Author's note: Part 8 is the beginning of Book Two. I hope you enjoy this new chapter in Tristan's adventures.

All characters depicted in sexual scenes are over the age of 18.

~

A flame-red dragon danced in the air, and Anja watched it in wonder. It slithered this way and that like a snake, then turned sharply with a snap of its feathered tail. Behind his daughter, Salam abruptly pulled on the strings, causing the fearsome beast to rear majestically before Anja's wide eyes. She shrieked and clutched at the hem of her mother's skirt. "Mama!"

Sonja smiled, her eyes reflecting their campfire's low coals. "Now now, love. What do we do when we meet a dragon?"

The dragon laughed, shaking its tasseled brow. "My dear, there's nothing to do...but get eaten!" Salam roared in the flowery Nyssian accent he used whenever he brought out the marionette. Anja screamed, not without a little joy, and buried herself in her mother's skirt.

Sonja couldn't help smiling at her husband's antics. She'd long gotten used to Salam's eloquent, intellectual dragons that were nothing like the devilish monstrosities she had heard about as a child. A little horror can be good for a child, but in this moment, in the warmth of their campfire, at the end of a long day's ride, Salam's over the top interpretation of the ancient beast felt right.

"Come on," Sonja patted her daughter's head. "What do we do?"

The child mustered her courage, and, searching the ground for something to give, finally came up with a small, dusty pebble. She offered it hesitantly.

Salam snaked the dragon in an unnecessarily roundabout course that brought its eyes directly in front of the proffered pebble. It seemed to inspect the small, furtively held thing. "Hmmmmmmm," said the dragon, a long and drawn out sound whose pitch ranged across octaves. Anja giggled. The dragon said, "What is so special about this pebble, my dear, that I would want it instead of such a tasty snack as yourself?"

Sonja nudged her daughter encouragingly. Anja cleared her throat. She thought for a moment. Then, face lighting up as if coming to a mighty conclusion, she brazenly said, "It's smooth!"

"Smoooooooth?" asked the incredulous-looking dragon, eyebrows deftly manipulated by Salam's pulling on invisible strings.

Anja rolled on the ground with laughter. Salam smiled, exchanged an affectionate glance with his wife. But Sonja wasn't looking at him, but over his shoulder, eyebrows knit. He paused, following her eyes.

Then he saw it too. The cloud of dust in the distance. After a moment, he heard it as well. The rumble of hoofbeats. Soldiers.

Anja sat up from her fit of laughter, offered the pebble again. "It's the smoothest pebble..." But something was wrong. Her father had unclasped the box and was hastily stuffing the dragon away.

"Papa?" she asked, worried. He hadn't taken it apart or anything. All the strings were going to get tangled. He hated it when the strings got tangled.

"Stay close to me," said her mother, pulling her close.

It wasn't a company of men, at least. There were just two of them plodding down the road. They rode on Jassanese packhorses, though they did not look like any of the Eastern soldiers they had seen in their travels. They flew no banner, and wore no identifying insignias on their gray cloaks.

Sonja and Salam exchanged a glance. Were they outlaws? Salam tightened his grip on the small firework he'd concealed in his hand. A pitiful distraction at best.

Fear, as the pair veered off the path toward their campsite. Anja started to cry. Sonja stroked her hair reassuringly, her eyes hard as flint.

The riders came into view. One was a youth with downcast eyes and messy black hair. He trailed sullenly behind the other, an older man with a cheery expression beneath his salt and pepper hair. Too cheery for a road this close to the Wastes. And too cheery for a face like his: old and scarred in many places, it was the face of someone who has seen much he does not talk about.

But his smile was wide. He waved from afar. "My humblest greetings," he called. His accent was hard to place. "Southward, or Northward?"

"We make for Nys," said Salam cautiously.

"And we for Sicil," replied the man, coming closer. His voice seemed to have changed subtly, or perhaps his Aarturian drawl had been masked by the distance. He stopped his horse; the younger man stayed five feet behind, looking back from where they'd come. "How are the Wastes?"

On this stretch of road, everyone knew the answer to the question. But you asked it all the same.

"Bad," said Salam. "Worse than it's ever been." He'd relaxed slightly upon hearing the man's Aarturian accent. They'd fled the North because of the war. An encounter with Jassanese soldiers would not end well.

"I'm sorry to hear that," said the old man. "How much further is it from here?"

"You'll arrive before the moon is out," said Sonja. Her tone was flat. It said, you are not welcome here.

The old man nodded, as if hearing confirmation of something he already knew. Then his face lit up. "Why, hello there!" Anja had poked her head out from behind her mother. He leaned low on his horse. "You're awfully young for the Wastelands, eh? But I bet you weren't scared one bit, were you?"

Anja hid herself from view. Salam had a strange sense that he could trust this man. He smiled, and said, "She did very well. She stayed on the road and kept her ears plugged."

"Did she? Fantastic." He turned and rummaged in his sack. "Such bravery! Why, I'd say it's cause for a present. Wouldn't you say?"

Hearing every child's favorite word, Anja poked her head curiously from behind her mother. Sonja watched uncertainly, a hand on her daughter. Behind him, the young man who hadn't spoken stared incredulously as, of all things, a pink stuffed bunny was produced from the old man's pack.

"Aha!" he said triumphantly. "I knew I'd find a home for this thing."

Sonja peered at the old man in a new light. If he was an outlaw, then he was the strangest outlaw she'd ever heard of. "Who are you?" she asked.

"We're just travelers, ma'am, on a pilgrimage of sorts to the Lodestone." He looked at their darkening faces. "What? Has something happened?"

"How long has it been since you've been home?" asked Sonja.

"...Years," said the old man. His mismatched eyes went glassy, seemed to look right through them. "Long years, the kind that stretch themselves as if to mock you."

Sonja let out a long exhale. Salam shook his head. "Bring your horses over here," said Salam. "There's news."

The two travelers trotted over and dismounted. The young one had a hard time of it. Anja was the one who spoke up. "What's wrong with his face?"

Upon coming closer to the fire, they saw the youth's face more clearly. It was covered in bruises.

"I fell down some stairs," he said. His voice was heavily sarcastic.

"And what's wrong with his arm?" asked Anja, undeterred.

"Anja!" reprimanded her mother. She looked at the young man apologetically, but he just smiled. His right arm hung limply at one side, wrapped in bandages. He'd had to dismount using only his left.

"It's alright," said the old man. He knelt down, held out the stuffed rabbit. "Anja, is it? Well, Anja, I've always said that the best thing kids remember that us old folk forget is how to ask questions."

She took the stuffed animal and traced her fingers over its fur, the material from a softer world than the war torn one they'd left. She fingered its button eyes, two discs of polished wood with a small black bead at the center.

"What do you think is wrong with his arm?" asked the old man.

"It looks broken," said Anja. "Just like Aunt Mosa's when she came back from the war."

"War?" asked the old man. He sat before the fire, held his hands out. "Are the River Lords at it again?"

"Did you hurt your arm in a war?" asked Anja to the young man.

He stayed away from the fire with his arms crossed. "Sort of," he said. He coughed. It was a bad cough, phlegmy. He smiled sickly. "Would you believe me if I told you that I fought a dragon, and it breathed fire on my arm?"

The kid held up the rabbit, made as if it were a speaking puppet. "Dragons don't blow fire," chided the rabbit. Its head bobbed up and down. Sonja smiled at its Nyssian accent. "Only wyverns do."

The young man groaned. "You've got to be kidding me."

"I'm not," said the rabbit. She turned it so it was speaking to her father. "Mr. Puppeteer, could you show our friend what a dragon looks like?"

Salam nodded to his daughter. But his mind was elsewhere, and he spoke to the old man as he dragged his chest from beneath their carriage. "It's no small war. The River Lords have banded together for this one."

"Hah!" said the old man. "That could only mean one thing, and the Eastern Kingdoms love fighting each other too much to ever make a move on Aartur."

Grim silence met the statement. Salam retrieved the dragon and brought it to the fire.

"Ancients above," muttered the old man. He scratched at his silvering beard. "That's..."

"It's garbage," said Sonja. "It's complete garbage. A senseless waste of life." She spit in the dirt. "Lahein."

"Now now, Sonja," chided the rabbit. Somehow the child had managed to fold the rabbit's arms across its chest, giving it a sternly disapproving air. "We mustn't soil our mouths with such language."

"It's been hard on all of us," said Salam as he untangled the strings of his marionette. They had bundled into a messy snarl, snagged on the wooden edges of its long elegant feathers.

"I'm so sorry," said the old man.

Salam shrugged. "We were lucky. We left. Most couldn't." He frowned, struggling with the knot. Seemed he forgot how to use his hands whenever the memories surfaced. Memories of home, of who they'd left behind.

After watching Salam struggle for a moment, the old man said, "Let me give you a hand with that. I know a thing or two about puppets."

Salam looked at the old man skeptically. "You do?"

The youth wore the same expression. "Please tell me you're joking."

Within half an hour, Anja was clutching her new rabbit to her chest, listening with rapt attention as the old man sang a ballad about dragons she had never heard before.

He spun in place, sending the dragon flying in long, wide circles. Its wings outspread, feathers bright with story and moonlight. The effect of his constant spinning was a rise and fall in the volume of his song as he either faced them or faced away from them. This, somehow, wove into the fabric of his story, which was about the rise and fall of two heroes; the rise and fall of two great nations.

His turning began to slow. His singing slowed too. His gray robes stopped fluttering and the dragon's flight was an ever shrinking circle. The end was approaching. The turning dragon was inches from touching him. Then he stopped, facing them, eyes downcast. The dragon listed aimlessly with spent momentum as he sang out the last words in a melody that broke under the weight of the rest of the story, the notes dying, the song dying, the dragon he had sung about throwing itself on the Liberator's spear for love of Archangel Ariadel.

Silence. The old man stood with his head bowed. Anja saw tears run down his wrinkled cheeks. She didn't know what to say. Neither did the young man. He had rolled his eyes and turned his back to the performance moments after it started.

Anja's mother and father came to the rescue, navigating the post-performance moment with compliments and exclamations of astonishment. They'd been alive longer, and could be affected by beauty without being silenced by it.

"Ancients above!" cried Salam. "What good fortune it is to meet such a talented Dervish on this long and winding road."

"Truly," said Sonja. "I have never heard that song sung before. Do you have a written copy?"

The old man wiped his eyes. "No. It was just something I heard once."

"I need to write it down while we remember. Can you help?" asked Sonja.

He smiled weakly. "It's not something I'm keen to revisit. Between the three of you, you should have the bones of it. Excuse me."

He tapped the youth on the shoulder, which caused him to flinch visibly. The old man whispered some words to him. His companion was looking at the road. He didn't seem to give any response.

The old man sighed and started unloading the horses. Salam approached him a few moments later as Anja and Sonja did their best to record the performance.

"There's a mark on that rabbit," he said at a whisper. "Under the right foot. An embroidery of a golden sun."

The stranger set down a large pack that looked much too heavy for him to lift with the ease he was displaying. "Huh."

"Where did you get it?" he demanded. "Did you steal it?"

The old man lifted a bag off the horse. He peered inside and seemed disappointed to find it only contained one apple. "It's just a stuffed animal." He grabbed the apple and split it in half with only his hands. He pawed at the ground until each hand held half an apple and a handful of rocks and dirt. He fed this to each horse. They chewed, hardly aware that they were even eating.

"Just a stuffed animal?" hissed Salam, casting his eyes back at his family. "It's made by the most legendary toymaker in all of the Haerth. That's real velvet fur. Those are black diamonds at the center of its eyes, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the wood was Old Growth."

"I wouldn't know anything about that," said the old man.

"Just who the hell are you?" demanded Salam. "If you mean us any harm, if-"

"No, no. We're just a traveling pair, searching for home."

Salam didn't know what to do. "If you're a Jassanese spy, if this is some sort of test-"

"Rinzai! They found us!"

Rinzai sighed. "Damn. Alright, Tristan. You know what to do."

"Found you?" exclaimed Salam. His wife and daughter looked up from the campfire, nervous. "Who found you?" He scurried to the other side of the horse, where the young one, Tristan, was coughing as he unstrapped a polished brown staff from their packs.

Another cloud of dust in the distance, but bigger. Salam's blood chilled: sounds of yipping and howling carried across the low plains.

"Efreeti," he said in one long breath. He spun toward Rinzai. "You brought them to us? To my daughter, my—is that a folding chair?"

"Impressive, isn't it?" said Rinzai, hefting the thing. "I designed it myself. Very lightweight." He scanned the topography. "I think that hill will provide the best view, don't you? Come come." He trudged toward the small rise a few hundred feet away.

Salam stared at him for a moment, then rushed to his family. "What's happening?" asked Anja.

Sonja pressed the pages of the stranger's song to her heart. "Efreeti?"

He nodded. "They brought them right to us, the idiots."

Anja looked confused. "So what if there are Ifrits? I saw a couple back home once and they were kind."

"These are different," said Salam. "They are outlaws. Scavengers."

"How do you know?" asked Anja stubbornly.

Her mother stroked her hair. "Do we run?" she asked her husband.

"Are you coming?" asked Rinzai. He came to their fire and dipped a twig in it until it caught. Then he walked toward his viewpoint, carefully sheltering his twig's fire from the wind.

"What does he want?" asked Sonja.

"To...get a better view."

Sonja's face twisted in confusion. "Of what?"

Anja pointed. "Of him?"

Tristan had withdrawn a smooth staff from his horse. He stretched, then twirled it smoothly across his body. He ducked, sweeping it over his head, and started a fighting routine.

He sprang forward. Jabbed the empty air, as if he were fighting enemies no one could see. Dodged left, then right, then planted the staff in the ground and heaved himself into a kick. All with only one hand.

He had removed his shirt. He was a lean man, but strong. His too-white skin was a tapestry of bruises, like a sky laden with stormy clouds.

He finished his practice set, then rested his staff in the dry dirt, and leaned on it. He took slow, deep breaths.

Anja didn't understand the severity of the situation. "Cool," she said. She tugged on her mother's skirts. "I want a staff. Can I have one?"

Sonja eyed Salam. "We might be safer with him."

All of his instincts told Salam to flee. The howls of the Efreeti crescendoed, seemingly coming from every angle. They might be happy enough to take these two as prisoners. Maybe they wouldn't chase him or his family. But if they did...

"We can't outrun horses," he admitted. "These two might be our best chance at survival."

They followed Rinzai, who greeted them warmly on his little hill. "He hasn't had an audience in a while," he said. "Hopefully he doesn't get too overzealous."

The invaders drew closer. "You don't sound very concerned," said Sonja. "Is he a skilled warrior?"

Salam nervously said, "Skilled enough to defeat at least..." He peered at the advancing cloud of dust. "Four mounted Ifrits?"

Rinzai procured a long pipe from inside his sleeve. The stem was black, the bowl red, carved in the shape of a demon sticking its tongue out. He filled it with leaf from a small pouch, then retrieved the twig that he'd stuck in the sand. "If I tell you, will you promise not to tell him?"

Sonja and Salam hesitated. Anja, however, nodded solemnly. She thrust forth the rabbit, who did the talking for her. "Yes, Mr. Dervish. I swear it on my cotton tail."

Rinzai's eyebrows shot up. "Hmm! That's quite a vow." He lit his pipe and puffed two perfect circles out of the bowl. Through the smoke he regarded the family. "A skilled warrior? Skilled warriors bow at his feet. That man is one of the best fighters in the world."

Anja watched the young man. Took in the shape of the bruises on his skin, watched the campfire's flickering illumination of his back. The light, she realized. He's keeping it behind him to blind them.

"If he's such a good fighter," said Salam skeptically, "then why is he so covered in bruises?"

Rinzai puffed on his pipe. "Because I'm better."

In that moment, Salam looked at Rinzai, and he finally saw him. He saw the hard set of his jaw. The sheer number of small scars that adorned his face, never mind the one like a lightning bolt that split his eye. The presence of a great desert storm that shone through his eyes. The rabbit, which was worth a fortune. The song, which was like an arrow to the soul. The pipe, with its bowl like a demon's head...

Salam shared a glance with Sonja. She'd realized it too. They were not in the presence of a friendly stranger. They were beside someone whose story was much greater than theirs. Their lives were puddles in the morning walk of his life.

And the young man. The sickly man with the bruises, with only one good arm. The one who so confidently awaited the Efreeti riders with only a quarterstaff to defend himself.

Who was he?

~

Everything has changed so much. I knew it would, but not like this.

~

You know, I used to think traveling was something everyone should do.

"A soft bed. A hot shower."

I thought it was this enlightening experience that opened your eyes to different perspectives, different worldviews.

"Ice water. Coffee."

I've heard it said that traveling is where you encounter the shape of yourself. Where you find your edges, your contours: how you think, when you push forward, when you give up. In short, who you are.

"A toilet," I said. "Dear god, my kingdom for a toilet."

Rinzai trotted next to me. "Don't you just love the smell of the road in the morning?" he beamed. He held the reigns of his horse loosely, and balanced the polished quarterstaff across his lap.
The people who say that about traveling? They're right. Traveling has taught me a valuable lesson: I really ought to stay in bed all day every day for the rest of my life.

Sleeping on the hard ground sucks. Riding a horse all day hurts muscles I didn't even know I had. Being away from the love of my life is like living with only a piece of my heart.

Add a dash of Rinzai on top of all that? Life was basically hell.

"There's just something about mornings," he said conversationally. "They're so fresh. The very air like the dawn of a new day."

"It's literally midnight," I said flatly.

True enough, though we'd just broken camp and set out for the day, it was still dark out. We'd gone to sleep under Haerth's foreign stars and they hadn't moved an inch by the time we woke up, shimmering in their thick clusters like milk spilled out of a saucer.

The only silver lining on this trip was that I'd been pretty much deafened by the boss battle in Caer'Aton. Shae's banshee wail had ripped my eardrums to pieces, and I'm pretty sure following that with the roaring of a dragon had ground those pieces into dust. So for most of our trip, I'd been unable to hear Rinzai all that well.

Unfortunately, my hearing was improving, so now I had to deal with his nonsense. "Ah, Tristan," he said shaking his head ruefully. "What is a day, if not those hours when man is aprowl?"

"That's not a word," I said.

"Ah, Tristan."

I clenched my teeth. "Will you please. Shut. U-"

The blow came quick. I could tell that I was improving, because I was starting to recognize the moments before I got hit. This one was pretty savage, knocking me off my horse into the dirt. My horse snorted, once. It was about the only sound it ever made, and even that, rarely.

Rinzai laughed to himself. "Oh ho! That was a good one."

At this point in our travels, I had no dignity, no shame. So I cried. But it was what I was starting to call a travel cry. I didn't sit my ass in the dirt and pout and complain that he was abusing me. No, tears simply welled in my eyes as I dragged myself off the ground. My thighs burned and I felt like I'd bruised my ribs and the tears ran down my cheeks.

The crying was more of a bodily thing than anything, my body's way of letting itself break down enough to justify pushing forward. I tried to control my pathetic sobs, flexing my sore, exhausted muscles to get me back on my horse using only my left arm.

I knew the second blow was coming. This one was obvious. But though my mind was up to the task, my body wasn't, and I was too slow in my turn and the lift of my hand. Instead of catching it, I had three of the fingers of my left hand whacked. It hurt so bad, but it hurt so normal that I didn't even cry out. I just stared at my throbbing fingers. They burned.

That was the moment where I was finally confronted with the fact: either I fell off my horse again and never got up, or I found a way to cope with his brutal lessons.

"Wow," I said, forcing a wide smile. "I love this. I love this so much. Thank you, Rinzai. I feel so great."

"Hmph." Rinzai trotted ahead of me. "If we weren't in such a hurry, I'd have you shadowboxing all day for lying to me."

"No, really!" I said, convincing myself in a deep part of my mind that I was having a fantastic time. "It's such a blessing to be taught by you. I bet my reflexes are getting so much better."

Rinzai grunted. "You're lagging behind."

There was always a hurry with Rinzai.

We had to leave, now, or we wouldn't get out of Caer'Aton before Shae snuck back into our minds.

If we didn't set a brisk pace each day, our minds would lose their edge.

If I didn't train hard and get quicker, someone faster than me would come along and beat me into dust.

The latest reason for our hurry? Apparently, the king of one of the major nations of Haerth had been killed. That in and of itself wasn't a problem—Rinzai, upon hearing the news the night I thoroughly humiliated the Ifrit riders, well, he'd nodded as if this was something he'd expected.

But he'd coughed and sputtered and nearly dropped his pipe when he heard that the army was nonetheless negotiating peace.

"Peace?"

"We're not sure we believe it ourselves," Salam had admitted. "It sounds too good to be true, doesn't it?"

Rinzai had grown suddenly quiet. Though he was, as a general rule, totally bizarre and unpredictable...this had felt like a more serious outburst. That much was evidenced by the pace we set the morning after.

It broke our usual trend. God, how can I even describe the nightmare that has become my life?

For the first week, the day started with Rinzai kicking me awake. It took my subconscious that long to develop a healthy paranoia for the slightest crunch of dirt under his footsteps, enough that I started waking up soon enough to spring off the ground. Of course, I was only hearing his footsteps because he was giving me a handicap. Normally he was silent as smoke when he walked.

For a while, my ego was about as bruised as my ribcage.

Awful as it was, I'll say one thing: I did not have sluggish mornings. I was wide awake from the minute my eyes blinked open. Panic will do that to you.

Once awake, we stretched. Rinzai's stretching routine was half yoga, half Tai-Chi. During this period he was a completely different person than the rest of the day. He was caring. He asked me about my body, which places were sore and which places I thought needed attention. He corrected my posture, showed me how to do exercises without hurting myself. "Don't forget to keep your core engaged," was something I heard pretty much every day. I learned to call this "Pilates Teacher Rinzai," and accepted that he was simply a wildly different person at different times of the day.

After stretching, we boxed with open palms. It would have been fun, but I had trouble not feeling infuriated by getting slapped for thirty minutes in a row by an old man. The awe that possessed me at seeing how he moved windlike around my strikes faded quickly after the second day, and was replaced with a fervent desire to become as quick as he was.

I noticeably improved over those few weeks. I could feel it. But did he ever validate my accomplishments? Of course not. That would have been entirely too reasonable.

After twenty minutes of being slapped around, Rinzai performed a small ritual. He made something: either a small structure out of nearby bushes or simply a drawn pattern in the dirt. He spoke a few words, then destroyed what he'd made without making any effort to include me in his ceremony. It was an abruptly solemn moment, in sharp contrast to the fervent fighting and slow, thoughtful stretching.

Sufficed to say I was completely disoriented by the time we ate breakfast, broke camp, hid all trace of our passage, and continued northward. The riding itself was mind-numbing, the terrain flat and uninteresting. Disoriented in the morning, bored and uncomfortable the rest of the day—meditation would have probably been the perfect antidote, but to all appearances Rinzai did not meditate. I once asked him about it, and he just gave me some non-answer about having more important things to do than sit around all day.

In such a hectic, all-over-the-place environment, you can imagine how it would have been the easiest thing in the world for the days to blur together. For me to space out, lost in the fog of our surreal routine.

I couldn't, because Rinzai kept hitting me. Really hard, all the time, and completely at random. It didn't matter if I was about to fall asleep, or if I was meditating, or if I was holding scalding tea. The strike would come like a clap of lightning. Mostly he used the quarterstaff. Sometimes his fists, or the back of his hand. It always hurt, and I never saw it coming fast enough to get out of the way. So the panic I woke up with never really left.

I wished desperately that I was allowed to calm myself down, but it was expressly forbidden. It was the most important rule Rinzai laid before me, and though he refused to fully explain why, I was able to put together some of the pieces.

Rinzai had this weird respect for the Haerth, as if the land itself held a grudge against the Arasit—Shae's people—and that by using her power the land would think we were one of them. Sometimes he spoke of this place like it was alive and watching our every move. He didn't have faith that the world would recognize Shae was the very creature we were setting out to destroy. That's always how it goes with giant, mystical presences, isn't it? No appreciation for nuance.

Anyway, that was our routine. The morning after we met those traveling circus performers, I woke up as usual, seized by the fear that comes with knowing you're about to be kicked awake. Rinzai was a dark figure striding toward me from wherever he went at night, winds madly fluttering his gray robes around him so that he could have been some lost revenant or herald of the damned.

Then, he just said two words. "Let's go."

That was the day our routine fell apart, and the day I started to miss it, because we'd been riding like madmen ever since. We hadn't been meditating. We hadn't been stretching, or fighting. The only element of our traveling routine that wasn't abandoned in our haste was me getting smacked.

Back on the road, I coughed, nauseous. "I think I'm horsesick," I said, not expecting to get anything out of Rinzai. He had the sense of humor of a toddler on LSD. The biggest chuckle I'd gotten out of him was when I'd looked around and wondered aloud, "Where are we?" I never knew what was going to make him laugh.

"You're just adjusting to the world," he said. "You left before Shae had fully inoculated you to all of Haerth's viruses."

I was too exhausted to be amazed. "Shae controls micro-organisms. Of course."

"That took her a while to figure out," said Rinzai. "For the longest time, she couldn't tell why one out of every three people she took from the Rifts was dropping dead."

It was a sobering reminder of the strength of our adversary. She controlled hundreds of people at a time—I'd thought that much was impressive. But she was messing with bacteria and viruses too? Not for the first time, I wondered out loud: how had I slipped past her defenses?

"You have to understand that Shae is not...sane," said Rinzai. "She has lived for thousands of years. Everyone she knows is dead. She has seen entire eras rise and fall. She truly believes she can rip a hole in the fabric of the world and go back in time."

"A few months ago, I would have laughed at that," I said. "But I think I'm starting to understand this world. It's..." I struggled for words to express the feeling I had. "I mean, it's like, really magical."

"That it is."

"But maybe she's onto something," I said. "How does it go? There is no past or future, only Now?" I chuckled. "Never been a fan of that saying. Yesterday was yesterday. It's not today."

Rinzai laughed.

I rolled my eyes. "I mean, if that theory of time holds true, and everything happens in the same now-time...couldn't you go back to yesterday's now-time if you had access to it?"

Rinzai said nothing, a wide smile across his face.

"Come on, I feel like that was pretty good."
"You are an idiot," he pronounced, still laughing, and said no more.

I sighed.

We plodded on. I gotta say, I thought the landscape of this fantasy world would be more vibrant. But the mountains in the distance weren't even snow-capped. I was expecting geysers of magic by the road, wild and amazing trees. But once the snow had cleared a week ago, the world had revealed itself to be utterly boring. A flat plains populated by staggeringly uninteresting shrubs and the occasional small tree that looked like it was more growing out of spite than any interest in being alive.

"Lighten up, kid," said Rinzai. "You're gonna drench me with that storm cloud above your head."

I glowered at him, then abruptly asked him a question.

"Where do you go at night?" He was never around when I woke up in the middle of the night. It was baffling. I once pretended to fall asleep with the intent to follow him, but he was already gone by the time I'd sprung out of bed.

"Away from you," he replied.

An answer! Hallelujah. "Why?"

His brow furrowed. "For your safety."

My safety? "What's dangerous about you sleeping? Wait...do you snore?" I moved my horse closer to him and spoke in a low and comforting voice. "Rinzai, if you snore, you can tell me. It's okay."

He paused in the middle of the road, and I thought he might be going along with my joke for the first time. But of course not, he was merely sniffing the air, kind of like a dog might.

"You alright?" I asked. "You want a bone?"

He stuck his tongue out and started licking the air, and he made loud smacking sounds with his lips. My horse was stopped next to his and seemed reluctant to move forward.

"What?" I asked, scanning around us.

"We're here," he said.

I guess I'd assumed the Wastelands would look like a parched desert. But that's not how geography works. The edges between one biosphere and another aren't like they are on a map, they're blurred. Peering at the hard-packed road, I saw that flecks of sand were mixed with the dirt. And the air...something was wrong with the air.

"It snuck up on us," said Rinzai. "That's not good."

"Really not liking how you're referring to this place as if it's alive," I replied. "Feel free to correct me and tell me we're not walking into a living desert."

Rinzai rummaged in his bag. "We have to hurry. Wrap this around your face and keep it on as long as you're on the road." He'd removed a pair of ragged gray scarves that looked like they might have been white once upon a time. He tossed one to me and tied the other around his mouth and nose.

"These meet OSHA safety standards, right?" I said, tying it around my mouth. There was a slight buzzing where it touched my skin.

"Tristan..." Rinzai's voice was muffled by his scarf, but even through it I could tell that he was uncertain about something.

"What?" I said. "Tell me."

He almost did. But then he shook his head. "The longer we stay in this place, the more likely it is that we lose our minds. Stick to the path. Ignore the visions. And...don't be afraid to use the Art. If it's absolutely necessary."

Oh. Shit.

Not using the Art had been the most important thing for us to do, just below our ultimate goal of finding the Liberator.

"Hurry" he said.

~

Freedom is a burning in my chest. I didn't think that it would hurt this much.

~

As Rinzai spurred his horse forward, the sun rose to our right. Its rapid appearance banished the thick stars and the big bright moon. I matched his pace, my stomach tight. The rays of light were glimmering on a substance in the air, as if it was chock full of dust like an abandoned home. But we were outside. I could barely see it and the Wasteland was already starting to unsettle me.

It took some encouragement to get the horses going, which was surprising, because they were usually dumber and more docile than a sedated mule. More surprising, then, was when it became clear that, yes, we were riding into the Wastelands, they began to gallop. Despite being weighed down by supplies, they managed to go fast enough that the wind was whipping at my hair, tearing loose strands from where they'd been tucked in the rag Rinzai had given me. I don't know if they recognized this place or what, but they definitely didn't want to stay in here longer than they had to.

"What are you hiding from me?" I shouted to him, holding fiercely on to the reins.

The air started to change. It got...not quite hazy, but...textured? I caught glimpses of form, but if I focused too hard on the air, they fled to the edges of my vision.

Rinzai didn't respond. It annoyed the shit out of me, which was great, because I needed a distraction from the fact that I was running into a living desert.

I grimaced, fueling my annoyance at him with my fear of this place. Hadn't I finally graduated from the "hide things from Tristan" club? Weren't we free from Shae's influence? Rinzai had basically admitted to me that our goal was to recruit the Liberator in a battle against Shae. That kind of thing used to be information kept in the shadows. I was supposed to be in the know, now.

But still, he hid things from me. Not everything—he'd given me a quick rundown of the geography of Haerth, and told me what he'd been doing on his travels. But for every question he answered, there was one he ignored, and I was starting to get a feel for the shape of that silence. He didn't want me involved in...something, and I didn't know why.

Rinzai's horse inched ahead of mine. The patterns in the air thickened into shifting mandalas that I felt I could touch if I only reached out. They were hypnotic.

I shook my head. I urged my horse to keep pace with Rinzai, but his was faster. "Hey!" I shouted. "Slow down!"

He didn't. Rinzai crouched low on his horse, hugging its metal-plated neck. He himself seemed to blur, to be absorbed by the fractal patterns.

Suddenly the sound of hoofbeats changed. The low thuds from riding on dirt sharpened to a harsh clack. I looked down and saw that the path had changed. We were on a proper road now, an old, wide road of white tile that cut across the landscape. It had been swallowed by the edge of the desert, but now that we were deeper, it had emerged.

My scarf hummed on my face, vibrating on my skin.

As the road crystallized, so too did the patterns in the air. They swirled into objects: shadowy market stalls that lined the road. Tall hooded reapers that loomed over us, the insides of their cowls as black as a Nazgul's. Circles of tall, thin demons danced madly around a yellow fire. All these images were rushing past me as my horse accelerated down the path.

Then I caught up to Rinzai's horse. He was stalled in the middle of the road, which split three ways.

"This wasn't here last time," he muttered.

Now that we'd stopped, I could actually take in our surroundings. The white road cut through a volcanic landscape of black sand. Maybe it was just the contrast, or the sun high above us, but the whiteness of the road was so bright I couldn't look at it without squinting. Nearby, currents of red magma broke through the sandy surface like whispers of what lay beneath. A sulfuric smell in the air managed to penetrate my scarf, and I saw plumes of thick smoke hissing from the ground.

And the patterns at the edge of the road were solidifying.

"Are we safe here?" I asked frantically.

"From the illusions? Yes. But from this?" He extended a long finger pointing the road. "That's what we have to worry about."

Okay. The demons are made up, the path is what kills you. Got it. "So which road do we take?" I demanded.

Rinzai bit his lip. "I...don't know."

We were being observed. Hosts of demons—demons, big and red and gnarled like an old oak—lined the road, chattering to themselves. Horns, tails, forked tongues; the whole nine yards.

I coughed, feeling nauseous in a different way than I'd felt since leaving. Then I shivered, which was strange, since it was hot as all hell.

Rinzai glanced at me. "Is it getting to you?"
I nodded mutely. This wasn't nausea. This was...something ripping at my soul. Though we'd eaten just a couple hours ago, I felt hunger growing in me. I felt my energy being drained. "It feels like the Wastes are...consuming me," I said.

"Not the Wastes," said Rinzai. "The road."

I looked at the ground. And in so doing, I saw the scarf around my face. It glowed a brilliant white, the same sheen as the road. Alarmed, I looked at Rinzai for an explanation.
He smiled that sad smile of his, as if he was sorry that I had noticed it. "We have a decision to make."

I understood. He didn't mean which road to pick. I pointed to the split in the road. "A one out of three chance versus wandering out there?" I eyed the demons that lined the road.

"Yes."

"Then make the decision, O teacher of mine, and let's get moving."

The demons leapt like a jumping flame as I spoke, some of them banging on the invisible field on the road's edge. He'd called them illusions, but I wasn't so sure.

"I can't make the decision," said Rinzai, sounding like he was realizing something. He moved his horse closer. "Tristan, it has to be you."

"What?" I asked, alarmed. "Why?"

"Shut up and choose! What's in your heart? Which way pulls at you?" His eyes held an urgency that made me realize he was not just messing with me.

"I don't know!" I said. I looked around us. "I mean, the paths don't have demons on them. I like the sound of that."

"Good," he encouraged. "Which one do we take?"

My brain decided it was a good time to start panicking. I almost reflexively reached for my Art to rein in my mind. But I checked myself. Panicking was reasonable. This wasn't an emergency yet.

"I..."

"Which one?"

"I don't know!" I shouted. "What the-"

The quarterstaff whacked me on the top of my head. A sharp, stinging pain.

I stared at him indignantly. Of all the times to train my reflexes. Now? Now?

My mouth must have been hanging open, but I didn't say anything. Fuck this guy. Fuck him not taking anything seriously. Fuck him holding information from me. I didn't care which way I went; I wanted nothing to do with him.

I jerked the reins of my horse, and it gratefully moved forward. We took the middle road. Rinzai silently filed behind us; I didn't care. On either side of the road the demons screeched and pounded on the invisible wall. I sped up, and ignored them. I also ignored how hungry I'd become, and how weak I felt, and how bright the scarf was around my mouth.

The road forked in front of us. Because I was pissed off and apparently nothing mattered, I jerked the horse left. It forked again, minutes later, and I kept left once more. Then, right at the next one. It wasn't so much that I was being guided by instinct as I just didn't give a shit anymore.

Rinzai was supposed to guide me, and he wasn't, with no explanation. I think I must have been scarred from my time in Caer'Aton—when there's just no good reason to hold information from me, it makes me want to punch things. But Rinzai was infuriatingly unpunchable, and I wasn't about to go toy with those demons if I didn't have to.

With nowhere to put my irritation, my options were to do what felt natural (curl up and cry in the middle of the road), or move forward. If I hadn't been as annoyed at Rinzai as I was, I might have picked the first option.

But then the road ran out. The luminous white bricks vanished completely into black sand ahead of us. The demonic mirages hadn't yet appeared this far down the road, but I could hear their high pitched howling following us.

Rinzai cursed behind me. "We made a wrong turn. Hurry, before-"

"Oh, no," I said. "You lost your decision making privileges." I slowed down my horse as we came to the end of the road. The air thickened with half-formed images and blurs of form. "You said it was the road that was eating away at us?"

"Yes, but-"

"Then how about—and I'm just thinking outside the box here—we get off the fucking road?"

Rinzai was silent, which I took as an affirmative. I didn't bother looking back at him.

My horse stopped where the sand began. It bucked and halted and even whined a little when I told it to move forward.

"Fine," I said. "You want to be that way? It's just sand." I slid off of it, by this point long comfortable dismounting one handed. My useless arm thumped at my side.

I hit the ground, knees wobbling. I was amazed at how weak I was. At what the road was doing to me. It was hard to breathe through the scarf, and I figured that I could remove it now that we were off the road. "Jesus," I said, "get me out of here." I ripped off my scarf, noticing that it barely looked dirty at all, actually, more like I was holding a piece of fluttering sunlight, and walked into the sand. Into that blur of shapes and patterns.

The minute I crossed that threshold the scarf exploded with tendrils of white-hot light. I yelped and let go of it before my only good hand was burnt to a crisp. It fluttered to the ground—and I swear, it was like the sand formed into a mass of fingers reaching for it—when Rinzai thrust the quarterstaff forward, catching it before it touched the sand. I spun and saw his alarmed expression.

"You idiot!" he seethed. Quickly he removed his from his face and stuffed both of them into his pack. "Do you have any idea what you almost did?"

"No, I don't," I said right back to him, "because you won't tell me anything."

Annoyed by his tone, I was going to fix him with my best glare. And then I saw his eyes. Saw something very unsettling.

Rinzai was afraid.

"You just have to trust me," he said.

I swallowed. I quickly forgot about being mad at Rinzai. I lost my curiosity about the scarves, and about the road. In fact everything pretty much left my head except a deep panic as I realized that this was real.

I wasn't in Kansas anymore. Rinzai was terrified—maybe he wasn't the bubble of protection I'd assumed he would be. We had our Arts to defend ourselves, but...what if there were things here that were immune to it? Shit, his pet cat seemed to be immune to the Art. I hadn't been sure if that was a protective Field he'd placed on it or an inherent thing, but now that uncertainty had more serious implications.

The Art makes you feel invincible, but...maybe I was not as safe as I thought I was. What if mind control powers weren't the failsafe I believed them to be? What if those demons weren't just hallucinations?

What if I died here, and never saw Jade again?

"You're starting to get it?" asked Rinzai.

"...Fuck." I said.

He nodded, as if I'd just said "Yes."

I scanned the horizon. Nothing but black sand dunes. But then...wasn't there something? A feeling, pulling me...

"This way?" I said mostly to myself.

"Trust it," said Rinzai. "Trust the way."

Reassured that he seemed to expect me to be guided by a feeling, I started walking, trailing my horse's reins behind me. I swatted at a shimmer in the air before my face; my hand passed straight through it. "Where are the demons?" I asked.

"Keep walking," he said.

I wrinkled my nose as a nearby split in the earth belched out nauseating sulfuric gas. "You mean all that talk about the danger of the Wastelands was just about the road?" I could see why. It had leeched away nearly all of my strength. "Why don't people just make their own way?"

"The road's not as bad for them as it is for us," said Rinzai. "And these sands are far from deserted."

We walked for a second. "Did you just make a pun?" I asked belatedly.

"What?" he replied.

It had been too much to hope for. "Never mind."

We trudged on. Emptiness is a devil in it's own right. Plodding forward with nothing in sight but hot black sand gave me a sense of hopelessness. We had some supplies, some fresh water taken from a river a few days back. But this landscape was hostile. Things didn't grow here. I got the feeling that this was a place that hated life.

And the only thing guiding me was a nudge, fainter than intuition. Almost as if the road were still beneath my feet, guiding me from beneath the sand. A feeling that only I could connect to. I wondered why Rinzai was deaf to it.

"Drink," said Rinzai. I nodded, in a daze. The sand was hot, the sun was scorching. I grabbed a canteen and drank.

"Not too much," he warned. I tilted the canteen away from my mouth, ignored how much my body wanted more. Then we kept walking. One foot after the other. Adventuring. Woo-hoo.

~

There is hope, of course. There is always hope. We can't in good faith justify despair. But sometimes I wish we could.

~

Rinzai took in a sharp breath. I looked up from the sand, so spaced out that I was surprised that I'd noticed it. Though I was feeling better for being off the road, the heat and the walking still sapped my willpower.

But new life was breathed into me when I saw what had caused Rinzai's surprise. The black sands ended, finally, at the bank of a wide river that stretched to the horizon. The haze of illusions in the air made the river look more picturesque than it should, as if it were a liquid moving crystal. But that's not all.

On the river there was an unmanned ferry with a prow in the shape of some kind of cat. And on the other side of the river, there was a moderately sized palace. Finally, some beautiful, magical scenery.

"That's what I'm talking about," I said, and immediately coughed. My throat was so dry. On the one hand it was a relief to see the palace wasn't floating in the sky—there's such a thing as too magical—but on the other I was disturbed to notice that it seemed to be made entirely of feathers.

"That doesn't look like an illusion," I said.

"It isn't."

"How can you tell?"
Rinzai chewed his lip. "We're supposed to cross the river?"

I contemplated for a second, but I'd already known. "Yes."

"You're sure."

I scowled. "I said yes, didn't I?"

He sighed. "Don't eat or drink anything they offer you. Be overly respectful. Keep half a mind on your Chi."

I peered at the palace. "You think it's occupied?"

"I don't know for certain. But I think this is a Library. A dead one."
"I love how you said dead," I said, "how you just casually implied that that thing used to be alive. Just like the road. Just another bit of fun, right?"

He pointed. "Doesn't that look an awful lot like a leg?"

I grimaced. I'd seen it, tried to rationalize it as anything else. Yellow leathery skin covered what was conceivably a leg broken at the knee. It jutted out beneath the rest of the palace, the size of a large tree trunk.

My rationalizing brain did its best to explain what it was seeing to me. "So in your world, Libraries are...bird castles?"

"This isn't my world," said Rinzai, and walked to the ferry.

Now that we were closer to the river, I saw that my eyes hadn't been tricking me. I couldn't believe it until I picked up a pebble and tried to toss it into the river. Instead of a splash, there was a ting as the pebble bounced off the crystalline surface.

"Unreal," I said. "A crystal river."

My hand reached out and caught the quarterstaff as Rinzai swung it at my head. I turned and glared at him. "After all that walking, you can't let me enjoy this one moment of wonder?" Then I stared at what I'd just done.

Rinzai actually smiled. "Nicely done."

I let go. "Don't swing again," I warned. "You better let me have this one."

He approached the ferry. "Come on."

It was a simple thing, basically a raft enclosed by a fence. I wanted to take a closer look at the prow, which was facing away from us, but I was distracted by a pair of squat stone statues that depicted bizarre looking spirit creatures. They'd been plopped in the sand in such a way that you'd have to walk between them to get onto the ferry. They were about as tall as my hip, each one was squat and pudgy and sticking its tongue out. The one on the left's tongue was partially broken, but the other's was intact. On it was a stone coin, carved from the same stone as the tongue.

"I've played enough video games to know how this works," I said. "They're going to come alive and eat us."

Rinzai walked onto the ferry, his horse trailing him. "They're purely decorative."

Once aboard, Zodiac stepped through a rift in space above Rinzai's horse, and stepped primly onto its head. There, she curled up in the flat space between its ears. Her long tail swished in the air, weightless.

"I was wondering where she'd been," I said.

"Coming?" asked Rinzai, unfazed by his spacecat's comings and goings.

I looked at the statues suspiciously, but I led my horse onto the ferry.

"How do we get this thing going?" I wondered.

"You return to us what was stolen," said a new voice, behind me. A British voice.

I turned. Behind us, in the sand we'd been standing in moments ago, was an Ifrit.

This one had none of the ruggedness of the bandits I'd fought. He wore a long suit that favored simplicity over decoration. His ears were long and pointed and unpierced. He wore glasses, and pushed them up the bridge of his small nub of a nose frequently as he spoke.

"Hi," I said, for lack of things to say.

"I wondered if you had a hand in this," said Rinzai. "The Wastes didn't give me nearly this much trouble last time."

"We made an exception for you," said the small Ifrit. "Really, you didn't think it was just a tad insulting to bring two Wings? The paperwork required to swallow the road was pre-approved."

"I'm flattered," said Rinzai.

"You two know each other?" I asked, pretending like this was all normal. When in Rome...

"Forgive my manners." The Ifrit bowed stiffly. "My name is Ekkam. I'm in charge of retrieving a certain item your mentor has stolen."

"Rinzai? Steal?" I spoke in a tone of utter astonishment. "But he is the most reputable, honest man I have-"

"Enough, Tristan," said Rinzai. To the Ifrit he said, "You know I'm not giving it back yet."

Ekkam frowned, and pushed his glasses up. "But surely you have given thought to our offer? The Black Throne is not unkind to its friends."

Rinzai gestured apologetically, "I'll return it when I'm finished with it."

"Ah, yes," said Ekkam, sounding very much like they had had this discussion many times. "That's disappointing. Thankfully, circumstances have changed."

Rinzai raised an eyebrow. "Have they?"

"Yes." Ekkam gestured sharply to me, and I was yanked off the ferry by an invisible force. I flew onto the sand and fell to my knees, cursing. Pushing myself to my feet, I readied my Chi.

Walls of shadow and flame leapt around me. The sky darkened. I realized abruptly that I was trapped.

Eep.

"Does this count as an emergency?" I said loud enough that Rinzai could hear me. I couldn't get out through the fire.

"What is the meaning of this?" asked Rinzai far too politely.

I heard the growling of something dark and bestial. It came from below me. Below the sand.

"Very kind of you to provide leverage," said Ekkam smugly. The flames boxing me in were ominously silent, and his voice carried through easily. "An apprentice? Not much of one, by the looks of him. Do you purposefully take on the infirm?"

The sand shifted beneath me. I didn't like how real this all felt. I pinched myself to check if I was dreaming. It made no sense to do that; I'd never done that in a dream, much less woken up by doing it. Pinching yourself is something you only ever do when you're wide awake and you'd rather be somewhere else right now. And what do you know, that fits the bill perfectly.

"Let's change the terms of our proposal," said Ekkam. "Return the branch of the Black Tree, or your companion dies."

"Will he?" asked Rinzai doubtfully. "Who are you sending against him?"

"Someone special," said Ekkam. "Someone wild enough to beat even you."

Sending against me? Wait, was this a cage match? "Am I on TV?" I said, reappraising the shadowy walls that boxed me in. "More importantly, are we talking boxing, wrestling or MMA? I just want to know if I should be afraid or not."

"You always say that," said Rinzai. "And how many times have you been wrong? It pains me to watch you try this hard when you'll be receiving the branch as soon as I'm finished with it."

"Silence!" screeched Ekkam. "And now, your apprentice will die! Behold!"

The sand rumbled louder, visibly shaking. "Um." Vents of sulfurous gas hissed out steam, and I looked at the ground uncertainly. "If you kill me, don't you lose your leverage?" I shouted.

Rinzai's smile quirked a little. Ekkam stared intently at the floor a few feet from me. I was nothing to him—just a way to get at Rinzai.

"Hello?" I called. "I've always felt this trope was pretty stupid. You can't actually threaten to end my life, because you lose your-" The ground shook, and in my weakened state I nearly fell over. Arm out to steady myself, I said, "I figured maybe we could talk-"

The ground exploded in a shower of sand. It fell burning into my hair and on my shoulders and I yelped, shaking it all off. Someone had come through. From beneath the sand.

I'd once been told that this world, the Haerth, was flat. Had this newcomer...had she come from the other side?

I'd been expecting red skin and a tail. Scales, horns, wings, something to match the sounds I'd heard. But she was a woman, looking to be roughly in her twenties. Her eyes were hard set—everything about her said 'tough as nails.' She was wearing the coolest-looking chain mail. The individual links weren't circles, but hexagrams, the mail sporting the silvery pattern of a bright, three-trunked tree.

She looked me up and down, then rested her gaze pointedly on my useless arm. "A cripple?" she demanded of Ekkam. "All of that for a cripple?"

Not one to be ignored, I said, "I also go by 'the leverage.' Not that your pal seems to understand what that means."

She looked at me suspiciously. "You understand me?"

"Of course," I said.

Wait. Duh. How the hell could she possibly be speaking English?

She smiled. "Then this might be interesting after all." She strode forward, cracking her neck. She didn't even have any weapons. I figured I was drastically outmatched. You can hardly blame me—you try staying confident when you're in a box of black and purple fire, and your opponent just rose out of the sand.

Ekkam called to Rinzai through the crackling flames. "It's not too late. You can hand it over, and we can all walk away from this."

She frowned and called back to Ekkam, "Shut up. Don't take this from me. My shadows are hungry."

"Last chance!" shouted Ekkam, ignoring her.

"Do it," said Rinzai.

He wasn't talking to Ekkam.

I flashed my Chi into my hand, and she froze.

My fingers gripped the handle of a humongous greatsword with a wide blade of flat granite. The size of it alone would have been enough to put astonishment in her eyes, but a big part of the wow-factor came from holding it one handed, despite it appearing to be made out of stone.

Yup, now it's granite. You can think I'm just overcompensating if you want—and you're probably not wrong—but I'd refused to turn it into a lame-ass wooden dagger when Rinzai had told me we needed to stay undercover. I liked my Chi. I'd had conversations with it and had let it choose its form—a wide-bladed greatsword that tapered to a point. I was strangely protective of it, but I did make the concession of changing its appearance. A sword made out of blue-green water, or light? When you're not surrounded by a bunch of other people with similarly awesome weapons, you start to realize that there is such a thing as overdoing the awesome.

My opponent's flint colored eyes were wide as dinner plates. "I've never...Which page did you learn that from?"

I planted it point-first in the sand, casually. "Six hundred thirty seven," I said. When in doubt: admit nothing, make jokes.

That seemed to confuse her. "What?"

Outwardly I was keeping my cool, but internally I was so relieved that people creating swords from pure nothingness wasn't, like, an everyday activity here. My powers had always been exceptional to me, but this world oozed magic. I hadn't been positive until now if what I could do was actually amazing.
I didn't have more banter in me, so I just shrugged.

She recovered her composure. She wore not the expression of a hotheaded bully, but someone who was genuinely looking forward to fighting. A small, confident smile. "This ought to be fun." She flexed her fingers, and it looked as if shadows were starting to gather between her palms, writhing like snakes trying to slither from her grasp.

"Hold, please," said Ekkam.

She whirled in the direction of his voice. "Ekkam!" she protested.

The flames that had formed the edge of our cage match fell to the ground. She glanced at me, and at my sword. She was unsure whether to be relieved or irritated.

"Something wrong?" asked Rinzai with a bemused smile. He was leaning on the railing of the ferry, as nonchalant as if he were leaving on a cruise ship.

Ekkam gave an anxious smile. "We would like to respectfully withdraw from this challenge. Is that permissible?"

"It's been fine every night since the first, and that's not changing now," replied Rinzai.

Ekkam bowed deeply. "Thank you, thank you very-"

"On the condition that you let us use the ferry."

"Wh-" I began.

"Done and done," said Ekkam. He extended a hand to Rinzai.

"Don't!" I said.

Rinzai clasped his hand and shook it, giving me a confused look. "Ekkam is a man of honor."

I eyed Ekkam suspiciously. "Yeah, well I'm pretty sure he's a demon. And from here, it looks a lot like you're making a pact with him."

Ekkam stammered nervously. "A demon! Why, Ancients above, I would never be so bold..."

The woman in chainmail rolled her eyes. "Shut up, Ekkam." She turned her attention to me. "Tell me how you did that."

I smiled mysteriously. "Ah, young grasshopper..." I took an enormous and hypocritical pleasure in being the one withholding information for once.

She frowned. "Grasshopper? The jumping insect?"

"Come come, Yanis," said the jittery Ifrit, wringing his hands. "We lost the fight. It was to be expected, really."

Yanis glowered at Ekkam. "What a waste of my talents. Are we square, now? Has the debt been repaid?"

Ekkam fingered the button on his shirt. I realized that, despite the purple walls of fire and the telekinesis, he may have just been more or less a secretary. "Arrangements can be made," he said vaguely.

"Ugh. Ifrit bureaucracy." Yanis spat. She nodded farewell to me. "When we next meet, you'll tell me how you shaped Rahmanda into a stone sword that weighs next to nothing. Deal?"

I was going to say yes, but my inner Jet told me to be as honest as possible. "I don't know," I said. "I can't speak for myself that far in the future."

She narrowed her eyes. "Ah. You are a coward, then." She turned on her heel and marched to Ekkam. He looked at me nervously, then sketched a deep bow to Rinzai. "Your pupil is a worthy foe. Until we next meet."

Rinzai inclined his head. "Safe return, friend."

Ekkam smiled weakly. He made a gesture at the ferry and my dormant Art senses couldn't help but pick up the thrum of energy that passed from him to the boat. The wooden planks groaned to life, creaking like they were stretching after a good long sleep.

I ran to the boat and hopped on, steadying myself on the cool flank of my horse just as the boat started to slide across the water. The bottom of the boat made a ridiculously loud squeaking sound gliding on the smooth but solid river. Like a wet paper towel on glass.

I looked back and saw the last parts of Ekkam and Yanis fall through the sand like they were on an express elevator.

"So," I said to Rinzai, "I have some questions."

"What?" he shouted over the boat's squeaking.

"I HAVE QUESTIONS FOR YOU!"
He shouted, "I stole something from the lord on the other side of the world. Ekkam coordinates their attempt to retrieve it."

"You get along awfully well with someone trying to kill you!" I called back.

Rinzai walked across the ferry to look at the feathery palace on the opposite bank. "It was just his underlings at first." Squeeaaak. "Then he came to watch," he shouted over the noise, "and when he discovered I could understand him, we got along much better."

"I was meaning to ask," I said, walking over to him. The palace hurt my eyes to look at with its otherworldliness. I kept thinking, A building...made of feathers...which was hard enough to wrap my head around without making the jump to it being a living thing. "How could I understand them?"

"Shae gave you the basic languages," he explained. "Ifrit, Jhinn, Droll, Human, plus all the most relevant dialects."

I frowned. "But didn't she withdraw her power from our minds?"

"Your mind already latched onto it," he said dismissively. "She wasn't feeding it power any more."

"Then why does it sound like English?" I asked, puzzled.

"Don't think about that one," he said. "It's not worth the trouble of figuring it out and needing to juggle the languages in your head."

I nodded. What he'd just implied should have been unfathomably ridiculous, but at this point I was comfortable dwelling in the uncomfortable mind spaces of the Art. I'd probably adopted some sort of Direct Control that bundled all the languages she'd given me and tricked my mind into thinking they were all English. Meaning that when I felt my lips moving, felt the shape of words on my mouth—that was a lie. It wasn't "actually" occurring in the world—just to me—and anyone else would think I was speaking their language.

And if you're wondering why it was okay for me to have these thoughts—why they didn't undo the magic of her Suggestion—it's because I was just thinking about it; drawing conclusions. It's not the same as putting my mind in the place of where the change was. You can think about yourself all you like, you can pretend you're a different person than you are, but unless you do it constantly it doesn't get at that deeper level of what's really you, and even with practice only some.

I leaned over the railing and stared into the glassy water. I was surprised to see rocks sitting at the bottom, and even some fish float by, somehow frozen into the crystal. "There's more you're not telling me," I said. "You didn't tell me about that part of your travels. Why were you on the other side of the world? What did you steal from them?"

"None of your business," he said.

Zodiac blinked from Rinzai's horse onto his shoulder and licked his unshaven cheek. I got the impression that the starry spots on her brow shimmered as this happened.

Rinzai frowned, surly. "Fine. You're right." He took a deep breath, as if he'd just been convinced by his space cat. "Shae's people were exiled from the other side of the world. I stole a branch off a tree that belongs to the people who were probably responsible for that. It is anathema to the Arasit."

"Anathema?" I asked.

He sighed, and mopped his face as he watched the other side approach. "It fucks their shit up," he said, "to use your parlance."

"Wait, are you talking about that black staff?" I asked. He nodded. "I thought that was your Chi!" The experience of my Chi shattering against that staff at the Tournament was vivid in my mind. It had felt so wrong, like a piece of my mind breaking. I'd felt like the staff wanted to consume me, bones and all.
Rinzai laughed at my proclamation. "My Chi! Oh-ho. That's rich."

"If it hurts her, how come she let you steal it?"

"She asked me to."

"Why?"

"Questions, questions..."

"Come on," I urged.

He considered it. "She wanted to get a better understanding of the chess board. Which players were still around, and what weapons they had."

Seeing as he seemed in as talkative a mood as he ever was, I tried one more time for the thing I wanted to know most. "How come I know the way through the Wastes and you don't?"

"Because I know things that you don't," he replied.

Look, don't get me wrong. I was totally down to be mystically guided through the Wasteland by an unseen presence I didn't know if I could trust. Because...

Well, shit. Because it's magic. And yeah, I'd had my fair dose of magic already in Caer'Aton. But this was something else entirely. Shadowy flames licking from the ground? Telekenisis? Writhing shadow tentacles and a scarf that gets brighter the further down a road you go? A palace made of goddamn feathers?

I loved it. And it terrified me. So I wanted answers.

I suspected that was all I was going to get out of him. There was a connection, somehow, between his knowledge and his inability to tap into the guiding presence of the road. I doubted this was another "knowledge gets in the way of learning" lesson, because for some reason, I got the sense from Rinzai that it might one day be very important for me to know the things that he knows.

The cacophonous squeaking died out as the ferry made it to the other side. We disembarked into the cool shadow of the palace. We led the horses off cautiously, keeping an eye out for movement in its windows, or through its open front doors. A stiff breeze ruffled the feathers of the building and I tried not to look at how it had collapsed on its own leg. And I definitely tried not to look at the bits of sun-bleached bone poking through the skin.

"You said this was a library?" I asked. "Would it have anything useful for us?"

Rinzai chewed on his lip. "Unlikely. And we don't want to stay here any longer than we have to."

"Hey, look! The path!" I pointed eagerly. Near the Library, the white stones poked out of the sand.

Rinzai frowned. "Does it feel right to you?"

"Um. I think so." I scanned myself for the guiding feeling. "Yeah...that's the way."

We mounted our horses and circled the feathery building, giving it a wide berth. But we were still close enough that I saw a cloud of dust motes swirling in the golden light that streamed through a window. They seemed to move with...intention, gathering at the windowsill as if to observe our passing. I shivered, and urged my horse to where the road emerged from the ground.

Once there, I immediately felt its draining effects. They were potent—my strength fled me as if it were allergic to being in my body. My thoughts slurred.

"Tristan." Rinzai handed me the scarf again—it wasn't nearly as bright as it had been when I'd accidentally brought it onto the sands. Then, it had been glowing. But even so there was no denying that it was brighter than when he'd given it to me at the fringes of the Wastes. I tied it around my face and immediately my mind cleared up. My body felt better—slightly. And my connection to the path strengthened. I knew exactly where to go to cross this place. And I knew that it was still eating me, scarf or no.

"What is this thing?" I asked. Rinzai shook his head as he finished tying his. "Great," I said, "another thing on the list of things I can't know?"

"Some things," said Rinzai, "if you learn about them, have a tendency to learn about you in return. And you don't want that. You want to be forgotten. You want to be a ghost."

Now that? That was a justification I could get behind. But it made me wonder: if Rinzai was so knowledgeable, if he'd been sent out by Shae expressly to understand what kind of world she was returning to...

Who, or what, had caught wind of him?

~

It's all become fractured. If we are lucky—very lucky—we will slip through the cracks.

~

We finished our journey through the Wastes, travelling across a portion of road that seemed to go out of its way to avoid a large, abandoned quarry of silvery-gray stone. After that point, the road began to dim and the patterns in the air thinned. I noticed for the first time that this hellish landscape was actually the center of a circular mountain range.

But that was about the extent of my ability to notice. My thoughts were kept to a bare minimum: by the time we'd left behind the last of the shifting patterns in the air, I was so weak-willed and exhausted that I didn't trust myself to get off my horse.

The white road vanished, fading into dust and dirt scarred by carriage wheels and the hoofprints of large animals. None of the tracks looked recent. Rinzai stashed our scarves and led us to the hill where the road spilled into Sicil.

Calling it a town would be an injustice to its nature. The heart of Sicil was a single straight road with maybe ten or fifteen buildings. There were auxiliary homes, of course, and farmlands to the left. It would have felt like a trading post, except for the soldiers.

Their tents crowded the outskirts of Sicil; tall things whose stripes of blue and white had gathered a thick layer of dust. Rinzai had fed me most of the details—this was the very back of the Eastern army, the reserves meant to secure this place as a stronghold. The soldiers I saw were plump and lazy, living the good life.

We were met on the road by two of them, a stern pair who didn't look like they trusted anything that came out of the Wastes. I didn't blame them.

"Hold on, then," said Thing One, hand on the pommel of his club. "Only friends of the East are welcome here."

Thing Two coughed politely, held out a leather glove. "You are friendly, aren't you?"

I couldn't help but roll my eyes at the obvious extortion. After what I'd seen, and what with how tired I felt...a pair of unarmored soldiers with a couple of clubs wasn't going to intimidate me.

Thing Two squinted beady eyes at me. "You have a problem?" he asked.

"Nope. No problems here," I said. I probably should have waited for Rinzai to make the first move, buuut...I didn't. "But we're not going to bribe you. We're not here to cause trouble, so just get out of our way and we'll get out of yours."

"We're not asking for a bribe." Thing One put a hand on his friend's back and adopted an expression of exaggerated indignance. "It's just a toll to maintain the roads is all." He scuffed his boot on the hard-packed dirt ground. "An investment in the roads for the good people of this town."

"That's bullshit and you know it," I said. "Just let us through. I don't know what kind of people you get coming into this town, but I bet you don't get many coming from here." I jerked my thumb back at the Wastelands. "I get that you're jealous that your friends get to hustle the other travelers, but we are not those people. We are important and badass. Get out of our way."

So maybe I was having a little too much fun with it. Sue me; I was as delirious as I was sure that these guards were wimps. I was probably coming across like an asshole, but playing nice goes out the window for me when I'm tired. Add in a dash of feeling superior to this guy? I was feeling smug as shit.
Thing One looked at us skeptically. We had come out of the Wastes, after all. "You know...maybe he's right."

His friend glowered at him. "A toll's a toll."

Rinzai spoke up. "Attention. I'm going to show you two something." His voice was a whipcrack, his eyes filled with princely irritation. "When you see it, you will say nothing. You will simply let us pass."

Before they could reply, he drew back his gray cloak and revealed a pair of gleaming metal daggers at his hip.

They both gasped at once, and stood smartly to attention. "Our apologies, sir," said Thing One. "We didn't-"

"Shut up and let him pass, idiot," replied the other guard. He bowed to Rinzai. "Your secret's safe with us, sir."

"I'm sure it is." Before I could figure out how he'd managed to conceal two daggers from me this whole trip, he further surprised me by throwing them each a piece of thick silver. They snatched their coins with expressions of complete astonishment, and we trotted past. I glanced back and saw the one I'd been bantering with biting the coin suspiciously, looking at me like he wished he had permission to be annoyed at me. So like the mature, dignified traveler I was, I stuck my tongue out at him, and then caught up to Rinzai.

We entered the town proper. It was my first time in one of Haerth's cities. It was hardly grand, just a dirty old outpost occupied by the soldiers not fit enough for the front lines.

But I loved it. After the terror of the Wastes, I was grateful to be surrounded by buildings. You know, the kind made out of wood and stone, not feathers. And there were people—humans!—who looked at us curiously.

A woman in a stained white shirt with a plunging neckline called out to us. "Welcome to Sicil, travelers! How were the Wastes?"

And I knew, then, what it meant to say, "Bad."

Her mouth quirked. She'd expected the answer. "I'm sorry to hear that. If you're looking for a place to relax after your hard journey," she said, adding an unsubtle emphasis on the word 'hard,' "our establishment takes good care of its customers."

I gave their "establishment" a closer look. Two women were reading an old, weathered book on a swinging chair, successfully ignoring the cat calls coming from a pair of nearby soldiers. Another older but no less beautiful woman hummed while braiding the jet-black hair of a girl who was looking at Rinzai thoughtfully, as if she recognized him.

It was a two-story place, and on the top floor balcony I saw a pale, topless redhead hanging up a shirt to dry. She lowered her arms and turned toward us. I looked away immediately. "No thanks," I said, trying to stay solid and composed, trying desperately not think of her. Trying to keep a traveler's cool.

What do I mean by that? I don't know, it's just this thing I've been thinking about.

Traveling does things to your heart. It breaks it open so it's vulnerable to the world, and it makes it calloused, something you don't often touch because you don't often need it, because what you do need is to not pay attention to how difficult everything is.

It wasn't the first time I'd thought of her, so I was practiced by now at suppressing my memories. But Jade was there, folded somewhere in me. She was a promise. She was a splash of color on an uncertain future.

I didn't know what the world held in store for me, but I knew she would be there to face it with me. I knew it in my bones, which is an expression I've always thought could more honestly be described as just wanting something really bad.

But sometimes you just know, you have this feeling, that this time you get to make demands of the world. You get to bend it so it will give you this one thing. I'm not talking about hope; hope is uncertain. And in a way, more brave.

I don't know what I'm talking about. I see a redhead and I lose my ability to articulate myself.

Whether it was madness at losing her, or love of having met her at all, I knew I would see her again. And I tried not to dwell on it, because there were things to be done. I had to not be depressed about still only having one arm to work with. I had to pull the strength from God knows where to get off my horse without collapsing into the dirt. Then I had to tie it to the post and grab water from our pack. I had to drink, something which still felt wrong to do left handed. Then Rinzai nudged me forward, and I shambled toward the inn.

Looking at the ancient wooden pillars and the boulder-sized gray stones that composed the front of the building, I got the impression that this was where you were supposed to go if the Wasteland's demons crept out of the sand. Some buildings are a presence in their own right, and this was one whose very existence seemed to say "Seek shelter here. I have weathered worse."

"I have respect for the owner of this place," said Rinzai. "Do me a favor and don't act like you did out there. No fights."

I looked down at myself. "Rinzai, please. Do I really look like I'm capable of fighting anybody?" I was a frail, gaunt shell of myself. Whatever the road had taken from me, it wasn't coming back easily. Come to think of it, we probably looked like hell.

The signs of travel on me were obvious. I was covered in black dust, and, now that I was taking the time to look, I saw strands of shimmering air trailing from my clothes as if they'd been snagged there like pieces of spiderweb. I tried to brush them off, but my hand passed right through them. I was too exhausted to be worried. It was fine. It was probably fine.
No wonder everyone was staring at us.

I sighed. "Tell me we're getting a bed tonight."

Rinzai smiled. "We're getting a bed tonight." He was about to push open the door when he had a thought. He paused, and stepped back, gesturing for me to open it. "The hinges are un-oiled. It's a very heavy, very loud door to open. But I want you to open it soundlessly."

Another one of Rinzai's tests. As far as they went, this was a good one. Slightly more interesting than the time he'd expected me to catch rocks blindfolded (I didn't catch any of them). More fun than when he sent me out of the tent into the rain and wouldn't let me in until I could dodge the droplets (The rain let up after two hours and he declared me victorious). My greatest and only success had been when I accurately guessed the number of fingers he was going to hold up four times in a row. It had been pure chance, of course, but it still felt pretty ninja.

To be honest, most of the time I hated being his pupil. But nonetheless, I put my hands on the door, and listened.

Yeah, with my hands. Not my ears. Let me explain: say you grab a chair and drag it across the floor. Even though you're holding the back of the chair, you can feel the feet rub against the ground, right? That's what Rinzai calls listening. Feeling through what you're feeling, to feel what it's feeling.

I paid attention to the door, to where it wanted to grate and squeak. I felt its points of friction. I listened deeply to it, and accepted it.

I brought that understanding with me as I pushed, and the door opened soundlessly.

Rinzai looked impressed. "Excellent," he said. "You've mastered the art of opening doors."

"Thanks," I said, letting myself feel a little smug.

"Don't get ahead of yourself," said Rinzai, walking in. "As with all things, there are many levels of mastery."

Sicil was my first town, and the Traveler's Tavern was my first inn. The thing that hit me first was the noise. I had no idea how the door could have kept it all in. The place was packed, a wide, well-lit room brimming with humans and Ifrits and Droll, all chattering with each other.

The second thing to hit me was a mug of ale. Flung from the hand of an angry Droll, it was on a direct course for my face.

But my arm sprang out, and I caught it.

I pretended not to be astonished by my own reflexes, and instead stared the Droll square in its pudgy eyes. I lifted the mug to my lips and drank from it, holding his gaze.

I grimaced and shuddered as the liquid ran down my throat. What on earth had I just drank? I peered into the cup and saw a grey, sludgy paste. Disgusting. Let me tell you, if a Droll ever offers you a drink, politely decline. It was gritty, and tasted like what would happen to porridge if you added vinegar to it and let it sit in a cabinet for a few weeks.

"Missed me!" sang an Ifrit standing on the back of a chair to my right. He blew a kiss to the Droll. I was surprised to see a heart-shaped ring of smoke escape his lips. He gleamed at me. "Nice catch, human. How'd you get so fast?"

"I hit him a lot," said Rinzai.

A kid who looked thirteen at most took the thrown beer from me. He wore a stained apron and looked like he'd been working for hours. "You gotta teach me that one someday," he said.

I smiled, unsure what to say.

"You don't look like a soldier," he said, grabbing a wooden tray off a table. It was loaded high with plates and cups, but he balanced it all without a second thought. "What are you doing here?"

"We came from the Wastes," I said without thinking.

He stared.

"Come on." Rinzai roughly pulled me through the crowd of off duty soldiers toward the bar. Though the inn was packed, people made way for Rinzai unconsciously, leaving a pocket of space that made it easy to follow him.

I rolled my eyes. Classic Rinzai.

"I wish they didn't look so at ease," he muttered. "These aren't people who are worried about being sent to the front."

He had a point. The atmosphere wasn't light, per se, but there wasn't the kind of anxiety hanging in the air that you might have expected from a bar in a war zone. Upon closer look, however, I started to notice the soldiers. From a distance it had been easy to interpret the casual milling about as the easy life of soldiers far from the front line. But now I was mocking my ignorance, because once I knew to look for them, the scars of war were obvious.

A Droll with a missing leg asked a friend to get a drink for her. A pair of wild-eyed Ifrits had patches of cracked, pale blue skin that looked like burns looked on humans. Another was missing his tail. Other signs were not so obvious—like the fact that the people who were standing were all leaning on something. The edge of a table, the back of a chair. Most Droll seemed to have no problem with an Ifrit or a human leaning on them. Whether it was a back injury or a bad knee or an amputated foot, standing seemed to be a luxury in this crowd.

A pair of people cleared from the bar as we walked up, and I frowned.

"I thought we weren't supposed to use the Art," I said.

"I'm not," replied Rinzai tersely.

The bartender was a stocky man wiping down a used glass with a dirty rag. His sleeves were rolled up, revealing thick muscular forearms that shone with a thin layer of sweat. He was in the middle of a conversation with a tall woman whose once white coat was completely covered in dirt.

"...are inconclusive, but promising. I think it's alive, Harper."

"That so?" replied the bartender.

She nodded smugly. "It's early still, but I'm sure of it. You don't look surprised. Do your stories have an explanation for this too?"

"I asked his Holiness to look into it for a reason." said the bartender, "If I understood the Wastes, I wouldn't have."

"Oh, drop the Holiness talk around me," said the scientist. "The man was a colossal ass. Only the stupidest soldiers would have believed that speech he made, if not for the damn sunrise. The world is better off without him, but at least there's a shred of good come from all his breaths."

"Yes?" Harper prompted, setting down the dried glass and picking up another.

She answered his question with a question. "Did you ever wonder why the Wastes only started expanding recently?"

"Of course."

"And you had your reasons for suspecting the Wastes were alive, however folkish. Let me ask you: what normally regulates the proliferation of life?"

Harper eyed the scientist critically. "Predators."

She grinned. "Exactly."

He looked thoughtful. "Something eats the Wasteland?"

She leaned back on her stool, eyes glittering.

Harper looked like he had more to say, but then he saw us. He looked gobsmacked, which was just about the first big emotion his face had portrayed. He excused himself, and walked over.

"You're back," he said, looking at Rinzai uncertainly.

"You're still here," replied Rinzai.

"That I am. Did you...find what you were looking for?"

"Yes and no." Rinzai sighed. "They rarely give you straight answers in that place. Sufficed to say my journey is not yet at an end."

"Mine either," said the barkeep. "It's a miracle I'm still here." He nodded curtly to me. "Name's Harper."

"Tristan."

"Pleased to meet you."

He fetched two bowls of stew from the kitchen. They were still steaming when he placed them on the bar. He shook his head when Rinzai went for his money pouch. Rinzai politely thanked him, and we dug in.

"Are the rumors true, Harper?" Rinzai asked around a mouthful of stew. "All that bloodshed for nothing?"

Harper scratched his chin. "Hard to know when to trust a rumor. Word comes down the line that the High Jassan died in combat, and I don't think much of it. More stories follow, and in them he died protecting his men. Then I know they're lies, 'cause that's not the man he was."

He shrugged. "But when the stories don't stop coming, when they start getting twisted, when I hear a different version for every mouth that tells the tale? That's when I start to suspect there might be a kernel of truth in them."

"So he's really dead?"

"Could be," said Harper. "You know, I met the man just a few moons ago."

"What was he like?" I asked.

Harper shrugged. "Seemed like the only reason he ever did anything good was 'cause of his fear. So I made up some story about meeting his father, and told him that parable you told me." He nodded to Rinzai.

"The one with the wolves?"

"That's the one. Not sure if it got through, it's always hard to say with that kind of thing."

"He tried to end the war, didn't he?" asked Rinzai, slurping his soup.

"Bah. It's too early to say. One day word comes down that the generals of each army are having talks, the next day those talks never happened and a hundred men were killed in an ambush."

Rinzai ate on in silence, reflecting, so I picked up the conversation. "Looks like this place was in the thick of the fighting at one point." I'd seen the scorch marks on the sides of shops and more than a few people at work repairing homes. "How did you survive?"

Harper ladled out some thick, clumpy Droll beer and handed it across the bar in exchange for a few coins. "We housed whoever arrived in Sicil first, and then we hid. Lost a few homes to fire, but this place is old. It'll take more than fire to destroy it. Just like it'll take more than some war to break us."

The food was heavenly, by which I mean it was hot. Anything hot is automatically delicious when you've been eating cold food for days. Harper seemed to think he owed Rinzai for something, so we didn't have to pay for squat. When he left to deal with other customers, I surveyed the place and had a moment to finally notice the faint itch I'd had in the back of my head since coming in.

I was feeling a familiar sense, a connection to some presence. Startled for a moment, I checked in with my Art to make sure I wasn't using it. Had Shae implanted a deep Suggestion in me to force my powers out, under the radar?

No, it wasn't that. My powers were in check. Something else was happening. Scanning the room, my gaze kept drawing to a hooded figure sitting alone in the corner of the tavern.

"Rinzai."

"Hm?" he grunted, lost in thought.

"Do you get weird feelings from that person?"

"Certainly," he said without even pretending to look in that direction. "But I get weird feelings all the time."

"No, I'm serious," I said. "It's kind of like how I could sense the road."

That got his attention. "Who are you talking about?"

"Hooded figure, corner pocket." I surreptitiously pointed.

He looked over and then stared. The cloaked figure had their hands wrapped around a mug of something hot, staring at it. "Huh," said Rinzai. "How did she get here?"

Goddamnit. "What?" How the hell did he know everybody?

He was already off his stool making his way toward the stranger.

"Here are your keys," said Harper, coming over. He slid them over the counter to me. "All the rooms are full, but I'm having the kid give up his bedroom."

"Thanks," I said, too tired to politely refuse. "I hope it's not too much of an inconvenience."

Harper waved his hand dismissively. "Have you known him a long time?" he asked, nodding to Rinzai, who was standing over the stranger sitting at the table in the corner.

"Not really," I said. "A couple months. Less." Wow. Unless my sense of time had been radically distorted by Shae or Dante—which was totally within the realm of possibility—it really only had been that long. "But it feels like a lifetime."

"Is he..." Harper seemed like a really solid man, so I was surprised to see him fidgeting a little anxiously. "A demon?"

I chuckled. "No, not a demon." Then I paused. "Well, shit. Now that you mention it, I don't know. I'm pretty sure he's just a normal guy, though. Why do you ask?"

"I saw him fight, once," said Harper. He got a faraway look in his eyes. "It was like, he was...untouchable. Like the wind itself. He's walked off the path on the Wastelands, gone to a place he shouldn't have known about." He paused. "I don't know who he is to you, but you should watch yourself around him. Stay safe."

"I don't think that's physically possible," I replied. "But though I'm grateful for your well wishes, to be honest, I'm not interested in staying safe."

"No?" Harper arched an eyebrow.

I prodded at my soup. "I know the shape of my future. Being comfortable doesn't fit into it. There are things that I have to do and sacrifices I'm going to have to make. Just like him. Rinzai walks a dangerous path, but he doesn't have to." He was sitting across from the stranger, now, talking amiably with her. Because of course hooded strangers obviously trying to keep to themselves leap for the chance to talk to him.

I took a bite of mushy potato. "He chose his way. And..." I struggled for words. I was processing thoughts I hadn't realized I was having. "I don't like who he is or how he treats me. But I admire his devotion to his higher purpose. I think he's a good person, maybe one of the best I've ever met. And maybe it's just more of the weird aura he has around him, but I have an unshakable trust that everything he does is for a good reason."

Across the room, Rinzai barked out in laughter and procured his pipe from his robes. He grabbed a nearby Ifrit and pressed its thumb onto the bowl. Shortly after, smoke began to curl around the Ifrit's finger. Rinzai let go and put the newly embered pipe to his lips, puffing gently, and clapped the affronted Ifrit on his shoulder.

I sighed, rubbing my eyes. "At least, I'm pretty sure there is."

"You his apprentice?" asked Harper.

"Yeah."

Harper paused, seeming to weigh his words carefully. "Whatever path he walks...I wouldn't wish it upon anybody. Don't forget that your journey and his aren't the same."

It was hard to talk with him, seeing as I couldn't exactly explain our purpose. The Liberator was a myth, not some dude you could go awaken to fight an ancient enemy. So I just nodded. "I've made my choice to stick with him. I trust that he'll show me the way."

Harper didn't say anything for a moment, busying himself dispensing food and drink to a trio of soldiers that had muscled their way through the crowd to the bar. Among them was the Ifrit for whom the thrown mug had been meant. He winked at me.

I smiled pleasantly, then finished my stew. It sat comfortably in my stomach. I was just starting to feel my head drooping when Harper planted his hands on the bar and looked me dead in the eyes.

"That man carries a piece of Hell on him." He looked anxious, and sounded like he'd been wanting to say this since the moment I walked in. "You have to be careful."

That piece of the Black Throne. Shae's bane. It had broken my Chi. "Thanks for the advice," I mumbled.

Harper sensed that I wasn't really taking it to heart, but he kept looking at me, as if he was really trying to get across to me how scary Rinzai was. Buddy, you have no idea, I thought. Behind him, Aidin carried an armful of dishes to the back for washing, wearing a scowl. When he re-emerged, his expression changed as he approached his dad.

"Have you eaten yet?" asked Aidin.

Harper drummed his hands on the bar, still looking at me. "No," he said finally.

"I could make you something from the back?" Aidin asked hopefully.

"Just grab me a bowl of whatever's left," said Harper. "You need to be out there taking orders and clearing tables."

The kid looked disdainfully at their busy tavern. "They'll manage."

Aidin went to the kitchen. By the sound of chopping vegetables, he was not simply ladling stew into a bowl. Harper chuckled.

"He's not a fan of your clientele?" I asked.

"Who is?" Harper sighed. "It probably doesn't look it to you, you just got here. But if you look past how nice the tavern feels, you might just notice we're being occupied by an army." He gave me one last look before walking away.

I stared at the bar, mind weary. I was starting to muster the energy to drag myself to bed when the Droll from earlier appeared next to me.

The hugeness of a Droll is not something words do justice to. Things that big are usually just that—things. They weren't people. My muscles tensed as he regarded me. He could probably pop my head like a melon with just a single hand.

But he wasn't saying anything. "What's up?" I said. "Do you need something?" I was being careful with my speech, not sure how well Shae's translation software would work.

His eyes squinted, and he stomped the floor twice. I was confused for a moment, but then I realized what he might be doing, so I stood up from my chair and put my feet on the ground. I sank into Stonekin.

The power to connect to the ground had been given to me by a Stone Giant. It made me the fighter that I was, able to swing my sword in such a way that it was grounded in the whole earth. It also let me feel out the presences of others who were similarly attuned, like Rinzai, or other Stone Giants.

And, weirdly, I could sense the Droll. They weren't Stonekin in the same way, but they too were connected to the ground, could use it as their eyes. And they could speak with it.

Language comes through differently when you're using your feet to talk. But as best as I could tell, the Droll was saying, Sorry.

For accidentally throwing the mug at me, I guessed. I tapped my heel on the floor, sending a pulse back at him. It's okay.

He grunted. He was standing close, and his breath was hot and smelled disgustingly like the vinegary stuff he'd been drinking. He replied, and I couldn't make sense of what he was saying. I had to piece together the individual thoughts he'd pulsed at me to string them into a sentence.

Ifrits are annoying pests, he'd said. Explaining why he threw it?

I smiled. Why? I gave the question the connotation of "What did he do?"

The Droll glowered at the Ifrit in question, who was laughing with his two friends. He warmed my beer.

I laughed. Ifrits, I surmised, had some kind of minor control over heat and fire. Using that to prank a Droll was absolutely hilarious. I offered to buy him a cold one, and he shook his head. Apparently, he owed me for being rude to a Stonekin.

We fell into conversation over drinks, talking with words when the impressionistic nature of the tremors didn't cover some subtlety or nuance. His name was Durem. He explained that he'd been a drummer in the army before he'd lost his cool in a battle and messed up the rhythm he was pounding out. As punishment, he'd been sent here.

When I asked him why that was such a big deal, he sent a tremor at me that indicated he thought I was from outer space. Rhythm is everything, he said. Strategy. Time.

Apparently that's how the Eastern army fought. Massive drums pounded out a living, breathing tapestry of the battle. Different beats could signify anything from a request for aid to the sighting of the enemy general.

"The Aarturians use this against us," Durem spat. "They fight like cowards, when our drumline isn't prepared. That is the only reason they killed the High Jassan. They fought when we could not communicate."

"Were you there?"

No. "But it is the only explanation. He is watched over by Angels. When they cannot hear us, they cannot guide us."

Stories? About this world? "Tell me more."

I kept an eye on Rinzai and the stranger's serious looking conversation as I listened, and had half a mind to walk over. But as time went by and drinks were drunk, that strange pull that had drawn my attention to her vanished. It was easy to forget about, because Durem got increasingly talkative the more he drank. And he was downing tankard after tankard of the thick horse piss he called bol.
I found myself surprisingly at ease. I'd finished a long day's ride through a nightmare and ended up chatting with a friendly Droll. But my feeling comfortable wasn't coming from him. If anything it was coming from the tavern itself. There was just something homey about it, a warmth to the crackling fire in the hearth that made me want to put aside my burdens and relax. Something in the varnish of the wood that told me this was not a place for conflict. As if in the opening of the front door I'd signed a contract to chill the fuck out.

...his legs snapped like twigs! Durem roared in laughter at the end of his story and I chuckled at how funny he thought he was.

The trio piped up from down the bar. "Will you tell him to shut up?" asked the Ifrit. "I can barely hear myself think."

Durem clammed up, and looked at the floor. Irritated at him for meaninglessly singling out my new friend from the noisy crowd, I said, "You're not hearing yourself think 'cause there's nothing going on in there." I tapped my head.

The alcohol was definitely getting to me. I would not have said that had I been sober. I was not trying to pick a fight. Not because I didn't think I could handle a single Ifrit: when I'd fought the riders, I'd learned that the advice Derrik had once given me was true: they're not the greatest fighters. No, I was more worried about the bar full of his fellow soldiers. I know how solidarity works in groups as tightly knit as an army.

The Ifrit looked at his companions, a pleased smile creeping across his face. "Fuck did he just say to me?"

"Called you stupid," grunted his Droll friend. "Get over it."

"Oh no, no! Let's see if our new friend can put his money where his mouth is." The Ifrit hopped onto the bar and swaggered toward me.

Harper was a sudden large presence next to the Ifrit. "Get your feet off of my bar, Jannis."

Jannis exaggerated a bow. "Why, certainly." He leapt into a handstand, and walked across the bar on his hands. His head was craned upward such that I could see the small hairs sprouting from his bald red forehead, and see the sickly yellows of his eyes. "You think you're smart, hm?"

"Next to some people, sure." It was clear who, exactly, "people" was referring to.

He was loving it. "I challenge you, then. A battle of wits."

"Off the bar, Jannis," said Harper. He reached under the wood, and the Ifrit somersaulted onto the chair next to me.

"You against me. Mind to mind." He cocked his head, and smiled lopsidedly. He was obviously drunk. "What do you say?"

"Nah," I said. "I'm good."
"Leave them alone," said the Droll again. "I'm too drunk for this." He poked a human woman who had her head buried in the crook of her arm. "So's she."

She raised her head off the bar. "Hm? What's Jannis doing?"

I was going to say something to the effect of, "Being an insecure teenager," when I saw Rinzai stand up across the room, a troubled look on his face. He paced back and forth for a moment, then made for the front door. I excused myself from Durem for a moment, ignoring Jannis the Dipshit, and picked my way through the room. Though the tavern was far from empty, the night's progression had thinned the crowd. I caught up to him at the front.

"Hey!" I said when it became apparent he hadn't noticed me standing very obviously next to him, and was going to leave without saying a word. "Rinzai!"

"Hm?" Rinzai said distractedly. His mind was clearly elsewhere, or at least, that was the impression he was giving off. The thing about Rinzai is that you'd think you should assume his mind was always perfectly clear. He was this enlightened warrior monk, or whatever. His facial expressions were probably a game he played to keep himself entertained.

"Oh, hello," he said, finally realizing I existed. "I'm going to go for a walk. Need some fresh air."

But sometimes, you gotta wonder. "Why?" I asked, glancing at the stranger in the corner. She was looking at me, face mostly cast in shadow. "Who is she?"

"I'm not sure," he said. "Someone lucky. Someone strong."

"You're not making any sense," I said.

He rolled his eyes, then settled them on me with the full presence of his being. "I have a decision to make," he said with complete solemnity. "It is hard. I need to think."

"Let me help you," I said. "You can bounce ideas off me."

He gave me a pitying look. "They'd come back flaccid and uninspired. No thanks. I'll be back. Don't be an idiot while I'm gone." He walked several paces from the door, then paused. He turned around. "Or, not too much of one."

Just then, someone pushed the door open from the outside. Rinzai let them walk in, then slipped smartly behind them. I grumbled at him, my good mood dashed on his demeanor. I just didn't get why he had to be such a dick all the time.

I turned back in time to see Durem holding Jannis up by the tail. Jannis was hissing and spitting and trying ineffectually to claw at Durem's wrist.

"Let go of me!"

"You try holding a beat under that kind of pressure," said Durem. "Arrows falling from the sky like fletched rain. Your friends dying around you. Ancients above, they were shooting the musicians."

"Let go!"

The Ifrit's friends noticed the commotion. "Wait, what the hell?" asked the Droll.

Durem sneered. "Call me a coward again and see what happens." He let go of Jannis's tail, who plummeted to the floor and landed on his ass.

His friends advanced on Durem. Harper tried to intervene. "You know the rules, everyone. Take it outside." The way he said it gave me the impression that it was something he'd grown used to saying.

Jannis dusted himself off, seething. "I bet you dropped the rhythm on purpose. You're a defector."

"Woah, woah," I said. "Take it easy." I put my arm around Durem—or tried to, but his back was so damn big—and tried to cool him off. Don't let this idiot get to you, I sent with my feet.

"You want to side with this guy?" said the Ifrit as his human and Droll friend backed him up. "Are you really sure that's the right move to make?"

Guess who was trying to start a barfight? Not me.

I'd felt confident in Durem's strength, but suddenly I noticed how tense he was. How anxious. He was not a fighter. He hadn't fought Jannis, he'd picked him up by the tail.

You get a sense for this kind of thing when you swing a sword around a lot. It's in the way you hold yourself. Your body language—no matter who you are—always says something on the spectrum of I will run away or I will end you. I did not get the sense that Durem was going to end anybody. I was very much throwing my lot in with the losing side here.

But I stood by him all the same. For some reason I was still riding the wave of self-righteousness and power that I'd been carrying when I rode into Sicil. They just weren't in the same league as me. They didn't know who I was.

But I had to keep that a secret. "We're going to back off," I said. "We're sorry. Just leave us alone." The words didn't taste good, because what I wanted was to tell them all the various ways they could go fuck themselves. But I didn't want anybody to get hurt. Or, at least, that's what I was telling myself.

Then the Droll and the human grabbed clay tankards and smashed them on the bar, creating small jagged makeshift daggers, and things suddenly felt a lot more dangerous.

"Just cut his tongue out," said Jannis. He jabbed his finger drunkenly at Durem's face. "That way I won't have to hear him talk."

Others had vacated the space around us, pulling away tables and chairs. They watched with the eager eyes of the extremely bored, and added chanting and jeers to the mix. It was really not helping operation anti-barfight.

Then Harper stepped between us and showed everyone why he was the goddamn bartender.

"THIS ESTABLISHMENT HAS BEEN HERE A THOUSAND YEARS," he roared. I winced—how was his voice booming so loud? "AND I WILL BE DAMNED IF YOU TAINT THIS PLACE WITH VIOLENCE." The earth seemed to shake with the weight of his words. The candles and lanterns dimmed a little; shadow seemed to gather around him. His face was furious, and it was as if the building itself was giving him strength and power.

Jannis quailed before Harper. He scurried behind his Droll friend, hiding behind a meaty leg. "What the fuck?" he shouted. The Droll looked at Harper uncertainly.

Harper stepped forward. Despite being a good two feet shorter than the Droll, it was obvious to all of us watching who was looking down on who. "Get. Out." seethed Harper. The whole room throbbed as he said it. Faint iridescent symbols appeared in the air, shimmered in clusters around Harper's fists and head.

"Don't tell me what to do," said the Droll defensively.

"Let's go," said the human, tugging on the Droll's arm. "I'm spooked."

"OUT." Harper's voice was a physical boom striking my chest. "NOW."

"I'm sick of you bossing me around," said the Droll. "You're forgetting who you're talking to, old man. We own this city."

"I feel sick," said the human, holding her stomach. "Come on."

"You own this city?" Harper asked, deathly quiet. The human retched all of a sudden, vomit spilling onto the floor.

"That we do," said a newcomer, a woman with an insignia-adorned uniform. Obviously someone important. "Harper, I'm going to ask you to leave shouting my soldiers to me. It's my job."

Harper looked at her. I'm not sure if it was obvious to anybody else, but he wasn't...there. He wasn't behind his eyes. The room throbbed again, a warping of space, and I almost lost my footing. My stomach twisted. I needed to intervene, but I didn't have the first idea how. It didn't help that I was more than a little drunk.

"The Traveler's Tavern is closing early tonight," he said. His voice was different. Layered with a deep, gravelly tone. "You all need to leave."

She pursed her lips. "Piss on that, Harper. You'd rather my men wander the streets? We had a good thing going here. Let's not ruin it." She looked uneasily at the floating symbols that had collected around Harper. "Just calm down."

Harper struggled with the force that had snuck into him, then asserted some control over himself. "Fine. But you two have to leave." He pointed at myself and Durem. "And you three, I never want to see again."

Everyone in the trio looked perfectly happy to never be around the crazy innkeeper again, except for the Droll. "Ksha,"he growled. "Who do you think you are, bartender?"

Harper advanced on him. I saw his presence recede from his eyes. "I am the Guardian," he said, fists clenched. "I am the protector of this place. When the old magics fail, I am the one who is called to wield them again. And they are failing. The Wastes grow. They have corrupted you." He reached his hand out to the Droll. Bright, iridescent shapes surrounded it.

He freaked out, and slapped Harper's hands away. "Get the fuck away from me!"

"Soldier!" reprimanded the sergeant sharply.

Harper narrowed his eyes, suddenly feral, and let out a bestial roar. The iridescent patterns around his hands crystallized into circles and triangles made of a rainbow shimmer like oil in a puddle of water. He lunged at the Droll, and they streamed behind his fists.

With a single swift movement, the Droll crushed Harper's head between his hands.

Blood squirted between the cracks of his fingers. I was splattered with some of it. I just stared in shock. I didn't have my Chi or the Art to give me presence of mind. His head was just...gone. Pulped.

The symbols around Harper's head fell downward, fading on the way so that they had vanished by the time they would have hit the floor. It was as if the tavern's energy that had gone into Harper was being breathed out. The dimmed fireplace crackled higher and the shadows receded, the pressure on the room let up.

The crowd erupted into exultant cheers and screams. My training should have taken over, but I was slow to act. I just stared, horrified.

Durem shouldered me aside, and launched himself at the other Droll while the sergeant screamed curses and called for help. The Droll's eyes were glazed with alcohol and halfway to surprise, as if he hadn't known that crushing a man's head would result in his head exploding. I knew then that he wasn't a trained soldier either. Not one who had seen combat, not one who knew what he was doing. He was just stupid and afraid and Harper hadn't been himself and now the room was rapidly deteriorating.

Durem had pinned the Droll to the ground and was pummeling his face with fists the size of anvils. Jannis jumped onto Durem's back and ineffectively tried to scratch at his face while the sergeant walked over, shouting for them to stop.

I didn't see my way in. What was I supposed to do, shout? That would just be more noise. I could bring out my Chi, but then what? I stared helplessly at the two brawling Droll, at Harper's corpse and his bloodied mess of a head, and his kid.

His kid. His fucking child was standing still and frozen, and he had only eyes for his father's dead body. He was holding a plate; on it was a seared slab of meat next to an assortment of roasted vegetables and a thick slice of bread. It was the first dish I'd seen here with any thought put toward its appearance. The plate trembled in his hand.

There are points in life where you are faced with such a powerful decision that your choice determines who you are. Where both action or inaction damn you into being that kind of person.

Inaction was inexcusable, impossible. The stricken, horrified twist of his child's face was an open invitation for justice that I could not ignore.

With a sudden, swift burst of willpower, I seized control of everyone's mind.

The dam was broken, and power rushed into me. The room brightened, and I could pick out the smallest details with hardly any effort at all. The individual licks of flame in the fireplace, the fraying cloth of the sewn patch on the sergeant's jerkin, the blood which flecked my skin. I was calm.

And I had a hundred minds at my disposal. No—a hundred beings. Their very personhoods were like putty to me. Having that access felt good in a way that made me uncomfortable. Maybe that was just the fact that I wasn't used to this. It had been a few weeks, and the confidence I'd once had in using the Art had been eroded by neglect.

So when I felt a hundred people's thoughts, the way they were feeling panicked or confused or filled with bloodlust, I realized I couldn't hold them all for very long. My control wasn't stable. So, thinking quickly, I froze them.

Without realizing it I had stepped onto a chair and held my arms outstretched, fingertips extended in a magician's pose. Rather than adopting direct control of a hundred people—which meant becoming a hundred people in order to act like them, which was way beyond me—I simply told their minds what to tell them. Much more efficient that way.

The room stilled. Durem was hunched over the bloody-handed Droll, fist frozen in mid-air. I'd just wanted the noise to stop, for everyone to calm down. But my command had been taken literally. No one in the Traveler's Tavern was moving.

But tears still poured down Aidin's cheeks.

Shit. What was I supposed to do? I'd already fucked up by using the Art...couldn't I use it for good? What harm could that do?

A lot, I knew. Improperly executed, the Art would scramble somebody's brains. You could use it to kill, ripping the life out of a person's soul.

The more I thought about it, the less certain I was. But looking at the kid was heartbreaking. I knew the face he was making too well. It was all twisted in a way that showed he couldn't accept that what had happened was real.

My concentration started to falter. I wanted to say something to him. To change his mind somehow.

But then someone broke out of the freeze. Unsurprisingly, it was the Droll that had killed Harper. It's hard to say why people reacted differently to being controlled, but it made sense that the one being pummeled would feel the most danger, and would snap out of my control first. I'd been pretty firm in telling their mind to freeze—the equivalent of what a deer's mind probably told it in the face of an oncoming car—but just like how at some point the deer's mind says "maybe I should get out of the way," the Droll's mind told him he needed to get to his feet.

And, apparently, to deal with the guy standing on the stool with his hands out. The only one still moving. The guy who might as well have waved a giant flag, saying "IT'S ME, I'M THE ONE DOING THIS."

He growled, took a step toward me, and then a golden dagger sprouted through his throat. He frowned. He scratched at it like it was a bug. Then he toppled over.

The hooded stranger stood behind him. She removed the weapon from beneath the base of his skull. The dagger was a work of opulent beauty, a golden blade protruding from a handle that looked like it had been wrapped in silver leaves. Blood fled from the blade, as if it didn't want to make the thing look ugly. She was staring at the weapon, face twisted in confusion. Then a smile started to spread across her lips.

She had a weapon. I'd once heard it said that there were only a hundred or so real swords in all the Haerth. That she had even a dagger carried significance, much less one like that.

"Who are you?" I asked.

That broke her reverie. She hesitated. And then I lost all control on the room.

Soldiers broke into action. Durem was tackled to the ground. The sergeant directed two of her soldiers to force me down from the chair. She sent a few others to go for the stranger, but she was hurrying for the door. I was so dazed that I didn't think to command the soldiers to let me go.

The woman with the golden dagger tried to pull the door open, but it stayed shut. The four soldiers sent after her closed in, and she turned around.

STOP.

The command was supposed to get the five of them. I didn't know what that weapon was, but I knew it wasn't going to end well for whoever was on the other side of it. She shouldn't have been able to pierce the Droll's thick skin as easily as she had. But I was astonished that when I tried to influence their minds, I could only tap four of them. My will slid right off of hers. I'd only had that happen with Zodiac and when encountering the defenses of other Art practitioners. What the hell?

She eyed her assailants for a moment, then tried the door again. It wouldn't open.

"Ancients above..." murmured the sergeant. I thought she was referring to me, or the door. But she wasn't. "It moved."

The two soldiers behind me muscled me around as they looked for what the sergeant was talking about. That's when I saw Aidin covered in bright symbols. Whirling triangles and lines and arcane images—an eye circumscribed by a pyramid, a diamond with a single crack down its face--spun dizzyingly around him, all made of the same iridescent light.

He looked just as confused as everybody else. Like he was puzzling out some new and great discovery. He closed his hand, and the space around it bent as if seen through a fish-eye lens. He watched this in wonder. Then he surveyed the occupants of his tavern—of his town—and there was murder in his eyes.

Uh oh. Without a second's hesitation, I jumped into his mind.

And found that I was not alone. Someone else was here.

First things first, I quieted Aidin's rage. That was easy—maybe because he was young. An anger so wild that it was easy to subdue. Once he was calmed down, I turned to the other presence.

I'd described the state of the soldiers occupying Sicil. They were a sorry lot. The ones who had returned from the front bore the scars of war on their body and in their eyes, and looking at them made you wish the war had never started.
But looking at the old man in Aidin's mind, that was empathy on a whole different level. The way his enormous skeletal wings were bare of feathers and flecked with dried blood made my skin crawl. His hair might have been silver once, but was now a wispy, threadbare gray that revealed a tough, almost scaly scalp. He had two slits for a nose and the deep pockets of his absent eyes in his gaunt, hollow face made me wonder how long it had been alive to look like he had seen so much.

He hadn't reacted to my presence. He was an unmoving form. Maybe a dead one? I tip-toed my awareness closer to him to get a closer look. Still nothing.

I gulped, mentally. This thing, whatever it was, was worth studying. Why was I seeing his presence so clearly as an image in my head? How come he had absorbed all the light around Harper, and how could he give Aidin the power to keep the front door shut?

My curiosity is a bad habit. I should have been running a mile away, but I'm a sucker for mystery. Haerth was magical as fuck, and I wasn't going to settle for none of that hand-waving, he-can-do-that-because-he's-Gandalf nonsense, Because I already had a lot of pieces to this puzzle.

Jet had once mused aloud to me that the Art was probably based in some kind of real life, physical thing. I'd heard Rinzai talk about maia, some kind of energy field that everything existed in. And I'd seen the Subfield with my own eyes, watched Shae use it to pull a person into Haerth. And what had that fighter from below the Wastes said? Rahmanda?

The final shape of the puzzle was obvious: the world is made out of whatever the maia-Rahmanda-Subfield is, and minds can interact with it somehow. I knew that much.

But the Wind Jhinn—sentient air inside a suit of clothes? Droll that could speak through the ground? Shadowy fire, a river of liquid glass, people falling through sand like it was thin air?

And here: what looked like a mix between Voldemort and a dead angel.

I didn't know how it all fit together. But in the name of me wanting to be in the fucking know, I was going to get to the bottom of this. I moved my mind closer to the thing in Aidin's head.

Upon closer examination, my Art showed me that the old man was a channel for power to Aidin. That much was obvious—the kid had obviously taken something from his father. But no, there was something else. I leaned in closer.

Aidin was feeding on the thing, absorbing energy from it. It wasn't giving it to him, he was taking it. Wait, no. Not energy. I moved my mind as close as I dared, trying to figure out what I was looking at.

In my mind's eye, the old man snapped his head toward me with a neck-cracking motion. I stumbled back.

"They blow...the sands away..." he whispered in a shredded whisper.

"What?"

He raised an arm. Skin literally peeled off his bone on the way up. He pointed at me. "They keep...the dark at bay..."

I tried to backpedal out of Aidin's mind, but I couldn't. I couldn't get out. The old man with the wings was stopping me somehow.

"Let me go!" I shouted.

"But in the golden light..."

Spookiness aside, he wasn't advancing aggressively. Okay, maybe I wasn't in danger? With my Art finally under my control, I easily calmed myself down. "What are you talking about?" I asked.

He heaved himself to standing. "Run. Run. Run."

His wings tried to spread, but they didn't work. The one on the right twitched and jittered, and then the uppermost bone cracked and half the wing fell, hanging like a broken street sign.

He fell to his knees. I heard bone crunch as he did it. He was projecting sounds into my mind. His head hunched over as his last words escaped his lips. "If Hellish night should meet them...to start the war anew..."

The beginning of the next verse died on his lips. The power that kept me in Aidin's mind released me. I was all set to run away, but I realized two things. One, the old man (spirit? Dead angel?) wasn't moving anymore. Two, Aidin was still tapping him for power. Meaning as much as I wanted to, I couldn't leave. In my distraction with the old man, I'd lost control of Aidin's emotions.

Cursing my carelessness, I checked in with the real world. It was hard to say how much time had passed, but I guessed only a few seconds. The whirling symbols around Aidin's head were ten times brighter, bathing the room's terrified faces in bone-pale light. My influence was rapidly fading, and the situation was getting bad. The stranger with the dagger was gone, and soldiers were pounding on the door. Some of them had enough smarts to try the windows too, but even their hefty cudgels weren't able to so much as crack the thick panes of glass. That was Aidin's doing, I assumed.

Thankfully, you can move a lot faster when you're inside someone's mind. You cut out the middleman—no need to vocalize words into actual speech, no need to listen or hear what the other person is saying. It's streamlined; all the information is there. I figured I had a few more seconds before things turned on us, so I reached back out to Aidin. I could have gone straight with the control again, but I did not want to mess with the thing in his head. It had the power to trap me in there, and weak as it looked, I couldn't risk that.

Aidin, I whispered to him. I took a step in his direction, making it clear to him that I was the one addressing him.

It didn't get through. Poor kid. He was barely there. "I want them...to die," he thought, brows furrowed like he was struggling with a math problem. "I can feel that I can do it." He kept flexing his hand open and closed. "I just, I just can't, why can't I kill them? Dad?" He looked at his headless father. "Dad, how do I, why-why won't they-"

Aidin, I said again directly into his mind. That shook him a little, and he looked at me.

"Do you know how?" he spoke in his head. "Do you...I don't know...my Dad won't talk to me." I tried and failed to swallow the lump in my throat. The swirling shapes around him mirrored his confusion, and their drifting became chaotic, drunken. A symbol that was a cross between a pentagram and a ring of celtic knots whizzed within inches of my face, wobbling on its trail.

I can teach you, I lied.

"Do it," he thought immediately. "T-teach me."

I will, I said. I threaded my arm through the symbols and placed a hand on his shoulder, trying not to think about how lying to yourself taints the power of your Art. But you have to let these people go.

He didn't like the sound of that. "They're evil. They killed my dad."

No. He killed your dad. I pointed to the Droll the stranger had killed. And justice has already been served.

"I don't care!" His thoughts were loud, reckless. "I don't care, I just don't care anymore-"

I could feel the explosion building up a mile away. I tapped my Art, grimaced when I noticed it was slightly less unified—more like hitting someone with a cracked vase than a cinderblock—and I popped his frustration like a balloon.

The emotion vanished too quickly for him to not put two and two together. He looked at me in wonder. "Can you teach me how to do that?" he asked. And as much as I felt like the coolest wizard on the block, I couldn't relish the moment.

Yes, I lied. I can.

He thought for a moment. "Okay."

Just like that, he let go of the room. It was like the whole building had been holding its breath. The huge fireplace swelled with flames again, the shapes around Aidin dimmed, and the front door creaked open, reluctantly. My shoulders untensed. Thank God.

The sergeant looked at me, plainly unsure what to think of me.

"Let me deal with the kid," I said. "Then I'll come outside and we'll sort everything out. Deal?"

She hesitated, maybe unsure why I seemed so calm. I didn't know how much she had pieced together. Mind control isn't obvious when you don't stand up on a chair to announce your wizardry to the world.

But she agreed. In a strong show of leadership, she corralled her troops and got them out of the bar. Aidin was standing over his dad, staring.

"Don't look at that," I said.

"I will never forget this," he whispered.

"Sounds real healthy," I said, and put him to sleep. He fell limply against me. I picked him up and brought him to his bed. I tucked him under the covers, waited until his breathing slowed, and then I slipped out the door.

I had the whole tavern to myself. The adrenaline had sobered me a little, and I briefly entertained the prospect of getting belligerently drunk. I knew it for the escapism it was, and it was tempting. But sometimes when all you want to do is get hammered and forget everything, there's just a headless dad on the floor and you've got to bring the body outside so his kid doesn't see it when he wakes up. Escapism is always cowardly, but it's only inexcusable when it's cruel.

Dragging Harper by the legs, and numbing my emotions with a strong dose of the Art, I reflected that I didn't know what the Haerth customs were around death. What if burying this guy meant he'd come back as a zombie? Maybe I had to light him on fire?

I was overthinking it. I stuffed Harper behind the firewood shack and figured I'd deal with him later. Then I got a rag and a bucket of water and got on my knees and started to clean the blood.

Look at me, I thought, scrubbing the floor until my arms were exhausted. Look how fun it is to transcend a fear of death. Look at all the things you get comfortable doing. Isn't life great.

It took me the better part of an hour to clean the blood alone, because the stuff did not want to come out. Something about the wood of the tavern seemed to drink it up. Maybe it was an especially porous wood, used to make spills less slippery? Yeah. I liked that explanation better than the one where the tavern was alive and mildly vampiric.

Point being it took so long that I didn't bother trying to clean anything else. I cleaned my hands on a dirty rag. Then I sighed and leaned against the bar, rubbing my temples. I had a headache.

Though I'd been away from the Art for a few weeks, it was already second nature to check on the kid. I sent my awareness a few rooms over and brushed it against his mind.

He wasn't sleeping well. I searched around for the source of his discomfort and almost snagged myself on the edge of a nightmare. An image flashed into my mind—a small winged boy prostrate, bathed in radiant light—but I retreated before it was able to snap me up with its jaws. It was almost a reflex to ease his dreams, but I caught myself. Something told me it wasn't right to take his demons away from him. So I left him sleeping there and figured now was as good a time as any to get the hell out of this tavern.

I went to the front door and braced myself for a discussion with the sergeant. When my hand touched the door's thick brass handle, my instincts flared up so loudly that I actually heard my Chi mutter, Is he really going to go out there? Just like that?

I sighed, and let my forehead hit the door. I didn't want to deal with more danger. More dumb stuff. But I quested out with my senses and found that there were a lot of people around. Nearby, too. Skimming their thoughts, I realized that if I took a single step outside this place I would get porcupined by half a bajillion crossbows. I mopped my face and readied my shaky will.

So much for sorting everything out. I carefully gathered each of their minds under my control. I made sure I had everybody, then I took a few stabilizing breaths and centered myself.

Just have them shoot each other, piped up my Chi. Twang! Problem solved.

Shut up, I replied.

With a single effort of will, I put everyone to sleep.

I waited a few heartbeats, then opened the door a crack. No arrows came. I opened it wider, peeked my head out. They'd stacked barrels and flipped over a cart as bulwark, but most of the crossbowmen had been out in the open. The street was littered with sleeping soldiers and a few citizens that had probably been there for the spectacle. I saw a man on the roof opposite slumped near the edge and realized that putting people to sleep probably wasn't as safe as I'd foolishly thought it was.

I walked into the cool night air. I hadn't realized how stuffy with the smell of blood that room had been.

"Jesus..." I muttered. I was exhausted, but there was no way my body was letting me go to bed any time soon. I put a Field on myself to make people's attention slide right off me, and I went for a walk.

I was surprised that the brothel was still open. No soldiers were in sight, but a few of the establishment's men and women were gossiping on the front porch in low voices. I listened in as I walked past them, for all intents and purposes invisible.

"...always knew there was something wrong with that family." An Ifrit was speaking in a high pitched voice.

"It wasn't them," protested a well-toned, shirtless man, "it was those newcomers from the Wastes. They're what made everything go wrong. He used his demon magic to stop every soldier in the room. I'm telling you, we should block off the road to the Wastes. Nothing good ever comes from down south."

"Shut up, Florian. He did us all a favor and you know it. Damn shame about Harper, but with any luck, the soldiers will leave."

Florian snorted. "Taking all their business with them."

"What business? Name the last time you got paid a fair wage. That's right. You can't remember, can you?"

"It's better than nothing. Sicil is dead and you know it. The Wastes are getting worse. No one travels the roads any more. Not like they used to."

"Hmph. Leave, then. More business for us."

"Leave our poor guests in your company?" Florian grinned. "I wouldn't want to give our establishment a bad reputation."

I shook my head. These people. They'd crack jokes at their own execution.

My wandering took me to a tree that stood on the northern edge of town, farthest from the Wastes. I sat beneath its widespread boughs, and that's where Rinzai found me.

He stood over me, a furious maelstrom contained in the shadows on his face. "I don't even have the words to express how disappointed I am in you."

I'd been expecting it. "There's this comic called Calvin and Hobbes that you probably know nothing about," I said. "And in one of them, Calvin's dad is yelling at him for breaking something expensive of his. Calvin says, "Can we just assume I've been beating myself up enough that we can save you the trouble of doing it too?"

Rinzai rolled his eyes. "You're absolutely right. How foolish of me to criticize my apprentice for breaking the most important rule I had set before him. Do you not remember that it was to be used for emergencies only? What was so important that you had to use the Art to solve it?"

I didn't want to think about it, but Rinzai had a way of making you feel like you had nowhere to hide. I unconsciously searched the dirt for grass to tug at, but there was none, so I worried at the earth with my hands. "...Harper died."

Rinzai nodded. "And?"

I was flustered. And? What did he mean, and? "His son saw it happen, Rinzai. I was there, I was watching him holding this plate of food he'd made...And there was just something about the look on his face..."

Rinzai knelt as if to comfort me. I foolishly expected him to reach an arm out and pat me on the shoulder consolingly.

"You can't afford to care about the dead," he said. "You aren't allowed to have feelings anymore."

This was weirdly callous, even for him. I recoiled. "What the fuck, Rinzai? What kind of mentor are you? You didn't see the kid, you didn't see what happened in there and what would have happened if I hadn't stopped it!"

"You're still worked up over a dead man," said Rinzai calmly. "You need to let it go."

I shrugged his hand away. "Fuck off."

"It's not helping you. It's not helping our goals. And it's certainly not helping Harper. You realize that you're literally incapable of worrying about Harper for Harper's sake."

"Do you ever think about how awful you sound?" I demanded. I stood up and brushed the dirt off my fingers, glaring down at him. "I just saw something really traumatic. I'm allowed to have feelings about it. I'm allowed to get worked up."

Rinzai shook his head. "No, you're not."

"Says you."

Another shake of the head as he stood up. "Not me. Our path."

My turn to roll my eyes. "Here we go..."

"Our path decides everything for us, Tristan. Everything you do is cast in the light of your goals. Right now we're fighting for the free will of billions of people. You're right that you're allowed to mourn for the departed, and mourn for the living who knew them. In fact, you must do these things if you are to have the strength to not let them overpower you."

"Wow!" I said. "You know, I was feeling really emotional about seeing a boy watch his dad get killed, but now that you reminded me that the fate of the world rests on my back, I'm totally freed from my mortal attachments to suffering. Thanks, Rinzai!"

He smiled. "You're welcome."

I didn't have it in me to tell him that I was being about as sarcastic as it was possible to be. He knew. I sighed. "I'm so tired, but I just don't see myself sleeping in that inn."

"Good," said Rinzai, "because you're not."

Aidin approached us, leading three horses behind him: our two iron-plated ones, and a third which could have passed for an Earth horse if not for the metal studs rimming its brow and the too-rigid stiffness of its sleek gray mane.

I crossed my arms. "You have about fifteen seconds to explain to me why the kid is bringing us horses and not plush, feathery beds."

Rinzai chuckled mirthlessly. "There's work to be done. More than I expected, now that it's clear you can't be trusted with anything important."

"I brought everything," said Aidin to Rinzai. "I'm ready to leave."

"You're funny," I said to him. I turned to Rinzai. "Explain. Now."

"You'll need someone familiar with the area to guide you to where you're going," explained Rinzai.

"And where, exactly, am I going?"

"To the front of the war. The High Jassan was murdered, and peace talks are under way. I need you to cut those talks to ribbons. That army needs to crash on the walls of Cammes."

The capital of Aartur. I put aside the enormity of what he'd just told me and asked a question I'd had for a long time. "Why did you start this war, Rinzai?" He always claimed it was for a noble cause, with the goal of ultimately saving more lives than it cost.

"Many reasons," he said. "The most relevant to you is that the invasion of Cammes will give us the opportunity to search for the Liberator without arousing suspicion."

That set alarm bells ringing in my head. "You want to sack a city just to give us cover?"
"I don't think you appreciate the danger we're in," said Rinzai. He glanced at Aidin, who was standing nearby looking at me with fierce determination. "There are certain things we don't want to notice us."

"Not just organizations dedicated toward preventing her return," I guessed, omitting Shae's name or the mention of her people for Aidin's sake. "You're talking about something bigger."

Rinzai nodded. "I only know what I've been able to glean from our collections. But what I have learned has convinced me that stealth is of the utmost importance."

"Just tell me," I said. This was the edge of the silence he never broke, the thing he never talked about. "Tell me who these things are. Let me know who I'm supposed to be afraid of."

Rinzai stroked the nose of his horse and then hopped on it with grace that defied his age. "The more you know, the more likely it is that they notice you."
"You must be totally fucked then," I said sarcastically.

He nodded seriously. "Demons crawl from the other side of Haerth to attack me on a nightly basis, and they are the least of my worries. But let's not talk about this in front of your guide."

Huh. So that's where he went at night. To fight the demons that were chasing him?

"I don't mind," said Aidin. "I mean, I grew up Wasteside. I just got possessed by a spirit that used to inhabit my dad. I think it would be pretty hard to surprise me." He shrugged. "I just want to get out of here. And to help," he added in an afterthought.

Rinzai parted his cloak, revealing the twin short blades at his hip. He'd done it so casually that I looked around us to make sure that nobody was watching—though they were in elegant scabbards of dark leather, I knew that they would draw all kinds of attention—but somehow Rinzai had known that nobody was around without obviously scanning the area. "The best way you can help is by staying silent and showing Tristan the way." He unbuckled the swords from his hip. "Here."

He tossed them at me, and I caught them each by the handle in both hands. Aidin looked impressed. I grimaced—I didn't want this kid looking up to me. I was being told to go stir up a war.

And why wasn't he mourning his dad? I briefly scanned his mind, and saw that I'd been a little overzealous when I'd popped his frustration. His emotions were being severely dampened by the aftereffects of my Art.

"Tristan," warned Rinzai.

I ended my scan, and tucked my Art away. "How am I supposed to do this?" I asked. "End peace talks? Get an army moving? Without the Art? What am I, a diplomat?"

"No," said Rinzai, "you're a Wraith. Look at the symbol on the scabbard and the sword."

I checked them out and saw a sigil of a golden sun at the hilt of both swords and on the side of each scabbard. Inside each sun, the number 29 appeared.

"The Wraiths are the secret police of the High Jassan," explained Rinzai. "They are above all laws. Impersonating one will get you a long way, you saw as much when we arrived. You'll have the kid to explain the finer points. I'm sure he can tell you all kinds of stories about the Wraiths that have passed through Sicil."

"They're the worst," said Aidin. "They never pay for food and they always get too drunk."

Rinzai nodded. "See? He's useful already. Once you're sure the army is on its way to Cammes, race ahead and meet me there."

I heard voices down the road, so I stashed the two blades in my horse's luggage.

"I don't get it," I said. "Why do we have to split up?"

"Because I'm going to find the Liberator."

"But that was the plan the whole time," I said. "Just come with me, help me with this army thing, and we'll go to Cammes together."

"There's no time," said Rinzai. "June has informed me of a new player in the game. An extremely powerful shadow organization with dangerous connections."

I rolled my eyes. "Ooh, spooky. But so what?" I said. "I don't get what that has to do with the Liberator."

"She showed me a weapon," he said. He smiled politely at a pair of soldiers swaying down the road. They nodded in response. Then one stopped and peered in our direction.

"Hey, aren't you...aren't you that guy?" He mumbled. To his companion, he said, "This is who I keep telling you about. Th' guy."

"Uh huh," said his friend. "The one who came from the Wastes and won a fight against fifteen people? What did you call him?"

"The Whirlwind," said his friend sourly, "and it wasn't fifteen. Just me and the other mercs gettin' in a tiff with some locals...You remember that? You're the guy, right?" he called.

"Me?" asked Rinzai. "I'm nobody."

"Let's get you to bed," said the drunk soldier's friend. "Go in his light," he said in farewell.

"Go in his light," responded Rinzai, watching them leave placidly.

I returned to our conversation. "I saw the weapon. It was freakishly beautiful, like an ornament. But it pierced through a Droll like it was nothing."

"It will do far worse if she lets it have its way," said Rinzai. "But that's hardly worth our time. I I looked for artifacts like that. Found a whole bunch of them. This group, they shouldn't have been able to hide it from me. But they did."

"Why didn't you take it from her?" I said. "Wait, don't tell me. Make yourself known to something and it learns about you in return?"

Rinzai nodded.

Yeesh. "These people sound dangerous," I said, "but I don't get why their existence means you have to hurry to find the Liberator."

"Because I already knew about the organization," he said. "They're based in Nys, which is a month's ride south of Caer'Aton. But June encountered them close to Cammes."

Not even counting the distance itself, you'd have to cross the Wastelands to make that journey. "What are they doing in Aartur, then?"

Rinzai bent down. "Exactly." He started assembling sticks into a small tipi. Then he traced a circle around it in the dirt. He was doing his morning ritual. He said the words he always said.

"Today we grieve for the ones we hurt while sleeping." His voice was deep, sonorous. It filled the air like Dante's low rumble. "In this moment, we pray for the ones we will hurt in our carelessness."

The back of my neck burned. I knew that using the Art had been reckless. That it had endangered everything we were working for. In Rinzai's mind, that was tantamount to endangering the lives we were trying to save.

"May what is made be made in good faith. May what is destroyed be rebuilt for good purpose."

He stood up and fixed me with his eyes as he crushed the tipi under his boot, and spoke the last line, modified for my benefit. "May we give more fucks about other people."

He gracefully mounted his horse. I felt a phantom twitch in the arm I couldn't use, watching him use two hands to hop on.

And just like that, without another word, Rinzai urged his horse into the darkness. Then, in clear defiance of all Hollywood tropes, rather than allowing him to be a lone rider vanishing into the night...the sun rose. The world had a way of placing theatrical accents on Rinzai's departures.

Maybe it was watching him after all.

The world was illuminated, and the trodden grasses around Sicil were bathed in light, and Rinzai wasn't some dark rider, he was just a dude on a horse, leaving without any more explanation for why I had to lug a kid with me.

A kid infested with a supernatural spirit, no less.

"Well," I said, "it looks like we'd better get to know each other."

He shrugged. "Sure."

I hesitated. "Hey. I've been through some of what you've been through. And...are you okay?"

Aidin's young face was suddenly wiped of expression. He started making adjustments to the horse's baggage that definitely didn't need to be made. "I'm fine," he said.

I watched him in silence for a moment. Then I sighed. "Me too, kid."

That's how I teamed up with a twelve year old inhabited by the guardian spirit of the Traveler's Tavern. Rinzai dumped him on me under the pretext of me needing a guide—someone to show me to the army and to show me how to be a Wraith. But was that really the whole point? Something told me Rinzai wanted to stick me with the kid so I'd get a feel for what Rinzai had to deal with by having me around.

We mounted our horses. The rode forked—Rinzai had taken the right one, which veered northwest, toward Cammes. The army had taken a southern route, with the aim of destroying the Aarturian's southern farmlands before making a sharp northern turn for Cammes. So we veered left.

I'd forgotten how tired I was. When we were out of range of Rinzai's senses, I tied myself to the horse, and used a shred of my Art to make the bumpy sensation of riding go away. Then I used just a little more to trick my mind into thinking I was lying down. The

I was asleep in my saddle before I knew it.

~

I want you to know that it wasn't my fault. I still love you, Tristan. I am trying so hard to reunite us, believe me. I'm sure one day you'll laugh with me at how ironic it was to send this by letter.

What I've done...I tell myself you won't hold it against me, because that is not the person you are. But this distance is rich soil for doubt.

Please, don't hate me.

~

June stood in the shadows opposite the brothel for a long time before making her decision. When she'd plunged the dagger through the neck of that Droll, the feeling had come back. It was an energy unlike anything she'd ever known had rushed up her arm and settled in her chest, a soft furnace that churned out a feeling of restlessness, a tingling in her muscles, a sense that she could do anything. It was like being drunk, but clearer. More powerful.

And on top of that, the Ghost...he was real. June had just seen him, had talked to him. The man responsible for the war. The advisor that had whispered in a hundred ears, united an entire nation against an enemy. How had he found her?

How had he known that she had done it?

Sometimes she felt the eyes of every soldier in the tavern on her. She knew they knew she had killed their God-king. She knew his spies were after her. They were in this room, they were waiting for the perfect moment. The white and golden dagger was a constant weight in her bag, eager to be drawn at the slightest provocation. She'd nearly stabbed the Ghost when he'd approached her, had forced the impulse down with her heart thudding in her chest.

But tonight wasn't about that.

A young woman on the front porch smiled eagerly at her approach. "What did I tell you, Florian?" she said. Her finger traced the low dip of her shirt's neckline, and pulled it down at its vertex."A night like this, it puts fire in your heart."

"Aye, and elsewhere," said the addressed man. His eyes slid shamelessly over her body, something that she expected. She'd changed out of the hooded cloak she'd worn at the tavern, as it had been splattered with blood, and replaced it with a long brown robe that concealed her body. It didn't stop him from staring. It never did.

But June's heart thudded in her chest when she heard him talk. His voice...it was similar enough. It would do.

She tried to stop her own voice from trembling. "You," she pointed at him. "You'll come with me."

A sly smile spread across Florian's face, and he rose to his feet, bowing. "Lucky me. What's in the bag, sweetheart?"

June's breath quickened and she tightened the strap to her chest. Was this what power felt like? People listening to you when you talked? She'd been the High Jassan's personal servant for so long she'd forgotten what this was like. If she'd ever known it at all. It didn't feel like her to order people around, but what if this was what she wanted?

She declined to answer his question and strode past them into the duskily lit interior. Dark lavender curtains were drawn across the windows to give the appearance of twilight. There seemed to be no customers lounging on any of the plush couches, only a handful of bored, scantily dressed men and women. The Ifrits and Droll paid her no attention, but the humans perked up at her entrance.

She surveyed the scene. She needed someone...right. The girl that had spoken to her outside wasn't it. Nor was the one reading by the bar. She was too blonde. Nor the woman dozing on the couch. Her exposed waist was too skinny, nothing like June's.

The owner of the establishment was old, wrinkled, gray, and possessed the most charismatic smile June had ever seen on a woman. It dazzled her. Equal parts coy and confident and charming...

"I like your smile," said June, approaching the small bar. She tried her best not to stammer.

"I've worked hard on it," replied the older woman. "My name is Carina. What can I do for you?"

Florian stepped next to June and put an arm around her. "Don't mind us, ma'am. We're just going to—oof!"

June had reflexively peeled his arm off of her and thrown it to his side. She'd thrown it a little hard. Something about the energy in her...she desperately tried not to think about the dagger.

The owner of the establishment rolled her eyes at Florian as he nursed his arm. "Show some respect." To June, she said, "Him? That's who you're picking? I know you're concealing your looks, but I can see the type of girl you are. I wonder if you might not be in the market for someone more...classy."

"I'm classy," said Florian. "Ask anyone." Snorts and scattered laughter met his statement, and he glowered at the room.

How could June explain? He had the voice. The perfect voice. "Not just him," said June. "I'm looking for someone else."

"Man or woman?" asked Carina, as if she'd expected the question. Ancients above but this woman was a smooth talker.

June was biting her lip, unsure, until her eyes alighted on someone walking down the stairs. She was wrapped only in a sky blue towel that left the tops of her pale breasts exposed. "Her," she whispered.

"Katya," called the owner.

Katya had been lost in her thoughts, but she turned her head and saw June standing there with the other two. "Oh! Excuse me. I didn't think anyone would be visiting."

Catarina snapped her fingers. "Get dressed, and meet these two in the upstairs suite."

June fingered two pieces of Eastern silver from her pouch and placed them into Catarina's soft, wrinkled hands. "That's alright. She's perfect how she is."

The owner coughed. "I'll be needing twice that. Silver doesn't hold its weight the way it used to, you understand."

June was probably being gouged. She didn't care. She gave her two more pieces of silver and glided over to Katya, amazed at how the hum of energy in her lent grace to all her movements. Like she was a cloud. June smiled, taking in Katya's body. "You'll do perfectly."

"Will I?" asked Katya, arching her eyebrow. "Did you have something specific in mind?"

June took inspiration from Catarina and snapped her fingers. "Come with us, Florian." She felt guilty for doing it, but giving orders made her feel good.

"Geez," he said. "What am I getting into?" Eyeing the two beautiful women leading the way upstairs, he said it like he was sitting down before a great feast.

"I don't know," said a friend of his playing cards on a low nightstand, "but I'll trade anything to change places with ya."

"Let me think about that," said Florian, and briskly followed the women upstairs.

June shook her head, thinking privately that they didn't get it yet. Trading was not an option. Florian friend's voice was too nasal. It had none of the lazy confidence that she was looking for, and none of the undertones of anxiety and fear she could always hear in the voices of brash men.

Katya let them into the uppermost suite, a room that was too velvety for June's tastes. Sicil was a step above most small towns, but not by much. Despite herself, June had grown accustomed to the High Jassan's rich lifestyle. The dark carpet and the polished bedpost might have impressed somebody else, but to June they seemed to be trying too hard. That was okay, the room didn't matter. The people did.

Katya turned around, looking genuinely curious. "You seem like someone who knows what she wants."

"I know exactly what she wants," said Florian. He stepped behind June, but didn't touch her. "You must have been on the road a long time. You must be tired."

June barely had ears for him. She was too taken with Katya's body. Her long hair a strawberry blonde that flirted with orange, her slender fingers. Her large, full breasts. "You're just like me," she whispered. "But my hair is black."

"Why don't you let it down?" said Katya. She smoothly stepped to June and reached her fingers into June's hair. June tensed up. Over her shoulder, Katya shared a glance with Florian that most in the industry knew well: Something's off about this one.

The long piece of wood that bound June's hair in a bun was removed, and it tumbled loosely to her waist.

"I want you to be comfortable," said June to Katya. "Okay? If anything isn't good for you. If you don't like anything. Just say it."

Katya threw her hair back in laughter. "You're precious. Don't worry about me."

"Besides that," said June, as if she were continuing her sentence, as if she hadn't heard Katya at all, "I want you to obey every word I say. And only do what I tell you to do." She shivered. She knew she shouldn't be giving orders. She had never given orders. She was a servant girl, she had been taken from her family, she...

Katya wiped the welling tears from June's eyes. "I'm all ears, honey. Just tell me what to do."

"What about me?" asked Florian behind her. He'd taken another step closer, his breath was close to June's ear. "You don't want me to be comfortable?"

June had been sandwiched between them, but she stepped sideways and lifted her bag over her head. "You go sit down on that chair." She pointed across the room.

Florian glanced at Katya. Katya shrugged. He walked over and sat down in the chair and crossed his leg impatiently.

June rummaged around her sack. Her knuckles brushed against the dagger.

She paused. She found her fingers curling around the handle unbidden, felt how warm it was in her hand, how right.

No, no. No. She let go and instead produced her harp. The small one the High Jassan had given her for practice on the road. The two others were mind-boggled by the slender curve of the metal. The different colored strings that bridged the span of the bend. "Here," said June. She gave it to Katya.

Katya looked like she was holding the world's most delicate crystal. "I can't use this," she said.

"You can't mess it up," said June. "It's a harp. The first one was commissioned by a king who wanted to idiot-proof his minstrels."

Katya looked nervous. "I'm not so sure..."

June put her hands on her hips and summoned courage. "Are you disobeying me?"

Katya's eyes shot up, surprised by the snap of June's voice. "No."

"I wouldn't want to set Florian on you," said June. "Not yet."

Katya gulped, for dramatic effect. She felt comfortable adopting the various roles her clients had demanded of her. Ancients only knew this was one of the least troubling. She raised her fingers to the harp, and began to play.

June inhaled sharply, eyes firmly closed. Katya paused.

"Don't stop," said June.

Katya resumed playing. Soft, scattered notes filled the room, delicately played, as if each note was afraid to be heard. It was so much like June's first time playing for the High Jassan that she was momentarily lost in the memory. The way he had kept an impassive face for her whole performance, and then had wordlessly disrobed, and walked toward her...

She brought herself back to why she had come here. She took a few breaths, and then June began to guide them through the fantasy that she'd been holding in her heart.

Florian was the High Jassan, come home after a long day listening to his nobles bicker. He was in a foul mood, and his temper had the best of him.

Florian stood up, unsure what to do.

The High Jassan pushed over a nightstand, knocked over an empty wooden candlestick.

Florian hesitated, but seeing Katya's encouraging nod, he crossed the room and promptly upended the nightstand. He looked at June for approval, but she was already giving him his next orders.

The High Jassan paced the floor, ranting about the idiocies of his people. Throughout all of this, Katya played the harp. She didn't do a great job of it to June's ears, but it was enough. It set the mood. It turned Katya into June.

The High Jassan demanded June stop playing the harp. June refused. Her music was dear to her, and she knew it would soothe him. The High Jassan ordered her to stop, and again she didn't. Then he put his hands on her. He ripped the towel off of her body and stood before her naked body.
"On your knees," he demanded. It had always been sudden with him.

June watched as Katya gently laid the harp down and got on the floor. June had been timid at first, just a spectator. But now her hand had slid under the waist of her pants, and her cheeks were burning as she continued narrating.

The High Jassan slapped June across the face, and she took it unflinchingly. He slapped her again, and again, until the will in her eyes was broken. Then he let his pants fall to the ground, grabbed June's head between both of his hands, and started to thrust into her mouth.

Hearing June's orders, Katya breathed an internal sigh of relief, because now she understood what was happening. This was her area of expertise. She'd long ago mastered the appearance of sinking into submission. Clients didn't want some timid girl they could have their way with. They wanted to tame a wild animal. They wanted to rein in her fire. Through Florian, June was doing just that.

But she didn't stop there. June started narrating Katya's thoughts. And it was starting to get to her. Gradually, she found her feelings to mimic the ones June laid out for her.

June had expected him to take her like this, because he did it every night. And she didn't fight back because she knew that like this, she had power. Because sometimes after the abuse he would open up and show a vulnerable side she could mold, and she couldn't get him there unless she let him have her way.

And he was the High Jassan. He owned her. He was a God, her body was his.

"Fuck," grunted Florian as he pounded Katya's face. "Let me in, baby. Move your hand."

June was shamefully turned on by Florian's improvisation. She had been thrusting her fingers inside herself to the motion of Florian's hips. She'd held off from fingering her clit, but she couldn't stop herself any longer, and she stifled a moan as her finger slid upward.

On her knees, June had to comply with the High Jassan's wishes. She let go of the base of his shaft, and he was able to push that much farther into her. His grip tightened in her hair and he stopped pulling out as far with each thrust, staying deep in her throat. She coughed, throat engulfed around his cock.

She knew what he wanted. She knew he wanted to be as deep as possible. So June had to give it to him. She wrapped her arms around him and pulled him into her so that he stayed buried to the hilt in her throat.

The High Jassan's reaction was fury. He was taking her. She wasn't supposed to accept it. She was supposed to struggle.

"Where's the fight in you?" he demanded. He pulled out. He glared at her teary-eyed face.

June said nothing. It was always bad when she answered his questions. She knew what was coming.

Florian picked up Katya and threw her on the bed, possessed by the role. On her chair, June had taken off her top and was squeezing her breasts, rolling her nipple and making vigorous circles around her clit.

"He rolls her on her stomach," she said, "and fucks her the way she deserves to be fucked."

Florian rolled Katya over, taking in the sight of her ass pointing into the sky. He slapped it, hard. June walked over, one hand still playing with her nipple. She knelt down, and told Florian to turn Katya's head. He grabbed her by the hair and flipped her. Katya and June were inches apart, eye to eye.

"Are you still okay with this?" asked June.

Katya closed her eyes. Her face was resigned, the look of someone who has gone within themselves to escape from reality. "I deserve this," she whispered. "He is my God-King."

June leaned over the bed and kissed Katya on the lips. Florian slapped Katya's ass again and she whimpered. June was burning between her legs. Then Florian buried his dick all the way into Katya, who couldn't help but cry out into June's mouth.

The High Jassan took her without mercy. He was incensed, pounding into her with one hand gripping her hair tightly. This was power. This was when he felt he deserved to rule, when he knew that he had power over all he touched.

But as he fucked her June felt something odd. Something different. She felt turned on...not by the intensity of how he was fucking her, but by the fact that it was her. He could not feel this way without her. B-because she was not an...an empty vessel. She was not some shell of a person, some n-nameless body, she was June and none of this would be happening without her because she existed, and she mattered, and if he had to erase her to feel whole himself then he was lost and confused and she had to show him what he was doing or else he would never know.

She pushed her ass at him so that he was left on his knees. She turned on the bed and saw him face to face, saw the livid anger rising in his cheeks. He rose his hand to slap her and it was g-going to be a...hard one, and she folded into him. K-kissed him tenderly inside his arm's reach...wrapped an arm around his waist. He struggled to push her off, but she held tightly to him. Kissed him deeper, pleaded with his lips to open.

When they didn't, she swiveled her body, throwing him onto the bed. He looked at her in outrage. Where was this coming from?

"There's the fight I've been looking for," he said, his anger turning to satisfaction. He propped himself to his elbows, read to fight back.

"This isn't that," said June. "This is something different."

Katya sat astride Florian, still entranced by the story June was weaving into her. She had never been this deep into a character before. Florian seemed genuinely angry that he wasn't able to do what he pleased to her anymore. He tried to push Katya off him but June kept his arm pinned down. And then she tied it to the bedpost with a piece of fraying rope.

He looked at it incredulously. Where had she gotten that? "I am the High Jassan! You will untie me!"

Words poured out of June's mouth and she watched them mold the scene, spellbound by the power of her own story.

The High Jassan fought hard, but he was helpless. Suddenly both his arms were tied to the bed. He strained against his restraints, but it was strong silk that tied him to the bedposts. That didn't stop him from trying. He pulled and pulled until veins bulged in his forearms.

June reached beneath her and grabbed his cock. She slid it into her slowly, melting herself onto him like hot wax. Her whole body relaxed and she laid down, her soft breasts pressed against his chest. She kissed his cheek, and rode him.

It was the most torturous, painful sex he had ever endured. Every fiber of him begged to rip at his bonds and conquer his servant. But he couldn't. She was taking him. He was helpless, and she was still fucking him. Her long harpist's fingers were sliding up his chest. She w-wasn't trying to hurt him.

"Stop it," he begged.

That only encouraged her. She nibbled his ear. Whispered something to him that made his eyes shut and tears well in the creases. She felt his walls crumbling, his being starting to soften, and she drank that vulnerability like it was sweet liquor.

Fuck.

June stepped onto the bed and pushed Katya off. She fell to the side, confused, hair sweaty and askew.

June slipped the High Jassan's dick into her, felt it pierce all the way into her innermost walls. She rubbed at her clit, eyes closed. "You don't have to h-hurt other people for them to love you," she said. "I know t-the person you are. The good you t-tried to do." She gasped, a quick inhale.

"Fuck. I...did what I had to do," she said. Feeling him resting deep inside of her, she started to rock him with her hips, moving him inside her in the most amazing way. "I f-for-forgive you."

She was searching for something. Some kind of release was eluding her, there was a block in the way. Fuck. She was so close. "I love you," she said, trying it out even though she knew it wasn't true.

That didn't do it either. The burning between her legs roiled through her body. "I'm the reason the war is ending," she said, because she knew it. He had tried to change for her. But still she felt herself peaking, a pressure building that needed something else to release it.

"Fuck!" she shouted, bouncing wildly on his dick."I killed you, I killed you and it felt so fucking GOOD!" An image of her dagger flashed into her mind, the moment she had stabbed it through his chest. "Fuck! I'm, I'm-"

Her orgasm was like a star burning, a full body racking of pleasure that flew through her. Her eyes were pressed tight together and she wasn't sure if she was making any sound or not, just that she had vanished from the world.

When she came to a few moments later, she was collapsed on top of Florian. Katya was staring at her with a completely baffled expression. "What the fuck?" she whispered.

June pushed herself off of Florian, taking stock of the room. She smiled. She felt great. Like light feels. "Wow," she said. "I needed that."

Katya stammered. "You-you-"

"You were...bright," said Florian. "You, I mean, there was this golden dust behind you, and-"

June skipped over to her bag. "Probably nothing to worry about." Her hand was wrapped around the silver hilt of her dagger before she knew what she was doing.

She froze. She tried to let go of the blade, but she couldn't.

"What was that?" asked Katya.

"Nothing!" said June, trying to sound as cheerful and innocent as possible. "That's all for now. You can leave."

Behind her, Florian and Katya looked at each other in mutual amazement. "What are you?"

"Just a girl, hoping to go home," said June. She looked over her shoulder and gave them what she hoped was a reassuring smile.

"Did you know the High Jassan?" asked Florian.

Her grip tightened on the dagger. She started to lift it from her bag. "No. My cousin did. I always used to have these fantasies," she said. "Really, you should leave. I got what I wanted, I'll just go to sleep now."

Katya hesitated. "I know what I saw. And-"

"Get out," hissed June.

That got the message across. They gathered their things and left in a hurry. The door had just closed when June whirled and flung the dagger at it. It stuck quivering, point first in the middle of the door. Right about where their heads would have been.

She was breathing hard. This was...bad. She wasn't stupid, she knew the dagger was changing her. There was magic in it. Probably not the best thing to keep around.

She gathered her clothes, thinking. Yes, it was affecting her. But it had also given her freedom. Power. It was what let her escape. If she were to ever fall under someone else's control again...

She debated with herself as she finished packing up. Going downstairs was not an option, the story would have spread. She didn't know what they'd seen, but she did know she didn't feel like answering any questions. She needed to be by herself. She opened the window and squirmed out of it. Crouching low, she padded to the balcony. She could get down from there.

In the distance, a rider took the path for Cammes, and two others were leaving in the direction of the Eastern army. She blinked. The opposite way, the eastern road, was empty; an open invitation.

In truth, that empty road was the condensed version of her struggle. Every part of her yearned for home. A simpler life. Her family probably assumed she had died ages ago. The way her mother would cry if she saw her...

But southward lay Nys. Where she had been told to go. The woman with the cobalt eyes, the one who had given her this dagger...she had told her to come find her.

It was the opposite direction of home, but also a different direction of her life. One where she didn't bury the dagger in a random patch of dirt and forget all about it. One where she instead listened to it, stopped resisting its influence. Where she could become someone truly powerful.

She looked at the roads going east, west, and south. "Who the hell do I want to be?" she asked of the open air.

~

I am indebted to the following people for their continued support of Tristan's Tale: Foxy of Fucking Loxly, Chris, Signet, Aurora Borealis, Havok87, Gerald Wood, Pilotshopprincess, Mike Nixon, I'm Chris, Jacques Hickey, Frikkle, Matthew Hodges, Blake Jezioro, Oliver Morrison, Champ13316, Robert Jacobs, John Smith, Joel M, Vergard, and Grey Harris.

Thank you all. Truly.

See you soon for Part 9! Feel free to write.
IPD