They hiked for two days, stopping only to sleep. Alyx did not loiter to let Cass forage interesting plants, pushing them relentlessly forward. She barely spoke to Cass either, caught up in her own thoughts. Instead, Cass spent most of that chatting with Salos telepathically as he darted from tree branch to tree branch in his cat form. He moved naturally as if he’d always had four legs. Cass didn’t know if that was a part of the skill or if he had spent time in the past as a cat too.

Eventually, the trees thinned, the tall lightningwood replaced more and more with the blue-barked madrones, before even these spread out and shrunk in height to dry, shrubby bushes.

The ground ahead of them more and more frequently became rising cliff sides, their faces of crumbling stone denying them direct passage.

“He’s there,” Alyx said and pointed down one such cliff, into the valley below. It was a wide meadow, awash with wildflowers and overgrown in tall grasses. At the far end was a pair of towering cliffs, unscalable and desolate.

Between them stood a behemoth.

Cass had thought the lion had been huge. She’d thought the spider enormous. Neither held a candle to the size of the boar standing in the pass.

It was larger than a semitruck, its body covered in dark, blue-grey bristles. It had a pair of tusks, one on either side of its wide, shovel-like snout. It pawed the ground with a heavy hoofed foot, something it did frequently based on the bare, muddy ground around it.

She tried Identify on it, but it was too far away.

Alyx supplied the details for her anyway. “That is the Thunderback Boar, the Lord of the Pass. That is his pass. He is usually between level 20 and 25 during the standard season. He was level 29 when I came in. The entrance to the valley is on the other side of him.”

“People choose to fight that thing?” Cass asked, the wind stealing her words as it gusted over the ridge.

“Normally, it is considered the weakest of the three Lords, yes,” Alyx said. “However, the group that challenged the Valley this year died to him, so he got a chance to grow. At this point, I can’t imagine any Trial taker strong enough to kill it. Unless—“ She looked pointedly at Cass, “—you’re hiding some other miraculous plan or power.”

The look in her eyes seemed to suggest she half expected Cass to have such a thing.

Salos shook his head. You could Wind Step around it if you were willing to abandon her.

Cass shook her head. She made a show of waving what remained of her destroyed sleeves. “Nope, nothing left up my sleeves.”

Alyx’s brow knit together in confusion but she pushed on anyway. “In that case, we should continue with the Skyline Ascent. We’ll climb these cliffs.” She pointed in the opposite direction up the cliffs to their right. “There is a winding path up. At the top, it then follows the ridge until we can climb down again on the far side.”

“And it's guarded by the Herald of the Pass, you said?” Cass asked. “What is it exactly?”

Alyx nodded. “The Epherwing. The apex predator of the skies.”

“And I don’t suppose we can just sneak past either the Thunderback or the Epherwing under the cover of dark?” Cass asked.

“That is a strategy others have used,” Alyx said. “But high-level Rogue skills are needed to do it reliably. The Lord is notified when challengers enter his area. As for the Epherwing… That may be our best option.”

“That’s the path you recommend then?” Cass asked.

Alyx nodded. “It's the only one that I have any chance of paying you back on.”

Cass frowned. That wasn’t exactly a good reason to pick it. But she agreed she didn’t want to have anything to do with that monstrous boar in the distance.

“Then I don’t see any reason to wait,” Cass said.

Alyx nodded, “This way then.”

***

The part Cass had not taken into consideration was how steep the path would be. Perhaps the name ‘Skyline Ascent’ should have been a clue or Alyx’s description of it following the high ridge line above the valley. Either way, Cass did not need to breathe, yet she still found herself huffing and puffing to keep up with Alyx as they hiked up yet another rocky switch back.

The flora had changed again. The tall trees had completely disappeared. The bushes were scraggly, spiky things, all twig and thorn. Weedy thistles erupted from the crevasses between the dark stone, islands of color and life in an otherwise dry and lifeless cliffside.

“Are you okay?” Alyx asked from the next turn in the switch back, an incredulous frown on her lips.

Cass nodded breathlessly, struggling the next twenty feet to catch up to the swordswoman.

“Are you sure?” Alyx asked again.

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Cass nodded again. She wished she had water. She could have water, she supposed, with a little magic. She had a cup in her Bag now. She’d only have to summon the water to fill it.

What was she waiting for again?

She stumbled up next to Alyx, pulling a cup from her Bag pocket and summoning the water between ragged breaths. She gulped it down greedily, the relief instantaneous and welcome.

Magic was weird.

Cass looked up to see Alyx looking down on her, an eyebrow raised in an unasked question.

Cass offered her the cup. “Want some?”

Alyx shook her head. “I don’t need it.”

Cass shrugged. She was about to put it back in her Bag but changed her mind, refilled it again, and downed the second glass.

Magic!

She grinned and put the cup away. Her stamina had recovered most of the way and she was ready to keep going.

“You can do all that, and you really expect me to believe you came from a world without magic?” Alyx asked.

Cass shrugged again. It was a weird thought. “Would you believe me if I said this was new?”

Alyx shook her head. “What’s so important you need to hide it like this?”

“You agree that I’m not from here at least, right?” Cass asked. They walked up the next section at a slower pace for Cass’s sake.

“You don’t seem to speak Jothi, so yes. Either that’s the most frustrating cover story ever invented or you're definitely not from the Continent,” Alyx said.

“So why is another world so unbelievable?” Cass asked.

“How did you get here?” Alyx asked in return.

“Creepy, tentacle-filled portal?”

Alyx shot Cass another incredulous glare. Or maybe a confused one? Most of Cass’s attention was going toward putting one foot in front of the other up the incline. She might have increased physical stats compared to the Cass of Earth, but the Cass of Earth had pretty abysmal physical stats. Like they said, two times zero was still zero…

“Your story involves summoning. Spontaneous summoning, from the sound of it,” Alyx said. “You must know how ridiculous that sounds.”

How ridiculous is that? Cass shot Salos the question. He had dematerialized when he realized Cass was struggling to carry her body weight up the climb and that he didn’t feel like walking.

Vanishingly unlikely, but not impossible, Salos said. It happened from time to time in places like this. That was part of why the Trial was built here.

“No,” Cass replied to Alyx, armed with Salos’s answer.

Alyx raised another eyebrow. “Let me try again, you say you were summoned here?”

Cass nodded.

“By who?”

“Weird circle on the far end of the valley.” Cass pointed in the general direction they’d come from.

“You were summoned to this Trial?” Alyx asked, the exasperation in her voice growing.

Cass nodded.

“That is impossible.”

Salos?

I wouldn’t go that far, he said. Just, as I said, statistically improbable.

“Summoning is the Domain of the Gods.” There was a finality to the statement that demanded to go uncontested.

Cass wasn’t about to let it, though. “Why?”

Alyx physically recoiled. “What do you mean, ‘why’? It's the Domain of the Gods. It isn’t for people to attempt, much less succeed.”

Hardly, Salos snorted. My previous companion was an accomplished summoner.

“That can’t be true,” Cass said to Alyx.

Alyx rolled her eyes. “I don’t know what things are like where you’re from, maybe your country is so blessed by the gods everyone has been given the right to summon, but that’s not how things work here.

“And, even if there was a summoner blessed by a God with that ability, summoning is expensive and complicated. It needs arrays and arrays of runes and even more Potential to activate it.”

“Isn’t the Trial ground littered with Summoning circles?” Cass asked. “Isn’t that where most of the monsters come from?”

“Are you a monster, Cass?” Alyx asked.

Cass froze. A thought she’d been ignoring since she saw the Kylten Hound all those days ago shoved its way to the front of her brain.

Monsters came out of the summoning circles.

Cass had come out of a summoning circle.

Was that because Cass was a monster?

She shook her head. That was silly. That was a logical fallacy. As true as saying: “All squares are shapes. All circles are shapes. Therefore, squares and circles must be the same thing.”

But she wasn’t human.

That was true. Did that mean she was a monster though? No. That was another fallacy. It didn’t mean anything.

What even was a monster?

What even was she?

Cass shook her head, catching her accelerating breaths from running off with her calm. She forced a smile to her lips. “No. What kind of question is that?”

Alyx’s eyes had narrowed. Had they done that when she’d asked the question or during the unreasonably long pause between the question and Cass’s answer?

Alyx’s hand rested on her sword’s hilt. Did she rest it there all the time, or had she just tensed?

“It shouldn’t be one,” Alyx said slowly.

“Oh,” Cass forced the smile harder. “I see. I misunderstood.”

It had been a rhetorical question. Only Cass was seriously worried about it. The tension was from the long pause. The tension may even have been imagined. It was just Cass, worrying about useless things.

“Seriously, what are you hiding?” Alyx asked.

“I’m not!”

“Come on, really? Is it a plot against my house? My city? The duchy?”

Cass shook her head. “I was summoned here!”

“By who? With what ritual? For what purpose?” Each question was sharper and more frustrated than the last.

Cass didn’t know what to tell her. Cass didn’t have answers to those questions either.

Alyx shook her head. “Never mind. You don’t need to trust me with your secrets. I will pay you back for what you’ve given me and then we can go our separate ways. Don’t you worry.”

Cass wanted to contradict her, but she already knew nothing she could say would change Alyx’s mind.

And what did Cass even want from her? She didn’t want to be paid back for saving her, she wanted a friendly face who could tell her where she was and why she was here. And that wasn’t something Cass could trade for. If Alyx didn’t want to provide it, there was nothing Cass could do to get it.