The next day was all frantic planning and gathering of supplies. Cyne was apparently an expert on the Necropolis for religious reasons, but I didn't know details because religion was something I had been avoiding thinking too much about so far. The fact that magic was real meant gods might be real, and souls, and some objectively "correct" morality, and... it was a lot to think about. At any rate, for now what it meant was that Cyne had connections who ran the corpse caravans to the Necropolis and there was a very strict cultural taboo against attacking those caravans.

This meant that we should be able to just waltz right past any Halenvar or Empire soldiers and they wouldn't be allowed to stop us, although of course they could follow us right up to the Necropolis which wouldn't be ideal. The city itself was a neutral zone with the same cultural taboo, although interestingly nobody cared if you fought zombies in the central pit. I would have thought that would be more of an issue - isn't that desecration of corpses or something? But apparently not. Either way, I'd take guaranteed safety even if it meant they were hard to ditch once we got there.

I tried to grab the others to help with shopping, but Katrin was still being weird. She was sitting with her spellbook, looking frustrated as she mumbled about non-lethal options. It was clear she was trying to learn a spell that was past her ability, and I didn't really get the sudden rush. She'd be going to the Duminere soon enough and - hopefully - would be able to pick up the Comprehension gift that would allow her to read the spellbook properly.

She almost emerged from her funk for a second when Errod mentioned he needed a new sword - he'd never recovered his after the battle. She muttered "oh no, our ancestral blade has been lost and our family line is ruined" under her breath and the sarcasm was palpable, but she dove right back in to her research. It was one of the only things I'd heard her say since we arrived. I tried asking her about the joke, since Hugh had made a similar mocking comment about Errod's shitty sword being an ancestral blade, but she just shrugged and kept reading her spellbook - or failing to read it, anyway.

I decided she was pissed at me and left.

The supply shopping went fine, and we got a wagon too - pulled by some things that looked like very wide, long-haired donkeys. Much like the one Hugh had when he first picked me up, the wagon had a canvas arch over it - but this one was a bit flimsier, just barely enough to keep most rain off. Connie got Errod a new sword, and also paid someone to recharge his shield brooch. She had money and a notebook crammed full of future information - it was the stuff Mila had stashed in a fake rock outside of Theramas, I was amazed it hadn't been left behind - but that money was going to go quickly so we focused on getting cheap food that could last the whole way. I wanted throwing knives, but the only ones I found that seemed like they weren't shit were too expensive and anyway they'd be lousy against zombies.

Everything seemed to be coming along nicely, until Sige knocked on our door at the inn. "Hey guys! Hope you don't mind me barging in, I called Cyne and Aestrid too so they'll be here in a minute. Yeah, so, uh, we're leaving tonight it turns out! Surprise! You've got soldiers from Halenvar asking around, I talked to one of them and they offered a pretty generous bounty. Don't worry, all three of us work for Mama Carnage and she wouldn't let us fuck you guys over. Not that I would anyway. Uh."

We didn't have to scramble much to get our shit together, but even so Cyne and Aestrid were there before we finished. Both looked completely relaxed, like moving up the schedule by two days was no big deal. Cyne took a seat and pulled out his little book, flipping through pages.

"Sadly, the caravan isn't here yet and there would be no good way to meet up with them on the road," he said, "Furthermore, I have been informed that soldiers from the Endless Empire have created a checkpoint at the Heregie terminal we were going to use."

Heregie was another plane, one apparently made of living tissue. It sounded gross as fuck but also kinda cool. Distance traveled there translated to something like six times further when you popped back into the prime plane, so there were some established routes that you could use to get to different places and we had been planning on doing that to reach the Necropolis.

"Could we go around?" Connie asked, and Sige shook his head.

"Naw, that's a fucking mess. Even if we found a good route the wagon could take it's all twisted and shit in there. And compasses don't work because there's... no North? Or no... whatever compasses do."

Cyne nodded. "Most planes have no magnetic North. And as Sige says, navigation is very difficult in Heregie which is why I recommend only using established routes. Getting lost can be dangerous, and even if you avoid the parasites staying there too long can risk infection."

"Itzele is too easy, if they're watching Heregie you'd better fucking believe they'll have someone cross over and watch the roads there as well," Sige added, "We're not equipped right for Hudai, that would be a shitstorm. Wrong day for the trickier ones. Nine months before Arrapidae is open, that's the only one that's really perfect for travel."

"My immediate concern," Cyne said, "Is how we would leave Good Charl at all. They must be watching the gates closely. Once we're outside we do have some options, although I agree that some of the best planes to travel through won't be useful to us."

"I assume we can't go through Nusos?" I asked. It was, after all, the plane we were already planning on using later in the trip.

"Sadly not. The wards around the city prevent planar travel except in certain locations, like the Heregie terminal. And once we leave the city - if we can - Nusos can't be entered without multiple rooms to walk through. If I had specialized in it a single door might suffice, but as it is we'll need to get to a settlement to cross over. Not only does that still require us to get out of Good Charl unseen, but we would need to leave the wagon behind."

Right. The wagon was for the longer trip to the Necropolis. We'd want those supplies for the journey there and down, although by design most could be carried in the big packs we'd bought since the wagon wouldn't be going into the bottomless zombie pit. It just meant that if we had to ditch the wagon now, we'd need to make sure our method of travel was way faster.

Sige looked nervous. "Okay so I can get us out, but... you gotta fucking promise not to talk about it."

An hour later we were in the bad part of town sneaking down alleyways. Mila, Cyne, and Aestrid had left to go get the wagon, which we were supposedly going to meet on the outside of the city. We got to a dead end, and I started to seriously worry that Sige had lured us there to collect the bounty. Instead he made us all hold hands.

"You said you've never been to another plane, right? Well. Here we fucking go!"

Things seemed to get... darker. The walls around us were suddenly cracked and peeling, the street lamp was rusted and fallen over - although for a moment the flame itself was still there, hovering in the air. The sky was black, all the stars having vanished. "Welcome to Itzele," Sige said, "It's like a shitty version of the material plane. Now uh. We're not supposed to be able to get here while inside the city, and the people that pay good money to make sure this spot works would be pretty upset if you run your mouths about it. Got it?"

We nodded, and he stepped through a hole in the wall that hadn't been there before we crossed over. On the other side there were some bouncers and what I could immediately tell was a club of some sort, probably also a casino. I could only imagine what would be illegal in a place like Good Charl - surely with what I'd seen around town normal gambling wouldn't require a hidden place like this, and I knew for a fact prostitution wasn't illegal in the city. Sige didn't seem like the type to be cool with human trafficking, but I could absolutely picture him being fine with smuggling or pit fighting so that's what I was betting on.

Sadly, we didn't get to find out. He had an argument with the bouncers - a quiet one, but lots of big upset body language - and finally one of them seemed to give in and ushered us not through the main door but a smaller side door that led to a tunnel. After a few minutes we were outside the city walls, where I could see that the black sky of Itzele had a red glow all around the horizon. The trees all looked dead or dying, the metal wall was pitted and covered in some sort of corrosion. Classic shadowy mirror dimension shit.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Sige snuck away for a moment before returning, and then led us the other way until we reached a copse of blighted trees. "There was a group of soldiers there, not sure why the Free States are allowing this shit. Fucking ridiculous. I think these ones were Empire, not Halenvar. Anyway, this should be far enough away and the wagon will be here somewhere."

We held hands again, and life started to creep back into things. The stars returned, and with them the wagon faded into view. We scrambled in and covered ourselves as it got moving. We got some rest without incident, but as the sun rose Connie returned from scouting ahead with the expected bad news. There was a checkpoint. The wagon couldn't make it into Itzele, and a lot of the other planes were still off the table for the same reasons we'd discussed before.

Mila looked up from a rock she was slowly turning into a tiny model of a house. "Can't we go through the jungle? You're a U'rmun aren't you?"

Sige looked embarrassed. "Naw. Uh. Doesn't work that way. It's like how humans with Dumines can't use wild magic, right? Other races lose any natural magic they had if they get one, though if you take the right ones to re-create the same powers you have a little more natural skill at it. But uh... fucking assholes back in my town decided that if you leave and get a Dumine you're banished - not that I could navigate that fucking jungle anyway without spatial magic."

This wasn't news to me - well, the banishment part was but not the rest. I'd asked Katrin and Mila quietly, away from the rest of the group, because I had been pretty sure Sige was a different species but wasn't totally certain he wasn't just a human that had gotten someone with enhancement magic to make him look like that. It seemed a lot of the planes had humanoids that were probably distant relatives of humans but had lived in that one plane so long they had adapted in strange ways.

Sige came from Uihene, which was a giant jungle filled with ruins and murderous plants. But it had some sort of strange spatial magic going on, so you could walk in a straight line and end up right back where you started. The U'rmun grew up in this and had natural magic that let them navigate the jungle - or prevent others from doing so. They rarely left, so Sige was a bit of an anomaly. Since people didn't often come across U'rmun, or for that matter most of the people that were native to other planes, I had been warned to take any information about them with a grain of salt.

Aestrid walked over to join in the conversation, still wearing a silk dress like the one I'd first seen her in. It had rained briefly before sunrise while she was walking alongside the wagon and she hadn't gotten a single drop on her, so clearly she did have armor of a sort - presumably a force field. "We can fight our way through, though I suppose that would offend Cyne's delicate sensibilities. Speaking of, Cyne, I think I saw the wagon roll over an ant earlier and since you were sitting up front wouldn't that make you responsible for its death? I saw some thorn bushes back there if you want to flog yourself."

Cyne nodded at her and smiled, not rising to the taunt. Connie clearly decided it was worth nipping in the bud, though. "Aestrid, please remember that Cyne is the harder one to replace if you all can't get along. Okay? Anyway, starting a fight at a checkpoint will tell everyone involved where we are even if we get away. We would need to, I don't know, trip the checkpoint but then go somewhere in a totally different direction to throw them off - and I'm guessing we don't want to spend that kind of time and energy."

Aestrid didn't seem phased by the comment about her being replaceable. "Fine, okay, I agree that pushing through the checkpoint could be bad. So I think we're back to the planar travel idea, especially since there are two qualified people here - three if Katrin knows anything but I'm guessing she doesn't. What if we wait until we're close to the checkpoint so we don't have to be in Heregie long? Is it navigable for a few miles? Or could we split up again like we did to get out of the city?"

Cyne looked back at his chart. "I think both are a concern, if they're this persistent. I wish I had known sooner just how important you must be, I wasn't anticipating them being so... thorough. Eliminating the planes that would be too immediately dangerous or hard to navigate, as well as the ones that either the Empire or Halenvar might be watching, my next preferred option has a price for passing through which would need to be paid by Connie and Callie. Xeyul."

Sige shook his head, looking less like he was disagreeing and more that he was just surprised to hear Cyne suggest it. Mila looked up from her stone house and said "I know Errod and Katrin are old enough to be setting out on their own but they're still young, would they be safe? Sahrger steal children, you know."

Cyne nodded. "Dealing with the Sahrger is risky, but only to the leader of the group so long as you specify safe travel for all of us. Xeyul is fairly easy to reach, and could allow us to travel directly to the necropolis thereby avoiding checkpoints and throwing anyone that may be tracking you off of our trail. I have charms I can offer, with the cost being added to my normal fee if any are discharged."

Connie pulled me aside and switched to English. "Okay so this is not a bad plan, but... Sahrger... well, picture fairy folk and you're not going to be far off. They live in these beautiful palaces made from living trees, and spend all day holding parties and things. They're simultaneously chaotic and all about rules, so they'll do whatever they want on a whim but then turn around and say that since you used the wrong fork at dinner you have to be their slave for a year and a day or whatever. Rules are a game to them, they make up rules for each other to follow. As guests we'd be exempt from the worst of it, but we would have to ask for passage very carefully. It's like the old jokes about wording a wish from a genie wrong and having your head turned into an orange or something."

"What kind of cost is Cyne talking about? Is it just that we have to be good guests and offer them a housewarming gift or something?"

"We should absolutely do that, yeah, but that's not the real cost. They're really good at curses. If they say 'I hope you trip and fall down the stairs tomorrow' then you'll probably do exactly that. There are ways to unravel curses before they can trigger, that would be the charms Cyne is talking about, but it's possible they would... I don't know... require us to let them put a curse on us as part of the price of passage? The point is, when we ask for safe passage we would want to really think about not only how we say it but the precise wording of how they reply - they like to slip little things in there. There are stories about them stealing people's names or firstborn or whatever, but I don't think that actually happens. I don't know. Probably not as a random curse anyway."

I was trying to work on myself, ever since Katrin talked to me in the bath that night. It had been stupid to run off and burn a building down, and if I kept acting like that I was going to get myself killed. Back on Earth it had been running away to live in abandoned buildings or shoplifting things I didn't need or - that one time - living in someone's attic for a week without them knowing. Here things were different. I wasn't risking getting thrown back into the group home, or even having to run away from some scary guy on the street. There were monsters, and magic users, and all sorts of things I didn't understand. But at the same time, I felt healthier and more alive than I ever had even with people trying to kill me - some part of me was desperate for this kind of adventure.

I decided to resist my impulsive nature and do the mature thing. "I'll do it if everyone else agrees, unanimously, but that's it. Otherwise we should do something where the risks are more... calculated. Send some of them through the checkpoint in the wagon, and have a couple of us sneak through the shadow world or whatever since that checkpoint will probably be a bit more sparse, and then hope we don't run into more. They can't be watching everywhere all the time."

We headed back to the rest of the group, and let them know our decision. Katrin smiled at me, probably aware that my initial impulse had been to run off to fairy land. I had dreamed of traveling to a magical world of fairies when I was little, though granted these ones sounded like dicks. To be fair, most older fairy stories involved them being things you didn't want to mess with. Little sociopaths that you left out milk for not as a gift but in the way you might pay a mobster for 'insurance'. Still, seeing a land of the fey would be a big checkmark on my bucket list.

We all packed up and got moving again, and after about fifteen minutes Aestrid climbed up onto the seat next to me and Katrin. "Hello ladies. Tell me, do any of you have ranged weapons?"

"I've been working on a spell to safely disable people but I haven't cast it successfully yet and I think the effective range is probably sixty feet. Errod just got a bow, but I suspect he's not a good shot."

"That's what I thought. And Sige is a wrestler, of all things. Well. Just wanted you to know there's a Segozertze circling above us. Almost certainly a spy from Halenvar. Do with that knowledge what you will."

She slid into the back of the cart and laid down, getting comfortable among the bags like she was planning on taking a nap. I looked straight up, and sure enough. One of those fucking bat-bear things.

"If Telen comes himself, we're fucked. I don't think he can teleport right to us, I think he needs one of those rug things if it's somewhere he's not familiar with, but... you know, probably there was more than one of those guys. They wouldn't just be circling for no reason."

Katrin sighed, flipping through her spellbook. "Most likely there was another that left for reinforcements who knows how long ago. And they might have a teleportation receiver for Telen. I can try to find a spell to... deal with it... but even if it works it won't change that they found us."

"Well I tried. I tried to do the more normal, respectable plan. But it looks like we're going to make a deal with the fair folk."