The average resident of New Regnąfels would not have been able to pinpoint the original location of the settlement even if paid to—a lack of education might have played a part of it, certainly, as few liked to pass such details on to the children young enough to not remember what happened. But in truth, even an avid explorer would have had a hard time recalling where it had been, or how to get to it.

Time was funny like that.

A lifelong student, Benedicta Aixez’s views on teaching were a complex thing—she felt out of place, no matter how many educational methods she had experienced or at least witnessed. This did not feel like her place, and she felt an imposter.

Had it been up to her, she would have sought the original Regnąfels alone, and having to assume the position of the authority figure in the expedition only worsened things.

“So this happens often?” the new apprentice assigned to her asked. She went by Flowers in the East for reasons lost to Benita, and she felt safer refusing to make a guess as to why she’d picked it. Reina was the girl’s real name, or something like that. The poor thing had let it slip—like some manner of fool!—quite early into their sessions, and Benita was unfortunate enough to remember.

This type of situation sucked. The more she knew about the person she was shepherding, the higher the risk she might get attached. That would have been well and good had it not been for how, for people like them, any day could be their last. Caring for a student would only lead to heartache, of the type Benita could go without.

One never knew when any of the fell might catch wind of their current location, after all.

Beneath her ornate veil, Benita exhaled. The mask underneath had been dubbed ‘overkill’ by one of the otherworlders she’d had the misfortune of meeting, but she stood by the arrangement. A wide-brimmed hat that nearly extended to her shoulders topped it all, for safety’s sake. All three items were enchanted with cloaking layers. Not only did it add an extra layer of security, to hide her features, but it also kept the light at bay, making it far easier for her to avoid overheating.

Some would have expressed concerns about whether this impaired her ability to travel and react to her surroundings, but those people would be fools. Benita’s Perception was such that she could have seen what stood before her with her eyes closed, even prior to its differentiation into Panopticon.

“It does not happen often,” Benita finally answered, shaking her mental tangent off. For a surface settlement to collapse like this—especially one so far from the sea—was close enough to unheard of that scholars and treasure hunters alike would rush to the site like vultures to carrion.

The only reason for the fallen city’s obscurity was, quite genuinely, the fact that no one could be bothered to come here. For a recent fall, Regnąfels was surprisingly inaccessible—it usually took longer than a mere few decades for the ruins to become fully buried, but its fall had been catastrophic, in the end.

In any Devil’s name, I swear none would come even if I paid them to.

Benita had certainly tried bribes, after putting the job offers up had failed.

For this trip, her company consisted of her undesired student and two mercenaries who lost a game of dice to Benita a few months back. One would have thought they should have known better than to agree to take on any job if they lost. Drunk soldiers of fortune were extraordinarily easy to take advantage of, and she was not the type to waste such a fortunate opportunity.

Though they had pegasi summons as mounts, the terrain made it so they could only fly in short bursts, lest the shifting landscape prevent them from finding the correct place to land. Navigating such a route was difficult enough to begin with that any true setback would be more than enough for it to be called off, and Benita had spent far too much time and resources on this to allow for such an abrupt end to their journey.

When the sea chose to bypass its entente with the integrity of the world, it at least deigned to avoid leaving a sinkhole behind, but the sea was the sea. Turning whichever place it ate into a sandpit was hardly better, especially when the winds were prone to conspiring in just the right way to spread the sands. Some theorized this had to be how most, if not all, of the world’s deserts came into existence.

Reina was still following close behind her, despite Benita’s accelerated pace. Her Buffs applied to her mounts, but the girl had no luggage, and was thus unencumbered. “Is that why we’re coming here?”

“No,” Benita admitted with a defeated sigh. She had given reason for this trip, which could become an extended absence, so there would be no harm in at least sharing the basics of it. “I am seeking something of personal importance.”

Their organization’s refusal to allow her to leave the girl unsupervised until she had proven capable of hiding from the fell grated at her.

Then again, perhaps they were on to something—dealing with the consequences of what the teenager might do if left to her own devices was likely to be an even bigger pain than having her tag along everywhere.

“What type of something?”

Benita looked over her shoulder, shooting her student a pointed glare that did not make it past the accessories that hid her identity. “You should know better than to ask such things, Flowers in the East.”

‘Keep anything personally identifiable under wraps’ was, in theory, the first lesson to be learned in their ‘little’ group. In practice, few got it right. It was human nature to wish to express oneself as an individual, but when you were unfortunate enough to be born with an Affinity the fell laid claim to, individuality was second place to self-preservation.

Her student had the decency to appear chastised, though Benita’s glee was hardly over whether she learned her lesson—she’d mostly been praying for an opening to get the girl to shut up.

In her position, Benita would have behaved.

She’d had countless teachers since her first, and took pride in how not once had she brought shame to them, no. There was a reason they kept taking her on, despite her rivaling them on the knowledge of multiple subjects.

Preventing anyone from having a valid reason to dismiss her was key.

To do otherwise would have been antithetical to her identity as She Who Learns, which she had cultivated for far too long to falter in.

Something caught her attention, then. In all directions, sand surrounded Benita and her companions, as far as her Panopticon could see. The desert shifted with the winds but ultimately lacked noticeable fauna or flora, with the disruptions to the endless sands being limited to the occasional rock that had proven too tall to be buried.

That was what made the metallic spire stand out the moment it entered Benita’s field of vision. It was uneven and somewhat bulbous, barely poking out from beneath the sands. The reflection of light against its surface had her wincing despite the distance between it and her true eyes.

“We are approaching my destination,” Benita informed her hired guards. She raised a hand, her gloved index finger pointing up, and dismounted. At last, she could abandon her company.

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It was not herself who she had hired the guards to protect.

Her boots hit the ground, sands billowing around her. The entirety of her outfit was white, and it must have been blinding to look at out here. She gave the mercenaries one last glance over the shoulder and nodded. “Protect her while I am gone.”

Reina’s complaint was willfully lost to Benita as she leapt with enough force to launch a miniature sandstorm against the expedition’s wards.

The next time she landed, she broke into a run, keeping her Panopticon locked in on the exposed spire. It became the center of her focus, as opposed to her own self.

Benita saw herself on the corner of her vision, approaching, and grinned beneath her mask. There was difficulty to the matter of imposing her Control out here, because these sands were tainted by their origin within the sea. But she did not border on Immortality for nothing.

Had any threats approached, she would have seen them by now—not only that, but she could have likely cut them down without a care in the world, shifting sand to sharpened glass.

Disappointment flooded the less mature parts of herself as it became clear there would be no need for confrontation. Her own vision superimposed her Panopticon’s image of the spire for a split second as she reached it.

This would be the challenging part.

Kneeling, Benita extended both hands to the sides, her index fingers touching the sand. In a swift movement, she spun her arms, her {Sand} Affinity meeting the mundane gesture to form a circle. Further details stored within a Trait manifested then, until an intricate design enveloped her.

Sand and white light alike danced around Benita and the spire, and the eternal student began to hum.

She stood and took a step forward. The sands sunk evenly, a rectangular hole in the shape of a single step forming beneath her. Then another, and another, in a spiral around the spire, as Benita began her descent. This was, of course, not a feature of the original Regnąfels’s ruins.

No, this was She Who Learns’s masterpiece.

Crafted and controlled almost entirely with raw Control, it was a testament to just how close she’d come to taking the final step.

Still, she could not move on. Not yet. Not without knowing.

That was why she was here.

Summoning an ornate medallion from her inventory, Benita allowed herself to close her eyes for a moment, inhaling deeply. Regardless of whether she liked the answer she got here, today, it would be done.

She’d know.

At last.

Seolferġiefu’s work was exquisite, as always, yet a pang of nostalgia coursed through Benita as she admired the piece once again. It was little more than a long wire shaped into an impossibly intricate form, but the excellence of it lay on how each piece of the enchantment had been carved into the wire before the medallion was made. The need for precision, for the final piece to function, was extraordinary.

At times, Benita still wondered what had become of him. Neither her superiors nor any of their organization’s own Seekers had managed to track him down since even before contact with Benita’s own teacher had been lost. An elder with a planted Affinity conductive to prophecy, well hidden within one of their safe houses, had gone as far as to claim even knowing of his fate would prove impossible for the foreseeable future.

And such a claim, phrased in such a way by such a person, was not to be taken lightly.

Alas, the matter had been dropped.

It was a shame, to Benita. The man had never been one of them, and he was naught but an acquaintance to her, but his work was precious.

Not to mention, his aid had gotten them out of a tight spot in more than one occasion. Part of why he remained an outsider was just how suspect some of those ‘connections’ of his appeared—it was wondrous that he could get the fell to turn a blind eye on members with {Ore} who proved dumb enough to be detected, but the matter of how was not to be ignored.

Namely, there were rumors that he traded with the enemy—and Benita did not doubt that for a second.

He’d seemed the type, not that it erased all the good he had done for their organization. He must have gotten all that precious metal somehow, after all.

As she found she could no longer see the surface well, Benita let go of those thoughts—the medallion’s creator was not currently a point of focus for her, no.

The spiral staircase through which she descended was one of her own making, and it would not endure forever. Clutching the amulet, Benita allowed it to lead her, and began to carve her path by hand. In her left, she held the last tracker Seolferġiefu ever made, while she sliced at the air before her with her right. Sand was pushed aside, not truly moved but compacted by the weight of her Control alone.

She brought into reality a pathway barely large enough for a person and their oversized hat to fit through, stepping over she knew not what along the way. She didn’t spare any of it a glance, not even through her Panopticon, though the sound of something cracking reached her ears on occasion.

A few centuries from now, if archaeologists ever set their eyes upon this place, they might wonder why so many potential artifacts were shattered, but they would like blame it on Regnąfels’s end.

Certainly not on her.

The first truly recognizable object she encountered was a chair. She suspected that, if she pushed her power enough for her Panopticon to get a better look, she might find an entire dining area surrounded her.

It was a shame the attribute didn’t benefit her other senses as much, but that was the price to pay for such raw power when it came to her vision. The range was ridiculous, and the quality decent, but it would never truly match what being in front of something was like. That ability to really examine what she was looking at was something she had forever tried and failed to integrate into her Panopticon.

Benita nearly tripped as the medallion yanked downwards, the power of the amulet latching on to that which she sought. It began to vibrate, confirming what she knew and expected—this would be the last use anyone would be getting out of it.

She bit her lip involuntarily, her steps uneasy as jagged rocks replaced the tiled floor she’d been traversing. Within moments, Benita found herself having to form steps out of the very sand, for the amulet led her past a large chasm.

It struck her, then, that this entire area had caved in, considerably so. She scrambled to walk through open air as the waning magic tugged at the medallion, and the stench of brine reached her nostrils.

With a groan, she pushed her Affinity harder, creating a larger sphere around herself. The sands fought against her now, eager to return to a state that was more natural and physically plausible, but she did not permit that to deter her.

Benita fought what felt like the world itself, until she reached a small area where rocks remained cohesive enough for her to at least stand on something. Every surface was jagged, and had she not come from above, she would not have recognized this as the missing piece of that dining area.

She caught a glimpse of shifting blue-green through her Panopticon immediately after—this was dangerously close to the sea. To her disappointment, the room was empty, all paths to it closed off, or at least, too small for her to pass through.

What got her attention, above all, was a small opening between shattered stones. As she tried to peer within, as far as she could with the limited lighting, Benita found it bordered on the appearance of a chute, almost suspiciously so. Still, no grown adult could have fit through there.

She examined the medallion—cracks were beginning to show. Where is it? Her expression contorted, not that anyone would know it. She wanted to break through her cultivated calm and shout at the amulet.

It had brought her here, yet the obit was nowhere to be found.

As if to answer her plea, the medallion shook, bringing a hum to the air. Benita’s eyes widened as the colors of the sea became brighter, all the more noticeable from where she was, and she was ready to rush back to the surface at a moments notice.

She almost did just that.

Then the ground parted.

A gracelessly burp-like noise echoed, and a puddle formed, dropping from above as if droplet by droplet while simultaneously erupting from below, and all within a split second.

Shards of emerald mixed with copper hovered in the waters, which retreated as swiftly as they had come, and the room was plunged into darkness.

Benita’s fist had closed around dust, and she allowed the now useless cord of the medallion to hit the ground.

Gingerly, she knelt, as if afraid the shards, too, would turn to dust if she wasn’t gentle enough.

She didn’t actually know whether they wouldn’t.

Ob

T s o co e de i s o Be l krī n. A ue ll] t o t owa he t rr n b asp s it.

d: T f 750

P s: 00 .

T b unusable if s

Benita’s past weeks—past decades—flashed before her eyes. All this time. All this effort. She had burned out Seolferġiefu’s last gift to them, and burned countless bridges to reach this point.

Yet all she had found, in the end, were little more than fragments of all that was left of the one she once called her teacher.

She had been too late.