After the absolute misadventure that the first half of our time in the realm had been, the latter half was surprisingly quiet. Between the water that the moles had given us, casting siphon vitality on any of the diseased dogs that came by, and Jackson’s healing magic, we were able to get back on our feet relatively quickly, though we did still spend basically the entire fifth day recovering. There was something of a brief scare when it rained, and we learned that the rain here seemed to do something with the brown plants of the plains, which caused them to begin to spew out thick clouds of toxic gas into the air, but the planar adaptation spell was able to take care of that.

  Most of our remaining time was instead spent putting the finishing touches on Yushin’s ritual, stocking up on spellglyphs, and helping Salem’s mental defenses. There were only three major events that were of any particular note. To my surprise, the first came from Jackson on the day we spent recovering. As he burnt the soulsplitting stone, it began to crack and pop, and I heard screams coming from within. My stomach twisted as the black stone continued to crack, and the screaming gradually faded, before the stone finally exploded, revealing three children, floating in our fireplace like ghosts. None of them could have been older than ten years old, and it was clear that whatever end they had suffered, it hadn’t been good. All of them were covered in burns and scars, enough to make my stomach twist at the very thought. The children’s eyes locked on Jackson as they started to fade away.

  “Thank you,” the oldest of the three said, extending her hand. Jackson took it, and I could see visible tears in his eyes.

  “Of course,” he said. “May your next life treat you better.”

  Then the children were gone, their souls returning to Magyk where they belonged. None of us spoke for a while after that. There was a solemnity to the passing of the children, to seeing the abuse they had suffered to empower the demonic deity Pern. Whoever the source of the woes had been, seeing it did something to Jackson. The man who was normally so boisterous, a beacon of light in the darkness, was as quiet as the rest of us. When he finally broke his silence, it was in a quiet, measured voice.

  “My father is a saint – though I struggle to use that term to describe him – of the Dark Cabal. Of Pernicious, Pain, and Poverty.”

  I stared at him, mind whirling, and a few different things suddenly started to click into place. I had known Jackson’s relationship with his god was a strong one. He’d been able to arrange a meeting with me. But I hadn’t really thought about just how abnormal that was. When we’d met, Jackson only held two boons, still too new to channeling the power of a divine being for much more than that. But consistently, Jackson had been able to pull more power from Effervesce’s realm than most neophyte priests should have been able to. When Jackson had learned of the Traitor Wyrm’s plot, he’d barely given Yushin’s god the benefit of the doubt. They were close, but he somehow hadn’t given the idea of his innocence more than a spare thought. And so much of his life revolved around Effervesce. Not because he was a zealot, but because it had saved his life, quite literally.

  “He didn’t even especially want me, but he decided to keep me. To raise an assistant. After all, it’s easier to lure people away if you pretend to be a single parent. I escaped when I was four, saved by the High Priest of Summerbone. If I had stayed and displeased my father, it would have been likely that I would have wound up being a part of something like this. Maybe not this sort of stone, but the cabal has countless rituals that require the lives of the most innocent.”

  He let out a sigh and gave us a sad smile. Yushin slid into his arms and pulled him into a hug, and he embraced her back before rising and dusting his hands off.

  “Hopefully, your family killed him,” Jackson said, nodding to me. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he was part of the reason that they were able to burn down Effervesce’s temple. He probably has enough power to block the priests, at least for long enough to destroy the temple.”

  I pulled Jackson into a hug, Salem moving at the same time, and Yushin keeping her grip around his torso. We all sort of piled onto him, until he began to squirm for freedom, wiping his eyes. Once the tears stopped flowing, I did my best to lighten the mood.

  “It seems like the Erudite really hadn’t been kidding when he’d said that he’d lumped all of his problem children together. I’m attached to a mercenary nation whose former leader became an aberrant, Yushin is tied to the dark god of her homeland, Salem’s got an aberrant tainted monster, and you’re the child of a dark saint.”

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  That actually got something of a laugh out of my friends as we relaxed, sharing horrible memories together. It was strangely good to release the emotions within, and by the end, we had shifted to funnier stories.

  The second of the incidents interrupting our general calm and studious household came on the sixth day. I was mostly recovered, and we’d split what was left of the water between us, so I headed into the marshy area filled with Grindylows with Salem, while Jackson and Yushin remained in the cottage.

  “An’ you’re sure there’s something out this way?” Salem asked, frowning as I flicked my wand up and used an arcane missile to blow away one of the grindylows.

  “Sure? Not at all. But I swear that the grindylows are coming from somewhere. The pools aren’t deep enough to explain it, and if you watch, there are flashes of magic in the ethersight spell when they emerge.”

  A skeletal thin and bloody martin, filled with a bloodline of death and undeath alike, erupted from the trees and launched a cloud of black miasma at us, but I raised my wand and conjured a wave of water that washed away the cloud.

  “It’s possible, but the grindylows and death martins seem fairly… weak? I don’t know if there are any particularly powerful materials here, if they’re all so weak. The fish in the volcano, the moles, and the Lauma are all strong. It makes sense that they have strong things. But there’s nothing like that here, other than a few of these mushrooms. But none of us are necromancers.”

  “I swear there’s something,” I said, shaking my head. “I know it. I don’t know how I know it, but there just… is.”

  Salem hummed his agreement, glancing around and raising his hand, casting another divination spell, then he shook his head.

  “Nothing with a high concentration of ether other than the mushrooms, or any sort of songcalling power related to water,” he said. “Though, to be honest, m’ not sure songcalling can do much with water?”

  “Bloodlines?” I asked, and Salem cast another divination spell before shaking his head. I sighed, then knelt down to the water. Salem placed his hand on my shoulder, and I smiled up at him, knocking aside a grindylow as it leapt out at me.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, then took a breath and activated the naiad’s kiss ritual as I dove into the water. More of the implike grindylows swarmed me, and I conjured four shields, spinning them around me. The shield spell wasn’t really a bludgeon, but I didn’t really want any of them dead. They weren’t even much of a threat, they were just annoying.

  I swept my gaze through the water, which was barely deep enough for my entire body. That was when I spotted it. A node in the trees where the grindylows seemed to emerge from, despite it not being large enough to hold more than a few of them. As each one emerged, there was another tiny flash of magic.

  I raised my wand, wishing that I’d learned the control water spell, instead of control wind. But there was no real sense in crying over spilled milk, and control wind had opened its own opportunities. A pair of steel crocodiles materialized next to me, and the grindylows behavior changed. The titanic crocs moved ponderously through the water, and I was able to reach the node where the grindylows seemed to be spawning from. As I studied it in my ethersight, I started to put together just what was going on.

  Within the hollow of the tree was a pearl, one that radiated water elemental bloodline magic. I didn’t know if it was a naturally formed condensation of ether here, or if it had been placed here intentionally by someone for some obscure reason, but it was spinning life into the water itself. It wasn’t powerful, only around first or second circle, but there was a lot of it. High quantity, low quality.

  That wouldn’t have likely been capable of producing a grindylow on its own. Water elementals, certainly, but not grindylows. They, like everything in this accursed plane, were straddling the line between elemental and faerie.

  But the strangeness that I’d seen flowing in when the grindylows appeared? It wasn’t another discrete magic source, but instead an overlap between worlds. Like the connection point to the faerie castle, but much weaker. I didn’t think anyone could actually cross through this overlap, not without additional magic to punch through, like having a teleportation circle on the other side. But enough magic had leaked through that it had begun to infect the pearl, causing it to create grindylows.

  I scooped the pearl out of the water and held it up to my eye. Like I’d already determined, it was weak, but there was a truly staggering amount of power within the pearl. If I could compress it, I might be able to make it into a reasonable material for a focus. I didn’t even know if compression was possible, but I thought that it had to be. Given the frankly absurd amount of compression that I’d managed to do to my own bloodline, I figured that if there was anyone who could manage to compress the power of a pearl, it would be me. And I’d take care of the grindylow problem, at least for a few decades, until enough power built up to create more of them.

  I tried to estimate how much power it would take to make the pearl on par with seventh circle materials like my obsidian, while still giving it a reasonable amount of power, and started to laugh. I swam up, bursting from the water and shaking my head. A brief pulse of ether let me breathe air again, and I looked at Salem, holding out the pearl. He tilted his head to one side as he took it and rolled it between his fingers.

  “What’s this? Oh, that’s odd.”

  “Can you look for these? I need to collect about a dozen of them.”

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