We walked with reverence for the unknown. The night was dark, and the cold wind instilled in me a fear that I had not seen thus far. We were guided only by a beacon in the distance—the dancing flame.

Judging by its size, it had to still be at least five minutes away from our position. The wooden house stood defiant to the ravine, challenging the strong winds in a battle of wits.

It was hard to believe that someone would like to hold a meeting there, but we had no other choice but to do so. Layan had too much skin on the game; lying to us and bringing us somewhere else would do no good for her. And it was impossible that we were confused, aside from that house, a few trees, and the bottomless cliff.

We advanced with utmost care. Every step product of a precise calculation. If we had made any wrong movement, we would have followed the rocks and pebbles that continuously jumped off the border.

Poorly equipped for this kind of adventure, we shook and shivered with every passing second. The cold was getting to our bones, and the image of the flame was quickly becoming our only salvation.

We were tempted to run to that fire and let the warmth embrace us. We were wishing to let go of any precaution, throw caution to the wind, and just rush in a sprint. A part of us, however, was still safe enough from nature’s chilling breath to keep it together.

We periodically exchanged looks. Our hands met several times. We talked and checked on each other. We were constantly making sure that the other one wouldn’t do anything stupid.

Soon, we abandoned our valley and entered the exposed side of the mountain, the very same that ended with a straight vertical face. The only other way forward was by walking on the exposed bedrock.

I was first. We had stopped to talk, to analyze if there was any other option, and we had concluded that we had to charge forward. I stepped on the bedrock just to find my world turning upside down. My foot slid on the ground as if it had never been there to begin with.

I placed a hand on the ground. Or tried, as it too failed to grasp anything solid. I gasped as my heart pounded hard enough to feel it in my mouth. My chest hit the ground, and all the air abandoned my lungs.

I gasped for air, failing to realize how trivial that problem was. My breath would, eventually, come back to me. Unless I failed to notice that I was falling right into the pit of darkness.

“Tarar!” I saw Yaira diving face-first into the mud next to the bedrock.

Her arm extended, and my eyes went round. Something in me clicked just then. My knee-jerk reaction managed to make my arm move fast enough. My hand clamped around hers hard enough to crush bones.

For a brief moment, I saw her face and her struggles to pull me up, and I thought that both of us were about to die. I had condemned her with me. She grunted and huffed; her face became a tone of red that I had never seen before on any person, but she eventually managed to stop us.

I wasn’t thinking anymore, to the point that I hadn’t even noticed that I was no longer short of breath. I lied on all fours as I recapped the events. The bedrock was wet. Not from rain, as the night was so clear that no clouds or stars could be seen. It was humidity brought up from the bottom of the ravine by the strong gushing winds.

“Thank you,” I whispered without raising my head.

I was not ashamed; I simply didn’t have the strength to do or say anything else. My legs were shaking, and I was repeating for the fourth time the whole situation.

“We are close,” Yaira said, forcing me to think of something else.

The house had become bigger, and even the dancing flame seemed to be welcoming us to dance with it. Certainly, this seemed like the last stretch, the last obstacle between us and Makka’s captors.

I got up carefully. My body wanted to do so in a rush, but my mind managed to convince it that, being so close to the bedrock, that was stupid. I could not fall two times into the same trap.

“It’s wet enough to make it impossible to walk on it,” I told Yaira. “But I have an idea.”

It was a smart idea that would solve our problem. However, and I was fully aware of it, it was a far from ideal compromise towards our stealthiness. We had to keep going, and we couldn’t afford to lose any more time, so I just did it.

La’er. The sword made of eternal flames materialized in my hand, as threatening and deadly as the first time I had drawn it. It would see no blood today, which might have been upsetting, as it only had to dry our path.

I refrained from sending big flaming blades in the direction of the house and instead focused on spreading tiny flames right in front of us. In our fours, not trying to tempt our luck, we advanced slowly, one slash of La’er at a time.

Just this patch of travel took us the whole five minutes I initially estimated for the whole distance. The traditionalists had chosen to erect their house in the least logical place.

The cold had become unbearable by that time. Our hands were freezing, our clothes humid, wet, and disgusting on our skin. We advanced towards the house with the dreadful sensation that the trees themselves were looming over us.

Yaira and I rarely crossed our sights anymore. We were holding hands to avoid getting too separated, but our eyes were darting from branch to branch, seeking the origin of the many noises we were hearing. Maybe it was the wind, or maybe the wildlife unique to this environment. We didn’t manage to locate anything at all.

Every time I stole a glance at the flame, I saw it unchanged. Unperturbed by our advance, it kept dancing to the rhythm of the wind. Refusing to acknowledge our steps, it didn’t grow anymore in size. The only thing that changed was its alluring promise of warmth, how it enticed us to abandon ourselves and reach for its safety.

We kept walking, immersed in this unwelcoming world that seemed to want us out of it. The night was getting darker; not even the moon was shining enough to guide us. Luckily, the flame was still going strong in the distance.

The time seemed to have stopped. No matter how much time passed, we weren’t getting any closer to our goal. We could now hear wolves howling. The wind tossed us from side to side, seemingly coming from absolutely everywhere.

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“Yaira, something’s wrong,” I said, finally tying the clues together. “The closer we get, the worse it gets. Wind. Cold. A ravine. Wet bedrock. Freezing. Horrors hidden out of sight. That’s not normal.”

“And the flame…” She murmured.

“Yeah, the flame is not changing at all.”

We were going nowhere. We might have even been nowhere. The flame had been the only constant during this whole time, and no matter what we tried, we weren’t getting closer to it.

We immediately stopped. As soon as we figured out that we were being played with, the illusion came down. There were still sounds, noises, and wind—everything was still happening, but it didn’t affect us. Maybe it had never affected us to begin with.

“How can a formation be this powerful?”

That was Yaira’s words, and I found them hard to believe. Why, if there was a formation involved, had I not seen it before? My true sight could see Ink as threads lingering everywhere I looked, and here there was nothing.

I turned around in a complete circle, and I reaffirmed myself. There was nothing. Nothing. Since I had gained my sight, when had I seen literally nothing? Not even in the darkest room had I been able to tune down this power.

Nothing!

I let go of Yaira as if she were burning on touch. My eyes, threatening to pop, examined every inch of her exposed and covered skin. Nothing, I thought once more.

How can that be possible, Spare?

No answer came. For two seconds, I was alone in a world where nothing of what I knew so far made sense. Two seconds that seemed like an eternity, during which I questioned even if I was myself.

Desperate, I took a look at myself and at my own tattoos. At first, there was nothing, not even the slightest trace of Ink. But the longer I stared, the blurrier it became. It was barely a dot centered on each drawing, but if I concentrated, I could see it—a string that started on the drawing and reached upwards, but that barely after leaving me, warped into circles and spirals that I had never seen before.

“I’ve heard of it,” Spare’s voice pulled me back to more positive thoughts. “Glyphs and formations powerful enough to impress fake perceptions onto people.”

I imagined Spare in front of me, gulping with gravitas as he stroked his long beard.

“It was a myth, not something that the Drak’ga had. Certainly, it had never been in the possession of the Traditionalist faction. Be careful, this changes everything.”

Yaira was shaking. Her eyes looked at me with uncertainty and fear. I was acting like a madman, and she was beginning to think I was indeed one. I shook my head twice and slightly slapped both of my cheeks.

“Sorry that I’ve scared you… For a moment, I thought that you weren’t real, and I was even starting to doubt that I was. My sight, everything I know about Ink, had started to fail me.”

I offered my hand again, realizing for how long I had been holding hers and how much I was missing it now. She took it with a smile, and pointed with her other hand towards the flame in the distance.

“We are in this together, so let’s figure it out.”

I stared at our hands for a heartbeat and then nodded enthusiastically.

“Yeah!”

I shared everything Spare knew, which was not much. A myth that never got confirmed, a story that explained how the greatest creation of some anonymous Drak’ga got lost. A formation capable of misguiding anyone unfortunate enough to trigger it.

All versions of the story agreed on a single axiom: the formation could deceive someone’s senses and make them see, hear, smell, touch, and even taste things that were not there.

Now that we knew what it was and that we were being played with, all that remained was escaping from the trap. Easily said, but not done. We imposed on ourselves a deadline of only two minutes before coming up with the next steps. Makka was still our priority, and we didn’t think he would last for long.

Rush ahead without caring for the consequences. Enter communion, where the senses wouldn’t matter. Swing La’er wildly until something, somewhere, broke.

We could come up with three options, and we discarded two of them almost immediately. Our senses weren’t to be trusted, but that didn’t mean we weren’t doing something in the real world. What if rushing forward made us jump onto a real cliff?

Similarly, swinging La’er could mean killing lots of innocents if done in the wrong place and moment. And we had no way to verify if any of those were right or not.

“Thus, I’ll enter communion,” I announced. “I think, from my previous attempts, that I should be able to see the Ink for the formation. The next part will be tricky, though. If I manage to move, which is yet to be seen, you have to blindly follow me. Even if it looks like I’m going to walk straight into my death, just let me and follow right after.”

I closed my eyes before I could hear her answer. I didn’t need to; I knew she would do exactly as I said. She was my friend, and if she had asked that from me, I would have done the same.

Entering communion while standing was tricky. I am not even sure I could accomplish it if I weren’t yielding La’er. My training with Dravia should have taught me how to do it solely on concentration and willpower, but the situation was way to stressful and demanding to have such luxuries.

I let the same out-of-body experience invade me, and I stood by as the white walls encircled me. I hadn’t found in any book a name for this space where I floated as a spirit, where She called my name one time and again.

And She did call for me, but I was busy examining the threads of Ink that floated around me. There was no mistaking my own Ink and Yaira’s Ink, I had become deeply familiar with them. The same way I could smell home and know I was safe, there was a tone in the Ink, its shape, waves, and patterns, that I just immediately recognized.

I grabbed the only string of Ink that felt off. It was thicker than what I had usually encountered and pulsed with a rhythm that no other tattoo had ever had. It was cold and warm at the same time, and it tried to assault me when I touched it.

But I knew that all those sensations were rooted on my body complaining about fake feelings. Instead, I told the Ink to let me roam free. Like the time I had managed to invoke a dagger while in communion, I instructed it to move my body.

Every step I took in this realm of Ink translated to a different movement in the real world. I didn’t care about where my body was going. All that mattered was that Ink guided me in the core’s direction.

The core. A concept that I didn’t even know the meaning of. A word that transcended my understanding, but that, somehow, I still knew what it meant. It was the central piece of the formation, the one part that, if poked, would break the whole chain of glyphs and sigils.

I kept moving, hoping Yaira was still following me into the unknown. It didn’t take much time until I reached the end of my journey. The thread continued expanding until it met with the Ink’s origin, but that was not my goal. I stopped when the core was in sight.

Right then, I sent my last command in communion. La’er, swing with all your might and destroy the formation.

I abruptly exited this peaceful status. All I could see was white, as if I had exited the darkest tunnel in Lamar, and, suddenly, the sun was shining right into my eyes.

I squeezed my hand. Yaira was still there.

A cacophony of voices was overlapping around me. I couldn’t get anything from what was being said, just that the air was filled with commotion, excitement, consternation, elation, and lamentation in equal parts.

If that overwhelming sensory experience were reality, for a moment I wished I could go back into the world of deceit. At least there, once you knew nothing was real, you were devoid of any senses.

Slowly, my vision was returning, but it wasn’t back yet when I heard two hands loudly clapping together. All voices were immediately silenced, and all that remained were mine and Yaira’s agitated breathing.

“They have passed the first test!”

A male’s voice—Drak’oora Weirar’s if my memory served me right—announced to the room. Once more cheers erupted, this time accompanied by the screeches of cutlery scratching against dishes and the clanks of glasses.

Just what in Ink’s name is going on?