No signs of the fumaroles’ miraculous recovery appeared as the group returned under the cover of darkness back towards the central valley, and their makeshift refugee camp.

Perhaps a river god felt time flow differently than mortal man. Restoring the fumaroles over the course of centuries hardly helped anyone in the here and now. Whole island would be paved over by Jean’in by the time anything came of it.

Aminia – or perhaps his ghost – wafted in and out of sight, turning transparent when heat off the thermal vents sapped the humidity out of the air. And since he was invisible to those not god-blessed, the father-son duo couldn’t even ask him what his angle was.

No pursuers could be seen in the fumaroles. Richard would assume Michael’s war party was dead or trapped in the underground chasms of the world indefinitely. There were slower but more stable routes into the central valley. They just had to outpace an invading army, and smaller bands were generally more mobile.

It began to drizzle slightly as they emerged into the high, flat plateau of the central valley. A rare rainstorm piercing the mountainous wall of the valley. Flowering plants peeked out along a vaguely defined footpath.

Again, a phantom voice narrated. “This isn’t my doing. Just the natural water cycle. Drizzle isn’t uncommon but it’s always light and never enough to feed the riverbeds.”

“Alright! Fill up those canteens,” Lloyd said over the god’s explanation.

Mist and drizzle formed a dewy haze that obscured the approach to the treetop manse. Above, the moon was still overhead, its light peeking through the rainclouds that penetrated past the mountains.

“Uh, anyone hear footsteps?” Sara asked.

The stormland warriors perked their ears up.

“Centurion birds, maybe three dozen, coming from the north-northwest.”

“Centurion birds aren’t native to the valley,” Michael said.

Still, the steady, thundering vibrations proved evidence enough even for the hearing-impaired humans. The group prepped what war weapons remained (three clubs between the lot of them, plus Maat’s broken war-bat.) and took up a defensive position on a rock.

Thundering stomps of several dozen talon-laden feet grew ever nearer. The tell-tale “kwah” sounds of cattle-sized avians grew ever nearer. All at once, a stampede enveloped their rocky perch. Birds were paired two at a time, tethered to carts.

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Quarterchief Michael’s war party stood their ground as the bird cavalry began to circle the rock. The riders in the carts wore simple stormlander jerkins and shrouds to keep the dust out of their faces. And for every driver there were two others with a bow or sling.

“Hey, that’s the QB!” roared a voice.

The lead chariot doubled back, pulled by a series of four particularly bulky birds. The chariot was a ramshackle, makeshift thing assembled from what timber could be found around the central plains. In the narrow bucket seat sat two lanky stormlanders and Hector.

“Dad?” Sara and Lloyd said in unison.

“Hey!” Hector waved the bird cavalry off. “You all made it. Scouts said there’s a small army camping down past the fumaroles. Bet there’s a story there.”

Maat looked to Aminia, now a barely visible mirage against the dust kicked up by the cavalry charge. He glanced over to see that his father was looking there too.

“It’ll be a long story.” Michael looked suddenly tired.

“Well, hop on. Manse is less than an hour’s ride. Ought to be able to say your peace in that time, yeah?”

Sara and Lloyd jumped in the second chariot. Though Maat wanted them to spend time with them, Michael insisted he stay with Hector to debrief. So Maat piled into the lead chariot as well. With Hector, two drivers, and the father-son duo, the chariot was a bit crowded. What remained of the war party filed into the last cart.

To begin, Michael relayed the events of the highlands war party from the time he left Secondhome to the time he reached the headwaters. Notably, the chief left out any reference to Aminia and instead focused on the return of their old friend.

“Had a hunch ol’ Rick wasn’t done yet,” Hector said. “Until a corpse washes up, there’ll always be doubts. Yeah?”

“Fair enough,” Michael said. “But there was no way to follow him or ever confirm the body.”

“I ain’t blaming you.” Hector paused to motion off towards some vague splotch on the horizon from whence they came. “Even if he survived that little spat. It’s been years.”

“He’s been busy. Gathering a bunch of soldiers of fortune. Making a fortune off Earth inventions. Probably funding this venture off patents.”

“The Stranger… Richard, said he went to the edge of the world,” Maat added.

“Edge? Like, a cliff? A waterfall?” Hector scratched his beard. “Huh. Makes sense given the moons. Still, this world never runs out of surprises.”

Maat wanted to ask more about what it was like to come from a world that was round. How did everything stick to the ground? How did the sun properly rotate above this sphere? But his father and Hector mostly mulled over the implications of Richard’s return amongst themselves. What an odd place this other world must be, where those steamboats and the firearms are so commonplace as to be reproduced from memory…

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“It’s been twenty years. What could he possibly want?” Hector asked.

“Same thing as last time.”

“What, a way home? Rumor has it the islands closer to the main trade routes have cities. Armies. Industry. If there’s a way home, Rick could just as easily find it there.”

“The spell needs bodies.” Michael spat off the chariot. “A vulnerable population. Core region has a higher population overall, but if you start culling islands in a major trading corridor the neighbors might object.”

The carts bumped over a particularly large rock. Everyone pitched and stumbled.

“Alright. Densely populated island with disunited clan-based structure. Divide and conquer. Island is isolated so whatever happens here occurs with little outrage back in the core islands.” Hector said. “Plus, this is where it all began. It’s symbolic and all.”

“Doubt Richard’s back ‘cause he’s feeling sentimental.”

The chariots continued onward in silence. The mist parted, and the treetop manse revealed itself. The stormlanders had disassembled some of the destroyed stone huts to shore up the walls.

Dozens more stormland clans had arrived in just the past few days. They’d brought leather canvas with them to form some sturdy, wind-resistant yurts out on the plains.

“Bird herders let us borrow and mount some of the centurion birds,” Hector explained. “No good in a fight; they startle too easy. But we can ride them, dismount, and then fight on foot.”

As the elders explained amongst themselves as they patrolled the perimeter, the birds were too frail to carry a grown human’s weight on their back. But hook two to four of them up to a cart, and suddenly they excelled. They were not true cavalry Michael described them, but on the plains in particular they cut all travel time by a fourth.

“It’s funny. Bird herders brought the fowl here for foodstuffs. Were going to butcher and eat them. Got kind of mad when we borrowed a few for the first chariot prototypes,” Hector explained.

“But once carts are set up…” Michael began.

“But once we got them going, we could cart much more food than any porter could on foot, yeah. So even though our rations are currently pulling us along here, they’ve more than carried their weight in other forms of food. Logistics wins wars as much as tactics or strategy, yeah?”

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Rita greeted the chariots from up in the treetop manor.

“How’d the shakedown go?”

“Could use some stabilizers,” Hector said.

The bird chariots ran off to the north, where makeshift stables were half-built. Once free from their carts, the birds flocked together like any other group back in the Stormheaths.

It’s the kind of innovation that wouldn’t have occurred amongst the bird herders normally. The terrain on the southern shore was too uneven to warrant fooling around with wheels and carts. But with Stormland-native fowl transported to the most ideal possible environment, the new form of transport practically innovated itself into being.

Michael and Hector ran up to the manse. The Quarterchief notably paid Rita only a minimum amount of heed as he passed. Ma’at supposed it was somewhat awkward, her having stabbed him when she was six and all.

“C’mon,” Maat told Sara and Lloyd. “I want to hear this.”

The trio slunk up the staircase as it spiraled up the tree. The first tree manse was empty and lightless, but there was a warm glow of candlelight from the next hollow over, across an arid and rickety branch-bridge. The group snuck over one of the bridges spanning the treetop compound, then peeked through a window.

“So how many bodies does Richard need?”

The drawl on the voice could only indicate Hector.

“Potentially? Thousands.” Michael stood over a rudimentary map of the isle. “More. He was ambiguous about it all.”

There were others – representatives of the bird herders and some remaining clans. A few plainswalkers, but still the majority of their coalition was gruff stormlander warrior-castes.

“Your outlander-butcher. Richard of Atkins. Did he not attempt this before?” asked a bird herder.

“Yes,” Michael said. “But there’s no one left who could speak to the particulars. The chieftain of the Laval and Kev’kurien were the last stormlanders who bore any witness to what happened at his last… ritual site. And they’re both now dead. The only person still alive who fought there is… well, just me.”

Maat’s father was keeping his knowledge of Aminia the river god a secret from everyone. Questionable, given how much he could help. And yet he’d kept quiet for twenty years, he could probably keep quite for two decades more.

“Hey, you three,” came a familiar, slightly feminine whisper.

Rita was directly behind the trio. She held a finger up to her lips.

“Shh. Don’t let me stop you. By all means, keep eavesdropping.”

Then, the older outlander squeezed past the trio and entered the room.

“Hey, boss. That’s not entirely true.”

“Rita?” Hector asked. “You, uh, sure about this?”

“Of course. Everyone thinks I was too young to remember being Richard’s helper. It was mostly just gofer and note keeping duties, but I read his journals when he wasn’t looking.”

“Rita, you don’t need to do this,” Michael began.

“He based formulas off how many rat-sized birds had to be sacrificed to warp a hundred-sixty pounds of inorganic goods ten miles. Richard required a hundred scavenger birds to warp supplies from the undermountain summoning pits to the Torrent, roughly double that distance. Got pretty good at warping things across the island, at least. Took six people’s sacrifice to warp the ten miles or so from Secondhome to his river shrine. And the toll increased a great deal with distance.”

“So, to transport anyone to another world…” Michael said.

“Another dimension.”

“Richard estimated it would need tens of thousands of sacrifices. Per person.”

Hector said something gruff and harsh sounding in their old-world language. “So that times nearly eighty across all the buses. How the hell did we even get here?”

“Probably an accident,” Rita said. “Knowledge of these teleportation spells was lost here long ago. And it’s a big world. You only need a rune at the point of sacrifice – not the source or destination. He spent weeks holed up in rooms by himself just theorizing what could’ve done it. If someone did it on purpose. Whatever happened, it could’ve been on any island but would’ve had to have been a mass casualty event, yeah? Ought to be some record of it. Maybe he found out the cause, out there on the other islands? Would explain why he finally decided to come back.”

“Yeah, figures,” Hector managed. “Hey, chief, were you ever going to tell us just what Rick was trying to do?”

“At the time? I didn’t trust the class not to go along with it.”

This got the outlanders in the war meeting arguing amongst themselves. Lot of the old language was spoken, often at a shout. War clubs were brandished before everyone agreed to reconvene in the morning. This sent the trio rushing back down to ground level before they were discovered.

“Alright, going to be a long day tomorrow,” Hector said when he returned from the treehouse. “Got a yurt for the kids set up just at the edge of this grove.”

The twins ran off with their father. The Quarterchief had yet to come down. Maat took the opportunity to visit the modest spring at the center of the grove.

A vial of water from the Torrent remained around Maat’s neck, still nearly full. A mere drop had rescued them out of the hollow beneath the fumaroles. It was said that the valley was once a fertile breadbasket. If this still-holy water could begin repairing the volcanic hellscape, could it do the same here?

Aminia’s phantom appeared across the way. He gave a near-imperceptible nod.

Maat held the vial before him and squeezed two drops into the spring. He stayed for five minutes, during which he thought he noticed the banks of the reservoir begin to rise slightly.

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