After far too short a time, Vari wakes me, and I feel awful. Maybe it’s just the juxtaposition of sleeping in a comfortable bed a couple days ago compared to now waking up in the remnants of a burned out building. But…something just feels wrong in a way that’s hard to shake. Something like that uncomfortable feeling you get the day before being sick, but less acute.

  “Anything happen during your watch, Vari?” I extend a hand, and he hauls me to my feet. An act that sets me wobbling forward until I catch myself on a table.

  “Not a thing. Are you alright?” He gives me a very concerned look, painting his heavily shadowed features even more darkly for a few moments.

  “Just a bit groggy, I think. Nothing to worry about. I’ll sharpen up once I get up and move around.” I turn to walk to the door, intending to jog just a little bit but to stay within sight of the building’s entrance, just to loosen up.

  “Take these. I know you can see well enough in the dark out to a fair distance, but if you scatter them around, you’ll extend your range a good bit.” In his hand sits a dozen high grade glowstones. One of these would probably be enough to light this entire room to daylight levels and then some.

  As I reach out to grab the small glittering stones — roughly spherical golden marbles — I say, “You want me to light up the whole town or something? Probably a bit excessive.” Despite the half-hearted protest, I really don’t have it in me to actually complain, so I reach and take them from him.

  One slips from my grasp immediately, and I sigh in annoyance before scooping it back up. He stares at me for a couple moments, looking uncertain. “Look, Nyssa, if you’re not feeling right, you can just sleep more. You’ve been traveling for days, I’ve only just started out, comparatively.” He extends a hand gently to lay it on my shoulder, but I shy from the touch.

  “I said I’m fine. Get some rest.” With the final words said, I step towards the door. “I can stand a couple hours of watch. I don’t need to be coddled.” Stepping outside into the silent night, I feel the chill set in immediately and have to check myself. My armor’s runes are still active — same with the cloak. “Then why am I so cold? Sure, it’s night, but it’s warmer now than when I fell asleep.”

  I wrack my brain over it for a little while, but eventually the thought just falls out of my focus when I remember Vari telling me to scatter glowstones around. It’s pretty insightful, all things considered. For some reason, I can’t see as far as I normally would. Maybe for the lack of the moons and the lowered essence density after the Calamity?

  Something about the explanation doesn’t make much sense, so I just try to focus on my current task…which was…something?

  Something about light?

  Did I make a note about it, maybe?

  I reach into my belt pouch and pull out my codex, pulsing a couple runes to set them running on muscle memory. After a few moments, it casts its harsh blue-white light up at me and as I look at it, the rune-tiles seem to be a bit blurry. I shake it a few times to no avail. Maybe it got damaged during my fight with those thugs. I haven’t had a reason to pull it out since.

  Peering more closely, I tap the STATUS tile with a burst of essence. Or I try to. I try to send a burst of fire essence and it fails to respond. It’s not until I try seven more times with increasing frustration that it begins its transition to the proper screen with a blur of motion that leaves me feeling dizzy until it resolves. Looking it over, I indicate for it to take a reading of me before I open the notes. It’s a standard practice anytime you access the slates: no reason not to, really.

  As it finishes racing Cognitio essence through my body, I prepare to tap the return tile but am faced with a confusing anomaly. The paper-doll cutout that represents me is covered in splotches of dark red and a couple scatterings of lighter red and yellows. The vast majority is the deep red I would normally associate with near-lethal injuries.

  I stare at it for a while, struggling to parse it and make any sense of it until my task comes back into mind.

  Glowstones. Spreading glowstones. Right.

  I feel them sitting in the palm of my hand, maybe a half dozen of them. I tap each a few times with some essence to get them on and raise my hand to scatter them, but midway through the act of throwing, I feel my arm go numb and they drop to the ground directly behind me — a small sun being born of a collection of marbles on the ground that casts the entire area in blindingly bright light. Sending deep shadows out and away from the buildings and any debris.

  Something about the scene feels wrong. Very, very wrong. The uncanny feeling of something in your room being moved, but you don’t recall moving it. There might be a very simple explanation, namely that you don’t remember moving it but moved it.

  But…no. There’s a puzzle here that I have many pieces of.

  Cold. Dizzy. Dazed. Clumsy. And my slate is showing terrible injuries.

  But the new thing, what’s wrong with this scene? I turn to look down at the glowstones and when I look straight down, I see my shadow is only being cast a spare few feet away from me, rather than being painted across the building opposite me on the street in large scale because of the angle.

  As I stare at it, it noticeably shrinks another inch or so and every piece falls into place at once like I’ve been hit by a train of epiphany.

  I try to keep in control, though. This moment of clarity gives me enough mindfulness for that. Slowly, I reach down to my waist with both hands, grabbing two healing phials in one and a knife in the other. I place one of the phials into my mouth, bite down, and swallow. The essence mixture — containing all of the necessary essence types to power your body for a period to heal you — slides down my throat in the smooth, gliding way that liquid essence always flows, but I fight the urge to gag as it chooses to linger at seemingly random points to do whatever it feels needs done.

  Quickly, though, that essence suffuses me, returning some degree of clarity and control to me. Looking down, I even see my shadow reassert itself fairly sharply to about two-thirds of what I would expect over a few seconds.

  Next, glancing down, I dash the remaining healing phial at my feet right where my shadow touches my heels. It shatters with a loud clattering of crystalline tinkles.

  There’s the briefest moment that hangs in the air: Like the world itself took in a sharp breath. The essence from the phial immediately seeks “wounds” and tries to return what it finds to its normal state.

  In the case of the Shade Thief hiding in my shadow — its “normal” is a life nearly devoid of essence. So when the phials contents come into contact with it, it immediately leaps through its paper-thin skin and starts to force all of my foreign essence out of its body.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  It releases a blood curdling screech as the healing phial undoes all of its work and shreds its body’s ley-veins — the magical equivalent of blood vessels — in its urgency to remove the foreign contaminants.

  It immediately launches out of my shadow, leaving it to instantly regrow and cast itself dancing on the far wall. But before it can really recover and go anywhere, I plunge my dagger into its center mass and pin it to the ground.

  It’s a vaguely batlike humanoid that looks like the voids between the essence seas high in the sky themselves. Like a winged child with too-long limbs that was cut out of space, leaving behind a hole.

  It struggles to move. These things are incredibly weak, all things considered, and utterly incapable of fighting stand up against nearly anything. But they are quite good at killing people without them even being aware of it, though.

  Holding my knife down, I stand and raise a mailed boot. I bring it down with a sickening crunch of whatever passes for a skull in the void-black creature. Its squirming and plaintive cries die with the noise.

  Feeling better and better with each passing moment, I grab my other phial, a couple of the glowstones and step inside. Without waiting, I toss the final phial at Vari’s body at the same time I send two glowstones into the room on opposite sides.

  My deduction is rewarded immediately when another of the creatures seems to erupt out of Vari’s chest, bursting from the folds of his clothes. The moment it’s airborne and trying to flee towards the door while howling in pain, I launch my knife. It flies true and impales the creature in center mass, pinning it to the wall with the crossguard and the force of the throw.

  The noise it makes sees Vari sit up groggily, but I have to solve this first. So I step forward and grab the creature by its batlike head around the neck. Withdrawing my knife from its chest in a little spray of ichor, I squeeze with everything I have — my armors runes flaring and heating as I do.

  There’s a single, solitary, wet-sounding crunch as its neck gives way and it goes limp in my hand. I flick my dagger clean with the other hand and draw it up before taking a final step to ensure it isn’t going to be getting up again under any circumstances.

  With a few deft cuts and some levering sawing, I quickly and efficiently sever its head from its shoulders. Some monsters can reform from terrible injuries, but removing a head is usually a reliable way to ensure they stay down.

  While Vari recovers I step outside and toss the body and head away before tossing the other body to join it. I needn’t saw off that ones head, as it’s already been rendered into paste.

  That done, I step back inside and wipe my knife more thoroughly clean before sheathing it.

  “What was that?” He sounds about how I felt when I first woke up.

  “They were Shade Thieves. Infiltrator-type monsters that steal essence through your shadow. I handled them. They typically travel in pairs, so there’s a negligible chance of there being any more of them. You’re fine to go back to sleep.” In response, Vari just stares at me blankly. “If you have any healing items you should use one. Your essence levels are going to be seriously out of sorts, and I assume that means your Cognitio will have been badly affected.” Still, he just stares at me. These things targeting your greatest essential buildups first can be crippling depending on what your affinities are.

  As Vari is demonstrating, having the essence of thought wrenched from your mind doesn’t do anything good for you.

  I walk over and kneel next to him. As I begin to dig around in his pouches I have to fight a spike of annoyance. Not at Vari — this isn’t his fault — but at myself. I should have realized what was going on earlier. Now I’m out of phials, I feel like I’ve been run over by a train, and my delay on dealing with this left someone as capable as Vari in this state.

  Garrick’s post-fight mantra kicks in, and I start to analyze how I could have done better.

  I probably shouldn’t have used one on the horse. As much as it pains me to think the thought. Just like with what happened at the expedition, I’m using limited resources too freely. I’m, at best, at the halfway point of this journey and am now tapped out of curatives. Once I knew what was going on, I could have just stabbed the shade thieves directly. Using the phials to force them to reveal themselves was expedient but didn’t need to use limited resources. Once I figured out what it was, I should have treated it like the minor monster it is.

  I sigh as I find the tinkling corner of Vari’s pouch and pull out one of his phials.

  “Right, open up, Vari.” Absently, he follows my instruction and I carefully place the gilded phial between his rearmost molars. “Think about feeling better, it’ll help.” When he closes his eyes I close his mouth with a bit of force to crack the vessel open, which immediately sets to doing its work.

  The light doesn’t descend into his throat like mine did. Vari’s greatest natural essence concentration is in his brain and its reflection in the Seas, and as such the phial works to recover that deficit. My phials would have never been able to do it. Compound essence needs more complex healing to work like this, but, luckily, Vari is funded and supplied by the crown, so he gets the best of the best.

  Not that my gear is anything to scoff at, either. But it’s a sliding scale, and the Crownsguard just sit at the top of it by necessity.

  I watch him closely. Mental and conceptual essence deficits can be more debilitating than physical and elemental ones. But after a few minutes he re-opens his eyes and fixes me with his deceptively boyish grin. “Thanks, Nyssa. That’s…not a great feeling. It’s a bit like being locked in a room with nothing but windows that you can’t open.”

  The description makes me cringe. It’s an actually terrifying thought, and something he has to face regularly if he ever overuses his essence. “Sorry Vari, I shouldn’t have let that happ-”

  “Seriously? You’re apologizing for saving me from dying in my sleep?” In a bit of very un-Vari-like behavior, he reaches forward and shoves me as hard as he can. Which, comparatively isn’t terribly hard with our relative physiques and armor focuses, but it gets the point across.

  “I should have realized what was going on sooner. It’s a common monster, especially in places like this.”

  “And I was the one on watch when the thing infested your shadow because I was keeping the lights low to let you rest. If I hadn’t done that neither of us would have been in that situation. Roots and Boughs,” He lets out a common Eldaran curse as he narrows his eyes. “This guilt complex isn’t like you. What’s up with you? Do you need to get something off your chest? I’m more than happy to listen.”

  I turn away, breaking the eye contact as I stand. “It’s fine. Get back to sleep, I'm going to need to leave in the morning and you'll have to be well rested since you'll be alone here.” It’s a cold, obvious redirect of the conversation, but as I walk outside it leaves Vari little choice to actually respond unless he gets up. I’m hedging my bets he won’t be willing to in his current condition and will leave well enough alone.

  I really just don’t have it in me right now. I still feel awful in every possible way. Besides, where does he get off saying I have a guilt complex? We both could have died while I was on watch — but he is right that what happened to me happened on his watch…

  I just close my eyes hard and count to ten, trying to center myself again as the sun begins to poke over the distant horizon to signal the coming of day in the next hour or so.

  “Nyssa.” As I get to nine, Vari walks up, sounding worried. I dread whatever he’s about to say, so I brace myself at the interruption. “The chances of me falling back asleep after that is basically nil. I’m going to make some breakfast, any preferences?”

  Of course he’s just talking about food. Thank the Watcher. “I’m not picky. I tend to just eat travel rations when I’m out like this — nothing else really feels like it’s worth carrying around.”

  “I’m well aware of how well the Vigil stocks their people, do you seriously only get by on travel rations? You have a carryall, it’s not like weight or space is a concern. There's no way that your carryalls don't have stasis enchantments too, so you could even bring fresh food and prepared meals.” He sighs performatively and crosses his arms, shaking his head. “I’ll make you something worth eating for once. Won’t be but a half hour.”

  I give in, Vari’s too stubborn and paternal to be worth fighting with about something like food. “Alright, fine. I’ve always enjoyed your cooking anyways. It will be a nice reminder of some of those little adventures we went on, yeah?” I offer the genial response, figuring — hoping — it’ll put him at ease. He looks back over my his shoulder skeptically but nods. “In the meantime, I’m gonna go see if I can’t find signs of wherever Garrick headed.”

  I walk off as the suns breath kisses the town proper for the first time today, casting deep shadows through the town that serve to highlight the damage of the town in stark relief. It also marks my first time seeing the town in full daylight.

  With a heavy heart, I begin my search.