He didn't fight the surge. He took it.

  One step back, weight shifting, the creature's momentum already committed — and then the edge was gone and there was nothing under his feet and the world reorganized itself around a single vertical fact.

  He fell.

  The creature fell with him. They were still locked together — its grip on his arm, his grip on its torso, neither able to release fast enough because the decision to fall had happened faster than the decision to let go. The bowl's north wall dropped away above them and the sky, wrong-blue and indifferent, tilted out of his field of vision, replaced by the rock face rushing past and the creature's face — if it could be called that, the fused and altered surface where a face had once been — inches from his own.

  He had time to think: thirty meters.

  He had time to think: the angle was wrong from above. Dave couldn't see the shelf.

  He had time to think: good.

  Then the shelf arrived.

  — ★ —

  Impact was not one thing. It was a sequence of things that happened too fast to process individually and too slow to avoid registering: the creature taking the first contact with the rock, its body absorbing some of what the fall had built — not enough, nothing like enough — and then Taric's left shoulder, and then his hip, and then the side of his head against something that was harder than everything else. He rolled and the edge of the shelf was there and his hand caught it — caught it without deciding to, the fingers gripping a crack in the rock that was not quite large enough to be called a handhold and was the only reason he stopped before the drop continued.

  He stopped.

  He lay on the shelf with his cheek against the rock and listened to himself breathe.

  The creature was not moving. It had taken the full force of the initial impact — its body between the shelf and his — and what remained of it was a meter away and it was not going to move again. Its surface had stopped pulsing. The blue-grey internal light that had run through it was fading, visibly, the way light fades in something that has stopped generating it.

  He should have felt relief at this. He registered it as a fact instead.

  His left shoulder was wrong. Not broken — he could feel the difference, had felt breaks before — but something in it was pulling in a direction it didn't usually pull, and when he tried to push himself to a sitting position the arm gave way and he did it with the right instead. He sat up with his back against the rock face and conducted a rapid inventory: shoulder, hip, the side of his head where something warm was moving through his hair. His ribs were intact. His legs were functional. His hands—

  His hands were wrong.

  Not injured. The wrongness was not the wrongness of damage — not the specific pain signature of something broken or torn. It was the wrongness of something happening. His forearms were warm in a way that had nothing to do with exertion or temperature, a warmth that came from inside the tissue rather than the surface, and when he looked at them in the pale light there was something visible beneath the skin along the path of the blood vessels. Something moving. Faintly luminescent. Blue-white.

  He looked at the creature.

  He looked at the place on his forearm where its grip had been — where the skin was abraded, where the impact and the grip together had been hard enough that the barrier between his blood and the creature's biology had not been entirely intact.

  He understood what this meant. He had read, in the briefing documentation, about involuntary integration. He had read it with the careful attention he gave to everything and then filed it under: possible but unlikely. He had been wrong about the likelihood.

  He thought: I need to get off this shelf.

  He thought: I need to find Dave.

  He tried to stand. His legs agreed to this. His body made it to vertical and stayed there, which was better than he had expected. The shelf was narrow — four meters wide, perhaps, ending in a second drop that disappeared into shadow below. Above him, thirty meters of rock face, the bowl's edge visible as a line against the sky. No movement at the edge. Dave had cleared the exit before the fall. He was already on the descent.

  Good.

  He needed to shout. The distance was thirty meters vertical, the rock face between them, and Dave would be moving. He needed to shout loud enough and soon enough that—

  The warmth in his forearms spiked.

  It was not gradual. It was a sudden and total intensification, the kind of change that eliminates everything else as a priority, and he sat back down against the rock face because the alternative was falling again. The lines under his skin were brighter now — not faint, not subtle, visible the way bioluminescence was visible in dark water, the pattern following the channels of his vascular system from his forearms toward his chest. He could feel his own heartbeat in them. He could feel something else in them too, something that was not his heartbeat and was not any sensation he had a name for — a pressure, building, as if something was trying to expand inside a space that had not been designed to hold it.

  He pressed his back against the rock and breathed. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the specific rhythm of someone who has decided that panic is not currently an option. His vision had developed an edge — not blur, not darkness, but a quality at the periphery that suggested the periphery was becoming unreliable.

  He thought: I need to shout.

  He opened his mouth.

  The pressure in his channels surged and something discharged from his right hand — not intentionally, not aimed, a pulse of concentrated energy that struck the rock face to his left and left a crater the size of his fist. The sound of it echoed off the bowl walls above. He stared at his own hand.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  His hand, which had done that without asking him.

  Above him, distantly, he heard Dave's voice: his name, called once, with the specific quality of someone who has heard something they cannot explain and are trying to locate its source.

  He tried to answer.

  What came out instead was nothing, because the pressure in his channels had reached a level that was taking everything available, and the periphery of his vision was not peripheral anymore, and the last clear thought he had before the darkness arrived was: the angle was wrong. Dave can't see the shelf. He thinks I went all the way down.

  He thought: good. He'll leave. He'll be safe.

  He thought: I'm sorry about the herbs.

  Then the darkness arrived, and he stopped thinking anything at all.

  — ★ —

  Above the bowl, Dave stood at the edge and looked down.

  He had heard the impact. Not the fall — the fall had been silent from where he was, the sound swallowed by distance and rock and the specific acoustics of a bowl that funneled everything upward except the things you most needed to hear. But the impact had produced a sound that traveled, a dense and final concussion that was different in quality from the creature's shots, different from the echo of the bowl, different from everything else he had heard on this mountain.

  It was the sound of something ending.

  He stood at the edge and looked down. The ledge dropped to a narrow shelf of rock some thirty meters below — he could see the shelf, he could see its dimensions, he could see that it existed. What he could not see was what was on it. The angle was wrong: the shelf's surface was invisible from directly above, concealed by the geometry of the overhang, and the light was wrong too, the shadow of the bowl's north wall falling exactly across the place where someone might or might not be lying.

  He stood there for a long time.

  He thought about the descent route on the north face. He knew it existed — he had assessed it when they first entered the bowl, the way he assessed all terrain, automatically and without conclusion. It was possible. It was also a traverse in deteriorating light with no rope and holds he hadn't tested, above a drop that continued below the shelf into depths he couldn't calculate from here.

  He thought: if I go down and he's not on the shelf, I'm on a bad traverse with no way back and no one knowing where I am.

  He thought: if I go down and he is on the shelf, I'm on a bad traverse with someone who may not be mobile and still no way back and no one knowing where we are.

  He thought about a sound that was the sound of something ending.

  He thought about Taric's hands on the creature — the economy of the movement, the specific quality of someone who understood their own body as a tool and was using it with complete precision. He thought about two days on a mountain with someone who named nothing they did as remarkable, which was its own kind of remarkable. He thought about: I knew him for two days, and then he thought: it doesn't matter. That's not how it works. The weight was already there. The weight had nothing to do with the duration.

  He stood at the edge until the light changed and his legs began to register the cold and the wind came back, and then he made the calculation one final time and arrived at the same answer he kept arriving at: the traverse was a bad decision and the light was getting worse and there was nothing he could do from the shelf that he could not do from Drevhan faster.

  He was wrong about this. He would understand later that he was wrong. But he made the decision with the information he had, in the light he had, and the decision was: descend.

  He descended alone.

  — ★ —

  He reached Drevhan by nightfall.

  He went to the stall where they had eaten stew two evenings ago — the same stall, the same fire in the square, the same vendor who recognized him and didn't comment on the fact that he was alone. He sat down and ordered something hot and sat with it and stared at the fire until the fire burned low.

  He did not eat much.

  He went to his room. He lay on the narrow bed and looked at the ceiling and thought about the sound of an impact. He thought about the way the light had fallen on the shelf and the way the angle had hidden the shelf's surface and he thought about these two facts and the gap between them and what might or might not live in that gap.

  He thought: I knew him for two days.

  He thought: it doesn't matter. That's not how it works.

  He thought: I should have gone down the traverse.

  He slept badly and dreamed of a shelf he couldn't see the surface of, and of standing at an edge while the light got worse, and of making the decision he had made, over and over, arriving each time at the same answer and understanding each time more clearly what the answer cost.

  — ★ —

  Three days after this, in the same Drevhan square, at the same fire, a scene unfolded that Dave did not see because he was not there.

  A new arrival — one of the men from the most recent intake, a thin figure with hollow cheeks and fingers that couldn't stop moving — sat near the fire. He had been in Drevhan for four days now and had not yet found employment, shelter beyond the intake facility's brief provision, or anyone to share either problem with.

  His name, by the documentation, was Ferren. He was twenty-six years old, convicted of property crimes of escalating severity, and he had entered Cosmulo already scared in a way that had nothing to do with Cosmulo — a background fear, pre-existing, the kind that follows you through walls.

  The IC percentage that the Observer at the eastern gate had flagged on his second morning in Drevhan was seventy-three.

  He didn't know this. He knew only that his hands felt wrong — too hot, as though his blood was running at the wrong temperature — and that he kept seeing the edges of things shimmer in a way that nobody else seemed to notice, and that when he pressed his palms flat against a surface, sometimes the surface got warm under his hands faster than it should.

  He sat near the fire and watched the heat rise from it and tried to understand why it looked different to him now than it had yesterday.

  He didn't notice the figure sitting on the far side of the square until the figure was no longer on the far side.

  The man who sat down across from him was young — younger than Ferren had expected, early thirties, with the lean, scholarly face and the pale grey layered clothing of a Clergy affiliate. He carried a small bag. He set it on the ground beside him without drawing attention to it.

  "Cold evening," the young man said.

  "Yes," Ferren said.

  "You're new," the young man observed. "From the last intake."

  Ferren looked at him. "How did you—"

  "The grey clothes. Most people trade them out within the first week." The young man smiled. The smile was warm and entirely genuine, which was somehow more unsettling than if it hadn't been. "I'm Brother Cael. I'm attached to the Missionary station here. We offer support services for new arrivals — health screening, pathway guidance, orientation resources." He paused. "You look like you might not be feeling entirely well."

  Ferren thought about denying it. Looked at his hands. "My hands are hot," he said. "And everything looks—" He stopped. Saying it out loud made it real in a new way. "I think something's wrong with me."

  Brother Cael's expression was the expression of someone whose compassion was completely genuine and whose professional objectives were completely compatible with it. "That's not uncommon in the first weeks," he said gently. "The biological transition to Cosmulo's environment can produce adjustment symptoms. If you'd come with me to the Missionary station, we have equipment that can assess your cellular state — it's quick, and it's free, and it would tell us whether what you're experiencing is something routine or something that needs support."

  He said it exactly as a doctor would say come in for a check-up and we can rule out anything concerning. He said it with no duplicity in his voice, because for him there was none — he believed sincerely in the assessment, in the station, in the legitimacy of what he was offering.

  Ferren looked at the fire. He looked at his hands. "I'd just like to know what's happening," he said.

  "Of course," Brother Cael said. "That's exactly what we're here for."

  He stood, picked up his bag. Waited.

  Ferren stood.

  They left the square together, moving toward the Missionary station near the northern edge of Drevhan — a building that was precisely as welcoming as it was designed to appear, with its warm light and its calm corridor and its two attendants who stepped forward with the same practiced compassion.

  Ferren did not come back to the square.

  The Full Experience: Want the whole story now? The entire 60-chapter Arc 1 is available for download (PDF/EPUB) for my Patrons!

  CLICK HERE!