Chapter 516: At the Edge of Nothing

ARTHUR LEYWIN

The crystal curtain passed, hard and cold, over my skin. The sundering of reality twisted my intestines. Distant pain, like the projection of a sensation suffered by someone else, ached deep behind my eyes. Frigid discomfort…there was nothing else. I tried to blink, expecting my vision to snap back into place or slowly fade in like an old black-and-white film from Earth.

My body spilled out of the curtain onto soft soil, and the emptiness of sensation was suddenly replaced with an oversaturated chaos of light and dark, noise and humidity, warm air and a strong breeze.

I blinked back the nausea that wriggled in my already churning stomach, forcing myself to stay present as I searched for Tessia.

But she was already standing right there, her back to me. I followed the graceful curve of her neck into her shoulder, down her slender, toned arm, to her small hand. My own reached out, our fingers lacing together. A jolt of surprise went through her, but then some of the tension left her body, and her grip tightened, but she did not turn back to look.

A shaky breath rattled out of me as my senses realigned into signals my brain could actually process.

The omnipresent noise came from a smooth ocean that seemed to expand out in front of us forever. We had been deposited just on the shore, my boots sinking into black sand. It was dark, but the ocean glinted with a purple light. Above the horizon was an equally expansive black and dark purple sky: the aetheric void.

Regis rose up from my shadow, shaking himself like a dog coming in from the rain. “Well, that was new. Where—” He started to turn as he spoke, then cut off with a low moan and such an intense sense of vertigo that it crashed through our connection.

I stiffened, resisting the urge to look behind us.

The crystalline curtain rattled, and Varay stepped out next to me, her face pale. Beside her, Bairon went down on one knee, his hand fisting into the sand.

Sylvie appeared behind me and Tessia. Her hands slipped under our arms, and she rested her cheek on Tessia’s shoulder. Through our connection, I could sense her confused thoughts, but could not hear them directly. Her breathing was shallow, her fingers cold.

A sharp scraping noise drew my attention past Tessia to where the griffon-like exoform of Claire Bladeheart lay on its back, one leg extended out far enough that the lapping edge of the water just touched it.

Suddenly, I was moving. Still carefully avoiding looking directly back, I swept behind Tess and Sylv and dragged Claire away from the water, not wanting her to touch it.

“Is this the Relictombs?” Varay asked, her stance uncomfortably stiff. “Mica attempted to explain it, but I’ll admit, I didn’t fully understand her…enthusiastic narration.”

“It must be, though this feels different,” Sylvie answered as I bent over Claire.

“You okay?” I asked.

Inside the exoform, she nodded. Her eyes slipped off my face to look directly away from the waterfront. They closed instantly, her expression one of intense discomfort. “Just got my bell rung. A little dizzy. Maybe I should get out of—”

“No,” I interrupted, all too aware of whatever lingered at my back, the thing no one seemed to be able to look at. “Stay in it.” You’re entirely unprotected in here, otherwise, I thought, though I didn’t speak the words out loud.

“The mana in here is stifling,” Varay continued, taking a step toward the water. She raised a hand, and ice crystals formed a complex fractal in the air. “There is some kind of potent spell at work.”

Slowly, she made a concerted effort to force her head around and look behind us, her gaze following some unseen movement in the air. Her eyes physically began to roll back in her head, and Bairon took hold of her elbow to support her. She dizzily turned, blinked several times, then her mouth fell open in obvious surprise as she looked out at the water.

When she spoke, her words were stiff and drunken. “What…just happened?”

Regis began to pad up and down on the waterfront, his eyes automatically falling with each turn so that he never looked directly back. “There’s this sick sense of wrongness and vertigo, but from the corner of my eyes, I can’t see anything. It’s like…” He trailed off, and I felt his mind fumbling for the correct way to describe it.

“Like this place is incomplete,” Tessia said, continuing Varay’s thought. “Or…maybe like that part wasn’t needed, and so nothing was put there.”

“Respectfully, Lady Eralith,” Claire said as she maneuvered her exoform loudly onto its feet, “but that doesn’t make any sense. How can a physical place be…incomplete?”

Sylvie stepped forward. Everyone turned to her, clearly expecting her to speak, but instead she kept walking toward the water.

“Sylv?” I asked, on edge due to the strangeness of the zone and our situation.

She didn’t answer, and her foot splashed down into the gently lapping aetheric water. She gasped, and in an instant, I pulled her back, putting myself between her and the sea. With a gentle shake, I tried to force her to meet my eyes. Instead, my attention slipped past her ear to the space beyond.

My mind instantly rebelled, refusing to make sense of the signals it was receiving. On pure gut instinct, I activated King’s Gambit. Instead of allowing me to clarify what I was seeing, it only amplified the spatial dysphoria a hundredfold, and I tasted bile in the back of my throat. My eyes rolled, and I thought perhaps I would collapse.

Then, I was once again looking out at the endless ocean beneath the aetheric void.

Sylvie was still beside me, but now her gaze was burning into the side of my head, her expression all intensity and desperation, no longer the vacant-eyed, lost-in-the-sea look from a moment before. “So you see a place where reality is so fractured you can’t even look at it, and your go-to move is to stare into it with a dozen threads of active consciousness all at once?” Although her tone was biting, her thoughts probed mine gently. ‘Are you all right? I can already tell you didn’t gain anything.’

“Yes—no.” I shook my head. “We need to figure out what’s happening here.”

“Do we?” Claire asked. As she looked down the line of our group, she was careful not to turn her head too far, never taking in the space behind us with more than the corner of her eye. “Don’t we just need to…leave?”

I cracked my neck and flexed my aether. “Yes, but these zones—chapters, as the djinn called them—almost always have some kind of puzzle to work through. Some can simply be fought through, but since we haven’t seen any monsters—”

Movement far out in the aetheric sea brought me to a halt.

A ripple was moving through the water—no, more like a wave, or a series of waves. The incoming tide suddenly reached our toes, and as one, our group retreated several steps.

“You just had to say it,” Regis bemoaned, his hackles up.

“Something’s coming,” Sylvie agreed, her golden eyes narrowing on the distant epicenter of the waves.

Bairon floated off the ground, lightning crackling down the crimson spear and up his arms as he gathered mana. “I don’t sense anything.”

I didn’t either, but Sylvie could. Not through the aether, but…through the water itself. I shot her a look, which she matched, neither of us understanding why she could feel the water like an extra limb.

The water rose up—or something rose from the water, it was difficult to tell. Humanoid in shape, the figure was smooth and featureless, formed almost entirely of aether but flowing as if made from the aetheric sea itself. A single eye opened in the center of its forehead, then a second, and then several more. Eight small, glinting garnet eyes shone out of a dark face, each one seeming to focus on a single member of our group.

I studied the features, trying to gauge the being’s intent. I itched to activate King’s Gambit, but doing so when I might accidentally be exposed to the broken space behind me was an unacceptable risk. Even so, meeting the being’s eyes conjured a shiver up the back of my neck and raised the fine hairs on my arms.

What I felt was…

Wrath.

Jumping in front of my companions, I conjured an aetheric blade, summoned my relic armor, and activated God Step, preparing to slice through the connective points—only, the figure was suddenly right in front of me.

I swung, and a sword of dark aether formed in its hand, catching mine. I withdrew my aether, shorting the blade so that it skated off the edge of the figure’s weapon, then thrust for the neck. In my other hand, aether was condensing as I prepared to release a point-blank blast into its face.

My shortened blade glanced off the hardened aetheric barrier around the figure’s physical form. Its own blade thrust into my side, its other hand grabbed my wrist to prevent me from bringing up the aether blast, and a third hand—formed without my even sensing it—grasped my throat.

The being was incredibly, impossibly strong. I held all eight of its eyes for a long moment, and then, from off to the side, a beam of bright blue lightning swallowed my attacker.

I released the blade in my hand and conjured three more to hover around me. Aether condensed over my eyes to protect them from the light as I unleashed a swift series of cuts and slashes with the three spinning blades. Violet sparks flew out of the beam of lightning as my aether clashed against that of my attacker.

Suddenly, a smothering killing intent radiated from it. The lightning winked out, and I was slammed backward, skidding through the sand as my feet dug two deep furrows.

The beach turned to ice, which rapidly expanded upward to the figure’s legs. It had only to take a step forward, and the ice shattered, unable to hold it in place. Green vines sprang up from the icy beach and tried to wrap around the figure, but it tore through those, too. All eight eyes remained locked on me.

I darted toward it, bringing two of the haloing aether blades into defensive positions as I grabbed the third, its tip pointed at the figure’s small eyes. It blinked again, just a foot to the side, and swung down on me with both arms. Its blows were so heavy and forceful that my aether blades were turned aside. I tried to twist out of the way as I thrust at the figure’s face. One blow missed, but the other glanced off my shoulder, slamming it free of the socket and knocking me to a knee.

Two wrath-filled eyes bled violet light down the side of its face for a moment, then the remaining eyes began to move, sliding through the liquid surface of its skin and congealing into a single eye in the middle of the otherwise featureless face.

Another volley of spells struck from several angles, throwing Regis onto his back, Destruction-wreathed jaws gnashing.

Aether gathered in my legs and arm as the joint slipped back into its socket, but before I could act, a knifing hand chopped through the air at my throat. I reeled back, trying to reclaim my feet and dodge the blow in a single motion, but as I half stumbled, my head turned until I fully stared into the gut-wrenching unknown opposite the aetheric sea, and I fully lost the thread.

My chest and jaw throbbed, and then I was lying on my back in wet sand.

The sound of water shuffling the small grains near my ears was so loud it seemed to drown out everything else. For a moment, I couldn’t remember what I’d been doing.

‘Don’t worry, princess, you just lay there while the rest of us get our asses handed to us!’ Regis growled in my mind.

Only half aware, I turned in the direction of tremors shaking through the ground. Regis was pinned on his back, his jaws clamped around the aetheric figure’s shoulder, but the plain face had elongated, forming a void maw with aetheric teeth that were now likewise buried in Regis’s neck. I blinked with each flash of lightning or bright pop of blue-white ice. Time seemed to flex and distort, with the battle crawling one moment and then rushing forward the next.

I shook myself, realizing all at once that I’d been stunned by the last blow. Rising on the aether, I gathered myself, then shot forward. An aetheric blade formed in my hand, no longer than a dagger. Before, my blows had glanced off, and a shorter blade would give me greater control.

Lacking time to build up for a Burst Strike, I nonetheless pushed as much aether into the muscles of my arm and shoulder as possible. Expecting resistance, I was yet again caught off guard when the blade punched through the aetheric barrier and inky flesh with little resistance, followed by my arm up to the elbow. The being was lifted off Regis, while Sylvie was forced to yank Claire out of the way as I flew past and crashed along the ground, entangled with our attacker. As we still rolled, I yanked my arm and weapon free, then stabbed it in again, then a third time. On the fourth, the blade again bounced off its skin.

From my back, I stared up into the single overlarge violet eye, now blazing with fury. The figure’s killing intent returned as it began to drop crushing, hammer-like blows down on me. I brought my arms up, but my strength flagged with each strike, my aether cracking along with the scales of my armor. Sand flew up around us, glinting in the dim purple light, and I struggled to collect myself as so much aether flooded to my limbs just to keep my defenses up.

The being, its face still elongated, opened its jaws wide, and an ear-splitting cry issued visible striations of sound that made my vision turn from purple to white. Spells shattered against it from our right—ice, lightning, and pure mana all failing to cause any noticeable damage. It seemed nearly impervious. Even the wound in its side was already sealed over.

What is this thing, I thought weakly, the words in the back of my mind as my conscious focus remained on my next move.

I thrust up with my left hand, forming a blade that continued to extend until it reached the hollow of the figure’s gaunt sternum just as its thin but powerful arms swung down again.

My right elbow lowered to the ground, my fist tight, aether flooding into the limb to empower each muscle and tendon, building up in preparation to release a sequence of perfectly timed bursts.

My sword arm buckled as the aetheric sword failed to pierce the inky, aetheric hide. I kept shoving with the blade, more like a shield than a strike, holding back whatever small amount of force and momentum I could. Twin blades, rounded and curved like tusks, formed in the dark hands as they fell toward me.

I unleashed the Burst Strike.

The force of my elbow pushing off against the black sand crystallised the ground below me. My knuckles struck it in the stomach, just below the sternum, and I felt my wrist—buttressed by aether—collapse, the tendons twisting, bone breaking, and muscles rupturing. My vision flashed white through the hot pain, and I struggled to hold onto my awareness.

Warm, salty breath gusted in my face as the being, some kind of manifestation of raw aether, the rage of the dead, chuffed in my face, the aetheric fangs shrinking and elongated face flattening. “Life,” it breathed out in a voice like wind through rocks. The sound made my blood run cold. “Hated, awful life. Must end you. Empty…you.” Two more thin arms suddenly erupted from the torso, reaching for my hands and throat. Time seemed to stop.

Behind the aetheric manifestation, Sylvie was standing up to her knees in the water. She was drawing on its power, but I could already feel her hold over time trembling.

I dragged myself out from under the thin, dark, aetheric form and barely reached my feet before the hold shattered.

Varay appeared in front of me, her body wrapped in a thick layer of ice, like a walking statue. The air itself hardened, the dense mana jumping at her call. The figure threw itself into the wall of ice and stuck to it as the ice rapidly expanded, growing around the creature. In a moment, it was encased in a perfect blue block, nothing moving but its eye, which glowed with rage as it focused on Varay.

Bairon’s crimson spear sank through the ice and drove into its side, then a white hot jolt of electricity ran along the spear’s length and into the dark body. Someone was kneeling at my side, lifting me to my feet and pulling me away.

The figure’s ice-encased arms flexed, and the frozen block exploded outward in a thousand blue daggers that fractured into harmless snow an instant later. Varay tried to fly back, but one long-fingered hand wrapped around her ankle before swinging her around and slamming her into the ground as the other grabbed the half of the spear. A third arm appeared, the skeletal fingers closing around Bairon’s wrist. Both Lances erupted with contained power, and for a moment, everything went white.

Then, Varay and Bairon were flung back. Emerald green vines erupted from the ground to catch and pull them away from our attacker.

This left Claire standing directly in front of the creature within the tall, griffon-like exoform. I adjusted my feet in the sand, prepared to Burst Step at the thing before it could attack her, but Tessia’s hands were clamped in a vice-like grip on my arm, and Sylvie’s voice was in my mind.

Look! she thought desperately.

The manifestation’s eye was locked on Claire within the exoform. But something about it was different. Physically, it hadn’t changed significantly, but it seemed softer somehow, its power more constrained. It had to look up at her due to the height of the machine, which made it seem smaller…

When it stepped back into a fighting stance, I knew some aspect of it had changed significantly. It stood like a person, like a back-alley brawler getting ready for a fight. That same gaunt figure now seemed wiry and…human, again clutching two dark shards like knives.

Claire’s wings extended out wide as she raised her blade.

The creature lunged. A wing covered in slate gray feathers scythed down, hacking off one of its arms, then a taloned foot rose to drive forward into its chest. It was taken off its feet and slammed to the ground, the talons digging into its shoulders and stomach, meeting little resistance from the dark, aetheric flesh.

A pitiful wet screech issued from a thin dark slash across the blank face as its remaining arm flailed, the blade in its fist scraping ineffectually over the exoform’s fusion of metal and treated mana beast parts. Claire’s own blade, a long, broad sword imbued with fire salts from Darv, spun to point down, then drove, hissing, through the flat face.

The form dissolved into smoke and was pulled out to sea.

“Not a sea,” Sylvie said softly, her voice stricken, her thoughts muddled and pulled in a dozen different directions. “It’s a river.” She put one hand down into the water to show me the way it rippled around her skin.

Beside me, Tessia’s hands fell away from me, and she took a slow step toward Claire, her eyes locked on the sword still stuck in the ground, the sand around it heated to glass.

The beaked head of the exoform turned to look at Tess and then back to me, careful to avoid looking past me into the indescribable wall of disorientation. Claire’s gaze was expectant through the panels of transparent, protective mana, waiting for me to explain what in the abyss had just happened, but my own thoughts were on Sylvie.

You need to get out of the water, I thought, having to push through the muddle of her unfocused mind. But in the effort, my own thoughts got caught up in hers, which seemed to be going in a dozen different directions at once, flowing far and wide into the past and future both.

Thinking together in tandem, we played back the short fight, from the figure’s appearance and initial rush, to my intervention, and then everything that came after. A few specific details stuck out. “Both times I got its attention, I felt a sudden killing intent. Strong enough to borderline stun me.”

“But we only felt it when its attention was entirely on you,” Sylvie finished.

Regis limped up next to me, his neck bleeding profusely. “It was after B-Man, and I got my fangs into it, then it turned on me and it was like I was suddenly fighting a freakin’ mountain. Couldn’t scratch it.”

I nodded, carefully looking around at my companions. Tessia was, thankfully, entirely unharmed. Her vines had retracted back into the ground, but I caught her shooting nervous glances around, as if waiting for the next attack. Bairon and Varay both had superficial wounds. Sylvie, though not injured, was still standing in the aetheric river.

“In most of your ascents, the monsters created by the Relictombs adjusted to the strength of those present,” Sylvie said before I could repeat my request that she step back up on solid ground. “This…apparition was doing that too, but based on whichever of us had its attention.”

“Except instead of being powerful enough to be a challenge, it was straight up empowered to kick our asses,” Regis said between noisy licks of his wound, which was closing quickly.

“But why did it suddenly seem so weak when faced with Miss Bladeheart?” Bairon asked, nodding respectfully to Claire. “You defeated it with relative ease, unless I am missing something.”

Claire maneuvered the exoform down onto one knee so she was eye level with the rest of us. “I’m not going to claim to have any idea what’s happening here but…when it was inspecting me, I felt…” She trembled inside the exoform. “I felt violated. Like it was looking into my chest. My core…”

I nodded, understanding what she meant. Her core had been broken during the attack on Xyrus years ago, and she’d lost her ability to use mana. I knew exactly how that felt, and although I’d lived with the impediment a relatively short time before forging my aether core, I too would have felt violated to have something staring into my weakness and judging me by it.

And yet, Claire’s weakness may turn out to be our salvation, I realized.

I explained my theory to the others.

“But if Agrona intends to trap us or kill us here, why design such a creature?” Varay asked. Her arms were crossed over her chest, and frost spread over the sand at her feet. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to simply throw the strongest opponent possible at us?”

I shook my head, and a lock of my wheat-blond hair fell in front of my eyes. I pushed it back. “Agrona didn’t create this creature,” I answered. “I don’t think he can do anything here. The djinn projection, Ji-ae, maybe…but she is basically a conscious library catalogue as I understand it. She doesn’t make the Relcitombs, just keeps track of it, helps to navigate it, that kind of thing.”

Tessia startled next to me. “What was that?” Then, as her eyes searched for something I hadn’t seen, she went green and got a queasy look on her face, quickly turning away from the indistinct backdrop. “Oh, sun and stars, but that’s awful. I wish we could do something about…that.” She gestured vaguely to the nothingness behind us.

“What did you see?” Bairon asked, his fist clenching around the shaft of the crimson spear, lightning crackling between his fingers.

“I’m not sure. A figure, maybe, but…” She gave me a pained smile and shrugged.

We all froze, preparing for another attack. Claire moved between the group and the direction Tessia had been looking, her sword held out as if ready to strike. Several long seconds ticked past, but no attack came.

Varay cleared her throat, drawing me back to our conversation. “So if this is just another ‘zone’ within the Relictombs, how do we get out?” Her expression drew tight and pensive. “The greatest part of our strength has been removed from the battlefield at Taegrin Caelum, leaving Agrona able to focus entirely on Lady Seris and her forces.”

I rolled my response around in my mouth, thinking carefully before replying. “I don’t think this is just another zone,” I admitted after a moment, remembering the apparition’s words. My focus shifted to the air around us as Realmheart burned on my back, causing my hair to float around my head and lighting up the runes around my eyes. “There is almost no atmospheric aether here. It’s all in that—wait, Sylv, did you say it’s a river?” And would you, please, get out of the damn thing?

Bairon cast his gaze out over the endless body of flowing aether. “There does not seem to be an opposite shore. How could such a thing be a river?”

Sylvie stooped, cupping the water before lifting it up and letting it trickle back through her fingers. Her eyes were unfocused, and she was beginning to tremble.“It’s flowing. See? Varay…”

The Lance understood immediately and conjured an iceberg fifty feet out from the shore. It was swiftly pulled downstream by a current that was almost invisible to the naked eye. “The way the mana moves…” Varay trailed off and shook her head. “It’s as if it is herding something into the river. The aether?”

I reached into the atmosphere and attempted to draw aether from it into my core, but there was almost none available. Then, I turned to the river instead, but I could not pull aether from it; the force of the pull was too strong. And so I stepped up to the shoreline and bent low.

“Arthur, don’t,” Sylvie said, but her voice was dry, devoid of intent or warning.

I dipped a hand into the water.

A sharp gasp was ripped from my chest as the pull of the river took me. The gates in my core flew open, and suddenly my purified aether was being syphoned out of me and into the river. I fell forward onto my hands and knees, both arms in the water up to the elbow. Someone behind me shouted in dismay, and strong hands took hold of me and dragged me back.

I reeled, jumping to my feet and pushing the press of bodies away, suddenly stifled, my head ringing, my breaths coming sharp and shallow. Looking inward, I paled at the sense of emptiness from my core: nearly half of my remaining aetheric reservoir had been pulled out of me in the space of a few heartbeats.

“Well, you’ve gotta give it to Agrona,” Regis said, his tone flippant even though I could feel the worry roiling beneath the surface of his emotions. “When he goes after you, Arthur, he goes hard.”

Bairon and Varay both shifted focus to Sylvie. They were speaking, asking a question maybe, but I couldn’t focus on their words because Tessia, who’d been forced to take a step back as I pushed for breathing room, tentatively eased forward again.

Her hand rose to my face, then brushed up through my hair, which was damp with cold sweat. She rose up on her tiptoes, leaned forward, and kissed me lightly.

My hammering pulse slowed, and some of the pressure was lifted from my chest. I leaned my forehead against hers, careful not to scratch her with the horns of my relic armor. Neither of us spoke; there was no need. We were saying everything that needed to be said between us.

The whirring of mana and metal drew both our gazes to Claire. “I’ll stand guard. If we’re attacked again, leave it to me. If additional enemies operate by the same parameters as this one did, then my exoform seems to give me an inherent advantage against them. I can’t quite believe I’m in a position to say this to you all, but…I will keep you safe.” She cracked a smile. “You just figure out how to get us out of here.”

Bairon looked at his feet, his jaw set grimly. Although he tried, he could not keep the frustration from showing on his features.

My eyes followed Claire as she maneuvered the exoform away, beginning a sort of patrol route up and down the riverbank. But my thoughts were on what she’d said: her inherent lack of personal power was our saving grace here. The martial capabilities of the exoform protected her from an apparition that attempted to match or even overpower her own level of strength.

The thought gave me another idea. Regis. Help me with this.

He dissolved into incorporeality and drifted into my chest, then back out again. The armor melted away from my body and was pulled along in Regis’s wake. He drifted into Tessia’s sternum—she let out a small, “Oh!” of surprise—and then released his gravitational pull on the armor. It immediately feathered out across Tessia’s body.

The black scales and golden trim remained, forming a compact, tight-fitting shell around Tessia’s body. Instead of the heavy white pauldrons and greaves, those that formed on Tessia were sleek, pearlescent, and leaf-patterned. There was no helm, but a dark hood edged with golden filigree hung behind her neck.

As she looked down at herself in wonder, I reached around her and pulled up the hood. Mana condensed into a helm covering the upper part of her face. Scale-armored fingers brushed over the protective mask along the rim of the hood. Her lips parted, but she seemed at a loss for words.

“This might give you the edge if you end up face to face with another one of those things,” I explained, running a loose strand of her gunmetal silver hair through my fingers.

“I can feel the river now,” she said, her head turning toward it. “All that flowing aether. It’s…pulling at the armor.”

I nodded. “The armor draws in aether, but the pull of the river is too much. Careful. I don’t know what’d happen if you went in.” As I said it, my eyes jumped back to Sylvie.

Squeezing Tessia’s hand, I turned back to Varay and Bairon. “All right. We need to understand what’s happening here. Varay, you’ve integrated, meaning you’ve reached a higher stage of mana manipulation than anyone else here. While that might not make you the Legacy, you’re our best shot at understanding what the mana here is doing.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “I…can’t absorb more aether, and the river already pulled out a lot. I need to maintain as much energy as I can, in case my abilities are necessary to escape this place.”

The two Lances exchanged a look. “I will dissect this spell,” Varay confirmed. Her eyes moved to Tessia. “Lady Eralith, you lived within the Legacy’s mind. Though your body may not be Integrated, your mind was, at least for a time. Please, sit with me?”

Tessia’s eyes widened behind the half-face helm. She lowered the hood, and the helm melted away. “Of course.” She smiled slightly. “I didn’t bring any sweets for training this time, though.”

Varay blinked at her, then let out a surprisingly mirthful laugh. “A shame.” The two linked arms and walked a short distance up the shore, where they sat in the sand and began talking and gesticulating.

Regis, stay with Tessia. Even with the armor—

‘Say no more, fam,’ Regis, who had manifested beside us as soon as the armor took form, responded lightly. He trudged over and sat a few feet from the pair, his bright eyes watching the shoreline carefully.

“I will scout around us,” Bairon said firmly, not meeting my eyes. He was stiff and tense as he turned away, and in his profile was a dour expression.

I clapped him on the arm before he could fly off. “Thank you. And Bairon…don’t let this place turn you against yourself.”

His brows furrowed, but he gave me a nod of understanding. As he lifted into the air, a fine haze of black sand trickled off him. Then he turned and flew away, a faint glow of blue-white light around him.

I drew in a deep breath and held it for several seconds before letting it out slowly and finally turning back to my bond. Sylvie was still standing in the river, her hands trailing through it, her eyes focused far away.

What are you seeing? I asked, unable to sense the movement of her mind.

She adjusted her feet, sinking slightly deeper into water. ‘What does the river feel like to you, Arthur?’

I frowned. Closing my eyes, I focused entirely on it. Despite the unquantifiable density of the aether, it was in a way difficult to sense. So complete was its pull that it seemed to drag even the emanation of the aetheric force along with it. Danger. It feels more like the void than the void itself.

She nodded absently without looking at me. ‘Because it’s time. It only flows in one direction. At least, for most people. But for me…’ She looked up, her golden eyes meeting mine like a reflection. ‘Arthur…’

“I can see everything.”


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