Randidly raised his head and roared. A yawning gulf of chilling emptiness lurked below him, but he refused to give in.

He held nothing back with his yell, expelling every bit he could from his body and lungs. The noise and the sheer presence of his release crashed against reality. The storm shuddered. The bubbling of the lava next to him quickened like a simmering pot of water. The plant collective trembled and the ants stilled underneath the pure cry of triumph and pain. His hands curled into fists.

He refused. He refused to succumb to the constant drain of Entropy. He would burn brightly and forever, the churn of Nether and Aether through his body creating an inexhaustible flame of potency that would never dim, even experiencing a relentless grind of existence. As sweat ran down his temples and small drops fell from his chin, that is what Randidly realized. Essentially, to stand against entropy was to create something permanent in an impermanent world.

Something that would persist despite the environment. That wouldn’t falter underneath the strain of existence.

I can do it for a time. Clarity revealed his own path forward as though a series of massive spot lights had been lined up and switched on all at once. Still buoyed by his yell, he surged forward. Yet at the end of that path, the cycle of life and death will reach its end. I will go from ascendant to descendant. And at that time-

Congratulations! Your Fatepiece the Hierarchy of Burden has grown to Level 54!

His lungs were finally empty. His chest spasmed, his diaphragm unable to contract any further. The cycle had ended. He needed to suck in another breath to begin again-

But now wasn’t the time for that.

Randidly released an explosive sigh after his inhale and deactivated the Fatepiece. He had some twinges of mental exhaustion, but largely he finished the training session without any consequences. In terms of being able to conserve the force of his power, training with Entropy was an excellent method. It forced him to be streamlined and focused with his execution of emotions, images, and patterns.

Which, considering how much horsepower I’ve been working with recently, has been an ignored area of improvement. A throwback to the old days where I was scrabbling for any sort of advantage. Randidly yawned and shook his head. His black hair had grown out almost to his chin during the last few months; he needed to cut it. Rather than an individual who would fight to overthrow the Nexus, Randidly felt like someone who had chosen to go off the grid and found some sort of esoteric order of scruffy monks with his spare time.

Made doubly convincing by the grunting and swearing group of people down on the beach, laboring even through the constant drizzle of rain.

He settled himself on the ground and then took care of his Penance. He was only a little in debt, but it was better to stay on top of these sorts of things while he had free time. When he resurfaced, he checked in on the state of his own significance. With the additional meaning he earned with his periodic plugs into the grand Nether Ritual within Expira, his Nether Core had rapidly grown in terms of size.

To put it in engine terms, although he had not managed to increase his top speed, Randidly now developed more horsepower to haul his increasingly large series of connections he bore. The whirling core of the maelstrom layered opposite rotating currents of energy. The resulting force that it generated filled him with vigor and spun the atmosphere around the entire island. Despite the fact that his Weight had stayed rather constant for a while, the flames of Nether Weight he manifested grew higher and higher when he allowed them to flicker to life across his fingers.

With all the new insights I’ve made, I can probably improve those enhancement rituals that help my Weight, Randidly mused.

But now that he handled everything else, Randidly turned his attention back toward that robust connection that he had discovered within himself. It was more difficult to find it when he wasn’t keyed directly into the Nether Ritual. But his connections to Delilah and Randy were special. Soon, he located the connection he was looking for, assisted by the fact he had a flow of energy going to that strange monkey. Once he had a lock on their location, Randidly eased back and seeped his awareness into the ground.

He was a thousand emerald motes, glittering and flowing toward a place far from his physical form.

He couldn’t use Mana, because his touch would invigorate and sear any plant matter to the point that it would be irreparable damage and disintegrate into ash minutes later. Instead, he just allowed his awareness to trickle through the ground, swimming above the complex network of bacterial life within Expira’s surface without ever touching it.

He moved through the ocean and then into the ground, realizing as he did so how fragile the boundaries were between plant and animal and simple organisms. Rather than any larger, meaningful difference, they were homes built in different architectural style, with different portions of the ‘house’ emphasized.

Big things are just stacked small things, Randidly hummed to himself. And in response, his Nether Core whirled just a little bit; the current political turmoil in Expira was just as much a chaotic pile of smaller incidents as the smell wafting off of a trash dump. It was not something he could solve easily.

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He soon slipped onto the location of that connection, smelling the campfire smoke and the wide dustbowl around the caravan. What he found was a pile of small things, a mid-sized thing stranded in the middle of nowhere.

*****

Randy shook their head, ignoring the insistent monkey’s pleading expression. It chittered at them, not annoyed but seemingly unable to come up for the human words to express the knot of emotion that the rejection had left it wrestling with; the small monkey named Takeyhands had attempted to persuade Randy to leave this place and Bethyl and the sharp eyed watchers but Randy refused.

I’m a burden. Wherever I go, I’ll be a burden, Randy rolled a ball of clay between their fingers. At least here I have Bethyl. She is willing to help. At least usually. And if I’m not here with Bethyl…

For a moment, Randy saw their father, his stomach being eaten by a massive warthog. No one had helped him. Not even Randy.

Because Randy was a burden.

It was around noon, so the sun sat directly overhead and the caravan was beginning to settle down. Two of the larger wagon owners made a great show of packing up their equipment and preparing to hitch their beast to the front of the wagon. If they had gone, the smaller wagons would have forced followed, unwilling to linger amongst such a large group of refugees without the two guards hired by Ulysses, the man who owned the largest wagon. Those two guards really only would protect the shiny silver inlay wagon, but the presence of the guards was a talisman for the smaller wagons. A symbol to protect themselves.

Randy had seen the way Bethyl looked at the two guards, especially the younger one with the red-orange goatee. Part of it was the money that the guards had that most of the rest of them didn’t, but Randy knew it was more than that. The guards were somehow magic.

However, the sun rose and the group had made a lot of preparations with no result. The animals were allowed to return to their half-hearted to scoop up more grass than dirt when they chewed at the ground. So the whole collective sat, stuck in the Badlands for another day. A few bored individuals hefted their weapons and wandered away from the campfires to hunt monsters, but otherwise, everything seemed frozen.

Takeyhands began to do cartwheels in the dirt. Seeing his gorgeous dark brown fur marred by the red-orange dirt, Randy couldn’t resist a giggle. And once they had started laughing the two of them moved between games of tag and juggling, a frantic playdate in the cracked clay. There was a frantic moment when a grunt from down the path made Randy freeze and crouch in the shadow of a large rock. Takeyhands joined them, pressing his dirty yet soft head against Randy’s chest, its fur tickling their chin.

Randy reflected how strange it was to meet a monkey here. But seeing its small body, what else was there to do but be friends?

Soon they heard the heavy adult lumber away, back toward the campfires. The small child and monkey could relax. Takeyhands hadn’t watched the other children in the caravan slowly vanish, either to starvation or to a cruel game played by adults, but it could read Randy’s mood well enough to understand the danger these individuals represented.

After the tension passed, Takeyhands produced several shiny stones and began to juggle them. They glittered purple and gold in the powerful, noontime sun rays. “Well if you won’t leave this place, at least let me help you. I might be a tiny monkey who hasn’t been able to speak for very long-”

“What’s that?” Randy whispered, partially to cover the cramped gurgle of her empty stomach, but also because there was suddenly a small fluffy patch of grey smoke that hung behind the small monkey.

Takeyhands bounced up to its feet and bowed frantically to the small grey thing. Then it turned and showed its yellowed teeth to Randy. “Oh! I told you someone wanted to help you, right? This is who wants to help you. His name is-”

“A cloud wants to help me?” Randy chewed their lip. They understood that the System had changed the world and made some extremely peculiar things possible, but this seemed incredibly weird. Much more strange than the sudden arrival of a juggling monkey. Randy wondered if clouds were soft too. They certainly seemed soft. But would it be as soft as monkey fur?

“No, not-” Takeyhands began, but the cloud produced a small bolt of lightning that lashed out and hit the monkey. But it didn’t really look like lightning, it was emerald and curled at its sharp junction like it released bright branches which were covered in thorns. However, the flash was so brief that all Randy had was the fading colors of that light burned into their retinas.

“Ah… ahem.” The monkey coughed into its hand. “Errr… yes, this is a cloud. He wants to help you.”

“Why?” Randy looked directly at the cloud. The heart in Randy’s chest began to beat strangely. An awareness rose, hinting at a strange connection between the two of them. And as Randy continued to stare, a vision appeared: of Randy, curled up and crying on the ground. A gentle sense of understanding stretched out between them.

Perhaps in any normal situation, Randy would have flinched and run away to know that another individual watched them at night. However, Randy supposed that clouds had nothing to do when they drifted through the sky except watch people.

Randy waved a small hand. “I wasn’t raining, just crying. Humans can produce water too; I’m not a cloud. You shouldn’t help someone like me.”

The cloud literally twitched.

Eventually, it seemed to recover its energy, but the cloud displayed the same sort of frustrated energy of the monkey. Small emerald bolts lashed up and down its fluffy form. Next to them, Takeyhands’ eyes flicked back and forth, from Randy to cloud.

“...uh, he is well aware that you are not a cloud. But he wants to help you anyway,” The monkey said. For a few seconds, it chittered at the clouds and several emerald bolts crackled threateningly at the small animal. Then it turned to speak again to Randy. “Because of your ability. What you can do, like you did with the Engraving.”

Randy went cold. Bethyl’s face appeared in their mind, filled with exhaustion and disappointment. They spoke quickly in denial. “That doesn’t happen.”

The cloud pulsed, clearly unimpressed by the lie. Even Takeyhands gave Randy a long look. The monkey chittered for a few seconds before shifting back into normal speaking. “Truth be told, that power is why- why the cloud is interested in you. He wants to teach you how to control that power. Would you like that? Not having to fear that you’ll lose control? And Stormshadow definitely is powerful. He is the one that gave me the ability to speak. He can show you the path forward. A way you can help your mom.”

“She’s not my mom,” Randy spat out immediately, but they felt a yearning rising in their chest. “But… I can help her? Truly? How?”

The cloud darkened and released a strange, resonant pulse that hummed through Randy’s ribcage. Takeyhands nodded seriously and translated from cloud-speak. “Cooking.”