Lank had the funniest grin on his face. Fireside to an oven roasting bird, he gladly waved Tim to join them.

“Smells delicious,” Tim said, careful as he descended the ladder. Chris’s citrus smelling ganja filled the small enclosure with its dank, yet cheery aroma. Freshly chopped buds sat in a pile by his rolling papers, and two small jars, one of seed oil, the other of goso syrup.

“I’ve been saving these,” Lank said. “Marinated with a family recipe,”

“Did you find a secret entrance down here or something?” Tim asked.

Kari kept busy on the other side; snipping ends off the husks they’ve harvested from the trees. She ate and worked, setting up a collection of tree pieces on a rickety wooden table.

Chris didn’t offer any hints and licked a doober sealed with a mischievous eye.

“I’ve been tracking the Sails into Dutchy lands,” Lank said, forking crispy sticks Tim guessed were vegetables onto the plates. “In the Hunt, I tracked them back here and have been looking for E’Tic or someone like him.”

In some ways, his patience reminded Tim of characters from political thrillers who can rest because they think they’re three steps ahead of you. He’d matured impressively since they’d met last.

“And you have the guy’s Spirit Memories,” Lank continued while chewing his chicken morsel. “If it doesn’t kill you first, being a priest down here gives us a powerful weapon.”

“Two if I we can forge the Pearl back together,” Tim said, gesturing with a lazy bow to his brother, who casually accepted with a humble grin.

Lank nodded, a smile gracing his response. “First we need to make demon traps.”

He sipped some water and glanced at Kari to deliver another message.

She smiled at the joy of ending a long wait, her attention on Tim with eyes doting before a request. “The truth is running into you down here was no accident. Silo 19 and the borderlands are swarmed with demons. We don’t have the ammo or the women to get us through.”

Kari tapped her temple with a coy secret. “I have a memory or two for you.”

The thought of pulling a memory sent a new tension headache through his skull.

“Not yet,” Lank said, “first we eat.”

Chris handed him a plate with the red and brown seasoned chicken breast, the skin steaming where the fork speared it.

“Did you make anything out of the Sail’s cipher on the door?” Lank asked.

Tim translated it with the details Murphy pointed out, carving his first bite and stabbing it into a couple pea snaps roasted brown.

Lank jotted some notes in a new ledger.

It could use some hot sauce. Oh well. Tim bit into the free-range chicken’s greasy skin and crunchy seasoning. The juicy meat was almost too hot, forcing him to gas the steam before it scorched the roof of his mouth.

Tim took his time while they cooled off, projecting his memories from E’Tic, and the artisan and the Night Watch into an aura-leather map, crafting enough physical texture to let Lank carry it.

While he worked on drawing their route through the borderlands, Kari divided the fruit strands among Tim and Chris.

“Like you did with the map,” Kari said to Tim, “we need a little physical substance,” she pinched the strands, each about a foot long and thin as shoe laces. “When you’ve absorbed my memories, you’ll come back here and stretch it out until it’s nearly pure aura, invisible to the untrained eye. Demons have poor eyesight, and when they get close enough, you’re going to cast some kind of fire or light to blind them before we cast the nets. I’ll show you in a memory how to ward the middle and the knots Chris will tie to the stakes.”

Tim nodded, too tired to sigh properly or put up a fight beyond, “Can we smoke first before that? The food and drink helped, but Me and Murph are aura wiped; my joints are stiff as wood.”

The poor donkey laid on its side by the fire, chicken bits stuck in the fur around his mouth while Tonda licked at his ears like a concerned mother.

“That’s it.” Lank lunged over the map and excitedly tapped three points in a trailing pattern through a farmstead to the northern side. “Had we followed the trails using the arrows in the original directions, it would have taken us to this swampsand and likely a trap the rebellion put there.”

He shifted his fingers to different connecting tunnels on the eastern side. “This is how we get to the Silo’s Dimensional Heart.”

Lank trailed his hand off the top of the map to where Silo 19 would be. Tim didn’t have that down yet. For now, they had plenty to worry about in the acres of borderland between them.

E’Tic’s memories shed snippets like fall leaves, forcing Tim to strain to connect them. The food helped, but he was toast for spells right now, and this strained the same brittle fibers. Still, he’d already spent the energy to cast it, so this was like cleaning up after a long day, tired or not, he wanted to finish the job. Some of those fragments included where his friends lived across the abandoned farmstead and secret tunnels they shared to stay out of sight.

“How do you know those new trails aren’t caved in or full of something we don’t want?” Tim asked. “My Danger Ping isn’t reading well at a distance down here.”

That was another spell he hoped to release soon. His head throbbed with its pulsing.

Lank exhibited maturity at a level above as he took in Tim with a proper level gaze. “You’ve been incredible. I’ve been hard on you since you picked my pocket.”

“Before that.”

Lank poised fingers over his chest and bowed.

Tonda studied him with her dark eyes, poised in her forward lying down to snap up if needed.

“My sincerest apologies to you both,” Lank said. Point is,” Lank pointed a perfunctory pointer into Tim’s chest, pointedly.

Tonda growled and inched forward.

“Easy now,” Tim said to Lank. “She thinks you wanna wrestle, and my money’s on her.”

Lank raised placating hands and lowered his gaze at Tonda. “I was only emphasizing a point that neither of you don’t have to prove nothing. We trust your best will be there.”

“Speaking of our best.” Chris slid out four wrapped doobers from his palm like a magician playing a bad trick with a bold smile. The paper reminded Tim of the brown paper they used to wrap their textbooks in before they were too cool for that.

“You know,” Tim said to Chris, “if this whole thing doesn’t work out you could run a real chill dispensary.”

“And you could bless the grieving with a trip down memory road.”

Tim thought of how that could go sideways and shook it off. “No thanks. We’re more than the psychic on the corner.”

Chris waved his spliff nonchalantly. “But I’d be fine settling for a corner dispensary.”

“I didn’t—”

“Realize when you were waggin' your bronze serpent around like a firstborn? Yeah, we get it. Wrap it up and put the sign away for the next town.”

“I was n—”

Chris shushed Lank with a snapped finger igniting his spliff. “All’s forgotten; I was merely pointing out what Tim couldn’t see.”

“Not that you’re one to hold a grudge,” Tim finished.

“Or get the last word,” Chris double-finished, grinning. His pupils of sandstone diamonds glinted in a power ready to challenge.

“He said we could get some rest, but this is a real rope burn,” Kari said with a mimed stroke of one hand.

Tim started to laugh, caught off guard from thinking he should apologize for his brother’s language to her topping him in the crudity. A ripple of wakened nerves sent a shiver up his arm and he shook it out. Something fought inside his nerves against the healing from Chris’s herb.

Chris burst into giggles. Rope burn would burn long and hard into their eternal memories.

Tim sucked his spliff like a good soldier, hopeful it would calm whatever buzz had taken over his arm. Even in the dim light from the oven fire, he could see patches of fade infecting his arm. Great.

The spliff’s inhaled smoke burned his lungs. Constricted in pain, his mind travelled on wings of fear to the unknown day when these boosts would demand full payment. Tim marshalled on with that in his pocket, the needs of today greater than that fear of tomorrow.

Kari raised a couple strands to gain his attention, then showed him how to weave the strand while stretching it with aura. “That’s the easy part,” she said.

Similar to how he’d elongated the pouch to catch Dryfu in the river beside Squire’s.

Oh, the good ol’ days.

Once Tim’s lungs recovered enough to speak again, he asked the group; “Before we get into when and how we take that trail, do we help Née assassinate the Gorin, or align with the moon golems against Hist and his demons?”

Each face revealed their preferred path. Lank was all about it, opening his mouth as soon as Tim said ‘help Née’. Lank rolled his shoulders in nervous energy. “You telling me we can let a demon risk its neck on a trek meant to deal major damage to Hist?”

“Killing a moon golem chief would cost me most of my Troll support,” Chris said. “And they already hate you,” he jokingly said to Tim. Chris shook his head. “I can’t. Even isolationism at this point would be tyranny to the tribe. We have to stop Née. Do you think the moon golems like being stuck down here? Sure, it protects their warded spells without much for threats–maybe they’re bored and once we tell Gorin about Née’s plot they could help us.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

“With opening the tomb they’re indentured to protect with their lives?” Kari asked. Ever the level head between them. “No, dummy.” She lightly swatted Chris’s hand.

“Hey.” Chris slipped his finger out of the tangled mess of fruit strands roped in with his wrist vine.

“Start over,” she said. “That knot would have snapped. You’re making the supports, but we’re making a trap to stretch from the top to bottom of these tunnels, so they’re gonna thin a lot. Keep each step smooth and the knots will hold when Tim stretches them into an aura tapestry warding a Trap spell in the center.”

“Okay,” Chris said and started anew.

“You get a different assignment,” Kari said. “The center of the web is the catcher. You’ll have to dip into that Oil and Water path to craft it.” She tapped her temple. “This is where we need to see how it’s done.”

Tim took another gulp of the sweet nectar nearing an end, then decided to finish it. The memories he took from E’Tic didn’t include demon traps, and it excited him to gain a new skill in Traps.

“When you’re ready,” she said.

His eyes grazed the cheetah-spotted shoulder armor with its organic shell and hardened branch she’d retracted when in safety. Her mud-toned, camo hood had a colorful collage of greens and blue in the skin along the interior. Black veins spiderwebbed the cloak with strong magical and physical resistance.

Magical enchantment ebbed a light readable only in his lingering Danger Sense and the way Chris’s weed enhanced the Oil vision side of his aura gifting.

The light reminded him of Chris’s torch, as though opened into instead of creating from something—a margin he didn’t notice at lower levels when he first studied Chris’s wood sorcerer aura. The glow in her hood and bits of dangling jewelry were imbued with a kind of wood magic.

Good job, Dryfu pathed.

Kari was beautiful in numerous ways before getting to her long dark lashes or soft eyes. Her stepping close enough to smell her sweat made him uneasy.

He pointed to her hood’s interior, and she twisted her head in curiosity. Playful and cute.

Tim rebutted that stupid thought and the shame it left him with.

“I was gonna say. The spiderweb pattern in your cloak and the essence from the enchantment remind me of Chris.”

She lifted a brow. “Yes…”

“You don’t emanate the same essence of aura as he does.”

“I like it when you talk about what I emanate, priest,” she whispered, now few inches blessed the space between them.

“Oh, quit burning my tassels. What I meant was I would not peg you as—”

“Oh,” she pouted. Her lips were… nice.

Tim looked away. Lank blushed with a seer’s insight. He coughed laughter into a fist and cleared his throat.

Chris pretended to remain busy at his weaving. An eye flick Tim’s way confirmed the act.

“What I meant was you’re not a sorcerer. But of the Wood family of classes. Unless you just bought the cloak.” Now Tim was rambling. “I love Jil.”

Well. That was blunt.

Kari graciously bowed, a minute shift of the head to respectfully allow his point. Smiling, she answered: “Ambassador to Emerald Forest.”

An image of her in a white powder sealing in a spell with the essence of discovery and protection, with sparkling jewels across her necklace and earrings, eyes downcast in regal pose, overlaid as a Spirit Memory of her during the parting ceremony where she earned said title.

Tim stepped back, heart beating as though in the presence of an angel, but she casually caught his arm, white powder and jewelry replaced by her dirt, smoot and grease marred complexion, and guided him back to within inches from her mesmerizing brown eyes.

“Sounds cool,” he said, half trying to figure out where her magic ended, and his thoughts could begin.

“Can be. I still have my monk, sniper, and arsonist skills, but they were grafted in to grant me Ambassadorial class, where I serve for enchantments and rewards and have no equipment limitations.”

“Nice… I hate carrying stuff. Normally I take Spirit Memories from the dead,” he said, controlling his breathing to lower his heart rate. Her complete cool only made it more awkward. “With the aura they leave behind. I–”

“Didn’t know that Lank and I studied at Tia’s Pointe to become Tanners? Only one of their sorcerers had Spirit Memories as an ability. The aura Murphy generates may get you close enough. Trust me, this is how you’ll learn.”

Murphy brayed and waddled over, grinning and squinting through the smokey space.

“I’m telling you, I’m toast.”

She scooped a fingertip of aurawax from Murphy’s ear, then swiped a stroke across Tim’s lower orbital bones and softness of his cheeks. She mimicked inhaling deeply and slowly. He followed suit, and a menthol scent filled his nose. Blue aura glowed from her touch, and with its fading, so too escaped stuffiness and throbbing deep into his skull.

“I’m joining parties with you for the safety of all in this tunnel, at least until all of us make it back to the surface,” she said.

Tim agreed.

“Now we can see each other’s skills and I can best guide this dream,” she said.

As a monk, her Karma skill blessed him with a return of what he’d spent, and in good measure. His MP and AF filled back up to a third.

“Thank you. Also, what dream?”

“Don’t worry. It’s not about me, naughty boy. I got the message. You’re taken.” She leaned to the ear opposite of where Chris sat and whispered, “your brother might be a better fit anyway. Don’t tell.”

She winked and returned to her still awkwardly close position. “We’re going to Tia’s Pointe through my memory of when I last saw our sorcerer friend. Would you like to come?”

“Since you put it like that. How bout it?”

Chris rolled his eyes at the newest catch phrase. “Am I coming too?”

“Hush, brother,” Kari chided playfully, “you get leftovers and you’ll like it.”

“Whoa. I make love, not war. I’ll take whatever you have to offer.”

Tim didn’t see the look she shared with Chris, but the essence emanating from her could have melted a penguin, in a good way. Don’t be gross. Oh, wait. Don’t be grossly violent. That’s better.

Are you still with us?

I just assumed you were in my thoughts, and I wanted to preempt you teasing me with an explanation.

Self-obsessed much? Dryfu was staring up at Tim from his favorite lounge spot in his vest pocket. Tim didn’t have to look down to know. He felt the sarcastic glare.

That’s right. I’m eyeballing you, kid. Get your head in the game.

Tim held back most of the laughter, causing Kari to pause her guiding his hands.

“I’m good,” he said. “Just my Guide trying to distract me. I’m telling you sometimes I just want to.’ Tim popped his lips and flicked an imaginary Dryfu for the stars.

You’d never dare.

I know, I love you.

Shut up. Don’t be weird.

Kari spread Tim’s fingers to press into her temples, then rested his palms to cradle her jaw. Thumbs crossed over her nostrils. She closed her eyes and snorted. Heated power sucked his thumbs into the holes and plugged the spell into place.

Murphy’s bray woke him to a lake’s edge and sunny blue sky. A sloped out clearing of the thick forest canopy gave way to a distant view of a tower beset by shaded mountain and sheer cliff sides tall enough to hide beyond the clouds.

The tower reached sniffing distance. Tia’s Pointe, he read in Kari’s memory. The Mount of Watchman’s Sorrow was named after an elite legion of knights stationed to protect The Tanners and the night their watch met its end.

Tim thought that a strange and unassuming name for a sorcerer’s guild organically developed through a mutual love of making books. One of them bought an expensive book for his cousin mourning his fiancé Tia’s sudden death. Through her tragic end, Teo Lamb became the first sorcerer of their group. What started as a gifted book for a mourning cousin accidentally became the catalyst for the strongest Resistance group to date. For, Teo’s cousin Sneal did not know the book with no text was enchanted with an incomplete encyclopedia of spells. Sneal bought it from a dealer from Kiber who said one could write new spells into it, and they would be blessed. What the dealer hadn’t mentioned was the pages were half full of invisible text.

When Teo opened his present, the text glowed, revealing the title, Esther’s Fire, and spells of teaching and power. However, they came with a catch: Teo could only keep the spells if he promised to teach them to another. For every spell he taught, another revealed itself on the page with the burden to share twice what he received.

Together, the Tanners became sorcerers and leather tanners, but they didn’t feel comfortable calling their group anything so outlandish or foolishly bold as to announce themselves as sorcerers lest those level seekers try to earn XP from their scalps.

Not that Tia’s Pointe was outlandish… no, Tim would never call it that, despite the thousand plus, perfectly sheen windows reflecting a cacophony of sun-reflected enchantments so strong he wondered if a direct hit by the sun would make a dent. The skyscraper could afford a sign, but at this point, everyone knew it was the infamous sorcerer’s academy; no one else came close to the spells and trades one could earn there.

On the morrow of this vision, Kari, Lank, and four friends no longer of this mortal plane would be expelled from this enclave. At least, that was her assumption when the Spirit Memory spell Tim used to transport them would no longer be needed. Kari picked the final Warding spell she witnessed, and now here they were.

The artisan she’d visited in these woods, Sa Reoleigh, 1st Tongue of the Thieves and Connoisseur's Guild, would cast a warding on a local critter’s spleen at just the right time. Something about its spell-producing properties and he needed it for a trade.

Kari walked shoulder to shoulder with Tim, slowing on the sly and hinting with her brush-by that she wanted him to trail back from Chris and Lank.

“The trolls can’t be trusted,” Kari whispered. “And especially not COIL. You need to convince him to ditch them. The COIL offers, at best, protection for a human city. Who wants to invest in guarding a prison camp as part of their cut?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I repeat—a, single city on an isle in the northwest quadrant. No more hunts. Childockia will have to forfeit their land. Outer Rim unfolds with secret armies to cut through our lands and remove the Age of Humans from the calendar.”

“Why?”

“If we don’t get Teo’s Skull from Poia’s Tomb, that one city is the best future we could hope for.”

That’s what’s in the tomb? “What’s with this world and collecting skulls?” Tim asked.

Kari scoffed. “I’ve heard of Paris. This is just more magical, and better. I’m biased.”

“What’s so special about his skull?”

“All I know is you need it. And it has something to do with fighting Hist. Once we get it, we can talk about opening a Tanner’s school in Open Arms so we can learn how to use it,” Kari said.

Tim didn’t hate that idea whatsoever. “Okay. Good plan. What happens to humanity if we don’t? Just, you know, so I can prepare.”

“The Taint.”

“Excuse me?”

Kari inhaled loud enough to voice her serious tone. His wife had been pretty good at ending arguments in the same way. “The taint is what happens to creatures exposed to too much dimensional gas.”

“Oh, that taint. I got you,” Tim said with a wink, and a gallon of relief emptied into his chest. “I thought it was the place between Vignyia and Earth.”

Kari’s brows bent over glazed eyes. “What does that make Earth?”

“Nevermind,” Tim said, suppressing a laugh. Cheeky wanker.

“The Taint are nothing to laugh about,” Kari reminded him, presenting as the adult in the room. “In it, humans become susceptible targets for spirits crossing through the rift, some of whom are incapable of surviving without a host.”

“Oh snap, invasion of the body snatchers.”

“I’m not familiar with that. I assure you this is worse,” Kari said. “The lone city is a compromise on genocide because when humans transform into an Immersed, a species of Tainted, they become mimics who can take any shape, including full aura.”

They approached Chris and Lank waiting at a fork in their trail, a row of trees thick as Christmas pines and descending a slope seaside.

“I’ll be glad to help even if it goes that far sideways,” Tim added with a more serious tone.

“I saw you learned Full Aura,” she said. “That’s good, unless the plague turns you into an Immersed.”

“Saying I don’t get the pleasure, what does that have to do with trolls and my brother?” Tim whispered before they neared earshot of Chris.

“The chieftain who left your party will stab him in the back as soon as he opens the tomb. We think they want Teo’s Skull to boost their magic strength in the war for their home. He’s already made the deal.”

“You two wouldn’t be making secret deals to cut us out of the tomb loot, would you?” Chris asked, semi-seriously. More like, wouldn’t that be something, older bro, for you to be the bad guy for once?

“Actually, we were plotting how to keep you alive long enough to see it. Should we stop?”

“Oh.” Chris popped some seeds into his mouth and crunched a shell. “No, please proceed. Sounds important.”

“I don’t see Sa Reoleigh,” Lank said, concern ebbing in his essence.

Tim pushed into Danger Sense deeper into the night draped woods. Seeping through branches thick with pine needles and the resin of… Tim sniffed the charred mint scent of the spellburn and cast Magic Hunt on its tail.

“What’s wrong?” Chris whispered.

Didn’t matter much at this point. Tim’s spell alerted their knowledge of an enemy at hand.

“He should have caught the critter by now,” Kari said, dipping her gaze to a stream twenty yards down the ravine.

Aura tingled into partial numbness under his scalp as he strained to keep his lock on the spellcaster’s tail.

“They altered the memory,” Tim said, gaining a glint of memories in its wake.

Tim’s Danger Sense expanded into an area where the predator’s afterburn was thick enough to track by heat to its most recent location.

Gotcha. Not that Tim was surprised. He was going to have to give this demon a name. Tim only knew it by essence, yet, what it exposed was hidden behind a floating shield.

Atmospheric energy cracked over their heads. A vertical eye void of light belched demons and razorblades in plague forged aura. Their war cry sounded like metal grinding metal and their skin peeled over flesh oozing with dark purple gas.

Tim cast Battleground with one hand and charged a gambit of spells in his other.