As Aiva lay unconscious, the sun above her continued to change, becoming suns. The light outside the brilliant dome grew strange, flickering between shades. As though some cosmically sized child was playing a game with coloured lenses. After a while, the vibrancy of the world seemed to fade. The land surrounding the city dimmed to grayscale, and the earth began to shudder. Huge waves of earth began to shift and slide, whole landscapes disappearing in moments. Fortunately, within the city, the movement of the earth was almost entirely muted. The tiny tremors that passed through shook the tower, waking Aiva. She struggled to a seating position, shaking off the weakness from expending so much energy. Sensing that the enchantment in the tower was stable, she breathed a sigh of relief. She looked out over the city, and beyond it, to the cascading destruction. Her face was fierce, "I told those fools the risk was not worth it!" As she watched, the anger on her face faded, making way for stark horror at the apocalyptic scale of it all. "This though... this should not have been possible."

As Mico shook the fog of sleep from his brain, he finally registered the loud sound, Cutter's words coming back to him '...kind of like the sound a Sciura makes when they sense danger.' Immediately, his heart rate spiked and he thrashed his way out of his furs. Unsure whether to shout or stay quiet, he landed somewhere in between with an odd kind of hiss, "Cutter!" Looking across the small tent showed a space where Cutter had been laying. Mico hoped desperately that his absence meant he was already awake and dealing with it, not anything more sinister.

Poking his head out of the tent soothed that particular worry. Cutter was just outside, looking to the northwest. "Don't worry, pretty sure whatever that was triggered the enchantment by accident. It's already moved away. Mico breathed a sigh of relief, his heavy tension fading to more moderate irritation at the early awakening. By the position of the sun he'd probably only got a few hours of sleep, but he was pretty sure he wouldn't be getting any more. He headed back into the tent anyway, to get properly dressed. It was only as he finished pulling on his top that he realised Felix had slept through the whole thing. He chuckled a bit to himself, tempted to poke her awake, but decided not to earn any bad will this early in the day.

Instead, he went outside again. Seating himself in a flat spot facing the sun, he began to draw. Closing his eyes he actively tensed and relaxed all of his muscles, finding a pleasant state of focus, worries sliding off of him. As his mind entered a balance between focus and calm, he felt a heaviness in his centre. He let his mind sink down with the weight, avoiding dwelling on the exact nature of the sensation. For a brief moment, it was as though his eyes opened, though his eyelids were still closed. He glimpsed something like a ball of light, half merged with it was another ball of light, light flowing back and forth between them. His focus grew deeper and deeper. The intangible feeling of weight growing until he was sure he couldn't take a breath. "Wow, that's a powerful draw you've got going!" Mico started so suddenly he fell backward, his head landing hard on the sandy white dirt. Felix immediately burst out laughing, "What are you doing? I wasn't being that quiet." Mico just grunted, annoyed to have been interrupted. He sat up and resumed his position, attempting to regain that focus state. An hour later, he gave up, moving over to where Felix had helped Cutter lay out some food. Apparently Cutter was feeling very confident about his prediction as they looked to be using up a good chunk of their food supplies on this morning meal.

After they'd all finished eating, and packed away the campsite, they swung their packs on and Mico started heading north. Cutter spoke up, "We'll be heading slightly west today. I don't think that beast was tracking us but I'd rather not risk it. Felix looked a bit confused at that, so Mico explained what had happened earlier in the morning. Felix looked horrified, "And you didn't wake me? What if it had come back? I could have woken up to some beast eating me alive!" Cutter ignored her and Mico just laughed. "I'm serious! You should obviously wake me up if there's a beast literally outside the tent where I'm sleeping." Mico shrugged, "Don't be so dramatic. By the time I noticed you were still asleep Cutter had already said it was gone. Besides, I'm not sure I would've been able to wake you. How do you even sleep through that noise? It was loud!" Felix seemed to be swinging between anger and embarrassment, settling on something like indignation. Nose up and arms crossed, she stomped ahead of them. Cutter was still ignoring her, taking long steady steps, so Mico called after her. "Where are you going? You're wasting energy going that fast. I was just trying to let you sleep!"

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Felix's burst of energy didn't last very long and she was soon lagging behind again, though she was doing her best to maintain the nose in the air. The fact that she was now behind them meant she was staring almost straight up in an attempt not to look at them. Eventually, that backfired when she missed an uneven section and stumbled heavily. Fortunately for her, Mico had predicted this exact moment and dropped back so he was able to turn and catch her before she fell. Finding herself faceplanting into Mico's chest, heavy pack pressing her against him, she sputtered and pushed away aggressively. Face red, she glared at him, arms once more crossed. Mico just rolled his eyes and turned to catch up with Cutter, who hadn't even looked back at Felix's stumble. Heaving a sigh and shaking herself, Felix called out, "Thanks for the catch Mico." He just stuck his hand out to the side, palm up flat. He'd picked up the gesture from Cutter, who said it meant something like, 'Our scales are even'. When used with strangers it generally indicated agreement to a deal of some kind. Between friends though, it's meaning was a bit more generous, expressing the idea that there could be no debt between friends.

Felix smiled at Mico's back and hurried to catch up with him, nudging him with her shoulder as she did. Mico barely staggered, now significantly taller and heavier than her, side eyeing her with a raised brow. She just grinned at him, laughter in her eyes. Cutter called back, "Stop fooling around and keep up." Cutters stride lengthened even further as spoke over their sputtering, "I'd very much like to be headed south before the Brightstar hits it's peak. This far north we'll be getting blasted, and the beasts will be at their most active." With an awkward gap between them now, the two hurried to keep up with Cutter's relentless pace. "How did he even see that?" Felix muttered. "I don't think he's turned around once all morning."

---

After almost two hours of setting a brutal pace, Cutter finally paused. As Mico caught up to him, he pointed in the direction they'd been travelling, "What do you see boy?" Mico followed the line of his finger, systematically searching the landscape for any irregularity. Pretty quickly he replied, "There's something about 300 paces out. Some kind of shadow? Maybe an indentation?" Cutter grunted, "Decent guess. It's a burrow." Mico's eyes widened. "A burrow? For what? Should we go a different way?" Cutter shook his head. "It's unlikely to be anything truly dangerous. Most of those don't bother with burrows, if they even sleep. It's the opposite in fact. There's decent odds we'll find what we need inside the burrow." Mico looked confused, "Why would a Brightshard be inside a burrow? I thought we'd have to dig for it." Cutter nodded, "That was certainly a possibility, thought one I hoped to avoid. It's not so much that there's Brightshards inside the burrow, as it is that the burrow is there because of the Brightshards. Even the smaller beasts that can't consume the shard's are drawn by the energies it releases." Mico's eyes had bugged out at the revelation that some beasts consumed the Brightshards but Cutter cut him off before he could keep asking questions, heading off towards the one tiny dark spot in a glaringly bright landscape.