Quinn slept surprisingly well compared to her normal sleep pattern. She only woke up a total of three times throughout the entire night.

One was when the two foxes snuck closer to her and fell asleep using her leg and arm as pillows. She thought they were kind of cute in their attempt to be sneaky. That and she was honestly too worn out to care too much. She let them be after casting Cleanse on both.

The second time was when Quinn shifted in her sleep. Her sagen opened slightly, allowing a torrential downpour to soak her trousers. There was nothing she could do about it at night, so she just recovered herself and passed out.

The third time was quite different. A particularly loud scream from the west side of the bearding stone’s aura awoke her. She looked out toward it as violent whispers and groans came at a much louder volume.

A creature stood shrouded in the fog. It was two, maybe three times taller than the other detestable horrors. It was also much, much louder. It nearly drowned out the thunder with its tempting pleas.

Two other things stood out about it. The dark creature just stood there and looked into the clearing. It didn’t twitch or bend at odd angles. It just stood there. Watching. The other thing was the scent that blew into the clearing. It smelled as though dozens of rotting corpses were just outside the fringes of the fog.

Quinn didn’t dare twitch as it watched, fearful of drawing its gaze. It was surprisingly difficult, especially since she felt the urge to puke every time the breeze picked up. It eventually left, taking several of the other abominations with it.

She fell back asleep after that, though not as deep a rest as she would have liked.

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She awoke early in the morning due to the foxes moving away. She stood and stretched out her back letting loose a loud yawn. They looked back at her before returning to the herd.

The entire clearing was bustling with activity as daylight returned to the world. Animals of all shapes and sizes were rearing to go as the fog slowly receded toward the south. As soon as the fog vanished, the clearing cleared out almost entirely. Only its human inhabitants remained.

Quinn kicked Mikeal as she ate a part of her bread. He jolted awake and created a magic circle. Different from her simple one-circle magic, his was much more advanced. His mana formed a circle inscribed with runes with another, larger circle around it. Small chains made from mana connected the two circles. His mana was also a different color than her own. Whereas hers was a murky purple nearly black, his mana was a bright pink-red. He definitely deserved to be called a mage with how quickly he brought the magic out and formed a fully functional circle. “Where?!”

“Yo, chill,” Quinn called out as she finished her breakfast.

The redhead canceled his magic and looked over at her. “Ah, good morning Quinn. How did you sleep?” He looked a tad… worse for wear. He had thick black circles under his eyes and looked as if hadn’t slept a wink the entire night. He also mysteriously had several red dots all over his face.

“I slept great. What, uh, what happened to you?” Quinn cast Cleanse on herself.

Mikeal groaned. “Where do I even start? I couldn’t fall asleep for a long time because of the freak shows in the fog. I finally fell asleep, but I had rolled away from my pack.”

“And?”

Red rose to his cheeks. “I blindly reached for my bag. I thought I grabbed it and rested my head on it once more… it was a porcupine.”

Quinn instantly burst into laughter. The image of him sleeping on a porcupine popped into her head, making her laugh even harder. Suddenly the pain of having him along felt well worth it. The hours of destroying her eardrums with terrible songs about ageless beauty seemed a valuable payment to see the pretty boy have his face hurt.

Mikeal looked like he had licked a lemon. “Yeah yeah, laugh it up. Are we going after the Rain Deer now?”

Quinn eventually managed to stop laughing, though the smile never left her eyes. “The herd is supposed to be north of here. They feed on a lichen that grows on the north side of the veiled grove.” She cast Compass to confirm her direction and set off.

As they walked into the woods, she couldn’t help but think about the events of last night. The whole interaction with the foxes was… weird to say the least. She was too tired to care last night, but now that she had time to think about it…

Why did they approach her? And they had the same kind of vibe as the… the… she really should come up with a name for the other energy, at least temporarily. It would make diving further into its mystery easier if she could actually relate her findings to a name. No pioneering scientist wrote a research paper without actually naming the phenomena they were observing, after all.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

How about… amber. It’s an ambient energy similar to mana. What did she know about amber? Almost nothing, unfortunately. It was definitely similar to mana in the way she could swirl it around. It was at least a hundred times more difficult to control and seemed to easily pass through matter. It felt like a warm pulsation, almost as if a heartbeat.

Quinn extended her senses away from her own inner thoughts in a way similar to sensing her inner mana. She could instantly feel the amber floating around the clearing. It was similar to oxygen in the way it seemed to be everywhere. This time, it felt slightly different. Instead of a warm and cozy blanket, it felt more along the lines of sunlight. It also kept the pulsation felt.

She hadn’t actively looked into it since her first couple of days, so she wasn’t actually sure if it was everywhere or if she just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Of course, more observations would have helped accurately dictate the presence, or lack, of amber.

Quinn was quite caught up in other pursuits, however. The main ones being magic and mana. She hadn’t messed with mana itself like she had when she gathered it into a ball but had rather practiced her control of the substance by moving it around her body. It took her half a minute to move it in the past, but now it took her barely fifteen seconds to gather enough mana to cast magic.

Quinn stepped over a branch. Since she didn’t know much about amber, nor did she know where to start, she turned to mana. She actually knew a fair bit about mana after the past week she had spent with it.

Mana was untamed energy in the truest sense of the word. The most common definition of energy was the ability to do work. And work it did. Just by giving it form and using runes it easily performed acts that could only be described as magical.

Was it truly a supernatural power befitting the name of magic? The ‘magic’ she had seen seemed to be more along the lines of a chemist transmuting matter through advanced science. The basis of its power appeared to be in mana’s ability to easily transmute into a different state of energy, after all. If anything was supernatural it was not the mana, but rather the runes that forced it to do work.

Ah, but that wasn’t exactly true. After all, healing magic couldn’t be explained simply as a different energy. Unless… unless it was a life force? Assuming that mana followed the laws of equivalent exchange, could it be so pure of an energy form that one could trade life force for it? Such a thing… surely the world would be full of immortals if that was possible. So maybe it wasn’t pure life force capable of extending lifespan, but rather a significant burst of cellular reproduction that caused wounds to heal quickly. That fit in with why she still felt hurt after she was fully healed.

Every form of magic she had seen, albeit a very limited amount, was some kind of energy transmutation. Cleanse seemed like it was a transmutation of mana to some seriously powerful ultraviolet rays. Healing was potentially a life force. The illusion magic she had seen from Mikeal was definitely a highly controlled form of light.

So what gave the seemingly simple etchings the power to force mana to change? They didn’t feel magical, and they certainly didn’t act magical when written on something other than mana. Quinn really didn’t know what to think about the mysterious written language. If only she could find a history book regarding its creation.

But assuming there wasn’t anything special about the language, would any language work? She had been thinking about using her native language to write on a magic circle but had held herself back. Maybe when she was truly on her own she could experiment further.

Although a part of her died inside as the questions stacked up, Quinn could only continue to let them stack as her primary focus was to leave the Veiled Grove. After she left she could focus on other pursuits.

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According to Compass, it was just before midday that they first caught sight of a Rain Deer's trail. It was quite easy to see as the animal made no attempts to dodge low-hanging tree branches and its hoof prints were quite easy to spot. They looked like two thick crescent moons facing each other. Just behind the tips of the moons were two little spots.

Quinn crouched down next to the trail of prints. They were soaked through and through while the area around the prints was only slightly damp. It had been through recently. No more than an hour at best guess.

Mikeal crouched down next to it. “Is it finally time?”

“Probably,” Quinn said. They followed the prints further north. When she lost the prints, she simply followed the path of destruction the thing’s antlers caused until she found them again. Deep gouges in the bark and snapped branches made tracking the beast quite easy.

And then she saw it through a gap in the trees. She paused while grabbing Mikeal to stop him from moving. He looked at her as if he was going to ask a question, but stopped when he saw the Rain Deer just ahead of them.

It was quite a majestic creature. The bull was different from the reindeer she had hunted and yet shared plenty of similarities. It was larger than the normal variant but had the same shape and proportions. Its fur was also different; a murky-gray hue that allowed it to blend in surprisingly well with its surroundings. Right around its collar, where a male reindeer's fur would typically be white, was dark black.

What didn’t allow it to camouflage itself were the massive antlers on its head. They were a deep blue that contrasted against its dark mane. The antlers were curved around its head like a regal crown as if the Rain Deer was some kind of great ruler. They seemed to glow with a faint light as raindrops were briefly illuminated before falling down to the forest floor.

Fortunately, they were directly behind it, so it hadn’t seen them yet. Quinn gently unslung her recurve bow and grabbed an arrow. Flashing her palm at Mikeal, she slowly backed up from the Rain Deer and walked in a wide arc around the patch of trees it was feasting at.

She stepped carefully, dodging lichen-coated branches and anything else that would make a noise if she stepped on it. Slowly, ever so slowly she crept up on its side. With movements that would make a sloth cry in pride, she aimed at the still clueless creature. Its head was bent down eating lichen growths which allowed her a near perfect shot.

She pulled the arrow back, straining her muscles to pull as far as she could. Then, with a breath out, she released the arrow.