“Oh,” I said softly as we landed in the soft, loamy soil at the bottom of the pit.

What I saw was not an intense battle with an abyssal shambler, deathfrill maiden, fungal tyrant, or other mobile mushroom monster menace.

No, it was far more somber than that.

The cave tapered upwards on the opposite side – if we’d approached it from about fifty feet westward, we would have stumbled across what should have been the main entrance, rather than a thin sinkhole that led into it.

But the entrance had collapsed, leaving only small gaps where beams of light from the world peeked through, but even the biggest gaps were only four or five inches to a side. The rocks were large, and felt dense with energy, which probably meant that they were even heavier than stone normally should be.

And inside the cave were bones.

There wasn’t even a stench to them, or much of anything left to them. Just bones and energy leftover.

I powered my Analyze Death spell and saw the pulsing death magic beginning to swirl through the room, and I felt a horrible moment of realization move through me.

“Oh thank goodness!” a boy said.

There hadn’t been a boy in the room a moment ago, and given the massive amount of death energy making him up, and the fact that tapping Vampiric Senses only gave me the scent of old, dead things, memories and sadness.

The boy-ghost looked to be about sixteen, but was shockingly muscular, and even from death he was putting out a sense of strong energy – he must have been quite the prodigy in his time, to be here at his age.

“Do you have any food or water?” a girl asked as she materialized as well. “We’re so hungry… I don’t think we’ve had food for a long time, and our waterstone is running low on mana…”

She looked a few years older, about my age, with long, windswept hair that shifted in a breeze that I couldn’t feel.

“Are you earth mages?” another boy asked as he stepped out of the air as well.

A powerful presence then swept over the room, a blending of abnegation, death, solar, life, temporal, and a shockingly large amount of desolation magic ran through the room. In some ways, it reminded me of the wards that could be found around a graveyard, though it was quite different in other ways as well.

Kene, Dusk, and I all turned to see a small fox standing in a beam of sunlight.

No, not a fox, or at least not a normal one. The front legs had gorgeous, long wings sprouting from them. They were brown, with white and almost red streaks, like a hawk’s.

The fox-creature was watching us carefully, and it filled the room with its power, making it very clear to us that it was watching, and more than willing to drive us off if we wanted to.

Then the power focused on Kene, and I tensed, prepared for a fight. If this fox-creature was willing to judge and attack Kene for what it could sense leaking out of their tattoos, I wouldn’t let it.

The fox was strong – much stronger than me, and maybe even stronger than Ed. Its power felt like it was still in the early stages of third gate, but… Not. It was more, but it wasn’t, and it was hard to explain. I wasn’t sure I understood it at all, come to think of it.

The ghosts seemed to fade away as the fox-creature and Kene stared at one another. Then the fox- sat down on the rock and just watched.

The ghosts grew more substantial again, and I smiled at them, putting as much reassurance into the expression as I could.

“Sure, we can share some food and water,” I said. “But no, neither Kene nor I are earth mages. Dusk has a little, but I’m not sure she can clear the rocks.”

I was sure she could, actually. What I wasn’t sure of was if the clear rocks were a part of the structure keeping this entire cave from collapsing.

“Oh,” the third ghost said, slumping his shoulders.

“It’s okay, though,” Kene said. “We found a back entrance – you guys can come out that way with us.”

“Awesome!” the first ghost said. “I can’t wait to get out of here. It’s been… So long…”

As he spoke, the substance that seemed to make him up thinned, and he became increasingly translucent.

“Follow me,” I said, turning and beginning the climb out. Dusk scampered out of my pocket and focused. Her power pushed out of her, and the earth of the thin crevasse we’d used to get inside the cave began to ripple and warp, small footholds starting to appear in the rock. I clambered out, then turned and held my hand in the hole.

“I’m Sarah,” the girl ghost said as I helped haul her out of the underground cavern.

It was very strange – she didn’t have weight in the physical sense, but there was a sort of… spiritual density… to her that made lifting her about as hard as lifting the person should have been.

“Malachi,” I said.

Once we’d helped the three ghosts out of the hole, the third guy, who introduced himself as Garrett, patted his stomach.

“I’m starving, you said you had food that you didn’t mind sharing?”

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“Totally,” I said, digging my hand into my pocket to disguise how I was reaching into Dusk’s realm to help bring things out.

The kid – Alexander – watched and made an impressed grunt.

“Dimensional pocket pockets? I hadn’t even heard of those, I didn’t realize they were a thing. You guys must be loaded.”

“Haha, no,” I said, shaking my head. “I just keep a dimensional ring sewn on the interior of the pocket. Makes it harder to steal.”

“That’s smart,” Sarah commented. “You should do that, Alex. A bunch of people have tried to steal your ring.”

“Why’s that?” Kene asked.

“You didn’t hear?” Alex asked.

Dusk chimed, saying that she hadn’t.

“Well… yeah, come to think of it, I don’t recognize you all from camp,” Sarah said frowning. “Were you not at the auction?”

“We’ve spent most of the time we’ve been here in the wild,” Kene said as they lit a fire for me to start cooking on.

“Oh, okay,” Garret said. “That must make you one of the few who didn’t hear.”

“I’ve got a powerful divinatory talent that lets me find anything,” Alexander said. “I just need to have a description and an image, and I can seek it out over almost a thousand square miles.”

I raised my eyebrows, and Kene whistled.

“No wonder you got a pass,” they said.

“Yeah,” Alexander said, grinning.

The group of ghosts started chatting as I leaned in to focus on the cooking. Pork chops overcooked quickly, and were hard enough to do perfectly on a normal hob without drying them out. Over an open fire, they were even more fussy.

I tossed some herbs and butter into the pan, then began slicing potatoes as well. I hadn’t been thinking – those should have come first.

In my defense, I was a little thrown off. I’d spoken to ghosts before, but rarely ones so… aware.

I passed the pork chops out on plates to the ghosts and watched as they dug in.

If it weren’t for the incongruities, I could almost have been convinced that they were people.

We made a bit more idle chatter, though it was hard – the communication mirror network hadn’t even been fully set up when they’d come in, let alone things like using it for shows and movies.

Each time we struck on something too modern, it seemed to suck something out of the ghosts, so Kene and I did our best to keep the conversation away from anything that had happened in the past twenty or so years.

“Alright,” Alexander said as he finished his plate. “That was great, thank you.”

“Yeah, thanks!” Garret said, grinning, and Sarah dipped her head in a shallow bow and murmured her own thanks.

“We should get going,” Sarah said. “We wouldn’t want to miss the boat out.”

“Of course,” Kene agreed.

There was a sudden, sharp, cold wind then, and I would have been hard pressed to distinguish if it was a spiritual one or not, but the three ghosts were gone then. The plates they’d eaten from were completely clean, and the fire guttered wildly.

I cast Analyze Death and Vampiric Senses, but the ghosts were… gone. There was only the faintest traces of power emanating from the cave where they’d died.

Kene looked around and gave a sad smile.

“I hope that we helped,” they said.

“That’s a shame,” I said. “If we can, we should bring their rings to their friends or families, if we can find anything. The kid, Alexander, had to have picked up a ton of good stuff. Some probably lost its value, but not all of it. It’s no compensation for losing someone close to you, but it might bring some closure.”

“That’s a good idea,” Kene agreed. “We should bury their bodies as well. Give them a proper funeral, and that may help them find some rest.”

Dusk let out a somber, baritone note, saying that she’d get started on digging the graves, since she had a Shape Earth spell, and we could bring the bodies up.

Kene and I silently moved the body and their belongings out of the cave, and laid them to rest in three graves. When we picked up each of their spatial rings, there was a whisper in our minds, the touch of death, time, and knowledge in the air, and we suddenly knew, just knew, where they’d come from.

That information was twenty some years out of date, but it gave us a place to start searching for, if nothing else.

Once we finished filling in the graves, there was yet another cold wind, and the remnants of death that had been in the cave were now gone.

With that done, Kene recast his divination spell to look for the truffles, and I let out a relieved breath when I found them.

I’d been worried that they’d be in either one of two places. First was that they’d have been in one of the storage rings, and have somehow survived for twenty years in there.

I knew that wasn’t likely, though.

No, my real concern was that the truffle would have been growing under a body, and I wouldn’t have been able to eat it for sanitation purposes.

Luckily, they’d grown in a loose patch of earth on the far side of the cavern, near where some large, gnarled tree routes peeked through the dirt and stone.

As Kene and I dug through the soil, I felt a familiar presence appear in my mana senses. The fox-creature stood in one of the beams of sunlight, and let out a snuffling sound, a noise that I thought sounded almost… Contented. Or pleased, maybe.

The fox bounded in the air and leapt over to Kene, then pressed its snout to Kene’s tattoo. Blue-white light swirled through the air and surged, the fox-creature’s blending of energy and mana suffusing Kene’s tattoo, amplifying and strengthening the seal.

There wasn’t much strength that could be added – the creature was only third gate, while Kene’s tattoos had been built by an arcanist – but it did… something. And whatever it did, it was distinctly beneficial.

The closest thing I could think of to describe it was that the fox had… smoothed… the connections between the seal. It had been made with alchemical inks, and alchemy was full of energy, and then enchanted with human magic, which was mana. It felt like the little creature had suffused the enchantment with enough beastial power to… link them. The same way beast magic was a blend of energy and mana. Then it had topped it all off with a jolt of power into the seal to keep it active, like an energy potion to the body.

I bit my lip in curiosity as I examined the little fox-bird-thing. Its magic had possessed a very strong amount of abjuration, and this was a fairly complex working. Was it able to come up with it on the fly? Or was this a spell it knew as a part of its biology? Something in between?

The fox then curled up like a cat and lay down in the sunbeam. Its peace didn’t last long, however, as Dusk quickly clambered up the rock and lay down on top of the strange little thing.

The creature didn’t seem to mind, however, just yawning, and I chuckled. Between Kerbos, Blink Foxes, and this, Dusk really was developing a knack for using magical creatures as pillows.

We returned to digging, and found the truffles almost eight inches down. They were tiny, each one only about the size of a pearl or marble, and they shimmered with a nacre sheen.

As we plucked the harvest, I felt myself grow increasingly excited. The first three were expected – they grew in groups of three to seven – but the fourth and fifth were a wonderful surprise.

“I’ll take one,” Kene suggested. “It will sell well at auction. You take three, one for each of your spells, and one for the overlapping area between the spells.. Then I’ll use the fifth one to brew a spell enhancement potion to help you speed along the process of mastering Beast Mage’s Soul quicker. It won’t be as perfect as Dott’s Draught, but it should work okay.”

I grumbled a bit – I felt like I was cheating them to take four of the five for myself, but they insisted that I could actually use it, while they could only sell it.

“It’s better to have my partner stronger than a bit more to spend at auction,” Kene repeated for what felt like the thousandth time.

“Fine, fine,” I said, shaking my head. “But why can’t you use one?”

“It’s a transformation enhancer,” Kene said. “While it’s true the dose makes the poison, that doesn’t mean that you can turn red into blue. It wouldn’t help me, and might make things worse. Better to not risk it.”

“That makes sense,” I agreed, then slipped the truffles into Dusk’s realm. “Do you want to keep exploring and camp out overnight? Or head back towards the entrance camp area?”