Since Glade had been taking the brownish-purple mind elixir, his mind hadn’t ever tried to shut off. He’d never even felt tired, and that made him best suited to keep watch.

If he ever started to drift, feel a little tired, all he needed to do was take another scoop of water from the well and drink it.

Every night, he climbed to the top of a tree and watched the landscape around them, keeping his eye out for any movement or unnatural light. Usually, after a few hours of rest, Nathariel would join him. The Admiral would offer tips and remind him when he was starting to lag behind in his cycling pattern or go too fast. There might not have been as much spiritual energy in this well-water as there was in other elixirs, but it was more than he had ever expected to have.

Tonight, Nathariel wasn’t up in the tree with him yet. Glade was on his own, cycling the bits of energy from the last handful of elixir he’d drank from the well.

With his weak spirit potential, he wasn’t ever able to get much mana out of the Stream just by touching it, but elixirs fed right into his channels. This was an opportunity that someone like him never should have had, and he couldn’t let a second of it go to waste.

Until, up on a distant hill, he saw an orange, fiery glimmer.

He took a sip from his canteen, which he had filled with well-water, and immediately cycled it up through the channels in his mind. They ached from constant use, but with the elixir, any little dregs of exhaustion fled from his mind.

The distant flame was still there. Whether it was a torch, or a lantern, or something else, it wasn’t natural. It flickered and shifted. He tried using his spiritual sight—clenching the muscles around his eyes—but it didn’t extend far enough.

He jumped down out of the tree and landed in a crouch. Pels slept with his back up against a tree, hand on his bandolier and one of his pistols. Nathariel slept right in front of the well.

Apparently, the Admiral hadn’t wanted to use any of the well water because he didn’t want to take any from Glade, who needed it more. Glade didn’t necessarily believe the explanation, but he let it slide.

Still, he ran over to Nathariel and shook the man’s shoulders.

Nathariel bolted upright. His eyes glimmered bright orange, and flame shone along his fingertips.

Glade leapt back, out of the immediate field of fire of Nathariel’s attacks. He skidded along the dirt, holding his hands up defensively. “Nathariel, there is something out there. We need your senses.”

Rubbing his head, Nathariel yawned. The fire in his eyes dimmed, and the flames fizzled off his fingertips. “Aye, that you do.”

They climbed back to the top of the tree and peered out in the direction that Glade had pointed. Nathariel pressed his fingers to his forehead and shut his eyes. After a few seconds, he said, “Three God-heirs. They came in recently; I didn’t sense them before.”

“How strong?”

“A First Lieutenant and two Third Lieutenants.”

Glade rolled his lips inward. “We could defeat them?”

“I could defeat them,” Nathariel said. “It’s possible they hit you or Pels in the process, and there’s not a lot I can do about those odds.”

“Fire shield?”

“Against musket shots? Of course. Against arcane techniques? I can’t guarantee your protection against so many of them.” Nathariel jumped down from the tree and said, “And we don’t need to cause a scene. It’s better if they don’t know we’re here. A fire-Path God-heir attracts attention.”

Glade jumped down from the tree again and nodded. “Where to, then?”

“We look for another well—preferably, something along the way up to the top of the dome.”

But, just in case, Nathariel drew three kegs of rum out of his voidhorn. He dumped them out with a grimace, then said, “Fill them with well water. I still have one in the horn if Pels needs to drink something.”

The Captain, being a complete mortal, wasn’t suited to drinking large amounts of elixir of any kind. With nowhere to go, no Arcara system to process it, the mana would slowly tear him apart.

Glade dipped the kegs down into the well. He remembered asking Elder Eman-Fa why some humans got so unlucky, when other races either had innate spirit potential—like phoenixes—or animals, who could all eventually develop an Arcara system if exposed to enough spiritual power.

Elder Eman-Fa had given a long-winded explanation about humans’ level of sapience, and humans being the most abundant race, but then had simply said, “Life isn’t fair.”

Once he had the three kegs filled up, Nathariel took them all back into the voidhorn.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

They shouldn’t have fit in, not even past the opening, but the kegs just seemed to flash out of existence. One minute, they were outside, and the next, they were inside. Nathariel must have done something to control it.

As soon as they had the kegs safely stored, they woke up Captain Pels and set off into the woods. They aimed for the central dividing wall of the greenhouse. Beneath the upper, inverted control dome, their final target, a few massive conks clung to the glass, and if they planned their ascent right, they might be able to climb up between them.

In the morning, they arrived at the central wall, and Nathariel reported that the God-heirs they had spotted the previous night were far behind—they probably hadn’t moved much from their location last night.

Glade stood a few paces from the central wall, but he had to crane his neck all the way up to see the top of the dome. A bundle of roots ran out through a hole in the glass (which they had grown around and completely blocked) and climbed along the wall. They had the same pale, barky outer texture as the roots that had fuelled the greenhouse from the outside, and they were about the same diameter, but they had no hairs on their outside.

“Well, we’d better get climbing,” Pels said. He pulled two ram-rods out of two of his pistols, then drove the semi-sharp ends into the soft bark of the root like they were climbing picks.

Nathariel climbed with his bare hands, slipping his fingers into the crags in the root’s surface, and Glade used his sword to help him. Soon, the two overtook Pels.

The first conk was only about fifty feet off the ground. When they reached it, Nathariel produced a rope from his voidhorn and tossed it down to Pels. Reluctantly, the man climbed up to join them.

The top of the conk was barren, save for a few small plants. It protruded away from the wall about the length of a ship, and it was entirely flat. But when Glade observed the enormous fungi with his spiritual sight, he caught glimpses of almost-purified, glowing mana swirling beneath the surface.

“They are…siphoning off the roots,” Glade said.

“Aye,” Nathariel responded. “They purify, too, and their natural refining qualities make it quite potent. These are greedy little parasites, and they don’t give anything back to the main root. There’s only one reason they grew so big…”

“I don’t suppose we’ll find another well up here.” Pels knelt down, tapping his knuckles against the beige surface of the conk. It clacked like stone. “Pretty tough.”

“We could dig through it if we had time to spare,” Nathariel said. “But we don’t have time to spare, and seeing how potent the energy in these has gotten, and how many of them there are, I suspect we will find something much more useful nearby. We should keep climbing.”

They continued up the roots, passing four more clumps of conks. When conks were close together, they created an aura that hurt to look at when Glade observed it in his spiritual sight, and a field of air that felt thick. It wasn’t quite as viscous as water, but an extra pressure resisted his hand.

“They’re starting to grow powerful enough to distort reality,” Nathariel said. “This is a fraction of what you’d feel in the presence of a god, but gods move around. These conks don’t. They’ve had a long time to start warping the fabric of the galaxy itself, knowingly or not.”

When they reached the fifth set of conks, there was also a decades-old maintenance platform awaiting them. It was entirely wood, and it wrapped around the central bundle of roots. Moss-covered trellises supported it, and a lattice of rope rigging attached it to the wall. It might have once been temporary, and it might not have been, but it wasn’t going anywhere now. Another clump of conks grew around it—an especially large clump. Glade counted ten stacked half-dishes of mushroom.

He climbed up to the platform, then offered Pels a hand. The man took it willingly.

Once they were all up on the platform, Glade turned in a circle and surveyed his surroundings. They had to be just under a mile off the ground, but they weren’t even a quarter of the way to the top of the dome.

He spun in a circle, turning back towards the central wall of the greenhouse. A wooden crane perched in the middle of the maintenance platform, and it held a small sheet of wood and glass panels—panels filled with Moulded Arcara. It was probably preparing to replace a sheet of the central wall, but construction hadn’t even started before the greenhouse had been abandoned. Much to Glade’s dismay, the damaged panels were still intact, and even if he wanted to, there was nothing he could do to break the true central wall open.

He sat down at the crane’s base. His arms didn’t ache, but his Arcara channels did. His dawnspear body was consuming mana, and his mouth was starting to get dry. He didn’t have anything to form a seer-core out of, even if he knew how, but he didn’t need one to know that his mana was running low.

But, before he could catch his breath, Nathariel exclaimed something. He stood at the edge of the maintenance platform, waving Glade and Pels over with his hand.

Glade pushed himself up to his feet, but Pels stayed exactly where he was. “I’m good. No need to go exploring the heights if I don’t need to. If it’s important, you’ll come get me, eh?”

Glade ran to the edge of the platform, where Nathariel waited.

“You see that?” Nathariel pointed down at one of the lower conks clinging to the roots—about thirty feet below.

“What am I looking for?” Glade asked.

“You’ll see it. Keep looking.”

Glade squinted. At the center of the conk, the air blurred. At its center was a slight…rift. A few inch-wide cracks had formed up in the middle of the empty air, and tendrils of light slipped through.

Without another word, Nathariel jumped down to the conk. Glade jumped down right behind him.

When they landed, they walked in a circle around the rift. The entire thing was twice Glade’s height, and if he turned sideways, he’d fit through the entire thing.

It was a gateway of some kind, and on the other side, there was nothing but an empty plain of white sand and dark sky.

“And this is why the Gods were limited to the upper realms,” Nathariel muttered. “Their presence creates anomalies like this. Sure, Talock might have cleaned it up, but he isn’t here anymore.”

“What is it?” Glade breathed.

“A rift.” Nathariel snapped his fingers, conjuring a bolt of flaming Arcara above the tip of his thumb. It flickered normally outside, but when he reached into the rift, it flickered many times fast. When he pulled it out, it flickered normally again. “There’s a little pocket realm in there. It’ll probably seal up after a few days, but while it lasts, this could be exactly what we need.”

“Why is that?”

“It’ll give you more time, kid. And you can't get enough of that right now.”