When Glade reached the peak of Master, he realized something was wrong. He turned back towards the rift opening, and all he saw was flashes of Nathariel’s Arcara-fire. The man was attacking something. The light flashed through the rift slowly, and almost so slowly that Glade barely recognized a problem.

By the time he turned and sprinted to the opening in the rift, the platform was already collapsing.

Outside, everything began to fall, and he had to watch it in slow-motion. He was about to jump out of the rift when a sheet of glass sheared down through the conks, severing them from the side of the greenhouse wall and sending them tumbling through the air.

If he crawled out of the rift now, he’d be plummeting through empty air.

So he sat down cross-legged on the white sand, staring through the opening, watching the outside world tumble around—and entirely powerless to do anything about it. Shards of wood tumbled slowly like snowflakes, until they passed through the opening and blasted in like cannonballs.

After one nearly took off his head, he dropped to his stomach and sheltered behind the corpse of a second rift-beast that he’d killed recently.

When the rift fell halfway to the ground, its edges began to waver. With the conks dispersed, the diminished power wouldn’t sustain the rift for much longer.

The opening inched shut, air rippling around it. Glade was about to break cover, but a shard of wood rippled past him. It blasted him in the shoulder with enough force to send him flying a few yards back across the desert of the rift.

He tried to sit up, but the shard was embedded in his shoulder. It stung—no, it blazed—with pain. It had nearly impaled all the way through. Holding it in place with one hand, he pushed himself up and staggered back towards the rift opening.

The conks and debris hit the ground around the rift, sending up a wave of dust, mud, and wind. The air rushed through the rift opening, blasting out at him. He tucked his head and pushed towards it.

The rift was only the height of an average man now, and it was rapidly shrinking. He reached out. By the time he plowed through the wind and a hailstorm of mud, the rift was only half his height.

He reached through it with one hand, then, shouting in pain, reached through with the other. The rift’s edges tightened against his shoulders, pressing directly against his human willpower. It wanted to thrust him back and trap him inside.

Slowly, he’d lose his mind. He’d decay like the rift-beasts, turning into something entirely unrecognizable.

That couldn’t happen. He still had a job to do.

Pushing his Arcara to his hands, he pressed against the rift opening. This time, he shouted with effort.

He pulled his head through the rift. Outside, the air was settling and dirt rained down on him.

Through the dust, a silhouette approached. He blinked, trying to clear the air, but he couldn’t see. All he could tell was that a humanoid silhouette was approaching.

He clenched his jaw, preparing for the worst. Any moment, the silhouette would blast him with an arcane technique—or, more likely, destroy him with a weapon of the mortal world.

The silhouette reached out a hand.

Glade blinked.

“Take it!” a voice yelled.

He clasped the shadowy wrist. His fingers wrapped around a gauntlet, and something pulled on him. As he passed through the rift, he blacked out.

image [https://static.wixstatic.com/media/f3a882_2bcdeab6626a49c1bc2fa21d230a67c6~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_560,h_281,al_c,lg_1,q_85,enc_auto/ship%20better.png]

Glade coughed himself awake. Dust flew out of his mouth, and his throat stung—like he’d just tried to eat a nest of hornets.

He bolted upright, one hand on his throat, and the other hand clutching his wounded shoulder. When he made it upright, his head whipped around.

He sat at the center of a crater, only a few yards away from the central wall of the greenhouse. Wedges of the conks stabbed into the ground all around him. One had cracked, and it leaked a vibrant blue liquid from its internal channels. Glade nearly rushed forwards, trying to capture some of it in his hands—he recalled what Nathariel had said about the material inside the conks, and how powerful it was—but he barely made it a few steps before his legs collapsed beneath him.

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But he’d left all the elixirs in the rift, and it closed. He’d need something.

He was about to push himself up again when a flicker of movement caught his attention. Out of the corner of his eye, there was another silhouette.

He stopped and ripped his sword out of its sheath with his good arm. Cycling Arcara, he prepared to defend himself.

But whoever it was…wasn’t in an aggressive stance. A woman perched atop a mound of debris, sitting with her hands between her legs and staring directly at him. Glade couldn’t make out any weapons on her.

He staggered in a circle to face her, keeping his sword ahead just in case.

“Ah, good morning!” the woman called. The mid-afternoon light fell over her, turning her into less of a silhouette and filling out the colours and shapes of her form. Her hair was the only thing that stayed inky black.

Glade rubbed his eyes. She was wearing a sleeveless robe that reminded him of overlapping white bandages, and a heavy sash overtop. Vines and twigs wound around her legs, and a twisted rope of roots made her belt.

And two rabbit ears poked out the top of her head.

She was a Lapinn—a race of rabbitfolk from the outer reaches of the galaxy. He looked harder, trying to pick out any weapons she might be carrying, but Lapinn God-heirs usually only ever practiced healing Paths. He saw no weapons.

Glade scrunched his eyebrows, then reached up to his shoulder. A bandage wrapped around the wound, and the shard of wood had been removed. But, above all of that, the muscles didn’t slip and grind against each other like they usually did while recovering from a stab wound. There was only a soft weakness and a sting.

“Greetings.” He turned his sword over and bowed, unsure how powerful this Lapinn was. She didn’t look any older than twenty years, but it was hard to tell with God-heirs—and he was certain she was one. Who else would have healed him? Who else would be wandering around a greenhouse like this?

Then he spared a glance up. He took a quick scan of her spirit (she had probably already scanned his).

Second Lieutenant, as best he could tell.

“I am Glade Charl Arvitir,” he said. “You have my gratitude for helping me.” She had to have been the one to help him out of the void.

The Lapinn jumped up off the rock and landed on the ground in front of him. She snatched his hand and shook it in a friendly gesture before he could protest, then said, “Ameena.”

“Your…name?”

“Aye.” She nodded, her ears flopping forwards. They nearly poked Glade in the eyes, but he raised his chin, and they slapped his cheeks. She was a few heads shorter than him, and on his level, she had to stare up at him. “Yes, you’re welcome for helping you, and all that. I was hoping you’d not be one for formalities…I dunno what I was expecting from an Orderman like you, though.”

He gulped. She knew what he was. God-heirs were rarely friendly to the Order of Balance. His grip tightened on his sword.

“Don’t worry, Orderman,” she turned away and took a few steps away. “If I wanted to kill you, I could have.” She snapped her fingers, and the tips glowed with a dark emerald light. “Your Rootline would have been easy enough to snap, and your Arcara easy enough to harvest.”

“Rootline?” Glade breathed, taking a few shaky steps after her. His legs were finding balance again.

“Orderman doesn’t know?”

Glade stopped and scowled. No one had ever told him about it.

“It’s the essence of your life, the main Arcara channel running between your soul and core,” she said. “Aye?”

The Order had just called that the governing channel. He nodded anyway.

“I’m leaving, now,” Ameena said. “Good that you’re awake and all.” She took a few more steps into the woods, but Glade ran around in front of her. It made his wounds ache more, but he needed to stop her.

“Why? Why save me? You are a God-heir. We are supposed to hate each other.”

“I saw someone fall from the sky and I thought I’d help. There was an angry moth lady over yonder.” She pointed over her shoulder off to the north. “Maybe a mile away. Tried to help her, too, but she tried to skewer me with a stake of wood, so I buggered off. She was a First Lieutenant.”

Glade tilted his head. That wasn’t really the answer he was looking for. “But…me?”

“Fine.” Ameena rolled her neck around. “I don’t really like the Order, but I was hoping to find someone to venture around here with, ‘cause the nymphs are getting nasty, and there are plenty of God-heirs looking to rip us weaker ones to shreds. But I’m not going with the Order, ‘specially not if you’re going to be all formal and stuffy.”

Glade paused, taken aback for a moment. Then he stepped out of her way. “I did not need a companion, either.” As soon as he said that, it sounded like he was just trying to save face. He knew it. “I needed to get back to my friends.”

If Nathariel and Pels hadn’t found him yet, that must have meant they were still climbing. They must have thought he was dead—or trapped in the rift, and close enough to dead.

“Climbers?” Ameena asked, marching off into the forest at the edge of the crater. The trees were a normal size, and here, they were only starting to send out buds and tiny white flowers. “If they were up where you fell from, you’re never catching up to them.”

Glade shut his eyes and sighed. Nathariel would climb faster than Glade could—he’d be able to support Pels better when he didn’t have to worry about Glade and ascend all the way to the top of the dome. Glade wouldn’t catch up.

“You’d have better luck scavenging around here.”

He conceded with a dip of his head. “Thank you for the advice. I—”

“Look, Orderman, I’m heading to the old guardsman barracks. There’s a staff there that I’ve been eyeing. Come if you want, and keep up if you can, but I’m not waiting.” Then, with a three-foot effortless hop, she took off through the woods, sprinting to the south.

Glade stood completely still, trying to parse the conversation in his mind. Wren, the mothfolk bounty hunter was here, and she’d made the rift fall. There was a healer who was looking for a team, and above all that, there was no way he’d catch up with Nathariel or Pels now.

He shut his eyes, and in a few seconds, he knew what his duty demanded of him. He needed to get stronger now—not just Vayra. He still had to reach Captain in time for the tournament.

Scouring the wreckage, he searched for anything useful. Eventually, he pulled up a mostly intact keg. He filled it with the leaking elixir from the conks to replace what he had lost in the rift, then fastened a shoulder strap out of rope and tied it over his shoulder.

Then he sprinted off in the same direction Ameena had gone.