Aerion followed the procession of Reavers, just glad to still be alive. Not that she really had much of a choice.

  There hadn’t been mere hundreds waiting for them—there had been thousands. With that many enemies, she doubted they would’ve survived even if she had been B Rank.

  Still, that wasn’t what weighed most on Aerion’s mind as she walked with Greg and Galia toward the Reavers’ village. Or at least, that’s what she assumed their destination was. The images the Reaver woman had shown her played over and over in her head. It hadn’t just been scenes, either, but a flood of sensations. Emotions, memories, even smells.

  She had felt the woman’s happiness pursuing the ideals all Reavers seemed to share. She had felt sorrow. Grief for fallen brethren slain in battles against other elves, fights they hadn’t wanted but had been forced into because of their innate aggression. She’d smelled food cooking, drifting from kitchen hearths deep within the village. She’d felt warmth and the love of the community.

  In that briefest moment, Aerion had lived years of the woman’s life. Was this the destination of her Blessing? Could she expect similar powers? Or was she something else entirely?

  She hadn’t gotten the sense that this Reaver was much higher in ascension than her—Convergence rank at best. Yet somehow, her ability dwarfed Aerion’s. Maybe her Blessing was just fundamentally different. Or maybe Aerion herself was just that underdeveloped.

  The thought made her uneasy. If the woman could convey all that directly into her mind, bypassing words entirely, then what might Aerion be capable of if she could master the same? How much clearer would communication be if she could just push her thoughts straight into Greg’s head instead of fumbling with speech?

  So many questions. And from what she had glimpsed, the Reavers’ silence wasn’t a choice.

  They truly were physically incapable of speech, their entire culture being built around that limitation. Or maybe she had it backwards—maybe their telepathy had simply made speech obsolete. Either way, Aerion felt like she was brushing up against some deeper truth about her own Blessing, and the thought filled her with both excitement and terror.

  She glanced at Greg, walking beside her, his expression grim. No doubt his mind was working overtime, plotting how they might survive this. That was just how Greg’s brain worked—always gaming the system, treating leveling, ranking up, and Blessing growth as inevitable steps.

  At first, she’d thought him insane. The sad truth was that most Blessed never grew beyond Foundation rank, opting to allow their powers to stagnate in favor of cushy, comfortable lives.

  Yet Greg treated ascension as though it were a matter of course. Now, Aerion was starting to see the value in his attitude. Such a mindset wasn’t simply useful, it was necessary if they were going to survive the Cataclysm.

  She only hoped they lived long enough to test their newly evolved Blessings. The potential increase felt enormous, so much so that a part of her even wanted to throw herself into a fight against the Cataclysm now, just to see how far they’d come.

  After some time, the forest gave way to a clearing. The procession halted abruptly in the middle, seemingly randomly. It was only when four Reavers crouched, rolling aside a thick mat of foliage to reveal a massive trapdoor embedded in the ground, that Aerion understood. They heaved it open and motioned for Aerion and Greg to enter.

  The tunnel beneath soon gave way to a labyrinth—a sprawling maze of passages that stretched on for miles. After nearly an hour of walking, they finally emerged, not into the cavern Aerion had expected, but something far stranger.

  “A Cenote? Are you shitting me?” Greg muttered, making Aerion frown at him.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “A sinkhole,” Greg said. “When an underground air dome collapses, it makes a cylinder open to the sky. I don’t know about this one, but they usually connect to the ocean. Freshwater rains from the top, and saltwater flows in through submerged tunnels at the bottom.”

  Aerion peered down. The place was massive—easily a quarter mile across. The bottom wasn’t filled with water, though, but with stone structures of every kind. Buildings crowded the rocky floor, packed as close as any dense city.

  Yet even more impressive were the countless structures carved into the sinkhole’s walls. From near the rim all the way to the base, tunnels and balconies honeycombed the stone, lights glowing from subterranean dwellings.

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  “Incredible,” Aerion muttered, studying its every detail. She wondered how such a city might’ve been constructed, whether they started from the top or the bottom, and a million other things.

  But their guides—or captors, more like—gave them no time to appreciate it. They were hustled onto a spiraling path that wound its way down the sinkhole’s inner wall. Around and around they descended, all the way to the bottom.

  The procession of Reavers had finally thinned out, people peeling away to whatever it was Reavers did in their daily lives. By the time we were close to the village, only a few dozen stayed with them. Just enough to ensure they didn’t get any ideas.

  Still, Aerion didn’t need Greg to tell her that any attempt to escape now would be suicide. This deep in Reaver territory, even finding the surface would be a nightmare. The tunnel network was a maze, lacking even a single obvious entrance to the outside. If they had to go back through those tunnels, they were done for. Perhaps that was the point—perhaps that was why no other elven tribe had tried to invade this cenote.

  Not that they’d dare delve this deep into Reaver territory. Not if they were sane.

  Greg, Aerion, and Galia were deposited in a small stone chamber with the barest bit of magical lighting, their guards shutting the door on them.

  “Well, at least we’re not dead,” Greg said. “What do you figure they planned for us now?”

  Aerion shook her head. “The vision I saw didn’t say much—it only showed me this city. It is quite the incredible ability,” she said. “I wonder if there is anyone here who might be able to tell me if I can learn it.”

  “Yeah, well, as amazing as that would be, I’d be happy just getting out of here alive,” Greg replied. “Anything else is just the cherry on top.”

  They hadn’t been in the room even ten minutes before someone came for them, gesturing for them to follow. They did.

  The elf led them down into the cenote’s floor, to a pyramidal stone structure at the center. They entered through a passage at the base and walked into what felt like the very center of the building.

  There, cross-legged on the floor of an otherwise empty chamber, sat an ancient elf.

  Aerion gasped the moment she saw her. With wrinkled features and white hair so long it curled around her on the ground, she might very well have been the oldest elf Aerion had laid eyes on.

  Then the woman’s bright blue eyes opened, almost glowing in their intensity. Her expression was as serene as the stone that made up the floor, walls, and ceiling of this place.

  Both Aerion and Greg took an involuntary step back.

  “Elves don’t age like that,” Aerion muttered. “She must be very, very old. A millennium, at least.”

  For a sliver of a moment, Aerion thought she saw the woman smile. She raised her arms, indicating she wished to initiate telepathy.

  Aerion gave Greg a hesitant look.

  “If they’d wanted to kill us, they would’ve done it already,” Greg said.

  Steeling herself, Aerion took a seat opposite the woman and crossed her legs.

  The woman touched the sides of her face with her cold hands and pressed her forehead gently to Aerion’s.

  The vision that assaulted her head wasn’t of everyday village life, or anything even about the Reavers, specifically.

  It showed a great pillar rising in the center of a colossal crater, spewing monsters by the thousands. Monsters that, Aerion instinctively knew, could gut an army of Convergence-ranked fighters.

  The view pulled back to a bird’s-eye perspective as the horde surged south toward a vast green expanse. The Sylvanglades.

  When the vision ended, Aerion was heaving, and Greg’s hands were draped over her shoulders. “Easy,” he said. “Deep breaths.”

  “That was less than a second,” he said. “What did you see?”

  “We have to go. Now,” Aerion replied. “A Cataclysm Dungeon has appeared to the north, in Wisdom’s territory. One of the strongest yet. It’s already spewing monsters, many of which are headed this way. That’s what the Reavers were trying to warn us about.”

  “How strong?” Greg asked, looking grim. “And how many?”

  “Thousands,” Aerion said. “Bastion Rank, at the very least. This dungeon has probably been active for months.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how we never heard of it.”

  “Well, we haven’t exactly been plugged into society lately. If this dungeon is really that strong, we need to notify the other Champions,” Greg said.

  “I think some of the others already know,” Aerion said. “At least that’s the impression I got. The only reason their matriarch showed us this was because we revealed I, er, was Order’s Champion.”

  “Good to know. Any reason they tried to kill us at the ritual?” Greg asked.

  “Yes,” Aerion said, almost forgetting to mention it. “We trespassed on their most sacred site. It’s one of the worst offenses you can commit in their society. It was only the revelation that I was Order’s Champion that absolved us—provided we promise to destroy the dungeon. That’s why they spared us.”

  Greg looked the ancient elf in the eye. “Thank you for sparing us. We apologize for trespassing.”

  “She can’t understand,” Aerion said, gesturing for the matriarch to put her hands up to her head again.

  She did so, and Aerion concentrated on her feelings of gratitude, and tried to convey that the other elves didn’t understand the Reavers or their rituals. That any perceived offense of theirs was born of ignorance, not malice.

  She showed images—of them fighting Cyrus, bursting the dungeon core, the Cataclysm—all compressed into a blink of an eye.

  Aerion felt like she’d talked for hours, though it’d been seconds. Before closing the link, however, Aerion asked her one last thing. What the Reavers truly were and whether her Reaver of Origins Blessing was related.

  What she got instead was a deluge of information—hundreds of years of Reaver history dumped into Aerion’s head with such force that Aerion clutched her head as a headache beyond anything she’d ever experienced hit her.

  “Greg?” she said, breath ragged.

  “I thought you were just giving them info,” Greg said. “What the hell happened? What did you see?”

  “I—” Aerion stammered. “Greg, the Reavers, what they are… this forest. Everything! We had it all wrong.”