Josh was currently staring at a stone guard tower.

He had left Haven behind two days ago, and had been walking north ever since. The Havenites had been generous, seeing him off with a pack full of food, a change of clothes, another walking stick, a thick woollen blanket, a fire lighting kit, a short coil of rope, a bow, a quiver full of arrows, and a great deal of well-intentioned but contradictory advice. There had been tearful goodbyes from Goodwife Benton, a solid, approving handshake from her son-in-law, and a short, manly conversation with Meikel, in which a great deal more was understood than was actually said.

The pending levels to his class were still applying themselves at a rate of one per day. Josh wasn’t sure why it was that slow, but he suspected it was so that whatever system was in place could apply the upgrades to his body in gradual and natural way. He’d put his attribute points from levelling into Endurance and Chi, and was getting additional upgrades for all the walking and feather enchanting he’d been doing. He’d been attempting to practice with the bow, but the sole lesson that Meikel had given him before he’d left had been notable more for its haste than its thoroughness, and Josh wasn’t sure he was making much progress.

The northern lands Josh was heading into were all that remained of Celespire’s territory, after the Storm King had wrested control of the capital city from Queen Halina’s son, King Rupern. The latter had established his court-in-exile the city of Drendal, a hundred miles or so north. If Josh couldn’t find out more about the Dreamer in Brackstone, he would go to Drendal instead.

First, however, he had this guard tower to deal with.

It was a tall square tower, which reminded Josh of the old peel towers you got in the north of England, and was situated on a rise that overlooked the surrounding country. The road skirted the hill, but remained in full view of the tower. This is what you get for following a road, Josh told himself.

There seemed no sign of occupancy. The door to the tower was closed, and there was no movement at any of the arrow slits on the upper floor, nor on the battlements. If there was anyone there, they would have seen Josh coming from a mile away, so there was no point in trying to avoid it now. Maybe it wasn’t manned?

This assumption was proved wrong when Josh reached the part of the road nearest the tower, and a sudden voice yelled at him.

“Hoy! Hoy!”

Josh looked up to see a figure in a helmet waving at him from the battlements. The tone of the shout suggested that Josh had been doing something wrong and ought to stop it at once. Maybe the road wasn’t for walking on? Maybe this was some kind of restricted area? He hesitated, wondering if he should just run away, but the landscape was clear for miles in every direction, and maybe the guard would have a bow or a crossbow.

Josh’s decision was made for him when a different guard opened the door at the base of the tower. He was a beefy, well-fed fellow, with a ruddy face, and wore an ill-fitting brigandine. In one hand he held a crossbow, pointed negligently downwards and, once he’d let go of the door, he used his other hand to pick his nose.

Josh and the guard stared at each other.

“Hello?” Josh said, eventually.

It was at that point that Josh remembered the enchanted feather he’d tied to the end of a long reed, which he’d stuck in his belt, so that it danced and swayed in and out of his sense range as he walked. The idea was to try and improve the range of his Feather Feel skill. He was aware that it made him look like an absolute pillock, but he hadn’t seen another person for two days, so it hadn’t been a problem until now. He didn’t blame the guard for staring.

There was the sound of running footsteps, and the guard from the battlements appeared. This one was shorter and wirier, but similarly accoutred. He pulled the door open wider and pointed at Josh.

“You!” he shouted. “Halt!”

Josh wasn’t currently moving. He looked down at himself and back up at the guard.

“Yes?” he said.

His heart was beating a little faster, but he tried to sound calm, and he had deliberately thickened his accent, in an attempt to make himself sound like a local. The Havenites had sounded northern English, although their dialect didn’t quite match any that he was familiar with. Which was its own mystery—why would people from another world entirely not only speak English, but in an accent that was not dissimilar to the very part of England that Josh himself was from?

Whatever the reason for the similarity in dialect, Josh was planning to do his best to sound like a local. He didn’t think he had a handle on when it was appropriate to go around thee’ing and thou’ing people, but he could definitely slide his accent further away from the received pronunciation end of the scale.

If the guard was put off by Josh’s calm demeanour, he recovered quickly.

“Stop what you’re doing right now!” he ordered.

“Ah...” Josh wasn’t sure what to say. Should he point out that he wasn’t doing anything, or should he ask what it was he was supposed to stop? From the little he had seen so far he wasn’t confident that the guard was susceptible to the logical reasoning.

“I saw you,” the guard said. “Sneaking along.”

“I was walking!” Josh protested.

“Walkin’, aye,” the beefy guard corroborated.

“He could be scourge,” the thin guard said, gripping his crossbow tightly. The point of it wavered towards Josh. “Invadin’ our lands!”

Josh’s heart beat a little faster and he looked down at himself again.

“I’m not—" he began, but was interrupted when a third guard arrived.

This one was older, and wore a breastplate, and a helmet with a plume on top. He stared at Josh, and then said, “Grig, what the hell is going on?”

“I caught this scourge, sir!” Grig said.

The newcomer raised his eyes to heaven, then took off his helmet and scratched at the red line where it had left a dent in his forehead.

“Grig,” he said, in thoroughly fed-up tone of voice, “If this was a scourge you’d be dead already. Get back to your post.”

Grig looked as if he wanted to argue, but after a beat he went.

“You,” the new guard—presumably a sergeant—said to Josh. “What you doing ‘ere?”

“I’m travelling to Brackstone.”

“And where you from?”

“Haven,” Josh lied. “It’s a village—”

“Aye, aye, I know the one. Alright, come in then.”

“Er...” Josh said. “What for?”

The guard post, it turned out, was one of the southern border forts established by King Rupern, there to provide an early warning system if the Storm King suddenly decided to invade. From the general level of preparedness exhibited by the guards, Josh gathered that no invasion was considered imminent. He hoped Private Grig wouldn’t be too disappointed.

“But if yer going north,” Sergeant Kelso told him, “You need papers. Can ye read?”

“Yes,” Josh said, before remembering he was in a different world and there was no guarantee that these people used the Roman alphabet. A moment later, as Sergeant Kelso laboriously transcribed his answers, he was relieved to discover that they did, or at least something that bore a passing resemblance to it.

The piece of paper which Sergeant Kelso showed him read:

I, Joshua de Haven, a plumier and apprentice seeking my trade, do certify that I am of sound mind and free from disease, and swear I intend no harm nor to His Majesty, King Rupern of Celespire, nor to the people of Dendralshire, nor do I travel with malicious intent.

Josh hadn’t thought to give his surname, and Sergeant Kelso hadn’t asked, maybe assuming he didn’t have one.

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“Needs a seal,” Sergeant Kelso said. “Oh, and yer fee.”

“Fee?” Josh clutched the piece of paper defensively. “I don’t have any money.”

“Aye, well, see what ye can do.” Sergeant Kelso gestured. “Turn out yer pack, lad.”

Josh hesitated. The sergeant had a sword by his side, and a square, heavy build that meant he outweighed Josh by a good margin. He also had armour, and Josh had none. On top of that, he commanded two privates, both armoured and armed. Josh was fairly sure that there was no legal basis for what they were doing, but he didn’t feel like he was in a position to decline. The sergeant gestured again, impatiently, and Josh didn’t like the look in his eye.

He put his pack reluctantly on the table. The sergeant emptied it out, and gave an unimpressed grunt. He took all the remaining food, the lovely warm, dry woollen socks the Havenites had given him, and the blanket.

“What am I supposed to eat?” Josh protested.

“Stop whinging. There’s food to be had up north, if ye care to work for it. Now give me yer finger.”

“What? Why?”

“Because yer need blood for the seal.”

Josh insisted that this be accomplished with his own knife, still sharp, and long cleaned of the venom, and let a drop of his blood fall on the paper. Sergeant Kelso dribbled some melted wax over the top, and then pressed it with a seal. Weirdly, Josh could feel a tiny speck of magic caught inside the wax. Was that his blood? Or magic that was in his blood? Did it come from him, or from the process of embedding in sealing wax? He frowned and concentrated, but the feeling was small and elusive, and he didn’t realise how much effort he was expending until he suddenly realised he was sitting on the stone floor of the guard tower, feeling light-headed, with both guards staring at him in bemusement.

“Paragon forfend, what a pansy!” the Sergeant said, obviously thinking this was in response to Josh cutting his finger. But he poured a cup of wine and made Josh drink it with a sort of rough kindness at odds with his blatant theft of Josh’s things only a few minutes earlier.

Josh left the guard post with a lighter pack and strong feelings of resentment. He came up with half a dozen plans for sneaking into the guard post and stealing back his things when the guards were asleep, even though he knew it was a stupid idea.

To distract himself, and put himself in a better frame of mind, he focused on his character sheet. When he’d woken up this morning, he’d received a choice between three new skills.

[Please choose one of the following skills:

Glow: Enchant a feather to glow for a short time.

Hide: Enchant a feather to blend into its surroundings for a short time.

Extinguish: Enchant a feather so that it can dim light in a small area around it.]

The descriptions could have been a little more informative. What did ‘a short time’ constitute? How bright did the feather glow? Specifically what effect would allow a feather to blend in—would it be like a chameleon, or would it go transparent? How large was ‘a small area’?

If progression worked the same way as in Spiralia, Josh would get his next skill choices at levels 15, 25, and 35. Each time, one new skill would be added, giving him a choice of six skills, of which he would ultimately be able to choose four.

Knowing this didn’t help him in any way, because the choices you made, even at level 5, mattered a lot. The four base skills usually had minor effects, but when they could be combined for greater effects—two skills would make a second-tier skill, for example. Combining all four skills together would give you a fourth-tier skill, a Grand Master Skill. If Josh could choose four skills out of six, that meant there were nine possible combinations, and therefore nine possible Grand Master Skills.

The trouble was he had no idea how they would combine, or what the Grand Master Skills would be. He would be choosing blind.

He already wanted Glow and Hide. Glow would be useful for lighting his way, and, remembering how the men of the village had liked the chicken feathers plumes he had made, he thought maybe he could sell glowing feathers as a novelty decoration. But it depended on what it looked like, and how long the effect lasted, and he wouldn’t know until he tried it.

Hide would be perfect for camouflage in the forest, even if it was a temporary effect. Josh suspected that Hide and Extinguish would synergise with each other to create a stealth effect, and that would ultimately be more useful than Glow. So he should probably choose Hide, but it would limit his options to earn money, unless there were a lot of people who wanted to use feathers as camouflage.

Josh wasn’t going to choose yet, however. There was no point, when he didn’t have enough feathers to make anything that would be able to take advantage of Hide or Extinguish anyway. It would be better to wait until he had found out more about the world first.

Despite the setback at the guard post, he had a plan. The first step would be to learn everything he could about the world of Six Spires, while keeping his outlander status hidden and under level 10. In the meantime, he would work on raising his attributes as much as possible. He needed to be much tougher. His strategy was hugely risky, because if he did die he would lose his unapplied experience, but on the plus side it would prevent any outlanders trying to kill him permanently for his player core.

Then, when Josh had found out everything he could about the Dreamer, he would apply any levels he’d accrued, and set off on his quest.

For this to work, however, he needed to be able to pass as a local.

Therefore, the short-term plan was to ask for work at farmhouses on the way north, in exchange for food and a place to sleep at night. Once he got to the Whortleberry Woods he would check out the druid grove, because they had something he thought would help. And maybe the druids would also know something about the Dreamer.

Of course, it didn’t go anything like Josh had expected. His catnip effect seemed to have worn off, because at the first house he stopped, the woman who answered the door would only open it a grudging couple of inches, and when Josh asked for food and lodging in exchange for work he heard a man yelling in the background, and then a dog came barrelling around from the side of the house and chased him off the property.

The next few houses he saw all seemed to have guard dogs, and after the second time he’d been chased away, he stopped trying.

That night he lay shivering in a hedgerow, and when he did finally get to sleep it felt like he was woken only a couple of hours later by a dawn chorus of bird screaming their tiny little hearts out, by which time he was freezing cold, damp with dew, and ravenously hungry.

The only bright note that morning was that he had gained two points in Chi in the night, as well as one in Resilience. Was the gain in Chi due to his feather-on-a-fishing-pole set up, or because he had nearly fainted trying to sense the magic in his blood? He would need to keep trying to sense the seal, but he felt too drained from lack of sleep and food. It wasn't as if he'd never missed meals before, but that was because he'd been hyperfocused on something, like a paper for a deadline, or a game. He'd always been secure in the knowledge that there would be something to eat at some point, even if it was just a packet of instant noodles unearthed from the back of a kitchen cupboard.

He had no such confidence now, and it made the hunger a gnawing ache that was all he could think about. Even his character sheet and speculations about the nature of the player core weren't enough to hold his attention.

When he finally did find a house without a dog, it was a ramshackle place with half-falling down fences and weeks choking the farmyard. However, there was a thin trickle of smoke coming from the chimney, so he worked up his courage and knocked on the door.

The couple who lived there were old and thin, with filthy faces, bad teeth, and clothes that were caked with ground-in dirt. For some reason which mystified Josh, they had scattered reeds on the floor of their farmhouse and then left them to rot. The whole place had a sour odour that turned his stomach. He almost turned tail and fled, and it was only the prospect of food that forced him to stay, and ask for work. That, and the fact that they clearly needed help.

Despite the unwholesome aura to the place, the old couple did their best to be hospitable. The old woman gave him some oatcakes, although, having seen the state of kitchen, Josh nearly gagged as he forced them down. They were also raw on the inside and charred on the outside, but they were plentiful and filling. That night he slept in their barn, in the hayloft. Getting into the hayloft itself had been an adventure in itself, because the ground floor was layered in compacted cow manure, which stank to high heaven. On the plus side, it was warm and dry.

In exchange, the next day Josh helped the old man shovel some of the manure from the barn into a cart, which he took to spread on a nearby field. By the time he was finished, both Josh and his clothes reeked. At least he still had the spare set of clothes, so he washed both himself and the soiled clothes using water from the well. The old woman, having watched his pathetic attempts at scrubbing the clothes with amusement, showed him how to mix water and ashes to make lye, which stung his hands, but at least removed the manure.

She gave him a slice of hard, gritty bread and mutton for his supper, and the old man offered him a permanent job on the farm, but Josh hastily made the excuse the family were waiting for him in Brackstone, and the next morning he set off northwards again.

This day started better, because he immediately got a lift from a man driving a cart full of barrels of cider, who cheerfully shared the contents of a basket of food which his wife had packed. It was full of thick slices of bread, yellow butter, a soft white cheese wrapped in a cloth, juicy red apples, a pot of honey, and a pint of milk in a glass bottle.

Josh had to restrain himself from falling on his portion like a starving wolf.

Josh soon discovered that the main reason he had been picked up was because the carter was the kind of person who liked an audience. He talked almost without pause from the moment Josh climbed into the cart to the moment he got set down. However, since the carter’s conversation related to the doings of the people who lived in his village, all of whom he referred to as if Josh would know exactly who they were, very little of what he said was either useful background information, or even comprehensible. All Josh was able to do was nod or say ‘oh?’ every so often, which he was perfectly willing to do if it would get him another slice of bread and cheese or honey.

The carter was taking his barrels of cider to a place he called ‘the Hall’, owned or lived in by someone he referred to as ‘Hisself’, by which Josh gathered it was the manor some kind of land-owning nobility.

After Josh’s experience with the guard post he decided he didn’t want to get mixed up with toffs, so when the carter turned off the main road he stuffed the last slice of honeyed bread in his mouth, wished the carter a slightly muffled farewell, and continued northwards once again.

Ahead, Josh could see the edges of a forest, which the carter had confirmed was the border of Whortleberry Woods. It was dispiriting that neither the old couple he had stayed with the previous day nor the carter had ever heard of a grove of druids, but perhaps druids were secretive and kept to themselves. If that was the case, they probably wouldn’t welcome a visit from Josh. However, he’d had an idea that he could use his feather enchanting skill for, and it seemed a shame to come all this way and not check it out.

Josh was still considering what to do when he reached the forest edge. He peered between the trees as he walked along the road, but all he could see was thick undergrowth and briars. Finding a druid grove in the midst of all that would not be easy.

He nearly jumped mile when a nearby voice said, “Oi, mate. Got a fag on yer?”