An enormous toad blocked our way. It sat in the middle of one of the muddy landbanks south of the mountain, six feet high and more than ten across, its eyes moving independently as tracking things only it could see. It was brown-skinned, with a pair of fleshy horns rising from ridges above its eyes, and mottled black shapes that almost looked like paintings running down its back. It was clearly a spirit, and fully corporeal. Given its size, that meant it was probably a local power in this part of the swamp.

Gail came to a stop. She let out the smallest sigh, looking more like someone who’d come across a fallen tree they’d have to climb over than a powerful, probably dangerous spirit.

“Spirit, move aside,” she called.

The toad’s eyes swiveled to point at her the second she spoke. It stared at her for moment, then belched a wordless croak. The noise went on for several seconds, loud enough that it made ripples dance across the surface of the muddy puddles between us.

“Spirit, move aside, or I’ll toast your skin off and leave you dissolving in the water.”

The toad turned to face her fully and hunkered down, lowering its head like it was going to charge.

Gail pulled on her maja, the sensation of prickling straw washing out from her like the heat from a fire. I grabbed the hilt of my sword and drew it. The short blade wouldn’t do much unless I found a weak point.

The toad responded by parting its jaws. A blob of pink bloomed out from between its lips, and then a giant pink tongue was flying at her.

I pulled on my maja, squeezing it into place along my spine and the back of my head. A thudding pain sprung up behind my eyes as the reactions-enhancing technique took effect.

The tip of the tongue became a blob of wax, oozing through the air towards Gail. With the world slowed I had time to see her casually step aside, hold out her hand, and release a cloud of energy that tinted the air a sickly green.

The cloud engulfed the tongue, blackening a section of pink sin over a few fractions of a second. The outer surface corroded into a mess of holes and leaking flesh, and when the tongue reached its full extension it snapped. The blackened section tore like wet paper and the severed end slopped to the mud, contracting like a worm.

The severed end of the toad’s tongue smoked with free maja as it flew back into its mouth. It opened its jaws again, this time to belch with a croak of wordless anger.

Gail took a relaxed stance, but from close up I could tell she was still tense. Her voice was as calm and authoritative as always when she spoke. “Now, stand aside.”

The toad wasn’t listening. It rose up on its legs and started charging at her, its padded toes plowing up the mud as it covered the ground as fast as a charging bear.

I readied a blast of Force aspect, but Gail was ahead of me. She threw out her hands and summoned a torrent of Force that stopped the toad in its tracks. It fought against the onslaught for a second, then leaped out of its path, straight up. It soared through the air, then came down right on top of Gail. She angled her arms up to deflect it, but the Force she was using wasn’t enough to stop something that heavy falling straight at her.

The toad landed across her body, squelching her into the mud. A second later its jaws were around her, lifting her off the ground, and tossing her back into its mouth.

I’d seen a toad eat a mouse, once, and the effect was disturbingly similar.

Its jaws snapped shut. Gail was gone. The toad’s eyes turned on me.

The pressure behind my eyes from the reflexes technique built to a sharp pain, and I knew from practice that it would only get worse. The configuration of maja that made the world seem to slow to a crawl was powerful in short bursts, but it was an imperfect technique. It put stress on the body that only built up as it was used.

I let go of my maja, letting it flood back into my core. The speed of the world returned to normal.

The toad was staring at me with slowly swiveling eyes. It looked like it was about to charge me any second, but for now was locked in place.

My breath tightened in my chest. I could imagine myself being eaten up as easily as Gail had been. Easier, even. With the reactions technique, I might have been able to dodge the leap that caught Gail, but it wouldn’t matter if it got close to me.

“I apologize on her behalf,” I said clearly.

The spirit was still a few seconds. It didn’t relax, but it didn’t throw itself at me either. One of its eyes twitched to follow something in the trees, then returned to me a second later.

“Do you have a name I can call you?” I asked it.

Its mouth parted and a pair of words tumbled out.

“Hungry Year.”

“Hello, Hungry Year. I’m Dorian, a sorcerer from the mountain.”

I gestured behind me at the looming silhouette of the peak just visible through the mist, though there was no way the spirit could have missed it. It was the most spiritually significant object for a hundred miles.

“Lots of food comes from the mountain,” Hungry Year burbled.

I kept my expression fixed as its eyes swiveled away, then back to me.

From a few yards ahead of me, I felt a sudden spike of familiar maja. Bristling straw and sharp spines. It felt like being attacked by a broom.

Gail was still alive in there and was fighting to get out.

“Will you do me the favor of spitting out my colleague?” I asked.

“No,” the spirit said.

“What if I do a favor for you in return?”

The toad focused on me, seeming to think about it. Its eyes twisted to stare past each other, before focusing back on me.

“Yes. Favor,” it said. “Give me larger meal. I will let the small meal go.”

I kept my expression neutral as I heard what it wanted. I didn’t have a larger meal for it. Gail was a more advanced sorcerer than me. Even if I vented all of my maja, it wouldn’t add up to larger meal.

“I’ll have to think about that,” I said. “But I still think you should spit her out. She won’t sit well.”

Even as I spoke, I could feel Gail’s maja raging. If she applied all her maja at once as Force, or Corrosion, or even Winter, she could probably kill the spirit from the inside. For now it felt like she was trying to get out without spending more power than she needed to.

“They all go down in end,” the toad said sagely.

“You’ve never tried a sorcerer that powerful before,” I said. “If you don’t spit her back up, she’ll probably kill you. She is a bad meal.”

“I ate bigger,” the toad gurgled.

I took a breath and let it out as a sigh. This was going to take a while, and I didn’t want the spirit to take me by surprise while I was thinking up arguments. I pulled the loop of cord off my wrist and slipped the reed ring onto my finger.

The pierced bird appeared almost immediately, not close to the toad, but in a tree to my left. It manifested as a fluttering ball, sitting on a branch. It turned its head, looking at me with an eye stabbed through with a thorn. What was back there? Probably not the runaways, this close to the academy, but probably not a spirit either, with Hungry Year so close. Whatever it was didn’t seem to be moving out of its hiding place.

I turned my attention back to the toad. I could still feel Gail’s maja, ebbing and flowing like she was fighting a magical tug of war with the thing. I was expecting her to escape any moment, but every moment passed with no sign of her. I started to worry the thing might actually be able to keep her down. What was something like this doing at practically the foot of the mountain?

“How did you come to be so close to the academy?” I asked it.

“Food told me to come,” the spirit replied.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“Someone told you to come here?” I asked.

There weren’t many candidates for who that could have been.

“Told me I would find bigger food here, if I let it go,” the spirit said.

“It wasn’t a pair of students from the academy, by any chance?”

“It was food from the mountain.”

It sounded like the runaways had come across the spirit first, and bought it off with the promise it would get to eat the people sent to chase them down.

“I can point you at even bigger food, if you spit her out,” I said. Spirits were true to their nature. If the trick worked once, the chances were it would work again.

The toad made a squeaking noise as air escaped its mouth. I could feel Gail’s maja working, and see wisps of green energy seeping out from between its jaws.

“What bigger food?” it asked.

“I know a powerful spider spirit called Arcometi. If you let us go and return, I can order it to come down the mountain to be your meal.”

I kept to technical truths, worried that even spirits might be able to tell a lie. The spider was powerful, by its own reckoning. And I could order it to come down the mountain, even if I knew it would ignore me.

When I saw that the toad was actually starting to consider my offer, I decided that the spirit probably wasn’t that complex. Just something of hunger and ambition, biting off more than it could chew over and over, and somehow succeeding, until it had become something huge.

The toad made a low bubbling sound. Its eyes crossed and uncrossed, then it lifted itself up to its full height and focused on me.

“We have deal, Dorian of Mountain.”

As it spoke, there was a massive surge of maja from inside it, a rash of prickling straw. The energy swelled up, then vanished as the entire mass was aspected at once. I recognized the pattern. I’d done it myself.

A second later the toad exploded. Its skin popped open like a bursting corn kernel, red-brown spirit flesh blossoming out as its body was practically quartered by the blast.

Gail crouched in the ruin of what had been its stomach. The robe she wore around her head and neck was blackened and covered in green-yellow slime, her hair looking ragged and singed.

She stood up slowly, meeting my eyes over the smoking ruin of the spirit’s body. Apart from the superficial damage, she seemed fine. She didn’t even seem to be injured from when the the spirit had fallen on her.

“What were you doing out here?” she asked.

“Trying to negotiate your release,” I said.

“We don’t beg for favors from spirits. We use them, or we brush them aside.”

“I’m not at the point where I can just brush everything aside. I’m not sure you are either.”

She made a disgusted noise and turned away from me. She pulled off the robe she was wearing as a cloak and shook it out. A lot of the sickly color seemed to disperse from it, giving off the same green light as the Corrosion aspect I’d seen before. Maybe the toad had been using its own Corrosion.

The fluttering of wings caught my eye, and I turned to see the pierced bird flitting around the branches it had been sitting on before.

Gail set off walking again, striding through the scattered pieces of spirit.

“Wait,” I called after her.

I took a few steps towards the trees, changing angle until I had a clear line of sight to where the bird was sitting.

Just behind the next cluster of trees, hidden by leaves, was a cantogram. Someone had peeled the outer layer of bark off a tree and carved the symbol into its trunk. I recognized it immediately, the Wraith’s Lantern canto. It was a cantogram that would create light, at the cost of gradually inducing a wasting sickness in anyone who was exposed to it. This one had a modification; in the empty space at the center was the carving of an eye.

“Gail, stop,” I called. The cantogram was angled to face directly at the road.

She stepped into line with it and the symbol on the tree gave off a sound like two wooden blocks knocking together. A sound like hissing started up, and the carved design started to glow.

I spun on the spot and threw out my hands, throwing a rolling wave of Force at Gail’s back. It knocked her forward, pushing her out of the way just as the cantogram activated.

Bright white light shone out of the trees. It was focused in a beam, bathing the section of path where Gail had just been standing in blinding white. I covered my eyes the second I saw the light, and only lowered my arm when it’d passed.

There were still spots in my eyes as I pulled my arm away from my face. I could make out Gail lying face down in the mud a few yards ahead.

All that was left of the canto on the tree was a smoking mess of scars. Whatever maja-rich material it had been set with hadn’t stood up to the energy it’d channeled.

Gail threw herself to her feet and rounded on me, but the dark expression on her face slipped away when she saw the spot where she’d been standing.

A large, irregular patch of ground was a completely different color to the rest. It was lighter, and the mud was covered in a thin crust, as if it’d spent an afternoon baking in bright sun.

“What was that?” she asked.

I turned away from her and walked up to the tree. I could just about make out the remains of the cantogram where the wood hadn’t burned away.

“A cantogram-based trap,” I said. “The toad spirit was manipulated to wait for us here, and I think the runaways set this trap as well. It must have been Gortan Oake. Duran didn’t know anything about cantos.”

She came up and stared at the cantogram for a minute. If she thought she could memorize it from the mess left behind after it burned out, she was out of luck. Eventually she turned away, heading off down the road.

“Be sure to warn me if you see another,” she said.

I spent the minute examining the center of the diagram, which had been relatively well preserved. I took a few seconds to pull out some paper and record the way the eye had been connected to the rest. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do anything with the information. Just drawing an eye didn’t have any magical effect. There had to be another component to it I wasn’t seeing, maybe a scrived spirit with orders to activate the canto at the right moment. There was no sign of any spirit, now.

When Gail was more than fifty yards ahead of me I bundled my papers back into my pack and set off after her.

I passed by pieces of spirit flesh on the way. The air was thick with maja, a tingling cut-grass smell, all of it smoking off the fragments of the toad. In another time, this might have been a good place to accumulate. The maja in the air here wasn’t any less dense than what had been coming out of the maja spring we’d found on academy grounds.

I noticed one of the pieces of flesh was moving. It was an irregular pink lump, about a foot across, twitching and stretching back and forth. It had four stubby nodes that looked like they could have been the start of limbs all waggling uselessly in the air, and as I paused to watch, I saw a slit open into a wide mouth. The spirit was regrowing itself a body. This piece of flesh must have been core to it, somehow, or it was just the biggest intact piece. A second later a pair of dimples appeared, becoming tiny eyes.

It was still alive, powerful enough to survive the damage to it had taken to corporeal form. It wouldn’t be as big as before when it recovered, but maybe that would be better for it. It wouldn’t have so much trouble finding meals bigger than it could handle.

It had been a dangerous spirit, one of the threats that stopped students from just running away, but now it was just another part of the swamp’s background spirit life.

I used the tip of my sandal to flip the lump over, and it immediately started wriggling away on its stubby limbs. It went straight to the nearest piece of brown-red flesh, opened its flat line of a mouth, and started chomping on it.

I turned away from it and hurried after Gail.

“Was that Corrosion aspect, you were using back there?” I asked, a minute after I’d caught up.

“Yes,” she said easily. “The spirit too. Most of my efforts were going to keeping it off me with my own mastery.”

“I don’t suppose you’d tell me how to learn Corrosion?” I said.

“Drink acid,” she replied.

I wasn’t completely sure if she was giving me the technique, or suggesting that I should go and kill myself.

The rest of the day passed with only a few scuffles with minor local spirits. A possessed vine curled down out of a tree like a snake to try and choke Gail, only to turn black and slough to the ground. A spirit in the shape of a giant wasp stung me and immediately died, and half an hour later a smaller version of it hatched out of my skin, the swollen spot itching and stinging the whole way through. At one point we passed a pile of mud which was singing quietly to itself in nonsense words. It didn’t respond to any of my questions, but also didn’t seem to pose any kind of threat.

We didn’t see any signs of our prey until dusk of the first day.

Just as the sun was sinking into the swamp, we came across a stretch of stagnant water wider than the others we’d passed. The bank was choked with weeds and cattails, the surface further out rippling with mortal insect life and the movement of underwater fish.

About thirty feet out into the water, a ragged piece of gray fabric floated on the surface, caught in a bloom of submerged weeds. A Potentiate’s robe.