Roughly sixty meters. That was the distance he had to run. Micah still hadn’t made it past thirty.
He deflected a wind arrow, ducked beneath a kite, and struck out with an open hand. At the last moment, he clenched his fist to pull the air in, and a spirit with it.
As he improved, so did they, and they had quickly learned they could avoid him like flies on the wind. The upside was that fewer of them clung to his clothes, the downside that he had to reel them in to connect.
His strike sent the spirit spiraling toward the ground. He took a deep breath, split the headwind, and picked up speed to keep them guessing.
Wind arrows ruffled his hair and brushed over his sweaty neck, sending shivers down his spine. He broke one on his shoulder, leaped over a conjured ribbon, and dodged when they adjusted the wind tunnel from a blanket cover to a full left gust that would have spun him like a top.
The lack of opposition still made him stumble, and the archers used their chance. A volley of curving gusts, less like arrows and more like rivers in the air, slugged him one by one and knocked him dangerously close to the edge of the mat.
As he focused to see the archers through the wind, he missed the metaphorical pane of glass in front of his nose. A spirit slipped beneath his shoe from one step to the next and, like the cushions of air Lisa could conjure, billowed out.
His foot didn’t meet the ground. It slipped as if on ice, leg extending, and the spirit snared it as it took off.
He cried out in surprise when he nearly kicked himself in the face and fell on his ass.
Immediately, his leg muscles and tendons revolted. Micah had [Lesser Agility], but he wasn’t that flexible without warning. He clutched his leg and grimaced.
Worse though, he looked ahead and could count the mats. He let his head fall back and closed his eyes with a sigh.
Two straight days of training and he’d barely advanced.
Anne had left. As had many others. The school felt abandoned. Everyone had left to do their own projects and go explore the world while he slept in his dorm room.
Against the dark of his eyelids, he saw the collector ignoring him, Maria spiriting him away through a rainy forest, Ryan running from him through a dark mine.
Lisa had told him from the start, he would weigh them down.
A bundle of spiraling spirits tried to cannonball onto his stomach, he rolled away at the last moment and they thumped into the mat. Ignoring the burst of wind that swept over the gym floor, Micah slid the mat back into place, opened his eyes, and marched back to the start.
Again.
He couldn’t split the headwind. The lack of resistance made him more agile and eased the burden on his body and spirit, and every time before he did it, he took a deep breath—to the point where the spirits could use it as a tell to anticipate him.
But filling his growing spirit with more wind essence wasn’t enough, in the same way that a growing child needed more than three healthy meals a day.
Running against a magical headwind was as exhausting as running underwater, but he needed that, to weather it, as Shanty had told him.
He was in better shape than ever, but he was no Ryan. He liked the idea of poking at the other guy’s muscles but not own. Micah’s ribs looked obvious to himself in the mirror. His skin seemed … strained, stretched over tubes of muscle and bone.
So from nine-thirty, half an hour after the doors opened, to lunch. Then from lunch to half an hour before the doors closed at eight-thirty, he ran the mats until he had to wipe them down.
He bought two more sets of workout clothes to cycle through until laundry day and put all his other projects on hold. The spirits would only challenge him for a month. He had to make the most of their time together.
On the fifth day, Micah flopped out of bed and couldn’t take a step without groaning.
He could take a day off. Take a breather, maybe find a new way of tackling the mats. Rest days were a thing.
“Or …” he mumbled.
Alchemist. Bottled solutions.
Ryan wouldn’t take a break.
Bastion and Shanty were kind enough to pay for his tuition and school books for the first semester of his next year. They would pay for the second semester if he kept his grades up. They also wanted to meet with him and Brian regularly for progress reports.
He had some money left over from the first weeks of summer break he had spent climbing with the others—he’d planned on saving up for tuition in case the sponsor thing fell through.
He’d also gotten some money on his birthday, and they wanted to sell the raincoat.
It meant, for the first time in over a year, Micah had money to spend.
He bought himself a blueberry muffin from the cafeteria and the largest meat-packed kebab he could find, from one of the overpriced shops near the guild even, on his way to the Registry to look up work-out potions.
They were specialized vitality potions that targeted muscle groups to help the body recover and adapt after exercise, used mainly in physical therapy to help people get back on their feet with as little pain as possible. They also enjoyed a rising and falling popularity as a luxury item in some circles. Finding literature on them was easy enough.
For him, a series of smaller doses was probably the best option. Like water, they were unhealthy if overused but … three weeks? That was doable.
He collected every book with a recipe he could find, paid for ink copies of their pages at the help desk, and brought them back to the workshop to check them.
The changes to the Towers had brought more than just new ingredients, they’d also altered some old ones subtly, like Teacup Salamanders or the new Kobolds, or eliminated them entirely, like Candletails.
In most cases, these tiny changes were negligible, but together, they could lead to unexpected results in more complex recipes. The Alchemists’ Guild was running a gamut of tests to make sure their most important recipes were safe.
The Registry bought most of their official publications with a government stipend, but only a copy or two, and those were highly coveted and usually signed out.
His colleagues and he had pooled funds for a subscription during the school year, and some people had bought and shared specific essays.
He could use what they had on hand to check most of his ingredients on his list … but not all of them, which meant he had to go all the way to the stupid guild to ask them.
Micah hated visiting. Ten months had passed since the changes, and the guild still acted like a kicked ant hive.
It was always crowded, nobody there took him seriously, they only suffered his presence because of his student card, and he had to wait for over an hour and pay a service fee for the smallest of inquiries.
All for an answer that could have been condensed into a single word: ‘yes.’
Just finding out if he could make the potion took him the better part of a day, and the ingredients for three weeks of doses for an underweight fifteen-year-old cost as much as two new pairs of shoes.
He spent the afternoon making the first batch, screwed up once, wasting materials for two doses—money down the drain—and had to have the potion checked to see if it was safe because he didn’t have a dumb appraisal Skill yet, despite practice.
By the time he was done, he grumpily shambled back to bed. His legs ached with every step as if his calves were petrified and his eyelids didn’t want to stay open.
Before he turned the lights off, he knocked back the liquid.
It tasted surprisingly good. Powdery and a little sweet, like warm milk and honey.
When he woke up, he dreamt he was still in Cairn, a shutter of warm sunlight on his face, a week of lazy vacation softening up his body like bread dough.
“So worth it,” he groaned. Was this how Ryan always felt? It was so much better than the vitality gummies.
He stood in front of the gym at nine sharp.
“You’re early,” Ms. Jo commented as she unlocked the doors.
Micah was giddy. “Had a rest day of sorts yesterday.”
“Wise. Those are important. Don’t run yourself dead.”
Uhm. Did ‘rest days in a bottle’ count? He decided not to mention it and ran a lap around the empty gym to wake the spirits up.
He dragged the mats back into place, took a deep breath, and tried.
Again.
If he couldn’t split the headwind, neither could the spirits. After his first few attempts, he asked them to keep the pressure up and not shift the wind tunnel anymore.
They seemed to take his words to mean ‘increase the difficulty,’ because they sped the wind up even more. It almost blew the outer mats away before he found things to anchor them with.
After he did, he wiped his forehead and stared at the quickened wind. It wasn’t what he had meant but … he would take it? Better to struggle now than when his friends’ lives were on the line.
Actually, the spirits did seem to understand him on some level. Shanty had asked them to challenge him, but he didn’t know if she had explained why.
Micah spoke up to explain his situation, wondering if they might have any other insights to share with him, and he stared at the gestalt eel of distorted light as it circled him.
It gave no indication they had heard.
He sighed and began his next attempt. He didn’t notice his mistake: telling the spirits what he wanted was the same thing as revealing a weakness, revealing his objective to his opponents.
Putting him under pressure? Sure, they would do that. Supplying him with the other thing he needed, nourishment, essence? They had been doing it all this time. They hadn’t known it was important to him. Why should they give that freely?
So when he ran forward, a spirit flew past him and, in a sea of wind, stole his breath away.
Micah choked up and tripped.
The headwind sent him back four steps, and he struggled to keep his ground, but it hurt.
The spirit had torn the air out of his throat, yet it was a more primal pain that plagued him. It had taken something that was his from within him, his being, the outer core of his dominion.
Wind rivers slugged him one by one. He was too surprised to defend himself. A flight of wind spirits clotheslined him, and Micah fell off the mats.
From outside, he stared at the wind tunnel he had trained in this past week, a river of cutting lines to his essence sight now, and took painfully hoarse gasps as he tried to wrap his head around what had just happened.
“Fuck. Uhm,” he mumbled and picked himself up. He wasn’t sure how to feel but he shook his doubts off and fixed his clothes.
A moment ago, he had been excited to run the mats again. He tried to summon some of that feeling back and steeled himself.
Again.
A spirit shoved a ball of wind down his throat. Micah choked and with an effort of will, forced the dense wind essence down.
The headwind turned sixty meters into a hundred and twenty, the spirits kept up their barrage, and he fought for every shaky step.
Hands, elbows, shoulders, headbutt—his defense was limited. It came down to choosing when to try and when to take the hit.
Pushing more wind into him was the lesser of two evils. Micah burped that back out. When another spirit flew by without a ball of wind, he pushed off and punted it out of the sky.
As he extended himself for the strike, a curving pipe of wind slugged him in the gut and another pair of spirits tore out of the veil of cutting lines in front of him.
He rammed his elbow into the top one and covered his mouth with his hand, but the spirit slipped through his fingers like water. The moment seemed to stretch as its face stretched in front of his eyes into the gaping maw of a banshee.
He was the one who screamed. A high-pitched choking sound somewhere between a voice crack and a shout lost in the wind tore out of his throat alongside his stolen breath.
He could resist, wrestle for control, but to do it he had to anticipate their attack or exhaust himself on wasted efforts, and how the fuck was he supposed to know it could ooze through his fingers?
He could barely see in the storm of swirling lines, could barely hear past the rushing wind in his ears, yet somehow, their chimes and whistles still echoed clearly.
Blind and deaf, Micah stumbled forward through the pain and gasped for air.
I’m in the school gym, he told himself. The words felt like nothing. A dark feeling crawled up his spine.
Wind bolts and rivers slugged into his flesh. Not enough to push him off his feet, but the wind pressed down on him incessantly. The weight of a mountain on him. It pressed down on his lungs, too, as he invited it in.
He blinked the pain out of his eyes and forged onward, halting step by halting step, to drag himself forward through the dark.
His throat felt hot and torn. He wasn’t dreaming.
Something dove out of the veil of lines. A glimpse of something animalistic. It should have been eel or bird but to his panicked mind, it looked like a coyote, slim red antlers grinning at him.
Micah scrambled back and the spirit laughed as it tore a chunk of what was his away.
The headwind turned one step back into six. Finally, he caught himself and keeled over. One hand on his mouth, he slammed his other into the groove between mats to hold himself in place.
Two hounds ran by and something hit his eyes. A conjured ribbon of air wrapped around his head, pulling his hand up and tying it in place, halfway over his nose and upper lip.
Something slammed into his stomach and finally, he fell. The wind rolled him back to the start and the soft mats began to feel like grass against his sweaty skin.
Still, they didn’t stop.
A laughing coyote stole the air out of his lungs. He struggled to stand.
Another followed it and this time, he wrestled for control, but it left him with half of that first painful gasp after holding his breath for too long. The panicked urge thumping in his solar plexus returned with a vengeance.
Breathe!
I can’t!
“Sto—” he croaked, but he didn’t have the air to speak, didn’t even know if anyone could hear him through the rushing wind.
Something else flew past him. He swatted uselessly. He couldn’t remember if anyone else was in the gym with him at all, didn’t even know if they could help if there was someone.
As the pressure became too much, their chimes and whistles began to sound like the high-pitched cackles of foxes and hyenas.
Micah curled up and saw himself stabbing a coyote over and over on the forest floor. His patience ran out.
“Mine.”
His voice was devoid of air but carried by something else. The spirits fled from it like prey underfoot and finally, with a ripple like an imploding bubble, wind flowed back to him.
He drank greedily and with the rising of his chest, sat up.
The wristband had stretched from his arm to the inner orbit of his dominion, a meter or so away from him. It looked as hazy as the spirits’ light, a thin green soap bubble stretched into the form of a shoehorn.
Micah eased up on the pressure and it snapped back into shape around his wrist.
He inspected the vessel for a moment for harm, but that spirit’s weaving had been sloppy in the first place and many of the inhabitants had left to challenge him.
By his guess … they looked fine?
He sighed.
Spirits. Pests.
No.
No, they hadn’t known, he told himself, and still rubbed his aching throat.
The rest of the lesser wind spirits flowed around him like a revolving cocoon of animal impressions and green thread, of too different minds to organize into one shape.
An open bubble of space surrounded him. For some reason, they didn’t want to enter his dominion. They looked … rattled.
By the curve of their ribbons, the slow pace of their flight, the glimmers of distortion that suggested eyes, the shadows of emotions he could see, they seemed …
Perplexed, surprised, miffed, a little worried, but little to no fear, no hurt.
That was a relief. They were roughhousing, but he had never wanted to hurt them. Neither had they. Not intentionally, at least.
Micah had spent every day of the last week with these beings. He got the impression of small children.
Children picked up a lot, he knew. It just took them a while to deal with what they did and sometimes, they didn’t process it consciously.
It was the same here, except the ‘what’ of what spirits picked up was different, their fields of expertise, the instruments they worked with.
Suffocating him? They didn’t understand the danger, the difference between wanting something and needing it to survive. To them, it was just fun to take his things from him and watch him struggle. They had been asked to challenge him as well, so win-win.
He doubted they could understand concepts like that before they were mature enough.
‘Woke up,’ that fire spirit had called it. Hugh. Their eventually shift from sentient to sapient sounded more sudden.
But if he didn’t try to explain it to them, who would?
“You can’t do that,“ he said. “You can challenge me, sure, but if I fail you have to let up or you will hurt me. Badly. The type of hurt that means I … never run again.”
He didn’t know if they understood the concept of death. He chose something closer to their being.
Perplexed, surprised, miffed, a little worried—their earlier emotions sparked again, except by now, many of the spirits were also beginning to look bored.
He sat still at the beginning of the mats and was clearly fine enough to lecture. They wanted him to move already!
Exerting his dominion had actually seemed to worry them, like the slap that was too hard in the mock fight, because why would he actually slap them?
Micah did it again.
It took an effort of will. He wasn’t using any of his usual beats to help him meditate, he had to get past that emotional hill of ‘don’t slap children’ when he wasn’t even sure how hard of a slap this was, and he made a conscious effort to shelter the wristband from the effects.
Still, he pushed that bubble of influence around himself out, and the spirits stumbled and spiraled away as if they had tripped over their own feet.
For a moment, they were inside his dominion. Then, Micah breathed in.
As he pulled with an entire space instead of just his lungs, the wind essence flowed like water down the drain.
The spirits resisted. Their ‘tassels,’ the texture of the threads, the sheen of the eels, the tailfeathers of the birds, began to distort like bent light, stretch, and crumble away.
Micah immediately stopped—he was just trying to prove a point—yet he still breathed in some of their essences, the ones they kept to themselves.
And the difference between the wind essences of nature and those a spirit had begun to assimilate into its being was like the difference between plain oatmeal and the Registry Ball buffet. The magic he knew felt mundane in comparison.
For the first time, Micah thought he might understand what Brent meant when he described taste: a brief-lived spark born in death between his perception and its being.
But just because it had taste, it didn’t mean it felt good to consume. Micah was pretty sure he had just bitten some of their hair off. He made a face.
The spirits did, too. Some stared, horrified, others puffed up like spooked cats and fled in obvious discomfort, and a pair slapped him with a wind whip.
He took the blow and deepened his grimace.
“Yeah, I deserved that. Still, that’s what it’s like for me, too! How would you feel if I kept doing that until I started eating the parts of you that are important to you, huh?!”
He exerted his dominion again as he said it. One millimeter, like puffing his chest out, but spirits fled as if he were a mother raising her shoe.
Their reaction hurt more than the slap had.
Obviously, this stunt had lost him some goodwill but … some of them actually looked ashamed.
Huh.
Could they understand him after all?
A spirit snuck up on him—he sensed when it entered his domain—and slammed his face into the mat.
Micah sat back up. “Okay, okay, stop! I’m sorry? Truce? No hard feelings?”
They swarmed like gnats singing a discordant tune. The breeze shifted and sent chills down his spine both as it grew colder and charged with energy.
He felt as though he was sitting at the open window and watching as a storm brewed on the horizon. The breeze hissed like a shrill ghost as it ran by. No wind chimes, just wood hitting wood as the wind picked them up and slammed them against the roof.
They were arguing, in their own way. Toddlers having a conversation.
Micah waited.
A part of him worried he had insulted them too gravely, that they would leave. That part of him whispered he should be panicking right now, prostrate himself, apologize, and do more to make sure they stayed but …
He had apologized because he felt bad, but he wasn’t going to treat them differently because they were born from magic.
They had been training. The spirits had kept a chokehold up for too long, and he had ripped some of their hair out. It wasn’t something to end a friendship over.
He finally caught his breath enough that he didn’t have to pant anymore, and he smiled.
The spirits saw, and their flight pattern shifted. Their sounds of discord began to harmonize and from one moment to the next, that great feathered eel swooped down and whipped the wind tunnel back into existence.
It gave him a look. Again?
Micah laughed. And as his laughter fiddled out, he had a thought which reignited it. He couldn’t stop.
“I’m such a tool!”
Some of the spirits looked confused. Others laughed with him and picked up speed.
Tools!
Wasn’t that what he had been complaining about when they’d fought the collector? All this time, he had had tools and he hadn’t been using them.
Micah closed his eyes and felt the pressure of the wind just outside his dominion, a meter away. He pushed out and the bubble expanded into the wind tunnel.
The wind flowed over its skin like a bubble of calm in a storm.
With a grin, Micah shot up and answered them, “Again.”
Micah punched, clenched his fist at the last moment to pull in the air, and punted a spirit into the mat.
He kept the pull up as he swung and opened his mantle, the middle layer of the holistic auras, and basked in the wind.
The mantle acted like a hollow shell around the body. When [Elementalists] covered themselves in cephalopod-shaped bodies of water, there was a good chance they were using it to anchor the spells.
With the motion of his punch and the pull of his spirit, wind flowed up his arm, shoulder, and neck.
Another spirit jetted into his dominion to slam into him like a kite. He sensed it, twisted, and shrugged it off.
They could avoid him like flies on the wind. So could he.
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The spirit slipped as if on ice and kept its momentum as it shot off into the distance.
Wind-basking was not as bad as splitting the headwind, but it did technically shelter him. Micah tried not to rely on it, but his mantle was a fickle thing yet, thin and semipermeable, and he naturally shed the wind essence as he moved forward.
Wind bolts and rivers rained down on him and he dipped and wove, shattered one on a shoulder, and caught the last of the volley in his hand, holding onto it with a mixture of his spirit, mantle, and will.
With a spin and hop, he tossed it like a javelin back at the archers. The spirit must have been too surprised to defend itself. It was struck out of the line-up.
The sight brought a smile to his lips. That was worth the three steps back the spin had cost him to the headwind.
His dominion lingered where he had been, quickly withering, and he reached out with his influence to reassert control, calming the wind for a second to sprint forward.
Again, technically breaking rules he’d set for himself, but it was worth flexing his abilities to see what he could do.
His dominion took that same awareness and control he had over his spirit, over the essences inside his body, and flung it outward into a field around himself.
Lisa had described the expression of her will like a muscle she needed to stretch, and it looked like some great beast coiled around itself. His was apparently a space he could maintain. He wasn’t sure why there was a difference, but it made sense to him that individuals would express themselves individually.
His will suited his needs. To exert his dominion, he needed a moment of stillness. The more he moved, the harder it was to maintain and the weaker its effects became.
That was good, because he still didn’t want to slap the spirits with the full force of it, and because he still needed to endure the full brunt of the wind.
All he had wanted was a small boost to his awareness and control, to not be blind and deaf anymore, and keep what was his, and that was what his dominion provided.
It freed up his eyes to focus on what was beyond the panes of glass in front of his nose, as each layer of the wind was a separate space where the spirits could hide.
It freed up his mind to react to what he sensed rather than have to make leaps of logic and guess before it could tell his body to move. It let him be quicker and more confident in his actions.
So he knew when a spirit entered his domain and he punched it out of the sky before it could get to him.
They still tried to steal his breath, but it was much easier to challenge them, and so much harder for them to challenge him in here.
He exerted a constant measure of will over his surroundings and didn’t have to time it anymore to wrestle against theirs, didn’t exhaust himself if he missed.
It was the difference between blocking a strike with a weapon versus wearing armor or holding up a shield.
The headwind was still a problem, but he had been getting stronger, the vitality potion helped, and losing ground was easier to stomach when he was assured of his ability to reclaim it.
Step by step, Micah strode through the chaos and conquered, and the spirits parted around him.
When he made it past the thirty-meter mark, they grew more aggressive.
The volleys grew denser, they attacked in groups, and more spirits left the wristband to aid their kin. It looked like a green cat’s cradle around his wrist.
It was too little too late.
When he approached the fifty-meter mark, he felt a quiver in the headwind, as if a spirit had placed its finger on its fabric but hesitated.
The quiver disappeared—they’d kept to their deal not to mess with it—but so did every other spirit around him.
Micah tracked them with his eyes and saw a great flight curve around the ceiling and turn back toward him.
He could guess why and panicked. What should he do? He didn’t know if he could face all of them at once. He could sprint toward the finish line, but would he make it?
After a moment’s indecision, he took a moment to center himself, focused, and stood his ground.
The spirits didn’t alter the wind tunnel, they created an entirely new, second one to race toward him from the side like a flash flood.
And for good measure, they rode in on the storm themselves in a great chain to sweep him off his feet, some of them armed with bolts and ribbons.
Micah thought of Cairn, of mornings spent with Ryan and his family, the warm sun, and the peaceful silence.
Inside his dominion, the wind essence stilled to air.
The spirits’ charge met him—and broke. That great feathered eel cleaved in two and for the first time, he could see the spirits clearly: a riot of colors like a festival crowd rode around his dominion and onward.
His jaw dropped. In awe at them and at himself. He had actually done it! He was still standing.
Just as he had the thought, his entire dominion, bubble of calm, himself, and all, moved as it was snared by the spirits as they took off.
Micah cried out in surprise when they flung him at the ceiling.
----------------------------------------
Ryan stepped off the riverboat into a smalltown on the outer edges of Hadica, hours from the city walls.
The lawns were nice and tidy, the roads interwoven with canals, and many of the houses had private piers and rowboats. It looked … idyllic. Artificial.
It honestly reminded him of Westhill, where people liked things to be nice and tidy, but rich instead of plain and with more space to breathe.
The disconnect had to be by design then. People summered or wintered here away from the city noise. He wondered if they had attractions.
He thanked the boat guide, found some roadsigns to orient himself, and walked by a few lavish inns on his way out. He wasn’t staying.
His parents had made absolutely sure that he understood he didn’t have to go. They had brought it up over and over again this last week, but he’d left anyway. Then, they’d told him to keep an open mind about things, like his future and what he wanted to do with his life.
“We’ll talk,” his dad had said.
Not looking forward to that. How was he was supposed to make a decision over three weeks of scout camp?
But walking was nice. Through the countryside and forest patches. The motion of his feet let his mind wander and two hours went by more quickly.
Then, Barry raised a hand in salute from a distant hill. A small group waited behind him.
Gus, their scout leader, stared into the distance as if he was lost in thought. He didn’t seem to notice Ryan’s approach as he hiked up the grassy hill.
There was Joey. Ryan had spent two days with him on the road and seen him once or twice as they’d planned this, but that was about the end of their interactions together.
He’d broken his arm last year and given the counselors an excuse to send them home early. He wanted to make the most of camp this year so he’d agreed to join.
He hadn’t grown much taller—he was about Micah’s height, maybe shorter—but he’d gotten a buzz cut that made him look as angry as he had when his arm had been in a sling.
When he saw Ryan, though, he smiled. It did wonders to improve his opinion of him. He mostly remembered him whining, understandably.
The other guy was a classmate Barry had brought along. Ken, or Kian, or something. He was a little taller than them, broad, and had short red hair and the beginnings of a beard.
Barry had some scruff around the edges, too, a shade lighter than his brown hair. It planted him more firmly beyond that imaginary border to adulthood.
Then again, Ryan apparently didn’t look his age, according to Rachel and Daniel, so maybe he was past that border himself and just couldn’t see it. They were the same height.
Barry was an old … acquaintance? Friend? He had trained with him some weekends back when he had taken afternoon lessons in classroom, though Barry was a year ahead. Their instructors were friends.
He’d been there when they had found Micah, he had taken Ryan under his wing during the scout camp, and he and his friends’ antics—stringing people up in trees, stealing booze, skinny dipping—had gotten them kicked out a few days early.
Their group had bought lunch when they’d gotten back to Hadica and kept in touch, occasionally meeting up for archery practice or to hang out for an afternoon. Once a month or so. Not often.
He had no interest in being a counselor himself so he was retiring from scout camp this year. When Ryan had asked about an airdrop, he’d jumped on the idea. Leaving with a bang.
“Ho, Ryan!” he greeted him and they clasped hands and slapped each other on the arm. “You made it! You were traveling alone and with the boat … we weren’t sure you would show.”
“I’m here, aren’t I? I can read a map.” Cardinal directions, road signs, finger to squiggly line as he walked. Easy.
“Small chance that will come handy where you’re headed,” Gus said without looking at them, “but if it does come in handy, it can be a lifesaver.”
“Good morning, sir,” Ryan greeted him and then the others in turn. Kian gave him a nod in acknowledgment, though it seemed more shy than anything, despite his size.
The only other two people on the hill with them were two women he didn’t recognize.
One was probably in her early twenties, wiry, with dark olive skin and darker hair tied into a sloppy bun. Despite the summer heat, she wore a green fur-lined jacket that went all the way to her knees, and an undershirt tucked into high-waisted pants.
It reminded Ryan of the jacket his parents had bought for his birthday, that he rarely wore.
The other woman looked older, more late twenties or early thirties guessing by the lines in her face. Blond hair. She wore rose-tinted glasses with a chain to hang them on. Her face was expressionless, and the look reminded him of a librarian or secretary.
Both of them also had thick, dark goggles hanging around their necks, and she had her own giant jacket folded over a small backpack in the grass. They had one duffel between them.
Gus introduced him.
“Mrs. Perin,” the older woman said as she shook his hand, “and this is my assistant, Ms. Bailey.”
“It’s nice to meet you, ma’am. Thank you for helping us with this.”
“Well, I am getting paid. So this is number four then? We’re waiting on two more?” As she spoke, she seemed to wake up a little and glanced in the direction of the main road.
He caught a flash of impatience in her eye. Only then did he realize she’d been bored before he had walked up.
Ryan checked his watch to make sure he was punctual, but it was quarter to noon. A little early.
They were half a day out from Hadica, on a hill a little ways off from one of the main roads—due to a variety of regulations—and he wouldn’t have been surprised if Barry and the others had woken up at four in the morning to make the appointment.
How long would the trip be through the air, though? Ryan eyed their gear and imagined they just flew everywhere. He might be tempted, if he could.
He was a bit of a runner and somewhat proud of his speed, though not of his habits, but legs had to seem so slow in comparison.
“Two more,” Gus assured her. “We left separately. They were staying outside the city, but they should be here on time.”
Perin gave a wry smile. “If not, that makes our jobs easier. We’ll give them an hour to start.”
They passed the time with small talk, though they had seen each other weeks ago to organize. There wasn’t much to catch up on.
Ryan did get to tell them stories of his sister, which hadn’t been able to do before as he hadn’t seen her, which was nice.
But he kept giving Barry glances as his mind wandered. Barry had made comments in the past, and Ryan had ignored those and pushed his thoughts aside because honestly, most guys he knew made comments like that from time to time. Even Micah.
They were a little harder to ignore now, a year later, when he had been turned down three times in a year and his face still felt a little dented from the bar fight:
If Ryan were open about who he was, Barry wouldn’t want anything to do with him, which … kind of sucked. It soured every moment he spent with him like a persistent headache.
Odd as it was, he looked forward to their other two arrivals. Parker and Silas showed up twenties minutes late with a string of excuses. They had misjudged how much time they needed this morning, other people had slowed them down, and then they had taken a wrong turn.
That was just sad considering where they were headed.
Silas had nearly put an arrow in Micah during their final exam. Parker had gone to the same scout camp as Barry, Joey, and him last year.
The two were classmates from another school.
Barry and Parker didn’t get along, which made sense. Parker was an asshole, like a dog that never stopped barking.
When Ryan had told him he’d assaulted the Kobold camp alone, he’d gone meteoric, but when their teams had met up to distribute the loot afterward, and he had apologized, the guy had seemed surprised and mellowed out a lot.
Still a dog that never stopped barking, just not at people it knew.
Ryan got the sense Parker hadn’t expected there to be actual consequences for him, which made no sense to him: they’d been kicked out of scout camp last year, too.
More than that, he got the sense Parker thought his punishment had been too harsh.
Ryan had been made to apologize, forfeited his claim of choice for the loot, failed his exam, and then been forced to run laps around the Tower and copy down the school rules.
Not that bad, all things considered … Failing the exam had led to him talking to his parents. That was nice.
Parker was a weird guy but someone he thought he could get along with eventually. Silas was just friendly. Even nice, maybe. It was hard not to get along with him.
He had a large black bag swung over one shoulder, with a dip in the middle, and its neck poked out like a lump.
Ryan frowned as he recognized the case. “You brought a guitar?”
Silas shrugged. “Yeah.”
The assistant rolled her eyes, swayed with the expression, and moved with the sway to her duffel in the grass. She crouched and brought out a large black rain tarp.
“We’re going to have to secure your belongings before we take off,” she said with the monotonous voice of repetition. “Make sure your backpacks are tied shut, your shoes laced, and anything you want to lose is in your pockets.”
Starting with Joey, she affixed the tarps around their packs to shelter them from the wind.
Gus briefed them as they stood still, arms raised at a slight angle, to let her work, and their attention was split two ways.
“Mrs. Perin will deposit you a hundred kilometers west-south-west of camp,” he said. “You will have a week to find your way back, and you will have to rely on your own skills and expertise to survive in the meantime.
“Each of you was told to only bring enough provisions for two days. I won’t check, but I hope you kept to the spirit of that instruction. Any other sources of food and water, you will have to find on your own.
“We will check in on you on a regular basis, but these checks are to make sure you are headed in the right direction and not dying from food poisoning or exposure. They will be conducted every few hours, and they will be conducted from a distance. We will not be able to quickly reach you in case of an emergency.
“The same holds true for the [Flare] wand I gave you Barry. Use it only in case of an emergency but do not expect help to arrive in a timely manner.
“You’re all high-leveled [Scouts] for your age. You all have survival skills. Use them. And I know, you’ve fought great foes in the Tower before, but do not underestimate nature. Step on the wrong snake? Its poison will kill you. Eat the wrong plant? Its poison will kill you. Get in the way of a grizzly? To put it in words you might understand: ‘It will fuck you up.’”
Ryan chuckled.
“I have poison resistance,” Parker said in a somewhat arrogant tone.
“Great. So you can eat mushrooms to intentionally give yourself the runs,” Barry told him.
“Fuck you.”
Gus ignored them. “We’re placing you in a relatively safe spot but there are animals in this forest, and even the ones you wouldn’t think of as dangerous are dangerous.
“If something bites you, be it snake, tick, or squirrel, tell us when you get back or your brain might melt in a few months, do you understand?”
Like zombies, they nodded.
“Keep an eye or ear out, try to avoid the wildlife, and they will likely do the same for you.
“If not, scare them off. If you absolutely have to, defend yourselves. Ryan, I know you, in particular, might try to use your [Swathe of Flames] spell to do this, but if you set the forest on fire, you will have to pay hefty fines. Do you understand me?”
It took him a second to respond. Ms. Bailey tied a knot through one of the loops of his pack with enough force to make him stumble.
He had packed and repacked his things until everything fit in one bag that split at the seams. He’d brought the magic teapot they’d found and some potions Micah had made him before they left, weak but brewed to last.
Everything else, spare clothes, was stuffed into a light duffel Gus was taking for him, though he wouldn’t see it until they arrived at camp.
“Yes, sir,” he answered and peeked over his shoulder. A black tarp covered his pack, riddled with lumps and protruding corners.
Gus gave them some more pointers and answered any questions they had, though they had been through this all before.
The assistant handed goggles out. Perin put her jacket on and tucked her glasses away.
“Luckily, none of you have magic resistance,” she said when their scout leader finished. “Would’ve been even better if you had resonance, but—” She sighed and gestured as if to say, What can you do?
“However, some of you have dabbled in magic so I’ll say this once: resist my spells and I’ll leave you behind. Mess with my spells or try to cast your own while we’re in the air and I’m dropping you off right then and there. Either way, you can walk right back home, got it?”
They nodded once.
“I’m only human and I only have so much mana. If this fails, I’ve only got so many attempts in me before we have to call this entire thing off.”
They stood in a loose circle around the hill. One by one, Perin looked them in the eye and Ryan nodded again to reassure her.
Kian, Barry, and Silas already had their goggles on, and they covered a third of their faces. Barry grinned.
Finally, she sighed and raised her hands in a quick somatic incantation. A wave of mana washed over them like liquid wind and the spell snapped into place.
He felt a soft resistance around his body, lighter than wading through water but subtly different from pressing against a strong wind.
It was sort of nice, like sinking into a soft mattress, except part of it choked like a tight shirt. Ryan tried not to scowl when he realized she had leashed them.
Maybe that was why she had warned them beforehand, bad experiences?
“Right,” Perin said and turned to Gus. “Anything else?”
He shook his head. “Not on my side, no.”
“Wait, that’s it?” Parker asked.
Perin turned. “Hm?”
“That’s the entire spell? That took what? A second? Why did we pay so much for this?”
She actually smiled. “You’re not paying me for a single casting the spell. You’re paying me for the years it took me to learn how to do it, and the extra years and paperwork it took me to get permission to make a business out of it.”
He grumbled something under his breath.
Flight business, huh? Ryan wondered what that was like.
“You okay on your own?” Perin asked her assistant.
She nodded once as she hoisted the half-emptied duffel over one shoulder but spoke in a distracted tone, “Give me a moment.”
Much slower, Ryan saw her repeat a similar incantation on her own, and then he felt a glimmer of magic as a smaller version of the spell washed over her.
“See you in a week,” Gus told them.
“Like we’ll need that long,” Barry told him. “See you Wednesday, sir.”
Their scout leader gave a rare smile. “I’ll look forward to it. You can help prepare the camp.”
Barry made a face and before he could say anything else, Perin interrupted them with a roll of her eyes, “Alright, enough time wasted. We’re off.”
With that, before Ryan could brace himself, she shot into the sky … and the leashes she’d cast around them flung them up with her.
----------------------------------------
Lisa didn’t know why she made her feet move forward. She didn’t know why she still wore boots.
Hers were similar to riding boots in style but shorter and meant for casual wear. She assumed. She didn’t actually know. She had seen some girls her age wearing ones like them years ago and bought a pair of her own, then never thought too much about them again. Until now.
You really could have chosen a better time and place, she thought in dry amusement, but the weeks spent on the road had let her mind wander. Her thoughts were a whirlwind.
Her lungs breathed of their own accord. Her legs crested another small hill. The sea of grass shimmered in waves of wind around her.
Mother’s Forest lay ahead.
Hadica’s rolling hills far behind her.
These rolling hills, which stretched around her for as far as her eyes could see, were not natural; they were craters.
Mounds rose here and there like lumps in the ground—old walls, domes, and horse spikes that had deteriorated. Beneath the grass, the dirt twisted in spiral patterns, starburst lines, and long roads where the ground had once flowed like water. Cracks caught her boots from time to time, relics of much larger fissures.
The Northern Border. Over two thousand people had died here in the Battle of North Star Fall.
A group of [Archmages] had, concurrently, cast [Meteor Swarm] and scarred the land for kilometers around to stop an elite regiment that had caught the City forces by surprise.
The regiment had been led by a member of the royal family, who were notoriously hard to kill. The seed that had led to the distant, distant branch of the mark on Kyle’s hand. The royal mark covered their entire backsides, shoulderblades to butt.
The regiment had been massacred, of course.
Not her uncle Adry, though. He had walked among the assaulting forces in disguise to collect a true first-hand account of the war—the first time he had done so—and gotten progressively more and more annoyed by the trials of war.
Usually, other members of her family would take over that task but he’d been looking for a chore to do while he thought on his next project and the war had been right there so …
When the meteors had begun to fall, threatening to destroy his notes, that had been the last straw. He’d turned on the spot and created a path home—along with some stowaways who had been near him.
And that path still existed today. For Garen, her family kept it functional. It was cheaper to maintain these things than to create them, they had learned. The magic that went into their creation was finite.
Her mom had given Lisa a map when she’d left. It hadn’t lasted a day in her care and was now crumpled beyond recognition.
Trying to sense anything through the torn space and wild magic in this region was a trial in enduring a voluntary migraine, but she knew exactly what she was looking for.
Eyes closed, Lisa listened for a hum in the air and made her legs stumble down the hill.
At the base of a crater, she found a glimmer of distorted light, like a fractal shard of clear glass in the dirt, no bigger than a mouse hole.
This is it, she thought and the storm of buzzing thoughts reached its peak. As if to escape them, she willed herself through the tunnel, to elsewhere—
—and stumbled out two hundred kilometers north, feeling supremely uncomfortable as her body unpackaged itself and snapped back into shape … mostly.
She popped an arm back into its socket, healed some broken bones, and sucked her skin back into place, then froze with a furrowed brow.
Why had she done that? She was going to have to fix it all again soon anyway.
It was thoughts like those that had plagued her. She shoved them aside and ignored them for now. Instead, she looked up and froze for another reason: the woodland edge in front of her.
Home.
Massive mammoth trees loomed in neat rows like an orchard, their leaves autumn colors even in high summer, thin grass poked out of the detritus like nails, and that hill where she’d used to wait for Garen to come visit looked the same.
Memories flooded her mind like smells. Actually smells flooded her nose, and she took a deep breath to fill her lungs with the warm scent of the earth.
Her heart thumped like a drum. Too many emotions to process. Almost three years!
Home.
Her legs seemed to move of their own accord then. She scaled the hill and halfway there, used her hands to scramble up quicker.
Her luggage slipped around her shoulder and knocked into her waist, weighing her down.
She smiled when she made it to the top and almost called out but hesitated at how quiet the forest was. Where was everyone? She would have expected someone to welcome her when she—
“Lisaaa!”
Oh.
Before she could break the silence, a distant voice called her name. Barely audible, high-pitched, young, and slightly out-of-breath, she recognized it, and the first thing she did when she got home was let out a bitter chuckle.
Of course, she would be the one to greet her first. Of course, they were late. She came home after three years and nobody was here to greet her? Someone must have kept them.
“Lisaaa!” the voice grew louder.
She slipped her large green duffel off, then her backpack, and rested them against a tree.
She wondered if she should get changed now or later. She wanted to show off, but she also wanted to hug people. She could always change back later …?
The tree crowns rarely touched here. Sunlight slipped past the canopy in thin lines that crisscrossed the forest and where it fell, the grass grew higher and the shade receded.
It let her see further. In the distance, a tall red figure loped toward her along the forest floor.
Lisa took a few steps back to the middle of four trees and stared at the massive red figure that descended from the canopy above instead, blending in with the leaves.
“Lisa, Lisa, Lisa!”
The excited voice got closer, and Lisa frowned because the figure on the ground hadn’t slowed down one bit. It hurtled toward her and—
“Wait, wait, wait—!” she yelled.
The child red dragon didn’t stop. It caught her as she turned to run, turning its head and opening its maw. Its jaw was wide enough for its teeth to puncture both of her shoulders, her ribs—breaking them—internal organs, and left arm.
It lifted her in its mouth as it skidded to a halt, throwing up clouds of dirt, and shook her like a chew toy, rambling her name over and over again in an overly-excited voice, “Lisa, Lisa, Lisa, Lisa, Lisa!”
In its excitement, it squeezed. The right arm of her body snapped off and hit the trunk of a tree. Her hip cracked. Her spine threatened to go next.
She groaned.
The dragon heard and whipped her body down. One giant pink eye narrowed to peer at her through a gaping wound in her chest. It drooled. Its warm breath wafted over her like plumes of smoke.
Through clenched teeth, the dragon laughed to itself and said, “Come out and play!”
Lisa sighed.
Fine.
Lisa thrust her arm out of her rib cage. Red scales and drops of blood flowed into the sunlight.
She bent her arm around at an awkward angle, working blind, and hooked her claws in her cousin’s mouth on the inside of her cheek.
When she pushed her second arm out, her already strained body exploded in chunks of gore that splattered across the forest floor.
With the weight of her arm, she leaned forward and freed a space to kick her leg out. Her claws dug grooves into the soil as she used it for leverage.
Using her weight, Lisa pulled her cousin’s face into the dirt, twisted her arm behind her back, and applied pressure.
As easily as a seventeen-year-old pinning a five-year-old, she pinned the dragon. Because that was exactly what it was.
Muri laughed and squirmed beneath her. She flapped her right wing for leverage. The other was trapped between their bodies. She struggled but couldn’t break free.
“I— Ugh,” she mumbled and spoke up. “No fair! Did you use a spell?”
“No?”
“Argh! Then why can’t I— Lisaaa,” she whined.
She smiled. “What?”
“Let me go! Let me go!”
“I thought you wanted to play?” her voice sounded odd to herself, like she needed to drink a glass of water to clear her throat.
But with every word, she became more and more accustomed to speaking, and then her voice sounded deep and rich, with an intensity that seemed to quake the air.
The air and ground both shook as the other figure touched down through the canopy. Her voice was even richer.
“Lisa,” she chided her, but her tone was full of love. How she’d missed it. “Don’t tease your cousin.”
With the air of a brat who had the adults on her side, Muri piped up, “Yes, let me go!”
“You want me to let you go?” Lisa asked. She could feel herself getting caught up in the moment.
“Yes!”
“Alright then!” Lisa sunk her teeth into her cousin’s neck, scooped her up, and threw her weight in it as she heaved.
Then, she wasn’t pinned beneath her anymore. She hurtled toward the canopy with a hoarse scream.
Lisa groaned—Muri had gotten heavier in three years—but she still laughed as she truly exerted herself for the first time in ages. She had almost forgotten how strong she was.
Muri tumbled through the air, reached the zenith of her throw, and began to fall again. Only then did she seem to remember she had wings, the idiot. She spread them out and began to flap with an … odd expression on her face.
Her eyes were wild and unfocused, her head jerked up to glance at her wings, which she was wasn’t using right, she was falling too quickly, and down at the ground again. The lines above her eyes twisted in fear—one of a few expressions they shared in common with humans.
She took in deep, rapid breaths with a high-pitched panicked whine, a child on the verge of tears.
The woman looming above her gave her a reproachful look and raised a hand. The wind shifted with the gesture as if rushing to be at her disposal.
“What’s wrong?” Lisa asked.
“Your cousin has been having trouble learning how to fly.”
A gale of wind flowed up and buffeted Muri, slowing her descent, and her breathing calmed down as the woman reached up to catch her.
The size difference was like a person lifting up a small dog with one hand, and Muri clung to her and slid down her arm butt first to climb to the ground.
Lisa felt a little bad, she did, but … she felt some level of satisfaction. She hadn’t had any trouble flying when she had been her age.
But she shook the feeling from her head and smiled for another reason, because of the woman standing before her, because she’d missed even her cousin, for all she annoyed her, and because she was here.
When the woman turned back to her, Lisa smiled up at her and said in a gentle tone, “Hey, mom. I’m home.”
Her mom stepped closer and craned her neck down to hug her. “I’ve missed you so much, my daughter. I’m glad you’re back.”
Warm scales pressed against her, the weight of her body over her, her mom made her feel safe in a way that no one, except maybe one other person, could match.
Lisa let go of the tension in her body and melted into the hug. “Dad couldn’t make it?”
“Your father is, uhm …” she hesitated, and Lisa perked up. It was rare for her mom to hesitate.
Was something wrong?
No. She leaned back, running her claws through her mane and neck spines, and looked away as she lied, “Preoccupied. He won’t be long. You will get to see him today.”
“Okay?” Lisa kept back a smile. Maybe she was getting a surprise party after all? The forest was awfully quiet, even if they were far from their actual home grounds.
As her mom pulled her hand away, Lisa felt a pull on her mane. Her mom picked a bit of hissing meat off of her and tossed it aside, its outer edges slowly turning to ichor.
She followed the meat with her eyes and blinked. Her mind slowly caught up to what had happened as the moment passed and her excitement waned.
All around her, gore covered the forest floor and slowly turned to ichor. The splattered blood was already hissing as it unraveled into smoke and then light—essences.
Her body lay in tatters. A limb here, a limb there, a rib cage …
“No. No, no, no, no, no,” Lisa scrambled to gather them up and her voice rose in fury, “No! MURI!”
“Yes?”
“My body!”
“Huh?” she sounded innocent.
“Do you know how long it took me to create a human body?”
“Huh? I, uh—”
“Lisa,” her mom said in a calming tone.
“ONE YEAR! I was developing patterns in that thing! Emotional cues! Body language! My own handwriting! Do you always have to ruin everything?”
She found a leg, half a bundle of ribs, and a broken arm and cradled them against her chest as she circled her mom on three limbs to look for the rest.
Her mom glared down at her, but Lisa just lifted one of her wings in passing to check underneath, and it blocked out the sun. It was larger than her.
“I— I didn’t mean to,” Muri protested.
Yeah, right, Lisa thought. She always broke her things. If she had just waited, Lisa could have carefully slipped out of her body, but noo. She had to shake her like a chew toy.
She found a jaw and wondered where the rest of her head was.
“I really didn’t!” she insisted, this time to her mom.
“I know, child. It is not something we cannot fix. If we hurry. We need to gather up the pieces of the body to preserve them before they unravel. Let your cousin and I handle that, however. Don’t try something yourself, just help us collect the pieces.”
“Oh? Okay! I can do that.” Muri ran around, collecting every bit of tattered flesh and skin she could find. She overdid it.
When Lisa had the major pieces, her arms were full and she had to use her wings to walk.
Her cousin dumped her own pile on hers and smiled innocently, as if she had done her a favor and this wasn’t her fault in the first place.
“Muri, could you carry her luggage, please?” her mom asked and she complied with a smile, running off.
“Carefully,” Lisa warned her. “I brought presents.”
The moment she said it, she knew it had been a mistake. A light seemed to go on her eyes and Muri perked up.
“Presents? Did you bring anything for me? Oh, from the Towers?! What is it, what is it, what did you bring?”
“You won’t get your present if you break it, or if you break the present for anyone else.”
Muri bobbed her head in acknowledgment, glanced at Lisa, and with a jackal’s grin, turned to her backpack and plucked at the fabric with one claw as if she could somehow get it to open.
“Hey, no. Stop, you’ll—”
There came a tearing sound and a pile of clutter, clothes, and books spilled free onto the dirt.
Lisa’s hands were full. She groaned. Definitely home.