Soon after they left Izel, it was obvious that the Skylands didn’t work like a real planet. It was “winter,” with snow everywhere, but they had a solid ten hours a day of daylight, and that was as dark as it ever got. Each evening, an aurora appeared in the sky as the light from the sun disappeared. The auroras grew stronger as they made their way west, away from Izel.

  Sophia had expected the ruins in the Wildlands to be relatively close to the last point of civilization; she’d assumed that the supplies they packed were for their time at the ruins. She was wrong. It took twenty-two days for the group to travel to the ruins Lan’ti was excavating, and that was without wagons. Some of that was due to the rough conditions and lack of roads, but a lot of it was simply because of how slowly a horse moved. Sophia was certain it would have been only a few days of travel in a flyer and less than that in a car on a good road.

  They arrived at the ruins just after sunset with a rich green aurora in the sky. Horse and wagon tracks in the snow made it clear they weren’t alone, but they didn’t see anyone before they reached the building. Sophia’s guess was that they were all under shelter for the night; they could get bitterly cold. Their group would have already been in shelter as well if Los’en hadn’t known they were so close to the ruin and insisted they push on to get there that night.

  His tent wasn’t as good as Sophia’s, and the only people Sophia shared her tent with were Dav and sometimes Taika, because Taika was small enough that he could sneak in and sleep on one of the couple.

  The ruin looked like a single old stone building partially protruding from the ground. The roof was long gone and many of the walls had followed, though the outer wall of the first floor seemed relatively intact on the side they approached from, other than a complete lack of windows and doors filling the openings.

  The thing that stuck in Sophia’s mind wasn’t the fallen walls or even the one window opening that seemed to show a fire instead of rocks and open sky. Instead, it was the fact that there were glowing green shapes on the eastern wall, the same color as the aurora in the sky. They weren’t glyphs or spellforms, at least not as far as Sophia could tell; they weren’t shaped right for that and they varied from weirdly natural-looking curves to long straight strokes formed into patterns that almost looked like letters.

  Sophia’s first guess was that it was some sort of runescript, but if that was the case it was one she didn’t know. Maybe it was an old decayed enchantment that was somehow being energized by the aurora? That made as much sense as anything else.

  Whatever it was, it certainly explained part of why Lan’ti thought there was something important about the ruins. There might or might not be anything to find, but Sophia was willing to bet that there had once been something important in the building.

  Before they reached the ruins, a man appeared in the window lit by firelight. It was hard to make out any of his body under his white fur cloak, but he was fairly tall, with brown hair, brown eyes, wolflike ears on top of his head, and a face that looked similar to Amy’s. Sophia was certain that he had to be Amy’s brother Lan’ti.

  Lan’ti grinned when he saw the group. He called out to them the moment they were close enough to easily talk. “Ci’an! Come on up. You have to introduce me to your team.” He paused for a moment as his eyes passed over the rear of the group, then seemed to make a double take. “Uncle Los’en? What are you doing here?”

  “Am I not welcome?” Los’en spread his arms wide. “After such a long trip?”

  Sophia sighed. She wasn’t sure what to think about Los’en. He could be serious one moment and a complete clown the next. No wonder people didn’t take his concerns about the Broken Temple’s Hilt seriously!

  Lan’ti threw his head back and shook it at the same time. “Of course you’re welcome, but you don’t get out of it that easily! Why did Mother send you?”

  “Oh,” Los’en drew out the word as he made an overly dramatic shrug with his entire arms as well as his shoulders. “You know Ais’lin. She thinks she’ll be able to handle matters better if I’m not around to piss off the Hilt. She also made a deal with him; I go away for a few months and she gets to command the Templars in the current defense of Izel.”

  “But she already does that,” Lan’ti objected. “That’s what she does, she picks who covers what areas.”

  Los’en shook his head. “It’s not the same thing. She’ll be directing a lot more than the area they’re to defend. Registry Master Ermine is also yielding control to Ais’lin. It’s an example for the future and a way to show off the Templars’ current weakness; Ais’lin probably won’t arrange for them to die, but showing off how weak they are is better than nothing. I don’t think it’s enough to get the Templars out of Izel, but it probably is enough to be worth me leaving Izel for a few months.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Lan'ti tilted his head a little to the left. “Never thought I’d hear you say that. Isn’t that why you came back, to rouse people against the Broken Temple?”

  Los’en shrugged. “I don’t need to be there for this, and if my absence lets Ais’lin split up the Templars so that others can see some of their issues without the Broken Sword, it’s a good start. She can’t stop the Hilt from starting to create another Broken Sword, but we’re pretty sure it’ll be years before he has anything good enough to do what he was doing, and we should be back in Izel long before that. Enough about me, though; it’s good to see you. How are things going here?”

  “Slowly,” Lan’ti admitted. “I’ll tell you all about it once we’re inside in the warmth. Come on in; we have a sheltered space for the animals at the top of the stairs, where they can get the heat that comes up the stairway once I close off the window. We can talk once we’re inside.”

  That wasn’t all there was to it, of course. The horses didn’t like the idea of jumping into the window Lan had hopped down from, so Lan had to pull out a ramp they’d clearly built after they arrived. It was a good thing they didn’t have wagons; there was no way they’d have gotten them up the ramp. The horses were hard enough, even when led by their riders.

  The room inside the window was larger than Sophia expected and even had a nearly intact ceiling that was somehow both black and reflective, like a black mirror. It was the reason firelight showed with the door open; the light coming up the stairway reflected strangely off the partial ceiling but anything other than strong light simply faded into darkness.

  There were patches of the ceiling that looked like thatched grass or straw instead of shiny black almost-plastic; they had to be holes that were fixed by the expedition with what they could find in the area to make the large area at the top of the stairs suitable for stabling. That explained a lot of why things were slow for them; they’d obviously started by enhancing their living area before the snow set in.

  While they settled the horses in, Lan’ti disappeared around a corner and grabbed a couple of pails full of snow. Sophia didn’t like what that said about their water situation. Maybe those water-generation Abilities she’d written off would have been more useful than she’d expected. She doubted the ones they had would help; hers had turned into Firewater Plume and Dav’s was Flowering Firewater. Neither really sounded like a good source of drinking water.

  Lan’ti waited for their horses to be settled near his expedition’s mounts before he moved the wooden panel that closed off the window into place and cut their light to almost nothing. He then turned and hugged his sister fiercely, with one hand around her back and the other on top of her head. “I’m so glad you were able to come.”

  Amy, no, Ci’an froze for a moment, clearly startled. As soon as she realized what was happening, she returned the hug with enough force that Lan’ti gave out a surprised oof. “I am too. I hurried, but I was almost too late.”

  Los’en gave them a long moment before he joked, “You were too late; Lan’ti was already gone.”

  “Get over here, Uncle.” Lan’ti tried to sound annoyed and almost succeeded, but Sophia could hear the laughter he tried to hide under fierceness.

  Los’en enveloped the siblings in a hug of his own. “There were times when I wasn’t sure we’d make it, but we did.”

  Temple Bravo Pelrith Moonshadow spat when he saw his targets’ trail end at a building. It was going to be much harder to quietly, slowly kill them inside a shelter than it was outside. He wanted to weaken them and let the cold kill them or lead a monster to them; anything that would make it so that his hands weren’t covered in their blood. If he killed an Aurora, he’d never be able to set foot in Izel again.

  Indirect means didn’t count, which was why he’d been sent alone. One person could hide more easily than many, and if one person couldn’t kill them, having more wasn’t worth the higher chance of being noticed. The only time it would have helped was after the elf’s disguise disappeared; he was pretty sure she was the thief the Broken Lord was looking for, but he couldn’t break off his mission to report in; he’d lose them and that would make the report mostly useless. A second person would have allowed him to send word back.

  Maybe he could head back now that he knew where they were going to be setting in for the winter?

  Pelrith glanced in the direction of Izel, then shook his head. That was a stupid idea. Even if he could find his way back to the ruins without a marker like the one his targets had clearly followed, he didn’t have the forty-plus days it would take before the weather turned terrible. He might not be able to make it back here before it was too dangerous to travel, even for a second-upgrade man experienced in winter travel like himself. It wasn’t like his Sphere helped him with anything other than resilience; that wasn’t what it was for.

  No, the right answer was definitely to follow the original plan. He needed to set up a hideout somewhere nearby, then harass them with anything that didn’t point to his presence; as old as this place looked, he could probably arrange for a ceiling to fall. They were definitely far enough out for monsters to be a concern.

  The real trick was going to be finding the ones that were pissed off enough that they weren’t scared away by the Aurora’s second-Upgrade presence. Pelrith wouldn’t have that problem, since he specialized in hiding his presence, but the Aurora’s presence was just as irritating and obvious as the man himself. Pelrith had been forced to fight off a couple of weak monsters that ran almost directly into him during the trip. Neither of them was difficult to kill, but it was more evidence of how brokenly annoying the man was!

  Los’en really doesn’t like the Templars, and they really don’t like him back…