The sun was up, and I felt hot. Too hot. Unnaturally hot. My face felt warm and puffy and the skin of hands was bright pink. I felt like I was halfway to a fever.

I might have taken off my cloak to try and cool down, if I hadn’t remembered the campfire stories I’d heard of winter hunters; men and women throwing off their clothes in the middle of winter, just before dying from the cold.

I had to be in that state right now, dangerously cold and not thinking clearly.

Worse still, I wasn’t alone.

A creature was sitting in my tree. It perched a few feet away from me, clawed feet wrapped around a branch, head craning over me. The smell coming off it was of old meat and curdled milk; a smell that tingled in my nose.

The thing was the height of a young child, with a black feathered body that reminded me of a vulture. Its upper limbs were more like feathered arms than wings, each ending in a small human hand the color and texture of dead leaves. Its head was a small, bleached human skull.

Spirit.

Worse than just a spirit, it was a corporeal spirit. The most dangerous category. Strong enough to have a solid body in the mortal world.

I needed to get down from my tree and run. Running would get me away, would get blood running back into my limbs, would warm me up.

I tried to sit up, but I was so weak I only managed to shift slightly before slumping back down.

The creature took a slow, halting step towards me, its clawed feet shuffling down the branch one at a time. It snapped its tiny teeth at me, and a wave of prickling power washed off it. More of the spoiled-meat maja smell.

I nudged at my own energy, pushing and pulling the sluggish bundle of maja at my core.

While my skin felt hot, my maja still felt serenely cool, a placid lake in quiet darkness. Acting on instinct, I pulled out threads of it, wiring them down and around my arms and legs.

The fever heat slowly vanished from my limbs, replaced with tingling coolness. My body immediately started vibrating with desperate shivers, and the truth of how cold I was hit me. I had to be halfway to a corpse.

The vulture spirit took a shuffling step backwards on its branch. It cocked its head, the empty eye sockets of the skull focused straight at me as if it were confused.

Its mouth dropped open, and a single word emerged from the empty space between its jaws.

“Flesh?”

“No,” I forced out through chattering teeth. “No flesh for you.”

“Why no flesh?” the thing asked, its jaws never moving.

“I’m not… not dead yet.”

The thing seemed to absorb that for a second, then stepped forward and craned down to try and take a bite out of my leg.

I felt its jaws close around my calf, the spike of pain as its blunt infant teeth sank into my skin.

I kicked weakly, then raised my arms and pushed Force aspect into the maja already permeating my hands.

The blast of force rolled out of my palms, knocking the spirit away. It fluttered backwards through the air, flapping to srabilize itself before landing back on its branch.

It leaned back, feathers ruffled, craning its neck back toto look down at me as if it were offended.

“I’m not flesh for you to eat,” I said.

It cocked its head again.

“Soon.”

I shook my head.

Keeping half my attention on the spirit, I leaned forward and inspected the wound it had given me.

Beneath my pants leg two curved rows of red marks lacerated the skin where the thing’s teeth had dug into me.

The bleeding wasn’t bad. Its teeth were blunt, and if the wound didn’t go bad then it would probably close up within a few hours, and be healed in a few days. It wasn’t deep. It wouldn’t affect my walking. It was just weird, and unpleasant. The thing that worried me the most was the dark irregular blotch marking the skin between the two rows of teeth. It tingled, just beneath the surface, in the same way maja tingled.

“What did you do to me?” I asked, half to myself.

The spirit just clacked its teeth a handful of times in response.

Wonderful.

I twisted in the tree, moving my legs over the edge. With an effort, I pushed myself off the platform formed by the branches and fell a few feet to the ground below.

My legs gave out under me and I rolled on the mud.

I was still weak. I needed to eat, I realized.

The enormous gnawing hunger in my gut peeled away from the sensation of cold to take its place as its own independent suffering.

I reached up to the tree and grabbed my scout’s pack.

I didn’t have an easy way to cook the oats it had come with, but I blessed my past self for the decision to bring my hoard of oat cakes from the barracks.

I pulled one out and stuffed it into my mouth. It was soft from the rain, but in that moment I wasn’t going to complain.

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There was scrabbling in the tree above me. The vulture child’s head appeared above me, peering down at the oat cake in my hand.

I turned to put my body between the thing and my breakfast and started walking away.

The ground was still muddy, though it was firmer than it had been the previous night. My legs were stiff and sore from sleeping in the tree, and every step was harder than it should have been.

I was still holding maja I’d threaded through my arms and legs. I could feel a gentle tugging on my core as I moved, as if walking with the energy extended into my limbs put a slight demand on my reserves.

I was still shivering intermittently. From time to time a shudder started up in my shoulders and spread outwards, before receding.

I experimentally tried withdrawing the maja from my arms and immediately regretted it, a wave of unnatural heat flushing my skin.

I wasn’t healing myself from the exposure by filling myself with maja. I was only suppressing the damage.

I checked over my shoulder as I walked, keeping an eye out for the vulture spirit. It was following me a few dozen feet back, hopping from tree to tree, occasionally spreading its feathered arms and soaring across gaps as if it really had wings. After a few minutes, I stopped catching glimpses of it. I hoped that it’d abandoned me as a potential meal.

The map to Fort Msiesetr was damp when I pulled it out of my bag but the fabric was strong even soaking wet, and the waterproof dyes hadn’t run. It was probably designed to survive any adverse conditions.

It was still too cloudy to get my bearings by the sun, but I found where I was on the map easily enough. I had Windshriek Mountain as a reference, a huge dark shape in the mist to my left, indistinct but recognizable. I could match the shape of the track to the line on the map from that. Occasionally the track would fork or take a sharp bend, and each time I could use the distinctive shape the path took to update my awareness of where exactly I was.

After a few hours of walking on the second day, I came across my first landmark.

On the map it was a small sketch of a house labelled ‘Drachon Stead’. The reality was a ruin, an ancient stone cottage standing a few dozen feet off the side of the path.

Building in the swamp had to have been a daunting prospect for anyone, but at some point someone had tried it, and been punished for it. The house’s architect had built it on stilts, the stone walls supported by thick stone columns that held it a foot above the mud, but if the columns had ever rested on something more substantial than soft earth then those foundations had long given way. The house was sinking. The entire structure bent at an angle, with the north side a full two feet lower than the south edge.

The doorway was a dark, hollow opening, with only the rotted remains of a door hanging from rusted hinges. The windows were a pair of square black eyes. The roof, once made from overlapping wooden planks, was now covered in mud and plant growth, as if the swamp itself had crawled up there to claim it as part of its own territory.

I stopped to stare at it, wondering who built it and what could have possibly possessed them to want to live out here.

After a few seconds I felt a chill. I noticed faces staring back at me from the windows.

Pale figures stood inside the house, too tall and narrow to be human, too insubstantial to be real creatures.

Incorporeal spirits.

They watched me with bulging expressionless eyes as I backed away. I didn’t relax until long after the house was out of sight.

I’d never imagined a place where spirits were so common — as common as animals it felt like.

In Losiris, large and dangerous spirits were almost unheard of. They were the stuff of fireside stories. A favorite tavern tale in Kirkswill was that a cave a day’s journey from the village was haunted by a spirit they called Feltskin Jon. And that one probably wasn’t even true. Here, I hadn’t even had to travel a day and spirits were floating out of the trees.

The legend was that the Abbey had purged the land of dangerous spirits in Losiris centuries ago. True or not, my homeland was safe and settled. Nothing like that had happened in the swamp around Windshriek mountain.

As the sun slid into the sky directly above me, I let the maja slowly drain from my arms and legs.

The deathly fever had faded on my walk, my body warming up from the motion, and my muscles recovering from my night spent shivering.

The maja-supported journey had noticeably drained my reserves. They felt like they were down to half of what they had been before I’d set off. Half of a year’s worth of slow, steady accumulation, spent in just a few hours. But if I hadn’t discovered how to reinforce my body with it I might not have survived at all.

The muddy ground firmed up in midday sun. The fog burned off, revealing the mountain looming to my left.

I stopped at a tree whose leaves had cupped the rain to drink. I ate from my provisions. I took off my cloak and hung it on a branch to air out.

I passed animals as I traveled. At a crossroads, a strangely calm boar stepped out from the undergrowth, paused to give me a long, knowing look, then disappeared into the forest on the other side of the road. By that point, I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to tell animal from spirit.

It was getting close to the evening of the second day when I finally reached the fort.

My first sight of it was a crown of moss-covered granite peeking over the canopy ahead of me. The stones were pitted by the rain, stained white and black with bird mess. Many of the stones around the top of the tower were missing, blown down by the wind or dropped by crumbling mortar.

The road had been almost invisible up to this point, reclaimed by the swamp. Only the occasional mile markers had risen above the crawling vines and grass to reassure me that I hadn’t wandered off into the forest. The final stretch was different. A few feet ahead of me,l the vegetation covering the old road grew thinner, and beyond that it was gone completely.

The line of slightly stony mud I was used to, when I could see the road at all, became a proper track. Wide and flat, it was paved with irregularly shaped stones that were clean of mud and weeds.

It might have been a welcome sight in other circumstances, but I knew how long the fort had been abandoned. And I knew there was no human presence here maintaining it.

I stopped, dropped my pack to the ground, and went over what I knew about my task.

Officially, I was here to look for the geneaology of Count Seratto.

Unoficially, Master Antonyx wanted me to search for astronomical records.

The area between the constellations Kor, Vance, and Mephit is called the Vance Trigon.

Antonyx wanted any records of changes in those stars in a certain time period.

It seemed obscure and irrelevant to me, but I could expect a better reward from Master Antonyx than I’d got from Master Korphus.

Though, now I thought back to my meeting with him, he’d never actually promised me anything specific. Or even anything at all.

I sagged slightly, then picked up my pack and threw it over my shoulder.

A few hundred feet down the well-kept road the main fort came into view.

Ruined, its gates broken, but clean and free from the growth that was everywhere in the swamp. Something was taking care of it, even if no human lived here. The best I could hope for was that it was protected by some kind of passive magic. Maybe a nice cantogram.

I checked my maja reserves. They were lower than when I’d arrived at the academy but workable. I kicked the worst of the mud off my sandals and headed for the front gate.