Elyria woke an hour after sunrise to find them already at work.

  Thorne sat cross-legged beside the sorted piles of carapace, working with the methodical focus of someone who considered idle hands a personal failing.

  Tunde was nearby, arranging the stacked pieces with a care that suggested he was treating the task as something to be done correctly rather than simply done.

  He looked different from the person who had collapsed in this cave the previous evening, the grey exhaustion gone from his face, his posture carrying a steadiness that had not been there before.

  "You look better," Elyria said.

  Tunde glanced up at her with a brief, genuine smile.

  "Feel better too."

  She looked at Thorne, who was watching her with the particular patience of someone waiting for a specific person to arrive at a specific realization.

  "What?" she asked.

  "Carapaces are dry and primed," he said.

  "And?"

  "Beast cores are ready as well."

  Elyria regarded the piles, then the void ring on her finger, then Thorne, with the expression of someone who has already decided what they are going to do and is simply taking a moment to register their objection to the process first.

  "If anything in those piles damages a single item inside my ring," she said, "you are replacing it at market value."

  Thorne rolled his eyes.

  Tunde had drifted toward the cave entrance, where the gradually desiccating bodies of the four Sandshard centipedes lay in the state Thorne had left them, the acid that had done considerable work on Thorne's skin having done what acid does to organic material left unattended overnight.

  "The bodies," he said. "Are they of any use?"

  "The rendered fat has applications," Thorne said.

  "The wastelanders use it to oil the sky cycles they favor for crossing the sand and to cook with, among other things. Fifty lumens for a sack of the processed material, probably more if you find the right buyer."

  He glanced at Elyria with something approaching challenge.

  "That is, if certain people are willing to accommodate it."

  "Not while I draw breath," Elyria said, without looking at him.

  She walked to the carapace piles, extended the hand with the void ring, and everything vanished.

  Tunde watched the pile disappear with an expression he had not quite mastered, the look of someone who has seen something impossible enough times that they are trying and failing to normalize it.

  "How large is it?" he asked. "On the inside."

  "Large enough," Elyria said.

  "The capacity varies with the craft and the crafter. A good void ring is among the more practical investments a ranker can make, particularly one who intends to move through dangerous territory regularly." She paused.

  "Which is most rankers."

  Thorne was already moving toward the cave entrance, stepping into the morning light without ceremony.

  "We've lost time," he said.

  "Frontier territory without settlements gets more dangerous as the day progresses. The serious bandits move at midday when the heat keeps honest travelers at rest."

  "Sand bandits specifically," Elyria said, stepping out behind him with a wince at the already climbing temperature.

  Tunde followed.

  "We'll fight if we have to?"

  Thorne looked at him with the mildly amused expression he sometimes produced when Tunde stated the obvious.

  "We see them, we assess. We fight if we must, we avoid if we can. The wastelands have rules like any other environment; they're simply less written down." He stepped off the rock shelf at the cave entrance and landed on the sand with barely a sound.

  "Welcome to them."

  ****

  They pushed north.

  The landscape was relentless in its sameness, sand and rock formations, and the occasional bone structure of something very large that had died here long enough ago to bleach white, the sky above a pale, washed-out blue that offered the color of distance without any of its coolness.

  Tunde ran with the Ethra distributed to his legs the way Thorne had shown him, the power burning steadily and requiring replenishment more often than he would have liked, the manacle filtering each recovery breath with its quiet, consistent diligence.

  His Ethra sight ran at the edges of his vision like a secondary awareness, a layer over the world rather than a replacement for it, and it was this layer that caught the cluster of yellow motes moving beneath the sand at the boundary of what he could reliably track.

  "Thorne," he said.

  The word carried enough in it that Thorne came to a stop immediately, the others following his lead, and then the sand erupted in multiple places at once, figures launching upward and landing in a loose encirclement with the practiced ease of people who had done this many times before.

  There were more than ten of them.

  Yellow cloth wrapped faces and bodies in various arrangements, the group's attire broken only by the single figure whose head wrap was yellow instead of white, marking him as the one who had made the decisions.

  He carried a curved silver blade, quality visible even at a distance, and he moved with the comfortable authority of someone who was accustomed to the scene he was currently staging.

  "Weary travelers," he called out, his voice carrying the particular warmth of someone who had rehearsed friendliness so many times it had lost contact with the actual feeling.

  "Crossing the wasteland alone is dangerous. Fortunate that we happened upon you."

  "We don't require assistance," Thorne said.

  The leader's eyes moved from Thorne to Elyria to Tunde, performing a rapid assessment that was clearly intended to be visible.

  Then he smiled, or the part of his face above the cloth shifted in a way that suggested smiling.

  "A Revenant, a Disciple, and a newly broken Initiate. You'll forgive me if I'm not immediately concerned."

  Laughter moved through the group, the coordinated laughter of people who understand their role in a performance.

  Elyria's floating blades tightened their orbit.

  She gripped the second one in her remaining hand, the serrated metal claw at the end of her arm catching the morning light.

  The leader's presence changed, a pulse of Ethra pushing outward from him like heat from something that had gotten too warm, pressing against the air in a way that arrived in Tunde's chest as a tightening, something wrong happening to the space between his organs.

  "Remove your aura," Thorne said, the words carrying no particular volume but landing with the density of something much heavier than sound.

  "Breathe," Elyria said to Tunde, without looking at him.

  "The cultivation method. Do it now."

  Tunde breathed.

  He found the rhythm that the night's practice had carved into him, pulling ambient Ethra inward with each inhale, the manacle intercepting it at the boundary of his body and doing its patient, inexplicable work, releasing something cleaner and more concentrated into his heart with each cycle.

  The pressure in his chest began to loosen its grip as his own Ethra stabilized.

  The leader had stopped speaking.

  He looked at Thorne for a moment longer, reading something in the man's face or his stillness, and then discarded whatever he had read and lunged.

  The collision between two Adepts at genuine velocity was not something Tunde had a reference for.

  The sound of it arrived after the impact, the pressure wave rolling outward across the sand and catching everyone in the vicinity with the flat, indiscriminate force of a large object being displaced very quickly.

  Tunde went off his feet.

  He tumbled across the dune face, controlling the fall as best he could, and came up with the bone blade Thorne had given him in hand and his Ethra sight cutting through the dust that the collision had thrown into the air.

  The shapes around him resolved through the haze as the gold of sand Ethra users, some brighter than others, arranging themselves with the purposeful movement of people who had a role in what came next.

  One of them came directly at him.

  An Initiate, the Ethra moving through his body in the scattered mote pattern Tunde was beginning to recognize as the baseline, a curved blade in hand and the specific confidence of someone who has identified what they believe to be the weakest target.

  Tunde raised the bone blade and met the first strike.

  The impact traveled up his arm and into his shoulder and told him several things at once. The bandit was at roughly his level of cultivation.

  His strength without the manacle's enhancement was honest and present but unrefined. His reach was longer. His footwork was experienced.

  Tunde's footwork was nonexistent.

  He compensated by using the ground.

  He was not graceful, not skilled, but he had grown up navigating underground passages in the dark without light, reading surfaces through the soles of his feet, and the sand under him communicated what the sole of his boot pressed into it, which direction it would shift under pressure, which patches had different densities beneath the surface.

  He used that, dodging a second blow by stepping sideways onto a patch his foot had already assessed as firmer, letting the bandit's weight carry the strike past him.

  His Ethra sight pulsed.

  The sand around them lit up below the surface, yellow energy pooling in a pattern he recognized belatedly as intentional, the bandit's attention splitting between the blade in his hand and the Ethra he was feeding beneath the ground.

  Tunde moved three steps to the left before the spike came, and it erupted where he had been standing instead of where he was.

  He felt the bandit's Ethra dim slightly from the expenditure.

  The bandit grinned and came again, the blade raised high with the full commitment of someone who had decided that volume of force would solve the problem that technique had not.

  The grin was a mistake because it meant the bandit was reading this as a victory and had stopped attending to the details.

  Tunde did not have a strategy. He had a manacle and a desperation that had organized itself into something functional.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  He let the intention reach outward.

  The dark silver blade appeared in his hand where the bone blade had been, the transition instantaneous, and he was already moving past the descending strike, the bandit's blade parting air while Tunde drove his weapon through the space the bandit's guard had opened in its commitment to the downswing.

  The blade entered. The bandit's eyes communicated surprise without being given time for anything else.

  Tunde felt his heart lurch.

  The Ethra he had spent on the transformation had come out of reserves he had not fully replenished, and the manacle was not finished.

  It pulled the remaining Ethra from the bandit's body as it always did, absorbing and refining, returning a portion to Tunde's heart with the usual efficiency, but the net result was a significant draining of what little he had to work with.

  He stepped back from the body on legs that were reporting their opinion of the situation and managing it.

  He had approximately enough Ethra for one or two more exchanges at this level of effort. Possibly fewer.

  The second bandit appeared through the dust before Tunde had finished assessing the first, a different quality of presence to this one, older, more settled.

  The grief on his face above the yellow cloth was the particular grief of someone watching a person they considered family go down to someone they did not consider a threat.

  "He was a child," the bandit said, to which Tunde had no useful response because the bandit had been trying to kill him, and the grief was genuine regardless.

  He did not have time to resolve the contradiction.

  The sand imbued blade came at him in a series of strikes that were demonstrably more skilled than the last bandit's had been, the yellow Ethra woven into the weapon extending it at angles that did not correspond to the blade's actual length, so that blocking one portion of a strike meant a different portion was simultaneously arriving somewhere else.

  Tunde took a glancing strike to the ribs that picked him up and deposited him on the sand several feet from where he had been standing, the world briefly white at the edges, the taste of blood where he had bitten his cheek on impact.

  He got up.

  He was not sure how he got up, but he was on his feet again with his weapon in hand and the understanding that lying down on this sand was a permanent decision.

  A force hit the bandit from the side. Not a strike, a crash, Elyria arriving at full Disciple velocity and converting it into kinetic reality as she hit the bandit with the metal claw and the blade in the same instant.

  The bandit was torn apart with the clinical efficiency of someone who has calculated the exact forces required and applied them without surplus or deficit.

  "Head in the fight," Elyria said, without looking at him, already moving.

  Tunde followed her assessment of the field. Three Initiates and two Disciples remained on their side of the engagement.

  Thorne and the bandit leader were a contained chaos somewhere in the middle distance, their exchange happening at a scale that was throwing intermittent pressure waves across the sand every time either of them committed to something significant.

  "Disciples are mine," Elyria said, her blades already accelerating.

  "The three Initiates are yours. Don't die."

  She left before he could respond to any part of that.

  He looked at the three Initiates, who were looking back at him with the particular calculation of people assessing whether to approach individually or together. They decided together.

  The first one came low, the second high, the third hanging back to throw sand Ethra in spiked formations from a distance.

  Tunde read this in the positioning of their feet and the direction their Ethra was pooling and moved before the first one arrived, stepping inside the radius of the low strike rather than retreating from it, so that the blade overshot him and the body attached to it was suddenly closer than it had intended to be.

  He drove his head into the bandit's face.

  The pain from the impact was significant and personal, and reminded him that using your head as a weapon has consequences for both parties.

  He accepted his share of the consequence and used the moment the bandit spent registering its share to drive the bone blade through the bandit's chest, then pulled the manacle's transformation and let the weapon do its absorption work.

  The drain on his heart was severe.

  He felt the motes of light guttering at the edges of his reserves, the quality of his Ethra sight dimming as the power available to sustain it diminished.

  He was running toward the bottom of what he had, and both remaining Initiates knew it by the way his body was moving.

  The third bandit's sand spike caught his leg and sent him spinning.

  He landed, rolled, got his feet under him, and felt his heart do something that it had not done before in a fight, a deep, compressed contraction followed by a full expansion that pushed Ethra through him in a single large pulse rather than the steady trickle of normal circulation.

  It lasted approximately two seconds.

  In those two seconds, Tunde screamed and swung the manacle blade in an arc that borrowed from every scrap of the reserve that pulse had made available, extending the blade beyond its normal form and through both the Initiates' weapons and then through both the Initiates, the intelligence of the relic directing the extension without requiring him to understand it.

  The blade contracted.

  Tunde's knees met the sand.

  He could not feel his heart. He was aware, distantly and with considerable alarm, that this was not a metaphor; his chest was simply silent in the way that a room goes silent when something that was making noise suddenly stops.

  He pressed his palm against his sternum and breathed, and after a moment that stretched considerably longer than a moment should, the heartbeat returned, faint and irregular but present.

  He crossed his legs where he knelt and began to cultivate.

  The manacle started its filtering without being asked, the familiar process resuming around him while he held himself very still and let his heart do the work of deciding whether this had been a recoverable situation. The vote, eventually and tentatively, came back as yes.

  Tunde dry heaved into the sand. He moved away from the result of that on hands and knees and sat a few meters distant and breathed.

  Across the dunes, Thorne held the bandit leader by the neck. The man's feet were off the ground.

  His body was doing the thing bodies did in Thorne's grip, the slow, terrible dissolution, the visible diminishment of something that had been a person and was becoming something else as its Ethra was drawn inward. Tunde looked away.

  His stomach protested again. He let it.

  Elyria appeared beside him with the quiet arrival that she had developed as a habit, close enough to be a presence without crowding him. She did not say anything immediately, which he was grateful for.

  "How do you do it?" he said, when he could say anything.

  "Both of you. After a fight like that, you just continue."

  Elyria was quiet for a moment.

  "I don't think we do," she said, carefully.

  "I think it looks like that from outside. But I have been present for enough of it that I have built specific and deliberate structures in my mind for afterwards. That is not the same as being unaffected."

  Tunde watched the sand settle over the marks the fight had made in it, the wastes indifferent and efficient in their reclamation of any disturbance.

  "I killed people," he said.

  "You killed people who were in the process of killing you," she said.

  "The distinction matters and it doesn't. Both things are true simultaneously. Let the feeling run its course. Don't fight it and don't drown in it. There is ground between those two things."

  Thorne's voice came from a few meters away.

  "Post-battle clarity," he said, and the term had none of the dismissiveness it might have carried from someone else.

  "It passes. It visits less with time. That's not the same as it stopping entirely, and anyone who tells you they feel nothing after killing is either lying or is something you should be more afraid of than whatever you just fought."

  He looked at the bandit leader's body, which had completed its desiccation and collapsed into itself.

  "Embarrassment of an Adept," he said, with what sounded like genuine professional offense.

  "Heart barely qualified for the rank."

  He turned to the horizon with the expression of someone who has already processed this event and moved on to the next question.

  His aura pulsed once, briefly, reading something in the distances around them. He pointed to a rock formation to the northeast, a cluster of stone rising from the sand in a way that was too deliberate to be purely geological.

  "There," he said.

  They walked toward it in silence, Tunde cultivating as he moved, the manacle doing its patient work, his heart gradually building back toward something he could rely on.

  By the time the formation resolved itself into an entrance, low and worked rather than natural, the worst of the depletion had passed, and he could walk without monitoring each step.

  Thorne signaled quiet as they approached the entrance. Inside, torches burned in low, orange light, casting shadows that moved with the draft from the entrance. Tunde let his sight run ahead of his eyes.

  A single figure, seated. Disciple rank, Ethra moving in the relaxed, irregular pattern of sleep. An empty cup lay on its side nearby, the spill long since absorbed into the cave floor.

  Thorne moved.

  It was over before Tunde had fully processed what he had seen, a single motion, the flash of a blade, and then the Disciple was no longer something that needed to be worried about.

  Thorne stepped past without pausing.

  Tunde looked at the space where a person had been alive three seconds ago and then looked forward and kept walking, because the alternative was stopping and he had decided, somewhere in the fight outside, that stopping was not available to him.

  The cave opened.

  They stood at the entrance to a space that was large enough that the torchlight did not reach the far wall, and the floor of it was covered in the accumulated result of what appeared to have been a very long and very productive career in predatory acquisition.

  Sacks of lumen coins, piled against each other in stacks that reached chest height. Herbs and cultivation ingredients sorted roughly by type, their various colors and conditions suggesting a broad and indiscriminate collection strategy.

  Fruits, some of which glowed in Tunde's sight with the clean, concentrated light of genuine essence resources.

  Small glass vials arranged in rows, the liquids inside them ranging from clear to deep amber, Elyria immediately identifying these as elixirs.

  Jewelry and artifacts mixed with general plunder in a way that suggested the collectors had not always known what they had.

  "How long have they been operating here?" Elyria said, and it was not quite a question.

  "Long enough," Thorne said, and the satisfaction in his voice was the quiet kind, the kind that comes from a problem solving itself efficiently.

  He looked at Tunde with a particular expression.

  "Thank your situation. The wasteland provides for those willing to take from it."

  Elyria's void ring did the work of inventory in the time it would have taken them to count.

  The wealth vanished in methodical waves as she moved through the cave, her ring accepting everything offered to it without apparent preference.

  When she reached the items she could identify by type, she paused over each group long enough to sort them into categories, and the categories became piles, and the piles were sorted into Initiate grade, Disciple grade, and the small, exceptional stack of Adept grade resources.

  The Initiate pile was substantial. Larger than everything else combined.

  Tunde stood in front of it and understood, looking at the density and variety of it, that these were the raw materials of advancement.

  That what was stacked in front of him represented years of struggle for a person without access to it, and months of deliberate investment for a person with it.

  That the difference between those two timelines was not talent or will but simply this, the material of cultivation in sufficient quantity, and that most rankers on Adamath never stood in front of a pile like this one.

  He did not let himself feel fortunate yet. He filed it under things that had been taken from people who did not deserve to lose them, which was true, and moved on.

  Among the weapons they found, most were serviceable without being notable, the blades and spears of accumulated conquest that had belonged to people who no longer needed them.

  Thorne moved through them with quick, expert hands, discarding most, setting a few aside. At the end of the sorting, he extended one to Tunde.

  It was a sword.

  Unadorned, functional, double-edged along its entire length, a weight and balance that would require someone to grow into it rather than immediately feel at home.

  It was not beautiful. It was not interesting. It was a well-made piece of metal designed to do one thing and capable of doing it reliably.

  "Your weapon," Thorne said.

  "From this point forward. The relic stays on your wrist and stays dormant until you have the reserves to feed it without it becoming a liability."

  Tunde turned the sword in his hand.

  "Will it cut through bone and blade together?"

  Thorne looked at him with the expression of a person who has been asked a sincere question that requires a sincere answer.

  "When you are strong enough that the force behind the swing can do that work, yes. A sword is a tool. The blade does not cut; the person holding it does. You are not yet the person who can do that."

  Tunde closed his hand around the grip and nodded.

  Elyria had produced something from her void ring while they were talking, a large cauldron, deep-walled and wide-mouthed, set on a flat base clearly designed for exactly this purpose.

  She positioned it in the center of the cave floor and looked at Thorne, who was already sorting through the Initiate grade resources with the focused attention of someone building something.

  "This will do," Thorne said, examining the cauldron with genuine approval.

  "What will you do with it?" Tunde asked.

  Thorne looked at him.

  "Cook you."

  Tunde waited for the tone to shift. It did not. He looked at Elyria.

  "Body tempering," she said, before his expression could fully develop into what it was becoming.

  "It's a standard practice for rankers building their foundation. The materials go into the cauldron, they are heated to the appropriate conditions, and the person being tempered is submerged. The body absorbs what it can. The process is deeply unpleasant and extremely effective."

  "Hope," Thorne said, still sorting,

  "Is that you emerge with some form of body tempering established. A properly tempered body at the Initiate level is the difference between a ranker who advances with a solid foundation and one who advances quickly and collapses when the ranks stop forgiving their weaknesses."

  "Hope?" Tunde repeated.

  "We're working without a proper tempering art," Thorne said, not looking up.

  "We have the resources and the method. The art is a formalized structure that optimizes the process. Without it, the outcome is less predictable." He paused.

  "You'll survive either way."

  "That's not as reassuring as you think it is," Tunde said.

  Thorne smiled at the cauldron.

  Elyria shook her head.

  "Tempering arts vary by practitioner and purpose. Bone tempering produces structural durability. Skin and muscle tempering increases raw physical capability. Some arts focus on Ethra absorption efficiency, increasing how quickly and how much the heart can take in. Poison resistance tempering is specialized, preferred by assassins and infiltrators." She glanced at Thorne.

  "The Heralds have their own method."

  "Had," Thorne corrected, beginning to move ingredients toward the cauldron.

  "Their method involves a containment space filled with essence materials and other aspirants, and the instruction to remain functional longer than everyone else in the room."

  "That's the method?" Tunde asked.

  "In principle. The refinements are in the specific combinations of materials, the concentration of Ethra in the environment, and the duration. The underlying instruction is to endure what the body is telling you it cannot endure, until it learns that it can." He began placing items into the cauldron, naming none of them, the process clearly one he understood at a level beyond explanation.

  "We're doing a modified version. The cauldron contains the environment. You contain yourself. The goal is the same."

  "Which is?" Tunde asked.

  "Survive it," Thorne said simply. "And emerge stronger than you went in."

  Tunde looked at the cauldron.

  He looked at the pile of resources going into it. He looked at Thorne, who was working with the quiet efficiency of someone who had made this decision and was not interested in reconsidering it, and at Elyria, who was watching the process with the careful attention of someone who intended to flag problems before they became critical ones.

  He had asked, in the wasteland the previous night, what it would take to get stronger.

  Thorne had answered: surviving things that should kill him.

  The cauldron was beginning to produce steam.

  "My clothes," Tunde said.

  Thorne paused. He looked at Tunde. He looked at the cauldron. He appeared to consider whether this was relevant information.

  "Off first," Elyria said, with the resigned tone of someone who has had this conversation before and won it.

  "Always. The materials interact with skin directly. Fabric is at best irrelevant and at worst interference."

  Thorne blinked.

  "Hm," he said, in the tone of someone revising a remembered experience.

  "That does explain certain things."

  Tunde looked at both of them, then at the steaming cauldron, then at the robe he was wearing that had belonged to someone who no longer needed it.

  He reached for the robe.

  The path forward, he had come to understand, was not made of comfortable choices. It was made of the choices that came after you had already decided the destination mattered more than the road, and you held that decision every time the road presented itself as an excellent reason to stop.

  He held it now.

  The cauldron steamed.