I was never a fan of dark places. Or being eaten.

Today, Traveler thought it would be amusing to put me through both.

A formless amalgam of mass and gravity and hunger leapt at me from the left and I ducked. It flew over me. Skidded to a halt. Another circled and found its place behind me and it whipped a tentacle at my head. I ducked and dodged a third coming from above. It splattered over the ground that was not ground and reformed and shot towards me again.

My fingers danced over my lute. Wind screamed. Time slowed, just by the tiniest amount. I ducked under the strike and whistled a hammer of wind spilched the creature across the void.

I shot away in a burst of Galesong and the voidlings followed at the speed of thought.

Thank the Ancestors these things were stupid.

“Traveler!” I roared, stomping my foot at nothing. The wind in my soles exploded. Brought me up, blurring, fast enough to make my guts wrench. “This isn’t funny, you smug, rot-taken little—”

One of the voidlings appeared in front of me, seemingly out of nowhere, and opened a mouth that was a tongue and an eye all at once. I shattered it with a song and flew past.

“Get these things the hell away!”

A felt a presence form beside me and Traveler flew, easily keeping pace with my fastest speed. He poked his pinky finger at the blank void where his nose would be, just between his silver eyes. He gave me a bored look.

“Come on, chief,” he said, watching as the idea of a tentacle wrapped around my ankle and pulled me down and slammed me into the ground. I screamed and swung my lute and the voidling splattered before it could eat me. “Today’s practice ain’t so bad. It was much more dangerous the first time. These things? They’re children, chief. They just wanna play.”

I scrambled up and rolled as several presences squeezed themselves out of thin air and slapped the ground with several misshapen limbs. Each covered in teeth.

Heaving for breath, I sprinted again, blurring forward. I grit my teeth at Traveler’s relaxed form.

“They’re trying to eat me!”

“They’re practically babies, chief. Babies are cute. And they try to bite things. These ones don’t know any better.”

“I don’t fucking care! Tell me how I can kill them before they—”

Another group of hungry little monsters exploded out from nothing and tackled me, taking me down, shattering the idea of ‘ground’ that I placed below us, and we fell down as they began to cover me in their existentially questionable bodies. Kicking and screaming, I raked my fingers down my lute and the strings shrieked.

Lightning and fire and wind and blades of moonlight exploded out from me in a rampaging storm. It destroyed the creatures. Scattered them into a million pieces.

They began to reform at the speed of thought. I ran. Again.

Traveler looked at me disapprovingly, clicking his tongue and wagging a finger my way, “So violent. You befriended that C’thaami-girl, didn’t you? Just do to these ones what you did with her. Though that’s probably harder, since these ones haven’t eaten a consciousness and can’t really think yet.”

I spread my senses out, a vast globe of sensory input sweeping out with me at the center. The voidlings in the distance were reforming. A bit slower than before. I took the chance to speed up, faster, fast as the wind could go. The distance between us widened.

Which mattered little, considering that ‘distance’ didn’t exist here for apparently everything but me.

“I’m not seeing—” I inhaled a desperate breath, sprinting, gulping down air that probably didn’t even exist, “—what I can learn from trying not to get eaten by these things. I didn’t sign up for a rot-damned combat lesson!”

“Eh. You’ll get it eventually, chief. Don’t worry. We got time.”

I grit my teeth and kept running. A second and eternity passed in the same instant.

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The void was vast. Endless. I ran and leapt and flew my way through endless horizons, and yet my body told me no time had passed. In that time, I fell into a state of monotone focus. There was me, the chase, and the tools I used to avoid being caught. There were songs, old and new. Some I’d relied on for a long time. Galesong. It battered the voidlings and gave me the speed I needed to dodge their unending assault. Then there were the flickers of sound that I caught as I ran. Instant glimpses into the nature of many things. Fire, fierce, fast. Lightning, laughter, the idea of last. Concrete things and immaterial things.

Here, they were both nothing. Just ideas, floating in endless void. I was the same. Here, I was reduced to my basest of forms—a complicated mass of memories and skills, personality traits and thoughts. I was a complete existence in a realm that only offered small peeks into larger, more complex things.

I was, in short, a full course buffet to things that had only eaten rice their whole lives.

“You should be flattered, chief,” the Traveler said, still grinning. “These little hatchlings haven’t chased anything for nearly as long as they’ve chased you. Gotta get yourself a girl that looks at you like a pack of hungry voidlings, eh?”

Traveler’s voice was constant. Always an annoying, ever-present companion. I’d learned to ignore it a long instant ago. He was trying to distract me—draw my focus away from the escape. By now, I knew that the voidlings were inescapable through normal means. I couldn’t run. I wasn’t capable of killing them permanently. Destroying them bought me an instant of time. It took them the same instant to catch up.

We were a bunch of ideas in a void of nonexistence, trying desperately to kill one another. In my case, it was for survival. In theirs, it was simply curiosity. The desire to taste something new in a world of nothing. Our mere existence was a paradox here.

Such was the nature of Avnlasce. The more I embraced my immortal senses, the more I understood why immortals feared this place. There were titans everywhere. Giant, pressing presences with a weight to them that distorted the void. And somehow, Traveler kept them away.

Only their smaller kin hounded me without end.

That would change soon.

I played my lute and whistled a song alongside it. Two different harmonies, intertwining, dancing around each other like vines around a trellis. My whistles uttered Galesong, keeping me fast, keeping the voidlings away. Air flowed around me like a second set of limbs. It smashed and tore and slices. And with my fingers, I plucked the strings of my lute, extending my control into the void around me.

The ideas—the essences of shadow and silence and emptiness floated around me. Little impressions of existence; concepts that bled into Avnlasce from the mortal plane. They flickered. I caught them. Kept them steady.

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And I began to weave.

But this weave wasn’t a glamour, nor an identity. It wasn’t an illusion or a state of being. No. I drew the formless ideas in, focusing, remembering the Fae I encountered nearly a year ago.

His image came to mind.

His shirt was made of leaves and laughter and light. His shoulder-cape was shadow and fire and ash, pinned to his chest by a button one part silver, one part starlight, and one part sapphire. His left sleeve was longer than his right, made of feathers that shone like cerulean gems under moonlit lakes. His oud was wrought not from wood, but golden glint and silken song. Everything about him shimmered between physical and ethereal, unable to decide.

I finally made sense of what he was wearing. It was not cloth, but concept. The very nature of things, condensed and solidified into something worn. I remembered his steps, soundless and graceful, every movement dancing with the wind. His shoes were of the breeze, soft and distant. An afterthought to be forgotten.

He’d made them. I realized that now. The Fae had woven every single inch of his existence from the world around him. He wasn’t just an agent of nature, he was part of it.

And I would be, too.

Each pluck of my strings strengthened the song I wove. Each of the essences I gathered began to break apart, forming into little strings of existence. They flowed into a single mass, gathering in front of my lute. They formed material that was dark as loam and as quiet as a still lake. I wove them together, sweating.

I watched a sole form. Then a heel. A toe cap, an arch, and a forefoot top. Strings, dark as night, binding the weave up the length of the shin.

The song ended. A pair of leather boots formed and they exploded into shadow and rushed towards me. Darkness flowed down my body, down my legs, and gathered at my feet. My old boots disintegrated into nothingness. I cast the idea of them away.

And in their place, I covered my feet in shadow and silence.

I took a step.

I disappeared from sight.

The voidlings chasing me shot past, screeching into the darkness. Far, far away.

Traveler started laughing, clapping. Impressed. He stepped up to me and I looked up and the fatigue caught up to me. The chase was done. My eyes fell, heavy, sleep taking me, and I staggered forward and—

My face hit pillow. My body crashed into the mattress of my bed, back in the ship, suddenly solid again. I was out. After what felt like an eternity, I was back, a half-mortal in the shape of Ashran once again.

My eyes closed shut and sleep took hold as solid silence covered my feet.

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When I woke up, it was fourteen hours later, well into the afternoon. It was my fourth day on the ship. Five days away from Felzan. I staggered up from the bed and squinted my eyes. My head hurt. A persistent throbbing beat against the back of my eyes, each pulse sending pain shooting into my brain.

“Damn Traveler,” I muttered, stepping forward. I used the wall for support, keeping myself steady. My stomach rumbled and a glance at my window told me that the ship was stopped in the air, waiting to recharge its batteries for flight.

Ugh. If I wasn’t in a hurry to Felzan, I would almost be glad that it wasn’t moving and making my headache worse.

I took another step towards the door and frowned.

My feet weren’t creaking against the floor.

I glanced down and saw the dark boots covering my feet. They were made of some kind of leather, none that I knew, and each boot was as weightless as a whisper. Memories from yesterday came rushing back—the endless chase, the void, Traveler’s sadistic methods for teaching, and…

The new boots I wove out of nothing. Boots made of shadow and silence and emptiness. Wetting my lips, I slowly raised my foot, before stomping down at the floor. Hard as I could.

The impact sent jitters up my legs. The floorboards bent, ever so slightly, but not a sound escaped. There was only silence.

A grin split my face.

“Ancestors,” I whispered, marveling at my work. “I made an artifact. Me.”

My headache could go and drown itself in a puddle. This was far more important. Giddy, I tested my new boots, walking around my room in complete silence. My steps made no sound. Each one felt as light as a feather, like stepping on a shadowy cushion. I tried hopping from side to side. Silence. I jumped. Silence. I stomped and ran and kicked at the walls and guess what?

Silence.

I laughed, my chest bubbling with excitement. My headache was all but forgotten at this point, despite the constant pounding against my skull. I was excited. For the first time in a long while.

Releasing a giggle that I refused to admit I was capable of, I did as any immortal would, once they discovered they had stealth shoes.

I started kicking stuff.

Bringing my bansuri up to my lips, I played a note of Galesong and leapt, weightless, up to the ceiling. I flipped in the air and kicked at the ceiling, sending me down. I slammed my heel into the floor and turned. I shot towards the wall. I ran across the length of it, playing a cheery song, stomping over the wood and the windows without so much as a whisper of sound.

Most people had to pay a fortune for something this awesome. Me? I could make it from literally nothing. I just had to play it into existence with a song.

Ancestors, I was awesome.

I spent the next few minutes bouncing around, hopping all over my room with my arms crossed. I cupped my chin in thought. If I could make something like this, what else was I capable of? Gloves capable of blasting things with fire? A cloak that could make me fly? Or maybe a chest piece, capable of blocking even the most powerful of magitech guns?

The possibilities were endless. A grin split my face the entire time, my windsong feet walking across the walls as if gravity didn’t exist. My head danced with a thousand ideas, each more ridiculous than the last.

In my daydreaming, I didn’t notice the switch on the wall powering the lights overhead.

I stepped on it. The lights turned off. And before I could react, my boot landed on a large patch of shadow on the wall.

Images exploded across my vision—fast, blurring, and my foot trembled, frozen, and the sensation of taking a hundred steps at once rocked up my leg. I saw a kitchen, a room, a storage, an engine, and a deck, sitting under the sail’s broad shadow. They shot into my brain all at once, screaming. Urging me to choose.

Panicking, I chose the next image that came to mind. One of the quarters, deep inside the ship. As soon as I decided, my foot sunk into the shadow below. I plopped down into it like a pebble into water and all was dark and a blur and a feeling of movement—

And then I was stumbling forward, out from the shadow of a bed, staggering into the center of a random person’s room. I stood, frozen, and stared.

Ildrex Soothson stared back, holding a cup of tea in one hand.

I raised a hand and gave an awkward smile.

“Sorry,” I said, before stepping back. “Bye.”

The shadow behind me swallowed me again. Images flashed. I chose. I stumbled out into the kitchens, out the wall and in front of a group of startled soldiers, then back again and out into the deck, under the shadow of the mast. I stepped back from it, laughing, watching the storm clouds churn and thunder below the ship.

That was right. This was the reminder I needed. I wasn’t just partially Nameless. I was immortal. I was one of the legends now, like Merden Moonchaser. I was on the same stage as Tidebringer Chreza and the Lady of Crows. Like the Fae. I stared up at the sky in wonder.

Who was I going to be, I wondered?

Ashran the Master. Or Rowan the Windrunner. Maybe the Shadow Walker or something else. Something cooler. Something that made me a name that every traveler on the road knew. I could be the subject of songs and poems and plays.

I could be a legend.

But best of all, I could see the world in freedom. In all the stories, immortals were powerful. They were myths, popping up in one corner of the world and appearing on another the next day. And now I was like them.

Beaming, I leaned over the railing, letting the wind whip around me. It carried the scent of the storm and the boom of thunder, but I wasn’t afraid. No storm could stop me.

Not anymore.

I would get to Felzan, no matter how angry the heavens were.

Relaxing, I leaned forward and closed my eyes. The whispers of the world filled my ears like a thousand little songs. They were fainter here. More jumbled than the essences I could observe in Avnlasce. But still, they were an ever-present companion, keeping me company everywhere I went.

They were an immortal’s travel buddy. A legend’s best friend.

My eyes fell down towards the ground, past the occasional break in the clouds below. The world was so much bigger now that I knew where I was capable of going. Below the ship, a small village sat nestled against one of the mountains. So small, up from where I was.

It was almost hard to believe I’d lived in one just like it just one—no, twenty-one years ago. I’d gotten so very far since then. The thought dampened my mood a little, but not enough to wipe the smile from my face.

I shook my head as I watched the rains batter the village’s force dome below.

I watched it crash against the mountains, eroding rock and soil. Then I watched that soil shift. Give way. I watched the trees holding the mountain together slide down, and I watched the mud gather, slipping, falling, dragging boulders and chunks of stone with it.

The mountain began to fall.

I watched an avalanche of mud and rock rush towards the village. Down, where a little girl stood at the edge of the force dome, watching death crash towards them from above.

My smile finally dropped, and without thinking, I moved.

I leapt down from the ship. Fast as the wind, Ashran fading away, replaced by a dark cloak and a shadow over my face. And then I appeared in front of the force dome, in front of the village, my steps landing without so much as a splash against the mud. I turned towards the mudslide, wearing the Traveler and his grin as a weave. My control over immortal magic strengthened.

A natural disaster roared towards me. I raised my cloak to grab my instruments, and I did what any immortal from the songs ought to do:

I saved the day.