Riftwalkers were terrifying.

And it took me only five seconds to realize why they were so feared.

Before I could even react, the human was already blurring past me. I saw him dash and I turned to see pistol fire light up the hall behind us. Nine shots. Nine monstrosities down. The force bullets crushed their heads like grapes against a hammer, exploding outward in fireworks of gore that splashed against the walls. The humanoid beasts screeched, tripping over the corpses of their own.

He immediately holstered his pistol as the gun began to recharge. He whipped around and smashed an elbow into a monstrosity climbing up the rails. I heard a wet crunch—then a splash, as the monster crashed into the pool of corrupted water below.

The man stepped around, faltering only slightly with a wince, as he pointed behind me.

I felt the invisible Aami wriggle against my back as sprinting footsteps came behind us. She whipped the everflare forward—the darkness fled. It revealed another horde of creatures from the other end of the platform, rising from the water and rushing towards us. I turned, raised my bansuri, and sent blades of steelwind into the swarm. Arms were severed. Heads were sliced down the middle. Amputated legs fell to the ground in droves.

But there were more. There were so many more.

“Above!” the man called out, and I played a note—sharp and fierce. It was the sound of grassland wind, scything against a field of wheat. The air around me turned into razors and I directed them up—turning my head towards a group of Blighted falling from the upper floors.

The steelwind shredded them like paper, but the blood rained—viscous and black. It splashed onto my shoulder and part of my face and pain bloomed with an acidic hiss.

I screamed, my hand coming to my face by reflex, only to touch the acid as well.

A hand closed against my shoulder and pulled me back, away from a pair of stabbing arms. The bones of the Blighted deformed into spear-tip points, coated in torn flesh and dark blood. The riftwalker's grip closed around the cuff of my shirt and I felt him jump and then I was being dragged up, up—past the engines and onto the upper floor.

More monsters waited.

He shot three of them, blurring out from the darkness. He kicked at one and grabbed another by the face. Threw it into the wall with enough force to shatter all its bones. More shots, destroying foes and saving me from their attacks.

I was weighing him down. That much was obvious.

So I staggered back, hissing, and forced my lips against the bansuri to play another Galesong.

The wind answered.

It swept down from above and tore the acid off from my face. It swirled around me, coating my limbs, forming armor of steel. The bone spears and claws raked against it, soundlessly swiping and bouncing away from me. I stumbled back, turned, played. Steelwind whipped around me like a cape’s edge and a sweep of hammer-blunt galewind smashed into the monsters rushing out from the dark. They crunched. Bent. Tore. The wind continued into the wall, breaking it—shattering wood and disfiguring metal.

A fattened monstrosity emerged from an adjacent room and the bloated, skinless amarid’s chest burst. Intestines barbed with shards of bone lashed out to grab me. But the wind pushed at them; shoved them back into the creatures chest. Steelwind rushed into its stomach and it inflated—exploded into a cloud of gore.

The acrid smell of viscera filled the room. Shit, piss, rotted blood. I choked at the thickness of it, forcing its way down my throat like a fat rock. The scent alone seemed to cover my tongue with slime. It filled my mouth with bitter copper and blood-vapor fumes.

It stopped my song short and I staggered back. My eyes watered; I gagged.

The thing about living without senses for so long:

When they returned, they came back twice as strong as before.

More monsters rushed at us, and I saw the riftwalker stumble, wincing, as his face went pale. Blood loss. Weakened circulation. He smashed a creature’s face in with his pistol and whipped it to strike another in the neck. Then he shot them twice. Both in the head. Blood splattered and melted the floor below.

He retreated back to me and opened his mouth.

“We need to—”

The side of the ship exploded. Splinters, shredded metal. A boom. The world turned sideways. Gravity vanished. For a split second, I found myself floating, the battleship around me spinning, whirling, and—

I smashed into the wall and cried out. I felt my shoulder slam into the side of a portside cannon and pop out of place. The ship tilted. Turned over. Struck by something gargantuan outside, it flew off the canopy and crashed into the floods below. Water poured in like geysers from the portside windows above. A tidal wave slammed into us, pinning us to the walls, trying to force water into our lungs. I shut my mouth. Pressed my lips together tight. I shoved the bansuri between my lips with one arm and blew.

A second of Galesong brought several, precious seconds of breath into my lungs.

Water filled the ship. I heard splashes above us and looked up to find another horde of flesh-blighted fiends swimming towards us, their blisters glowing yellow in the dark. Filled to the brim with slithering, sentient worms.

Beside me, the riftwalker reached for the cannon and grunted, turning it underwater. He faced it inwards, into the ship, and slapped a runic engraving on the side.

It flared to life and roared.

My ears rang—deafening. A massive blast of kinetic force tore through the cannon’s mouth and blasted the horde to pieces. It ripped through the water and crashed into the other side of the ship. The cannon shot tore the hull apart—turned a section of it into a massive hole of splintered wood and shredded metal.

Blowing once more into my bansuri, the water around me and the riftwalker suddenly reversed directions, bending to my will. The tide carried us forward—up, up and out the hole in the hull. Out of the sinking ship, plummeting into the deep flood. We burst through the coiling waters and out into the air and my playing changed. Galesong. Windsong.

The air swooped under us like a mass of arms, catching us before we could fall and pushing us up again. Higher—past the branches, the darkened canopy, and the bleeding blisterwood.

We burst into the open air.

And what I saw made my stomach seize up.

The entire forest was red. Corrupted. The healthy canopy from before was a guise—altered by the blight to look normal. But in truth, the corruption spread from one end of the horizon to the other. The trees were consumed by crimson. Their trunks were pulsating muscle and jagged bone and their branches were limbs, misshapen arms and legs, sprouting flaps of cartilage that looked like leaves. The trees writhed. Their limbs swayed and danced, reaching for us. Clutching at empty air.

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And up in the sky, in that gaping wound splitting the heavens in two, red light shone down on the world like luminescent blood.

It revealed a graveyard of airships. More than a dozen, shattered, scattered, broken and bashed apart and blown into several sections of the ruined forest. This rift hadn’t taken down a riftwalker’s ship—it had taken down a fleet.

Lightning flashed in the sky—a violent red. A streak of crimson in storm clouds that were dyed the color of gray-dried blood. The flash of light blinded me and I winced, closing my eyes and playing, pushing us up, higher and higher. Closer to the clouds where the grasping trees could not reach. Beside me, the riftwalker turned in the sky, letting the wind push him up as he shot his recharged pistol’s rounds into the forest below.

It struck something.

Something massive.

I saw it, for a split second. Something long and coiling and vast, made of red muscle and plated bone, slithering in and out of the water like an eel that was hundreds of meters long. It slipped into the water. Disappeared. I clenched my teeth tight as goosebumps sprouted over my skin, only for my face to pale as shapes began emerging from the trees.

Three massive forms. Winged bundles of skin that barely resembled birds, each the size of a small house.

They were made of animals. Bats. Wolves. Deer. All glued together, twisted into a weave of pulsating flesh and shattered bone, heads dangling all over. Wings like canvas sails expanded and flapped, throwing the winds into chaos as smaller, corrupted birds began emerging from the trees in a swarm.

The monsters rushed towards us.

I lashed steelwind at them. Massive blades. Scythes. Guillotines of solid air. It took one of the massive creatures down. Shredded a whole section of the swarm. It ripped into the other two and blood sprayed, painting the air black, but they only staggered in the air. They kept going. Blurring. Rushing straight towards us.

The riftwalker turned and kicked me in the chest. Hard.

We shot off in two separate directions, and the two creatures sped past us, barely missing with their claws. The world around me spun again; out of control. Out of Galesong. Over the chaos, I saw one of the attacking birds swivel in the sky and rush down back towards me. Screeching, howling like it was tearing its own throat to shreds. Its human face opened to reveal rows of razor teeth.

I flinched, closed my eyes—

“Oh! I get it now!”

And a familiar weight returned to my back. The intangible turned tangible.

C’thaami stepped into the mortal plane of reality.

Black ooze exploded out from my back like a cluster of roaring geysers—expanding, an ocean of tar. A miniature sea of dark water. Eyes of all kinds opened along every inch of it. Glaring. Angry. Terrifying.

And an absolute relief to see.

The eldritch mass condensed into dozens of tentacles, and black tar morphed into razor-sharp talons, enlarged and strengthened to rake through steel. Aami lashed at the creature and tore it to shreds. Skin and flesh and blood rained down on the lake as she cut it into literal ribbons. Her limbs hissed, boiling against the acid, but Aami shed what mass she could and devoured what remained of our enemy.

She consumed it. Turned it into more of her.

With her mass kept so controlled all the time, I’d forgotten just how large she’d gotten over the past two weeks. How vast her eldritch mass had grown.

Because right now, Aami could fill an entire house.

She coiled around me protectively, and I reached into the goop and grunted as I popped my shoulder back into place. Hissing from the pain, I brought the bansuri to my lips and Galesong once again brought us up. We were hundreds of meters from the treetops, now. Ascending. Jets of air turned us into blurring bullets, shooting straight for the clouds. I stopped before we could reach the sky, hovering half a mile over the forest.

My eyes swept over the trees.

Searching. Looking for the riftwalker.

I found him just as he tore his own pursuer apart. His pistol failed him, so he punched holes into it with his fists. A kick sent the creature slamming down into floodwaters and he clicked his heels. His artificed boots glowed and he leapt, striding on air as if it were solid ground. He ran up to me but kept his distance, meters away. The two of us ran together, blurring through the sky as more and more things began flying up from the trees. I glanced at him. He was pale and trembling. Barely awake. He regarded Aami with a wary stare.

“What is that on your back, friend?” he asked, and I noticed his grip on his pistol. Tight. Ready to fire. It was lowered, but the way he held it would let him flick it up and shoot at a moment’s notice.

I temporarily halted the song to speak. Its effects persisted—longer, now. Longer than before. The Galesong continued pushing me forward even as I pulled my bansuri away. I just had to focus on keeping the sorcery together. I frowned at the wary riftwalker, “She’s another friend. Now loosen your grip on that pistol before she and I stop being yours.”

He pulled his finger away from the trigger. Reluctantly.

I heard Aami whisper through the wind, “Thanks, Rowan.”

I nodded, patting her before turning my attention back to the riftwalker. “Which direction’s the fastest way out of here?” I asked,

“I don’t know,” he said, panting as he ran through the sky. “But it’s not close enough to last the entirety of my boots’ enchantment. That rift’s been open for a week now—it’s turned massive. The blight probably goes on for hundreds of miles all directions from here. It was already too big when my fleet came and it’s far bigger now.”

Nodding, I frowned. “We’re faring fine at the moment, and it’s just the three of us. What the hell happened to your fleet?”

He shook his head, “You don’t understand. The blight’s just woken up, and things only get worse from there. We need to find an intact ship—and fast. There should be one at the base of the mountains. Are you a learned mage, Traveler?”

“Of a sort. We need to look for a friend of mine first. She’ll help. Do you mind if I disappear for a second?”

“What do you—”

I stepped back from mortal reality and into Phelasce. The in-between. The riftwalker blinked, looking around, his eyes passing right over me. I watched the colors around me fade. I lost my senses again, and I swept my eyes over the forest, looking, searching—

And I found Vivian’s house north of us, fighting the Crimson Tide.

She stood over the hole in the basement, frowning as her house stabbed into the water at a run. It hobbled forward over the trees, its extra legs spearing into the hordes of flesh-chimera jumping out from the forest. The few that got past the house were shredded by her magic. Fire and water and ice, felling enemies by the dozens.

She didn’t even need her sorcery to tear them apart.

Looking around, she saw me in the distance and the frown on her face deepened. I saw her raise a finger to her temple.

“What was it that I said about overconfidence, boy?”

She spoke into me—into my mind. I blinked. Just how much learned magic did this old woman know? I stared at her in the distance, hesitating.

“Vivian? Can you hear me?”

“Yes. All this hassle, and what—for one riftwalker and a broken ship?”

“Don't be like that. We were walking into this without knowing, anyway. And he says there should be a working ship—one at the base of the mountains. Right at the edge of the Heartlands.”

“That’s over five hundred miles east, boy.”

“It’s our best chance of getting to Felzan quickly. Especially here, where the lands are already so blighted. The riftwalker says that it probably extends for hundreds of miles now.”

“How old is that rift in the sky?”

“A week, he says.”

Vivian turned silent, and through the constant flashes of magic in the night, tearing the creatures to shreds, I felt the mood between our link turn grim.

“I lived through two Convergence Wars, boy. We need to leave. Now.”

“So the airship is our best option, then?”

“It seems so. Come here and—”

We both stopped as a sound rose from the trees. All around us. Echoing, grating. It was the sound of rubber being stretched—of razors grinding into each other and releasing those terrible, dry-scrape sounds. I watched the trees bend towards each other, morphing, twisting. Combining into something far larger, all around us.

The twisted flesh grew. Up, up, up. Up into pillars of bone and blood that rose up all over the forest like twisting, crimson spires. The tops of the massive trunks spun themselves into a bulb. Like a flower. A plant. I returned my glamour, and to my confusion, the Traveler acquiesced.

We stepped back into the mortal plane.

“What are those?” I asked, and the riftwalker flinched. Turned to me. His face was paler now. And I watched, for the first time since we met, as fear etched its way into his features. He looked at Aami and I and shook his head.

“It’s starting,” he said, gripping his weapon tight. “They’re waking up.”

I stared at the bulbs as they began to unravel. I watched them begin to bloom. The riftwalker closed his eyes and released a breath. When he opened them again, his gaze was serene in a way that only few gazes were.

He was getting ready to die.

Monsters rose from the forests. The flowers piercing the sky bloomed. I readied my bansuri as one of the most feared planes of the Nine Realms showed us why things were so.

“My name’s Ildrex,” the riftwalker said. “Figured you should know.”

I frowned, watching the monsters approach. “Why?”

“Because there’s a rule in the Association—when the Gazerstalks bloom, know the names of the people you stand with and understand: if you survive, it will be their names you cross out from a list.”

He smiled grimly, as if this were a common occurrence.

“Don’t be surprised if you die, Traveler. There’s no certainty against the Crimson Tide.”