It was a good day, I thought. Shine-Catch ate alongside the caravan and I slowly reeled in the countless Mana-flames of the dead, the desert shimmering with rainbow fire unseen by all but me. I drew that fire into a spiral, a maelstrom, sparks of thin soul flitting on the waves.

In a sense I ate alongside them. I was the ghost hearing their tales and jokes, Kahlin holding court among the children. Today he’d brought out a silver bell for the tale of a girl who fell in love with the wind. The bell would vanish from his rocky hand and reappear, tucked behind the horn of a young one, or hidden beneath a cup, the sleight of hand keeping their wide eyes fixed on him.

Shine-Catch was so rapt the food on her spoon didn’t always make it into her mouth.

But what I was most curious about was the child studying alone. Her skin was smooth, the usual crags and grooves the adult stoneskins sported on their hides yet to develop, leaving her with the appearance of unfired red clay. She sat patiently observing the fine engravings on each page of a massive tome.

One I had already read, quietly. The circular rings of tightly-set runes were similar to the formation I’d discovered within my core, that infinite lock of moving rings written with ever-changing script. Simpler, but the same principles applied.

“You see?” Her instructor - also her mother, I gathered - kneeled down beside the child. Holding a hand aloft she conjured an illusory butterfly of golden flame. The spell was shaped by knotting and twisting her fingers, speaking out words, calling to the Pale Beyond. “The symbols have to flow. It must be as graceful as dancing. Move fluidly, move as is natural, but when you stop, you must hit the exact formation. A hair off of perfection is a ruined spell.”

It was more complicated than that. Magic words and signs were like a knife. They were of the Beyond, of magic, and never belonged on this side of the great veil.

Each one could only exist for a split second before piercing through, being drawn into the Beyond. This was why magic words never echoed, why magic books were known to burst into flame, why magic, in general, was so vanishingly rare.

The symbols of magic didn’t want to be in this world.

But the act of the symbol leaving, the word fading in the air, the sign made by fingers being unmade as they moved to the next symbol, tore a hole in the veil between. By sheer will the caster would reach through that rift and pull their desired power from the Beyond’s bloody viscera.

The child had the will, had the aptitude. She struggled with the complex signs and grew frustrated easily, until they were on the edge of tears, fingers shaking with the stress. Her mother pulled her into a hug as the child gave up and threw the book aside.

I moved on. I’d already licked every rune off the page, mentally transcribing them. Runes for light, for simple motion, the crude basics of an enchantment to make a wheel turn from ambient Mana. Useful things to have.

But in truth I had enough fronts to work on without trying to teach myself spellwork. I was prepared to spend the next few days ignoring the siege, quietly developing my defenses. The lions in the flooded valley could become excellent warriors, and my herd of gazelles accompanied by the deadly panther could run ambushes as soon as the enemy entered my domain, guided by my ability to see across the desert. The hares and serpents of the twin lakes were hardly warriors yet, but if the enemy gave me enough time to slowly build on their strengths I was confident they’d pay off more than simply granting another mid-size creature deadly weapons. The path of obvious strength was limited when I only had the desert’s malnourished creatures to work with - from the description of so many creatures as reduced bloodlines of ancient titans, it was clear the true apex predators of this region had died when the magic they relied on turned to poison.

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One of them had even left its bones behind, the huge ribcage surrounding a Locus that I suspected was the remnant of its powers sunk into the earth. My goal for the day was to scout the bonefield out and then spend my remaining time developing static defenses for the twin lakes; I was confident I could improve the design of my lightning-statues now, or even develop living creatures who could ‘guide’ the charge through the air in the way Shine-Catch’s spear had.

Before I went-

The old man Adhlat lingered at the water’s edge, whittling a pipe for himself from the soft white timber of the Moon-Hare Lake’s shores. As scraps of wood fell away in thin shavings, a story was drawn, the Hecatoncrus rising from the lake, the trees in the wind over the water, scenes of the caravan’s stay here. Even the wolves possessed by the dark-smoke cloud and a goblin holding lightning in her hands.

“Tell me something. Where did you find that book?” I asked, drawing my voice from the waters.

Adhlat paused, and one-handed made the sign for ‘begging the indulgence due an old man who’s about to tell an exceptionally rambling tale.’

“Oh, it’s an old, old thing. I was trained as a storyteller in the army, as I marched from ruined town to ruined town, chasing- oh, it hardly matters. The enemy. We were told all kinds of lies about, evil murderers and thieves. When we found them they were just a band of deserters from our own army.”

Again he paused, and chewed a bit of tree-sap. He had warned me.

“Not that they hadn’t done a fair bit of killing and marauding. I was lucky. Never saw the real war, just spent the whole season chasing down the ones who ran from it. And along the way there’s this man. Always has a sad smile, and braids full of wooden rings he carves into birds and serpents. Handsome fellow. At the edge of things always, watching us. I asked him to tell me what he saw once.”

The sign he made was indeterminate. The kind of poetic sign you make when something could have been one thing or another and only the heart knows. His knife scraped along the wood, providing a steady, abrasive beat to the tale.

“And- he tells me a completely different story. About an army who walked across a bridge of starlight to a distant land, full of heroism, full of valor. Only the star’s lover dies and it weeps itself to death so they can’t find a way home, not for hundreds of years, and when they finally do the whole world is dead. Not sure why he told me that story, really, but I was so homesick for my fathers voice weaving tales of the world I asked for another. He took me as sort of apprentice and gave me the book and then he died.”

There was every chance he’d met a god, wandering in disguise. The story sounded very much like the tale of a warrior against the Black Beast who’d been stranded when the star-roads were broken. “Are you sure he died?”

“No.” Adhlat finally stopped carving, setting the pipe and knife down in his lap to make, two-handed, the sign of ‘a life’s great regret.’ “One day he said he was leaving, joining another platoon headed for the front. Never outright said he wanted me to join him, and since I was a coward, I pretended like I didn’t know. Not a single survivor of that war, you know. The sea took every last man of our side as they crossed the Eithhul Strait.”

I was about to ask more, eager to follow the trail of this still-living god.

And then the pleasant nature of the day came to an abrupt halt.

I felt the pressure of an Abyssal sour the air, arriving with the cold surprise of a knife in the back. This time, the intrusion came not from the edges of the desert, but from below. Something had emerged right beneath the goblin tribe. Something far bigger than the mandrils had been.

Their arrival was like the scratch of metal against metal, an insufferable, constant scrape within my mind.

“SHINE-CATCH!” She dropped her bowl as my voice filled the glade. My gazelles were afield, the panther with them. I called out across the wastes and instructed them to meet us along the way. “We have to go.”