the fifth rite ritual by the light of Valerie’s sword. They’d dug the graves in a three-by-three grid, and they started the ritual at the top left.

“The fifth rite is as much a practical thing as it is a cultural or religious one,” Valerie explained as she placed her offering: a white gemstone. She spoke quietly, and only when Aly was out of earshot. “In Mornlunn lore, there are believed to be five Damnations to which unhallowed souls are sent, each corresponding to classes and acting as punishment for various sins. We place five offerings for departed souls to ward off the devourers that drag them down into the Damnations.”

Lucas took that in. “And what’s the practical reason?”

“Vitamancers and necromancers both agree that a tiny remnant of the soul remains in the heart after death,” Valerie said. “Why it’s there and what it does is still up for debate after hundreds of years of study, but it doesn’t lie completely dormant. Sensors with a particular talent for soul arts have observed activity akin to a living soul in pain, and it stops when the fifth rite ward is active. Whether that actually corresponds to an afterlife of eternal damnation and a ward against it, we don’t know.” She looked at Lucas. “The custom long predates the Conquest. We can reasonably assume that someone, somewhere, a long, long time ago, figured out something to do with the soul’s next stage after death we haven’t been able to rediscover since.”

There was no reply he could give to that, but he liked the idea that they were still able to do something to help these people, even if they’d been too late to save them.

Their offerings were simple things. Lucas defaulted to his now-customary twig shaped into a heart using floramancy. Valerie seemed to have an endless supply of faintly glowing white gems stashed under her cloak even though she took it upon herself to fill two of the five points. Wick started off giving dirty old coins, but had to switch to tiny bits of wood after four rites. Aly just picked single strands of fur off her pelt. The value of the offering wasn’t in the object, apparently, but in the prayer.

“As I said, we don’t truly understand why the fifth rite works,” Valerie told him quietly when she got another opportunity. “Just so long as what you place has been sincerely given with the intent of honouring the dead, the pentagon will keep the remnant safe for around twenty years, even after the offerings and the diagram itself fade. The prevailing theory is the objects get infused with some kind of undetectable mana by our prayers, but Lady Claire told me she tested that theory and the rite worked as usual even though she’d given no prayer.”

“She could be a bit disdainful of religious stuff at times,” Lucas commented idly.

“Yes,” Valerie said, looking away. “She certainly can.”

The night was truly dark by the time they were done, and it was a solemn group that made their way out of the field. They were all tired after an arduous bout of battle and evening of labour, but the idea of camping so near to a gravesite was, thankfully, as creepy to the native Aerthlings as it was to him.

They picked up the belongings and supplies they’d stashed prior to the battle and walked for about five minutes in silence, making their way to the top of a hill Valerie had picked out back when they’d still had daylight. The night was dark, clouds obscuring the moon, so Lucas’ firehand was their guiding light. Wick took first watch, standing sentinel a short distance away. Lucas had felt a curious gaze on him intermittently for the last few hours, so it was no surprise when Aly spoke the second he’d settled into his bedroll.

“You talked about eating beasts and fighting armies, and your body filled up with mana,” she said. “What did you mean?”

Through the dim light of his firehand, he could see Valerie frown. “Speak Mornish, Bowmaiden,” she said harshly.

Amber eyes narrowed, but the girl seemed to shrink in her furs under Valerie’s intense stare. “Can’t I ask questions about the people paying me?”

“You can,” Valerie said. “But do us the courtesy of speaking in a language we all understand. It’s only polite.”

“Why do you not have the same magic he does?” Aly asked. The bottom half of her face was hidden behind the lower jaw of her fur bear pelt, but the scrunch of her eyes gave the impression of a pout.

“It’s a technique Ser James is working on. He does a lot of magical experimentation.” Her gaze seemed to pin Aly in place. “We do not want to reveal any of his techniques until they’re perfected. Could I ask you to keep them a secret?”

“Who would I tell?” Aly asked, brows furrowed. At Valerie’s continued stare, she hastily added, “Fine, fine.”

“Thank you.”

The fact she hadn’t made any connection to Lucas Brown from the whole translation magic situation was encouraging, but didn’t guarantee she wouldn’t figure him out from other clues. From the look Valerie had now turned on him, he assumed she wanted him to keep on hiding the truth. It didn’t sit right misleading a kid, but he had to be practical, here.

Lucas sighed. Luckily, he’d had time to come up with a plausible excuse. “I’ve developed another special technique along with my translation spell. This one lets me absorb mana from beasts,” he said, because he didn’t think she’d believe him if he tried to claim she’d misheard that. “I was being hyperbolic about fighting armies. When my technique worked, I got overexcited, thinking I’d be some unstoppable force some day. Absorbing only two beasts was difficult. It dampened my hopes a little, that’s all.”

Aly watched him for a long moment, then nodded. She put up her hood, letting the upper jaw’s vicious fangs fall over her eyebrows. It was a wonder she didn’t cut herself on those things. “It’s sad when magic doesn’t work as well as you thought it would,” she said softly.

“Your magic seemed pretty impressive to me,” Lucas said, steering the topic away from himself.

Aly snorted quietly. “It’s nothing. Anyone can bond with a weapon.”

“I was thinking about that,” Lucas said. “Have you bonded with your arrows rather than the bow?”

“Yes. It’s how I was taught. I didn’t think it was strange until I met some of these Mornish archers.”

“What difference does it make?” Lucas asked.

“Bonding with a bow is generally accepted to be more versatile,” Valerie said. “Better aim, more drawing power, keener instincts. Common perception is that bonding an arrow means only being able to summon one at will, which is of little use when Wands can work magic into arrows anyway.”

Aly scowled. “This is ignorance. There’s way more to bonding an arrow than that.”

“Like what?” Lucas asked. “I’m curious.”

“You Mornish are all the same. The farmer knew nothing about this, too!” With a flick of her wrist, Aly summoned a silver arrow into her hand and held it up for his inspection. It was about a metre long, and its tip was a filed point rather than a triangular head. Its phosphorescent glow gave it a faint nimbus in the dark. “I can make the arrow however I want it to be.” Another flick of her wrist, and the arrow faded away only to be replaced by another. This one was about twenty centimetres longer, with a long, sharp arrowhead smoothly integrated onto its tip. “With some mana, I can make it pierce anything.”

“Anything?” Valerie asked with a raised eyebrow.

Aly looked away. Her arrow vanished. “I’ve found nothing my arrow can’t hurt yet.”

“What about your bow? Mine’s less than half its size and it’s a struggle to draw it. You must be really strong to use that,” Lucas said.

Aly shrugged, picking her bow up from where she’d dumped it next to her and frowning at the dark wood. “It does its job.”

“I know a Bowmaster who’d take your lack of care for your bow as heretical,” Valerie said.

“What do I care what some Mornish archer thinks?” Aly hissed, surprisingly venomous. Though she didn’t actually look at Valerie, he noted, her gaze instead on her bow. “You people wouldn’t know good shooting if an arrow struck your pale asses!”

Valerie studied her blankly for a moment, then looked at Lucas.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“That was in Raeli, huh?” Lucas asked, suppressing a smile. “I don’t think it’ll be good for team spirit to give you a translation.”

“Hm. Tone is universal,” Valerie said. Then to Aly, “I meant no offence, Bowmaiden. I was simply making an observation. Forgive me.”

Aly said nothing, still staring at her bow.

“You mentioned a farmer earlier,” Lucas said, grasping for a topic change.

“My friend,” Aly said. “He doesn’t cheat me, or treat me like I’m stupid.”

“He sounds like a kind man.”

A smile twitched at Aly’s lips, her eyes going distant—the expression of someone who was thinking about something that made them happy, and didn’t realise it was showing on their face. “Yes. He pays me to cull predators after his livestock, but he could do this himself, if he wanted to. One of the mother hen types, you know?”

“I get it. One of my friends is like that too,” Lucas said, thinking of Jamie.

“He learned how to make curry in Raeli style. His children hated it.”

“It’s nice to hear you’re not completely alone out here,” Valerie said.

Aly’s smile faded. Her eyes darted between Lucas and Valerie a few times before she hunched in on herself, pulling her fanged hood closed, hiding her face behind the interlocking teeth. She flopped over onto her side.

Conversation lapsed, and Lucas settled into his bedroll, looking up at the stars. He still felt overfull with mana, but wasn’t sure what to do about it. It wasn’t a part of the Gift, according to Valerie, but the Skycloak was pragmatic enough that she wanted to make use of it anyway, providing their tests proved it to be no harm to him.

Venting the excess mana until it wasn’t overwhelming anymore had been a panicked decision and probably the same one he’d make again, but he kind of regretted it. Despite everything, it felt like a waste.

The feeling of his overburdened mana pathways was annoying enough that it would probably keep him up all night if he didn’t do something about it. Luckily, some ideas had already been turning over in his mind ever since they’d left Pentaburgh and the plant network behind, and he snatched the excuse to test them.

After relieving Wick of his watch—might as well let the shieldmaster get more sleep if Lucas was going to be up anyway—Lucas reached out with his plant mana and delved into the most complicated plant he had in his range. Seeing as they were atop a hill in a wide grassland, the best he could get was a large weed covered in nettles. Lucas inspected it in his mind’s eye, cataloguing the information his mana fed to him. It was about a foot long at the stem, with thirty three nettle leaves, and a tangled web of roots that stretched about two feet in every direction underground, forming an inverted dome shape.

There wasn’t much to the plant. Its only interesting trait was its leaves that were covered in tiny hairs containing a concoction of chemicals including a weak acid that would irritate the skin of anything that touched it.

But that was enough to work with.

Lucas pumped mana into the plant, giving it the fuel to make it more. It started growing, its stem lengthening, leaves widening, roots stretching deeper into the dirt. Most of all, the chemicals that give it its sting increased in quantity and quality.

This was only part of Lucas’ plan, however. He’d been watching in his mind’s eye the entire time the plant was growing, observing where his mana went and how the plant spent it without his will guiding its changes. He noted the mechanisms by which acid entered the tiny hairs and held that pattern in his mind. If he imposed this design on the plant now, his mana would maintain it in that shape for as long as the magical energy lasted. But this was an old trick. One he’d figured out weeks ago. He wanted more.

Delving into the plant’s genetic memory, he found the ‘codes’ that made the hairs partly break off when brushed against, leaving the remaining hair to act like little needles that injected the tiny amount of irritating chemical concoction stored within. Extrapolating from the knowledge he’d gathered, Lucas created a second inactive pattern of mana, this time one where the mana shored up the hairs so they didn’t break, preventing any stinging.

Now came the real experimental part, where he had nothing to guide him apart from the knowledge that something much more complicated than this was possible.

He wanted the plant to implement one of the two different mana patterns he’d constructed based on various criteria; one where the plant’s sting was considerably more painful than its base state, and another where it didn’t sting at all. It took some considerable tinkering, but he got it in a few minutes.

Ultimately, it required a third pattern that linked between the two, and this one was of almost entirely original design. To put it simply, the construct created an absolutely minuscule film of mana around the plant that sensed what mana it was coming in contact with. If it was Lucas’ mana that touched the plant, it would activate the ‘no-sting’ pattern. Otherwise? Ouch for whoever touched it. It took bloody ages to get it in a state he was relatively confident it would do what he wanted.

Excited to test it, Lucas snuck over to the plant and gingerly poked his flesh finger at the underside of a nettle. He felt the mana he’d implanted in it activate, and sure enough there was no sting when his finger made contact. He gripped the stem in his fist and rubbed the back of his hand under every nettle, but there was nothing. No hint of pain. Just a mildly dry plant.

Lucas chuckled to himself.

“Ser James?” Valerie whispered, sitting up. She’d been wrapped in her cloak, and in the darkness her eyes were just visible peeking out from under her hood. They were an eerie blue-white.

“Can you heal stings from nettles?” he whispered back.

She looked at him. “Yes.”

“Okay. Can you touch this for me?”

Eyeing him dubiously, she walked over and pinched one of the nettles between a finger and thumb. She stared at the plant for a moment, then stared at her hand as she withdrew it. Soft white light flashed on her fingers. “That was considerably more irritating than I would expect from a stinging nettle. Do you need healing too?”

“Nope,” Lucas said with a smile. He held out his flesh hand for her to inspect, and there was no sign of the little red bumps that typically came from nettle stings.

“Ah,” Valerie said. She glanced back at the other two—both asleep. She spoke softly, “Are you feeling better?”

“A little,” Lucas whispered. “To be honest, the extra mana just took me off guard. Wasn’t expecting it to feel like that.”

“I could sense it straining your pathways. It was like you were inflating.” She paused, frowning. “It was extremely strange to behold from the outside, I must say. There was no hint of the spectre you described. From my perspective, the mana in your system abruptly doubled in… density. But that doesn’t feel like the right word. Hm.”

“All I can call it is ‘too much.’ If it’s always like that, it’s not much of a boon.” He rubbed absently at his heart. “Do you think it’s some kind of sabotage? Someone messed with the summoning?”

“It’s possible,” Valerie said slowly. “I’ll have to study the array more.”

“You think it’s something else?”

“I suspect your undeveloped system is the source of the problem, here,” she said. “It was hard to tell how much mana you absorbed since you purged it from your pathways so quickly, but your arms didn’t seem to be nearly as strained as the rest of your system.”

Lucas huffed a mirthless laugh. “So it’s a matter of expanding my pathways again. Maybe.”

“Maybe,” Valerie agreed.

“Guess I’m just gonna be working as a support for a while,” Lucas said, shoulders slumping. It wasn’t as if he wanted to be in the thick of battle, but having yet another thing weighing on his mind while fighting for his life wasn’t an appealing idea.

“We’ll have to be careful not to overwhelm you with the mana you consume during a conflict,” Valerie said. “But I think we should experiment more with this. One data point isn’t enough to form any conclusions. For example, I want to see what happens if you use the absorbed mana to expand your growing pathways rather than expelling it from your system.”

Lucas smiled wryly. “The idea did cross my mind. Forcing my pathways open is a three outta ten ache right now, but forcing the issue with excess mana sounds very unpleasant,” he said, but even as he was disparaging the idea he was turning it over in his head. The pain, he thought, was because the mana was trying to expand pathways that were already as big as they could get.

If the problem was that there wasn’t enough space to accommodate the new mana, he’d use the new mana to make more space. Easy as pie.

Except for how much it would hurt.

“Well, it’ll be worth trying,” Lucas said, simultaneously resolved and resigned.

“I’m certain there will be more beasts to kill,” Valerie said. She held up her hand, inspecting the fingers she’d stung on his nettles before sending Lucas a flat look.

He winced. “Sorry about that. Should’ve told you what I was doing.”

“No harm done,” Valerie said. “You enchanted the nettles to sting other people and not you?”

“Yeah. Like the plant network, but basic as shit.” A thought occurred to him. “I wonder if I could do the same with pyromancy…”

“Enchanting constructs is an advanced and highly useful field of magic,” Valerie said. “Though I would be remiss if I didn’t put extra emphasis on the advanced part of that statement.”

“The plant network would be considered a masterwork, then.”

“If it’s what you believe it is, then it’s one of a kind in all the world. Complex enchantments with lots of possibilities accounted for are one thing, but a construct that learns and adapts?” Valerie shook her head. “Just when I was learning not to be frightened of Lady Claire’s power.”

Lucas stared at her. “You were frightened of Claire’s power?”

Valerie blinked once, slowly, then turned away and started moving back towards their little camp. “Anyone sane is. Have fun with your experiments, Lucas, but try to get some sleep.”

“Sure,” Lucas said. He had every intention of doing so, though that last tidbit of information was a tad distracting. Did that mean she was scared of his power too? Or was Claire herself the issue?

He settled back into his watch with thoughts churning in his mind, idly implementing more basic autonomous magic constructs in the surrounding plants. The night passed by.

The next morning they had the leftovers of the alber that Aly had preserved in packets of blue leaf filled with chunky salt for breakfast, then got straight back to business. The trio of beasts they’d slain had killed nine people, but hundreds more poor souls had gone missing the past few months; according to Valerie, it was unlikely for only three beasts to wreak so much mayhem in such a short length of time. There were almost certainly more roaming Harwyckshire.

Sure enough, they found more tracks after only a few hours of searching, a mile or two to the east of where they’d battled the trio.

There were many, many more than three.