Vayra pushed her arms down and guided her Bracing technique through them. For a moment, she felt a burst of strength, then it morphed into the Astral Shroud and found its purpose in speed and agility.

She tucked her head and darted across the platform. In seconds, she reached the outer edge of the platform. She teetered over it, but with the Shroud’s agility, she quickly spun around and dropped to a crouch.

Behind her, off the edge of the platform and on the floor of the greenhouse, was a ravine. The earth was cracking, and she doubted the dome’s creator’s had ever intended it; it was rough and non-uniform. Roots fed into it, bleeding out half-refined elixir and creating a flowing river. If Vayra fell, the river would drag her into some underground cavern.

Larra used her bracing technique. She approached from one angle, moving slower than Vayra but not necessarily slowly. Her wolf approached from the other side.

“You’ve trapped yourself!” Larra shouted. Veins of water wrapped around her voicebox; she Braced it to make her voice louder.

The wolf only snarled.

Vayra had already been spotted. There was no sense in trying to hide. She needed another distraction to buy time, then find another spot.

“What do you want?” Vayra asked. Then, she whispered, “Phas, how’s this kausisia plant supposed to work?”

‘The liquid in its veins is a base for all mental elixirs. It will cause hallucinations if taken alone.’

“Drank?”

‘Or its fumes inhaled.’

“I’m here for you, Mediator!” Larra shouted. “That should have been obvious by now, yes?” She stopped off to Vayra’s left, holding her staff in a ready stance. To Vayra’s right, the wolf approached, snarling.

It was getting a good whiff of her—that much was certain. If Larra couldn’t track with magic, the wolf could track by scent.

Vayra reached up and pulled on the nearest kausisia fern. It bent down in front of her, its tip large enough to shroud her. Just looking at it made her head swim, but she clenched her eyes.

‘It works by targeting your channels first,’ Phasoné said. ‘It softens them, and that’s where its energy gets into you. It targets your mind through your spirit.’

But Vayra could cleanse her channels faster than most people.

She had a plan, but she needed to keep Larra busy. While she pulled the fern lower, she asked, “What’re you gonna get from this, though? Huh, water girl?”

“I desire what every God-heir desires!” Larra proclaimed indignantly. “Honour, power, a destiny fulfilled, and—”

Before she could finish, Vayra blasted the center of the fern with a Starlight Palm. The leaf shattered, spattering turquoise elixir everywhere. It became a fine mist.

Instinctively, Larra would cycle faster—and that meant breathing faster.

Most of the mist washed over Larra and the wolf. Larra stumbled back, clutching her eyes, then rubbing at them. The faster she breathed, the faster she rubbed. She swung her staff side-to-side wildly, swiping aimlessly at Vayra, and cast a water ward over her entire body. The wolf buried its snout in the dirt and pawed at its eyes.

The elixir mist washed over Vayra as well, but less hit her. She shook her arms to fling it off her skin, but she had to breathe to maintain her Astral Shroud. A wisp of the mist writhed into her mouth and seeped into her channels.

In an instant, her eyes clouded over. She dropped to her knees to keep herself stable.

‘Keep breathing,’ Phasoné said. ‘You channels will cleanse faster than Larra’s will. Stay calm.’

A bank of dark cloud swirled in front of Vayra’s vision. She tried closing her eyes, but that didn’t make it go away.

She cycled quickly, pushing mana and Arcara through all her channels. She pushed it everywhere she could—no specific technique, only speed.

The dark clouds of the vision lit up with orange flashes. Her mind ripped through the clouds, and when they parted, she thought she’d emerge from the hallucination. Instead, it deposited her over an ecumenopolis.

The towers of Thronehome collapsed, the streets burnt, and people scattered in fear. Orderly lines of Bluecoats marched through the streets, and field cannons boomed in the distance.

Vayra slowed her breathing, trying to keep herself calm. Just a vision.

This is what happens if you fail.

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She focussed on willpower to bend her mana as she desired.

I…I can’t worry about that.

Her heart dropped. She didn’t care?

I don’t know anyone on Thronehome.

She had promised King Tallerion that she was on his side. That she wanted to destroy Karmion’s empire and restore the Kingdom of Velaydia.

But why?

The vision shifted. Clouds of black smoke wafted across her vision. She had seen scenes of Thronehome burning before. She had seen Tavelle burning, and it hadn’t given her the Mediator Form. Why would anything be different now?

This time, when the clouds parted, she stared at the tall cliffs and grasslands of Kallo VI. Only now, they burned. Dirty workers cleared scrubland and tossed it into great firepits. They chopped distant copses of trees and built smoke-belching megastructures that filled the air with an acrid stink and turned the sky orange. Miners tore the cliffs apart, ripping out iron and smelting it into steel for weapons. The sun itself dimmed.

There will be nothing left to explore. Cities are not the only things that can burn.

Like rain off a roof, the vision washed away. Her mana pushed up to her head and cleared the channels in her mind, sweeping away the kausisia mist.

Vayra was once again on her knees in front of Larra and the wolf. Only seconds had passed, and her enemies still hallucinated. The Astral Shroud still shimmered around Vayra.

Vayra ducked between Larra and the wolf, sidestepping the God-heir’s whirling staff. She considered trying to end the now, to conjure the scythe and attack, but even if Vayra could get close, Larra had encased herself in a watery Ward technique. Vayra didn’t have time or the ability to break down the shield.

Before she sprinted away, Vayra tossed more dirt onto the wolf’s muzzle. It was as close as she could get without the beast snapping her fingers off or clawing her, and hopefully it would help clog the beast’s nostrils.

She sprinted to the other side of the platform. There was a larger shed here, as well as a two-storey groundsman’s house, but Vayra had a chance to get higher. She’d take it.

“Phas, we’ve seen what the kausisia was going to show us, right?”

‘Unless the ways of the universe change, that’s what it predicts for you—reading the Stream water. I doubt that will change for a little while.’

“So we’re doomed.”

‘Just get out of here alive. Then we can worry about your doom.’

She looked up at the next highest platform. A curtain of vines hung down. She chose one and climbed, using the Astral Shroud to pull herself up as fast as a monkey scampering up a wall.

When she reached the next platform, she dropped the Astral Shroud and peered over the edge. Her mechanical limbs stung and her lungs ached, and she wanted nothing more than to rest.

“Phas…” she whispered. “What if I don’t like who I am?”

‘What do you mean?’

“I want to want to save them. I want to help. I want to do my best, but something’s holding me back. How can I be the Mediator like this?”

‘Vayra, the kausisia only sees who you are. And guess what?’

“Some things can’t change.” Vayra lifted her arms, holding them up to the moonlight. “No amount of magic will make me the strongest, most powerful person, or—”

‘But some things can change. Sure, you may not beat Larra in an arm-wrestle, but are you going to let that stop you from doing everything else?’ Phasoné radiated a feeling of warmth, almost like she was hugging Vayra from the inside-out. ‘There are other kinds of strength.’

“You’re right, like always,” Vayra whispered, backing away from the edge of the platform. “We have a lot of ground to cover before we reach First Lieutenant.”

Vayra didn’t sleep that night at all. She searched the next platform for any sort of shelter. The platform was about the same size as the one below it, only this time, vines and oak trees (or at least, what seemed to be) covered it. They formed orderly rows, but they hadn’t been trimmed in decades and there were enough stray branches to make it impossible to see from one side of the platform to the other.

She found a small complex of old workers’ houses, and she ducked into the central one. Its brick walls felt comforting, and a few of the windows were still intact. The roof had rotted away long ago, but Larra wouldn’t be coming from above.

For the rest of the night, Vayra continued to work on her advancement to First Lieutenant. Whenever Larra’s spirit flared, Vayra veiled herself. With any luck, Larra wouldn’t even know that Vayra had climbed up to a higher platform.

She finished one barrel of elixir that night. The next day, between veiling and unveiling herself, she finished one more barrel. The exhaustion started to set in, and Phasoné’s ghost kept watch while she rested for a few hours—with her spirit veiled, of course.

As she processed the enormous amounts of elixir, she continued developing her corespace. Once she had spread silver leaves over the entire ground, she began to add reeds and stalks of taller grass around the pond—something natural, like a garden meant to be viewed in the moonlight.

All across the rest of the hill and land, she placed pale blue and yellow flowers. Alone, they didn’t make much of a difference, but in clumps, they changed the core entirely. Viewed from the outside, specks of blue and yellow pierced the bands of white light swirling around the core, filling them with a more natural nighttime glow. Something closer to stars.

On the third day, she finished the last barrel of elixir. She cast two of the empty barrels out to lighten her corespace, then filled another with a creek of Stream water just outside the house. She’d need the mana more.

When she was outside the house, her core advanced.

First, she emptied everything from the core—she didn’t know what would happen if she was storing Adair and a few barrels in it while she advanced, and she didn’t want to find out. Then, like the advancement from Third Lieutenant to Second, she pushed waves of mana through it, locking the changes in place.

When she finished the advancement, she bolted upright. Phasoné had manifested as a ghost, and she was shaking Vayra’s shoulders. Adair had scrambled up onto her chest and was nipping her chin.

“What is it?”

“Larra,” Phasoné said. “She climbed up, and I think she sensed your advancement.”

Vayra jumped up to her feet. She absorbed the barrel of Stream water back into her corespace, then raised her hands. “We need to keep—”

A brick wall shattered just to her left, and Larra plowed through shoulder-first. She held her staff ahead of her.

“There you are!”