My world jostles regularly. Not quite enough to wake me, just enough to keep me on the fringes of awareness "… You're lucky Nyssa managed to manifest her Sanctus essence. You were dead otherwise. You can't hesitate like that." Garricks voice finally cracks through the haze and I realize that my everything hurts. Especially my head and legs.

  "I'm quite aware, Garrick. It wasn't intentional. I understood it the first three times you made the point with different verbiage." Serafina's response sounds sharp, probably not used to receiving a tongue-lashing from someone like Garrick. Or anyone, for that matter.

  I work up the gumption to open my eyes and realize that it's gotten quite dark. How long was I out for?

  "Ah, our hero of the day is awake." Serafina's voice sounds very happy, coming with a singsong cadence. "How do you feel?"

  As I take in my surroundings I realize I'm being carried in Garrick's arms no differently than when I was a child. There's a comfort in it that I realize I've missed. It's been a long time since anyone has held me in any capacity… The thought sours my mood immediately.

  "I feel like I was attacked by a bunch of goblins with hammers who paid special attention to my legs and head. Otherwise, I'm whole. How about you, Serafina?"

  "I got a little wet, but that was about it. Someone made a very good effort to absorb all of the shock for me. We really need to figure out how to get that essence of yours to protect you. Not just help you perform well-appreciated suicidal heroics."

  Garrick chimes in. "Mm, that wasn't suicidal. I watched, it was very calculated. Being honest, I'm not sure how you were so accurate with that maneuver, Nyss. You reacted before I could even start calling, let alone shaping, and did so with near-perfect timing and aim."

  "It wasn't anything that special." I offer uncomfortably, trying to shift the topic away from me. "I'd already drawn on a huge amount of Aero, it was just the accelerating state of my poisoning."

  "That's a lie." Serafina declares warmly. "Don't be so modest, Nyssa. You stopped me from ending as a very pretty can of paste smeared on the ground and your abilities are what made that happen."

  I shimmy a bit to indicate for Garrick to set me down. "Right… As you say, Seraf- Dame Serafina." Walking hurts, but now that I've been set down there's no way that I can abide asking to be picked up again. "I just…went with my gut. I don't have a better way to say it. That's what I mean when I say I don't feel it was special. It was just my training and general awareness being amplified by the Sanctus actually coming to me for once."

  Garrick speaks up as we walk alongside the fast-flowing river. "What were you thinking about? Specifically."

  I clam up instantly as all of the thoughts I've been having around Serafina come to mind. With a small, small, voice, I respond. "I was trying to think of ways to save her." More confidently, "I realized none of my spells would be enough with the amount of time, so I tried to think of a more direct solution."

  "That was a pretty direct solution."

  "Okay, and you mentioned last night that it's come to your call a few times recently since you started out and about, right? Where's the common thread? Evidently what we did in the keep wasn't cutting it and something you're doing out here is." Garrick steadily takes on the tone of a lecturer. The kind of teacher who will never give you the answer, but they'll drag it out of you to make you get it yourself.

  "Fighting and chasing the calamity, and when I fought those thugs were the other times. A common thread…" I trail off as I think but realize an obvious answer, but one I'd long since written off. "I guess every time I've used it it was while I was thinking about protecting others. But that's been my motivation as long as I've been able to fight. I don't want what happened to my people to happen to anyone else. I want to see those things dead. That's never changed."

  Serafina sounds thoughtful as she crosses an arm across her chest to support the other as she taps her chin. "Well, if that specific motivation was never enough, then the obvious difference is that you need a tangible threat to react to. You can't train to be a selfless hero. It's something you either have, and have the opportunity to be, or you don't. When you were chasing that anomaly," She seems to avoid referring to him as a calamity, which I appreciate and it helps put me at ease. "What were your chief concerns? What was motivating you?"

  Continuing our trek, I start to hear a waterfall up ahead so I raise my voice. "I was thinking about the risk if he got away. The risk if I was wrong. I didn't want to do what I needed to do. At least that's what I was thinking at the time… I'm not as sure now." The last half gets cut off by the crashing waterfall.

  I peer down. It's another drop, but only one that's about fifty feet and there's ledges every ten or so, so getting down will be trivial. Otherwise, looking out at the rapidly darkening skyline, I see the Mineralis forest denser than I've ever seen it before. We'll be deep within it once we go down, and there's not yet been any signs of the…anomaly.

  Probably an hours walk, off in the distance, I see something that sends a shiver down my spine.

  The sparkling, multicolored barrier that marks the boundaries of the lands of the fae. I've read about it and Lan has told me some stories, but seeing it in person, shimmering in the air with a mother-of-pearl sheen like oil on water, makes me feel uncomfortable. The fae aren't anything to fear according to Lan. And being half-fae, a sidhe, I take their word for it, but other stories and rumors abound in far, far greater numbers from far, far more sources. In scripture, even.

  The teachings of The Traveller say that the lands of the fae can only be entered by those in dire need. Moments of life or death. To do so otherwise is to invoke the wrath of the powers they wield. I've always found the idea of taking away fundamental pieces of yourself to be especially terrifying. Stealing someone's name and identity, their memories, and others.

  It sends a shiver down my spine as I tear my eyes from the glimmering wall in space and look down, refocusing on the task at hand.

  I needn't worry about the fae, we aren't here for them. The anomaly, however…

  He must have drifted at least this far and gone over the waterfall. We'd have found something otherwise. Maybe he went over the edge and got caught in the undertow?

  That thought fills me with dread. It would mean I condemned someone to drowning to death. Monster or not, it's an awful way to go. I want to dispel that theory as fast as possible, so without offering an explanation I drop onto the next series of ledges in sequence. A ten-foot drop is nothing at my level of development, let alone accounting for the boons my armor grants, so I make it down in what amounts to five steps.

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  From there, I walk out onto fine red sand, likely colored by the presence of metal essence in the region, and further to wade into the water enough so I can duck down and look beneath the crashing water. All it takes is a brief glance though, and I can see that, even through water distortion, there's no body trapped there.

  When I stand back up I let out a sigh of relief and trudge out of the water. I hear a pair of heavier thuds onto soft grass while the other two hop down after me.

  Serafina opens, "Did you see something? You kind of walked away while I was in the middle of talking." Her face betrays a little bit of annoyance. Reasonable annoyance.

  "I just," I pause, knowing how stupid it sounds, "I was worried he might have drowned here by going over the side and needed to check." He, I keep thinking. Both of them use "it" more often than not and Garrick has given me a little side-eye when I say 'he', but I really can't shake off everything that happened that night.

  I don't really even know what outcome I want. If he was 'he', then I killed an innocent who might have been helpful to the world. If he was 'it', then I potentially released a uniquely dangerous Calamity into the world by my hesitation.

  It all makes me feel very suddenly tired, so I get the rest of the way out of the water to start drying off and sit down in the sand, facing away from the others. "Sorry, Dame Serafina, I didn't mean to ignore you. It just felt very important at the time and I couldn't get my mind off of it." When I drop my hands to my sides, one strikes sand, but the other sinks substantially deeper and with less resistance.

  Curiosity replacing my growing bad mood, I look down and see my hand has sunken into a small "puddle" of null powder. "Oh, I've found something."

  Garrick quickly walks over to inspect and frowns a Garrick-deep frown. "Seems it survived, then." He stands up straighter and quickly calls upon his compound essence, Auram, or the essence of emptiness and etherealness and instills it into his sight after tracing a sigil in the air and stepping into it. It's another reason why he's who and what he is. His unique essence access allows him to very readily find things that have suffered aetheric collapse — they are one of the best examples of "empty" that exists, and he excels at finding "empty." And that's not even accounting for its direct combat potential. For someone the size of a barn, most attacks against him tend to miss.

  He wanders around a little bit without speaking as the sun finally crests the peaks of the Ironreach on the far distant horizon. It's an interesting thing to view from ground level — the coming line of relative night being cut sharply by the mountain peaks and driving darkness across the region as the sun disappears.

  "Good find, Nyssa." Serafina comes over and stands before me. I've been in a darkness of my own on realizing that it did survive, and has apparently kept consuming things. So her compliment is welcome. "It's not your fault that it's still around. You did everything you could at the time considering how bad everything leading up to it went for reasons out of your control. I want you to try to keep that in mind." When she looks down at me sitting with her kind eyes and warm smile, a fair bit of my anxiety boils away.

  "Thanks, Serafina. I know it's something I need to work on. I think I have just had too much going on to really do so. Between training ramping up and these last few weeks it just feels like things are being taken out of my hands and I'm left treading water." It's a much more honest description of my mindset than I think I've managed lately, but being around Serafina just seems to make it easier to stomach. At least, as long as I keep my eyes closed and try to avoid imagining what her face might look like when I admit it.

  I jump a little when I feel a hand on my shoulder and open my eyes to see Serafina taking a knee next to me. She fixes me with a soft expression, "Then maybe you need to actually take a break. Most everyone else in the Vigil spends half the year away from their duties. When was the last time you did?"

  I think for a while, reaching up to unseal my helmet as I do. "I don't remember, if I'm being honest."

  That makes Serafina roll her eyes with a smile. "It was when we first met. After that debacle on the training mission. The only time you've ever taken a vacation, to my knowledge, was when you narrowly avoided dying. And even then you only took about two-thirds of the recommended downtime."

  I don't really have a good response for that, so I just nod and make a noncommittal noise and look into my lap. That whole situation is a lot of very mixed memories now.

  "The calamity got back into the river. All of the remnants are concentrated here. I assume it realized it would be harder to track if it kept to the water." Garrick sounds deeply displeased at that assessment. "Which shows a bit of forward planning they normally wouldn't."

  "Or, perhaps more proof that Nyssa's concerns might be valid. That's the sort of decision a person might make if they knew anything about tracking."

  I'm left staring at Serafina. She didn't seem to have that amount of reservations about it before, so I'm more than a bit surprised. Maybe she's just trying to be nice.

  "It might be, but that's not a call I'm willing to make until I've put eyes on it. Alive or dead. The alternative is unacceptable." Garrick pauses for a few moments, looking in my direction. "But I'll keep it in mind. We should carry on. This area should be reasonably safe with its passage, so we can push on through the night until we find a better site than the base of a waterfall."

  With that, all three of us set off down the much slower-running lower section of the river, keeping to the clearing by the waters edge as we travel in relative silence into the night. Before long, both moons join us in the sky above, painting the world in their respective lights: clean and silver, and irregular and bronze-gold. They provide more than enough light to travel by such that I don't even have to rely on my natural night vision at all.

  It takes a few hours, nearing midnight if my codex is still accurate after all of the impacts, but we come upon a anomalous fishing dock. It's fairly ramshackle, but sturdy enough to have seen use enough that the wood is smoothed over from years of usage. An untended fishing rod sits propped against a similarly roughly made barrel.

  I trot ahead to inspect and find the barrel sealed. Popping it free, it's full of composted soil and worms. "Someone lives near here, obviously, but this rod looks old, like whoever left it here forgot about it or something. Everything otherwise looks well used."

  The others follow and start looking around. After a brief period of searching Serafina identifies something. "There's a concealed path over here. Overgrown. This place might be abandoned. The stability of the Mineralis essence in the materials here would limit decay. Could have been a long time since anyone was here."

  Garrick grunts displeasure. "There's quite a bit of null dust in the area. Mostly centering on that path, to and from the river." Without further explanation, Garrick starts to move determinedly down the path, taking Bane from his back in his offhand while channeling Terra essence ahead of him to part the overgrowth. It's a deadly and intimidating stride.

  I similarly unslip my knives as Serafina calls her stave to readiness. It fills the air with a steady hum as it starts to collect nearby essence into its runes while she weaves it through the air. Magicked items like our armor and weapons cannot call essence to fill themselves, but they can absorb what they're exposed to directly. Which leads to things like Serafina's waving her stave around or armored combatants going through stretching routines before a fight.

  After a few seconds, her stave falls silent, only emitting a lambent red glow. A glow that casts her face with deep shadows and giving her the same intimidating feeling as Garrick's hunting stride.

  I jog to catch Garrick, passing Serafina. "I'll go ahead. I see best in the dark out of us and can move more quietly."

  Garrick signs an assent and Serafina nods. "Just disengage if you find it. We'll move as one."

  That I can agree to.

  I slink forwards into the woods keeping a low trickle of Aero imbuing my senses to dial them up a hair at the same time I keep my helmets sensory enhancements fully active to maintain full awareness and coverage.

  After about ten minutes of moving through the brush, I come upon a clearing — a homestead. There's a fairly crudely constructed building with a sod roof sitting behind a terribly overgrown farmplot on the left side of the clearing. On the right, running alongside a path leading to a cave mouth that is at least fifty feet across, is a well that's overgrown with the same creeping, flowered vines that seem to have taken over the garden.

  Finally, that building looks sturdy, if handmade, and in overall good condition except for one detail. The has door fallen out of its frame and is laying about ten feet from the house in the grass. The frame it should have been in has been savaged by oversized claws about the right scale for the ones that damaged the gate in Meadowfields.

  Seeing it, I start to pick my way over, keeping to the treeline. If anything is inside, I should like to take it by surprise.