My blade took a long time to cool down. Fae steel apparently has a much higher melting point than regular steel, and so the sword wasn't safe to touch until the late morning. Additionally, Ref had informed me that cooling it with water would be a Very Bad Idea indeed, and as such, I left it alone.

So we waited in the now cleansed town square, clearing a small space to make a campfire. The shriveled up tentacles of the monster made for surprisingly effective kindling - or so we thought, until the flame turned bright violet and formed screaming faces. We left it alone after that.

We spent the remainder of the night curled up beside a normal fire, one sourced from the dry, dusty wood courtesy of the more uncorrupted buildings around the square. If anything, the still-glowing blade, which I'd managed to pull out of the stone - into which it had apparently melted - was good as a firestarter. I doubt I could do it myself at the moment, my own magic felt drawn-out, viscous and lethargic, while the Flame was barely a whisper. Whatever I'd done had been so intensive I was hesitant to try anything until both were somewhat restored. Though even now, I could feel the Flame bolstering, slowly gaining strength, and knew that it was enough to beat back any sort of creeping corruption within our bodies.

Speaking of bodies... my own was fine, relatively speaking. I had several new scars, the largest of which adorned my neck, which looked like the flesh was fused together, welded. They felt weird to the touch - thin, jagged lines, not different to normal skin, but sunken into the skin like a relief. The others weren't so lucky. Elran's arm had been sliced by a razor-sharp talon, and the wound had needed stitching, while san-Zur's lower leg muscles had been ripped apart by a monstrous beak. He would be fine in a few days (according to him), but would need one of us to carry him until the muscle was healed enough to walk. Ekias' face looked like it'd been flayed, but some of the herbal tincture in our medic's bag soothed the pain and it had already scabbed over. je-Kalyi was physically unhurt - but only physically. She was sitting stock-still, staring into the fire unblinkingly. I thought I saw her lips move once or twice, but her face was unchanged when I turned to look. Her only interaction with us was an absent nod when we let her know we'd start walking again the next morning.

***

When said morning came, most of us slept in. I was the first to awake, noting with satisfaction that my magic was already recovering, and saw that the others were still fast asleep. Both brothers leaned against each other (cute), san-Zur was sleeping like a rock, and je-Kalyi was slumped against the wall behind her, having apparently fallen asleep while looking into the fire.

I stood up, wincing as my joints popped and I stretched muscles awake that would rather have stayed asleep.

God I wish memory foam was still a thing.

Looking over at the remains of the statue, I noted with satisfaction that the sword was no longer glowing. I walked over, ran a finger over the metal to check its temperature and picked it up by the hilt. Whatever the hell the handle was made of, it was apparently extremely heat-resistant. The metal itself was unchanged. Still matte, the reflective properties scrambled, but it wasn't bent or flaky or even dulled. I grinned at the sound it made when I returned it to its scabbard.

Still grinning, I quietly walked back to the dying fire, fed it some more wood and went to warm up something for breakfast.

***

After a quiet breakfast, we started walking again, making good time in the flattened grassland beyond the village. The wind was in our favor and blew towards us, revealing the Eastern Mountains looming in the distance. I wasn't very good at judging distances in this world (something was messing with my depth perception, the same thing made it seem like the sky was really, really high up), so I spoke up for the first time since we’d left the village.

"So how far do we still need to go?"

Elran, who was walking beside me, startled, looked at me, then shrugged.

"My eyes could be tricking me, but it looks like we'll be reaching the mountains in two or three days, if we keep going like this."

"Kinda small for a continent, wouldn't you say?"

"Eh, I don't know about that. It gets frozen in the north and a bit warmer than here in the south, but I don't know of anyone who journeyed further in either direction before the land became uninhabitable or stopped being land. There were some boats launched towards the east and west as well, but none of those ever returned."

Huh. So this world was wholly unexplored.. or maybe only unexplored by this civilisation?

***

As noon turned to dusk, the mountains seemed closer once again - I could now see the evening sun reflecting off their snowy tips. But as we crested the slight, almost unnoticeable hill we'd been ascending for the past few hours, we found ourselves looking out over a large, deep valley stretching to both sides for miles on end. Down below was a thin river.

Either the river had carved this valley into the ground, or it was once much larger than it is now.

"I think this is a good spot for camp, what do you think?" I asked the group at large. Ekias nodded, and we plopped our bags onto the floor. While they were unpacking, I searched the surrounding crag for firewood.

As the sun's last rays vanished beyond the flatlands to the west, we already had a fire going. A lot of my magic had returned, enough to create a heated spark and guide it into the dried grass that served as our firestarter.

I wasn’t accustomed to my magic feeling like this. I felt empty, lacking, with so much of it still gone. I’d become accustomed to it.

With the flames crackling away, we settled in around the heat source and ate the rations for tonight. And then, finally, after almost an entire day of silence, je-Kalyi spoke for the first time since the battle.

"We were scared of you, you know." she whispered, looking at me, through me with unfocused eyes. The others paused mid-meal.

"Scared of what you became in that village. I don't know if you know, but to us you looked... menacing, wild, evil, almost. At first I thought you'd accidentally ignited yourself with magic, but then I saw. I saw and I can't forget it. You weren't on fire, you were fire. I've never seen anything like it, and it made me afraid."

Then, Elran spoke up.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

"I think what got me most was the sword. I've handled weapons almost my entire life. You tend to pick up things as you take them to be repaired, or watch them be smithed. I remember the heat of a forge, I know what fire feels like when it's hot enough to turn the hardest steel as liquid as water. And even from as far away as we were on that fountain, you burned brighter, hotter than that. Your sword was on fire! And it's not even warped, or bent, or anything. Even the hilt."

"I told them they were being idiots, of course." Interjected Ekias, easing the tension a little. Knowingly, if I interpreted the cheeky grin he was hiding correctly.

"Honestly, I'm just glad you're on our side in this. What you did to that eye was the most brutal and grotesque thing I've ever seen, but it was certainly effective." came the voice of san-Zur, who was sitting beside me.

"I honestly don't know what I did. I think I got stabbed in the neck, and then everything went cold, but after that it gets a little fuzzy. I remember everything, but I don't really remember why I did it the way I did. Like the eye stabbing thing," I mimed the motion using a stick, "I did it, I knew it'd work, but I don't know why I knew. I mean, sure it's logical, stab the big vulnerable spot, but the eye could've easily been just an eye. But I knew for sure that stabbing it there would kill it. That that was somehow the part that made it go."

"Well... it's not unheard of to be guided by unseen forces. je-Kalyi can probably tell you more about it, I'm not really versed in that kind of thing." san-Zur threw in, with a sidelong glance to the Weaver, who was looking into the campfire again.

"There's many stories where the hero's blade is guided by their ancestors, or the gods, or simply a friendly spirit of nature. I think the closest to what you experienced would be the third story in the Heimstahrsaga." Elran piped up.

I looked at him questioningly, but it was his brother who began speaking in a poetic tone.

"Far ashore -- past mountain and river

Grand vistas -- bloody battles and lakes

Lay Heimstahr -- feste of evil and sorrow

Brave knight -- radiant and strong"

"Blade shine -- silver in the moonlight

Came hence -- seen and felt across

The Land -- sundered and dark by loss

Ancient Spirit -- asleep deep beneath"

"Wake now -- as Knight pass overhead

Heart pieced -- yet light's magick's bright

Knight falls -- bleeding, sundered halls of Heimstahr

Light's heart -- as battle great commence anew"

"Far ashore -- past mountain split and river dry

Grand vistas -- Deathly fields and bloody lakes

Lay Heimstahr -- shadow, smoke and memory

Brave knight -- did what none could do"

The rhymes or tempo seemed to be lost in translation, but I got the gist of it. An unnamed knight who invaded an evil fortress, was wounded, and then assisted by some form of "ancient spirit" beneath the earth.

I told them as much.

"Yes, that's generally the accepted interpretation." answered the mediciner, "The poem is one in a collection, each telling of a place named 'Heimstahr', which these stories purport is a gathering place for evil. You see why it might be applicable to our situation, though."

Now was my turn to sink into thought. I conjured up my spark, and made it dance over my hand, looking unthinkingly at the small spot of magic glinting in the night.

***

According to the map, we had only once passed into the border of the taint, which was - of course - the monster village. Having passed out of the infected zone, we made good time, towards the ever-growing mountains to the east.

The canyon was surpassed via rope and a bit of rock-climbing, which I'd never done before. We stocked up on fresh water from the stream that had carved the canyon - after confirming it was coming from the mountains, not the corrupted area. I slipped a few times during the climb back up the other side, but was saved by the brothers' surprisingly strong grip on the rockface. Their claws made climbing a breeze.

Approaching the mountains, the land became more and more windswept. Lush grass was exchanged for more and more craggy rocks and the few trees dotting the plains before became small, huddled things clinging to the rocky ground.

And then we started walking uphill.

Contrary to popular belief, mountains don't actually jut out of the otherwise flat ground - they raise the ground around them as well, creating a very wide slope in the landscape as they jut upwards. I wasn't too out of breath, but it was definitely harder than walking the flatlands now stretching out behind us. After two days of walking slightly uphill, we began to see more and more landscape behind us. The canyon which had given me so much trouble was a small, jaggy line crossing the plains below, stretching in both directions and eventually vanishing from sight.

By the third day, I noticed we were definitely following je-Kalyi, and wondered when the change had happened. She'd come out of her funk a while ago, hugged me and then returned to her normal self.

But now, she was determinately striding towards one of the valleys visible between the mountains, neither looking left or right at any of the other gaps between the rocky titans. I felt compelled to ask why.

Her answer of "That's clearly the right way, silly." was a bit obvious in retrospect, but if I'd learned anything in this world, it was to trust the Weavers if they had an intuition.

***

"So why hasn't anyone found this lake before?" I asked out of the blue, the two mountains our path would take us between looming impossibly tall.

"Who knows, maybe someone has, and the finder was compelled not to share their discovery? You must also remember that these mountains are treacherous in the best of cases. One misstep means tumbling down and breaking your bones on the rocks below. There are no roads, only a few paths made by either animals or crazy people and you could die at any time because of rockslides." explained san-Zur.

I was suddenly feeling a bit more apprehensive about the next leg of our journey. At least with je-Kalyi's apparent compass, we had a direction, but as the mountains around us grew taller, our path grew more and more treacherous in turn.

Several times we had to turn around and look for another path, another broken rockface to walk upon, another gap to climb over, another slope to climb down.

However, slowly but surely, we managed to pass deeper and deeper into the mountains.

je-Kalyi's internal compass seemed to lead us up the mountains, out of the lush valleys deep below, and before long, we were trekking through chalk-white, craggy stone basins, our only living companions a few lizards, some insects and the occasional fern. The winds slowly became more and more harsh and cold the further we ascended, and at night we were forced to find something to take shelter behind, or it would blow out our fire.

Still, we made progress. Very slow progress, much slower than we'd made in the plains, but progress nonetheless. On the sixth day into the mountains, we found ourselves on a large, jagged plateau formed when a gargantuan chunk of rock had slid downwards into a valley. Wind and rain had hollowed it out into a bowl-shape, and the water had carved a small channel into one side of the bowl.

Walking along the channel, the ground was surprisingly flat, but once we began climbing the bowl, the rock became porous and loose. To stop one of us from sliding hundreds of meters down the slope, our entire group tethered ourselves together using a rope, with Ekias, who walked behind je-Kalyi, jabbing a long spike of steel into the ground with every step.

This slowed us significantly, but we were safe from uncontrollably sliding down into the bowl.

When we finally reached the ridge, je-Kalyi was the first over it and on the small plateau that crested it. She froze, looking out over what lay beyond with wonder in her eyes.

The rest of us quickly clambered up next to her, and as I came up next to her on the ridge, I saw what had perplexed her so - a massive, round valley, filled with flowers of any color imaginable, verdant grass on the floor below. And towards the center, a clear lake, sparkling as the evening sun reflected into our eyes.

I knew that, without a doubt, this was what we'd been searching for.