Solo The lion's tale - part 1: Burnt offerings

[Leo Varniak]

Posted with Gossamer’s permission

Spring 31, 513 AV


————

”So this would be the place?”

Leo Zaital took a better look at his surroundings and found that they looked pretty much like anywhere else in the Sea of Grass. There was a bloody lot of grass, for instance, and foreigners were typically hard-pressed to look any deeper than that. It took a Drykas to discern the subtle nuances that made the different areas of the Sea truly unique and easy to distinguish - and true enough, a Drykas boy walked three paces ahead of him, his motions fluid, his steps quiet as he stalked the grass with his nose in the air, sniffing. The boy brought his index finger to his mouth to signal the need for silence, but then nodded.

”This place, there’s folks in our Pavilion call it the Weeping Rock,” the boy whispered in a heavily accented common. He had bad teeth and way too many freckles for his own good, but Leo found him likable all the same. ”Here, look, sir.” He gestured for Leo to come closer and pointed at a patch of grass right in front of him. Dew still shone dimly in the pale morning light. Leo’s boots rustled against the green carpet, uncaring of the sound emitted - it would take a true apex predator to pose a serious threat to him now. He knelt down by the designated area and parted the blades of grass with his gloved hands.

He sucked in air upon finding what was hiding underneath. A slab of grey rock, unlike any terrain within five hundred miles of that place. A massive thing, too, over five meters across and vaguely circular, with a grainy texture but clear-cut edges ruling out any chance of a natural occurrence. ”i take it you named it that for a reason,” Leo murmured, still entranced by the discovery. Behind him, the boy fidgeted with the cloth of his shirt, uncomfortable with the topic. ”People come here and then they’re just gone,” he said in a low, hushed voice, ”My cousin twice-removed says he heard old Pat talk about the Weeping Rock around a campfire. Granted, he was drunk, but he said his grandfather had heard the stone cry back when he was young.”

”Who am I to doubt old Pat,” Leo shrugged, then frowned and pointed at a slight disturbance in the grass, not far from their location. ”Those tracks?” The boy slid over the plant life like a phantom, gave the tracks a cursory glances and nodded with barely concealed anxiety. ”Yes, sir. Glassbeak tracks. Quite fresh. Going towards the rock.” The news had Leo barely suppressing a smile, which the boy did not fail to notice. ”Glassbeaks are nothing to laugh at, sir! They can gut you and start eating your bowels before you’ve even touched the ground,” he said, indignant. Then again, every man, woman and child in a Pavilion had lost someone to a glassbeak.

Leo ignored him altogether, and closed his eyes instead. Breathing slowly, he traced his fingertips against the cold surface of the rock. Allowing his sensitivity to unfurl like a sail in the wind, he tasted the air around him with his gnosis. The stench of sick emotions wafted back to him almost right away, tugging at his core with its miasma. Feelings long gone bad, rotting from the inside, being denied release. Fear that smelled like cold sweat, hunger reminding him of hot bile, unspeakable despair blind even to itself. Leo gave a deep sigh. This must be the place Ivak wanted cleansed.

Leo Zaital understood. He reached into his money pouch and fished a single gold-rimmed Miza. He clutched it in his closed fist, eyes still shut, as he recited the words to his prayer - the one that had sprung forth from his heart when he first met Eosi Barlowe.

“Let me be the one that keeps the cold at bay,
give me strength, make me deadly, help me nurture,
let me give and let me take, let me blaze and let me crackle,
spare me nothing, feed me evil, let me rise and let me cleanse,
and even if I should not live to see the morning,
let me burn in the memory of tomorrow's fire.”

He opened his eyes. The Drykas boy was watching him as one watches a natural disaster unfold, with a mixture of terror and fascination. ”A bit dramatic, perhaps,” Leo conceded, ”but it comes with the job. You have done well, boy. I suggest that you now leave and do not turn back. Here, for your trouble.” He flicked the Miza his way, and the young Drykas caught it more by reflex than because of any conscious decision. He let out a surprised yelp as he touched it, and started juggling it from one hand to the other. ”It’s hot!” Leo’s eyes narrowed at that. ”Some would call that a powerful metaphor of life. Go now.”

The boy finally managed to pocket the Miza, nodded frantically and scrambled for it. Just as Leo had suggested, he never turned back. Ivak’s champion stood straight and regarded the horizontal slab of rock for a long moment. A flash of intuition washed over him, no doubt brought about by Xhyvas’ gnosis mark showing him the hidden potential of things. He saw this contraption for what it was - a door. And recently, this gluttonous door had swallowed a glassbeak whole. Maybe it would have a taste for Leo, as well - and find him rather hard to digest. The champion’s first thought was to just shoot firebolts at it till it opened, or broke (a tactic he had never grown completely out of), but he had no wish to set the Sea of Grass on fire, and he had to let go of the idea. The second plan was only marginally less direct than the first.

”Let me in.”

The wind rustled in the grass, stealing his voice away. There was no reply.

”I said, let me in.” Again, no reply. He could just picture Eosi smiling at this fiasco behind his back. A part of Leo regretted not having her by his side that day, but surely there was no need to get her involved without necessity. This was all in a day’s work for Leo; he would no doubt fall asleep next to her that night, victorious. But then, little did he know he would pay dearly for such arrogance.

”Let me in or else,” he growled, his consciousness expanding well underneath the surface of Mizahar, looking for active fault lines. This being Cyphrus, the power was nowhere near what he might have wielded in Kalea, but pressure could be found virtually anywhere, and once found, it could be released. The earth rumbled darkly under his feet, shaking with the world’s heartbeat. Leo bit on his lip, ready to unleash even more power, when all of a sudden a distinct sound could be heard from beyond the rock. A light cacophony of people weeping. ”Well,” the champion muttered, ”looks like you’ve been vindicated, old Pat.”

The rock began to slide sideways with a groaning of stone.

[Leo Varniak]

The light of Syna shone into the opening revealed by the dislodged rock, illuminating the start of a long flight of stairs digging deeper into the underground of Cyphrus. Each step seemed planned with care, purposefully chiseled with unchanging proportions. It was, however, the voices that caught Leo’s attention - a soft crying originating somewhere nearby, past the few steps touched by sunlight. Female voices, young sopranos, sounding like they were in some heart-wrenching distress. Yet something about the whole thing felt off, fishy; Leo frowned. Only one way to know.

He took the first step down, ready to be swallowed by the long tunnel into the bowels of Mizahar. The cries intensified slightly, but there was no visible source to the sound. He ventured a little deeper, eyes darting across the walls, until he crossed the sunlit patch and marched on into the dim remainder of the passageway. No humidity moistened the earthen walls; no signs of moss or any other organic growth. The voices sounded very close by now, wailing at some abstract pain. Leo’s eyes focused on a strange box-shaped implement protruding from the ceiling right in front of him, and he had to conclude the voices came from the box. At that very time he realized what it was that felt so strange about them.

”They’re… repeating?” He listened to the crying with undivided attention for a long moment, taking notice of the exact time when it started to loop. And then there was the high-pitched lament again, the almost-musical fugue of the other two voices, the indistinct syllable, the short silence, all over again. A terrible suspicion began to form in his mind. He outstretched his index finger, doused it in Res and set it alight, creating an improvised torch out of his own left hand. The fire was the life. Its light cast dancing shadows around the box-shaped thing, and Leo could see it was metallic, criss-crossed with slits behind which some kind of taut animal skin was vibrating widely as it broadcast the crying voices. Leo reached out with his right hand and gave it a tentative knock.

The cries stopped at once. Instead, a loud chirping of birds emanated from the device. It too repeated after just a few seconds, causing Leo to bite on his lip. He gave it another knock, and was treated to the desperate neighing of a wounded horse. A dull rage began to rise within the champion. ”Bait,” he whispered to himself, ”different bait for different prey.” He looked over his shoulder - strangely enough, the door had not closed behind him and it did not seem as if it was going to do so in the near future. He had assumed it would try to seal him in as soon as he set foot inside, but apparently he had been wrong. Maybe he’d broken it with his antics?

Leo considered destroying the device, but decided against it: he wanted some element of surprise against whatever awaited down the stairs, assuming he was not being watched at that very time. He walked past the box and down the next step, and then the next and the one after that. The descent lasted more or less five chimes, only interrupted by the crackling fire that enveloped Leo’s left hand.

And then there was a short stone-paved corridor which soon opened into a large subterranean space. By now the cries from the device had become muffled and indistinct, but another noise had taken their place at the forefront of Leo’s attention. This one was all too real, a frenzied animal shriek that had the champion rush forward to understand where it came from. He found himself in a spacious hall, torches lighting the outer perimeter and braziers hanging from the tall vault-shaped ceiling. The air was stale, indicating a dearth of other ways out.

More importantly, the hall was lined with rows of sturdy-looking cages, roughly large enough to host a humanoid or a similar creature. Actually, to call them cages would be doing them a disservice; they looked far more complex than that. Solid-walled on three sides with bars on the front, their exterior was dotted with cogs, levers and other contraptions. They also seemed to buzz and hum ever so slightly as if on standby, but not quite sleeping. There was obviously some serious world magic at work here.

A raging glassbeak was, quite obviously, the source of the commotion. The beast kept clawing and biting at the bars of its narrow prison with mounting fury, but no success. No matter how much it threw its body against the cage, it would not budge. Right across from the glassbeak, in a different but identical cage, a dog - a patchwork-furred mutt of average size - waited with stoic resignation, a stark contrast to the wailing predator in front of it. Leo froze on his tracks, morbidly fascinated with the scene. Suddenly, he heard the noise of approaching footsteps and was quick to hide behind one of the cages. He peeked around the corner and saw a robed figure walk with measured dignity towards the glassbeak’s cage. He was carrying a basket in his right hand, and as Leo strained his eyes he could tell the basket contained a number of empty glass jars.

The figure stopped by the glassbeak and laid the basket down. Ignoring the beast hissing and clicking its teeth at him, he reached around the cage and pulled some sort of metallic cover in front of the bars, completely hiding the creature from view. Then, he did nothing but push a button somewhere on the left side and take a step back. And then it happened. The cage sprung to life and began to emit a loud whirring sound of rising intensity - so loud it covered the glassbeak’s desperate shrieks.

The device shook and stirred and turned and churned. The cries of fear turned into cries of pain. Not just ordinary pain. The pain of being ground into meat while still alive. The machine was implacable; it hammered and cut and tore and smashed and sliced - or at least Leo could imagine it doing so on the inside. It was only Ssena’s gnosis mark that allowed him to judge the situation objectively, or even he might have been afraid of this monstrosity.

It kept whirring long after the glassbeak had stopped making any noise, and finally it came to a leisurely stop. The figure nodded, picked up a jar from the basket and knelt by the cage, laying the jar next to a metallic protrusion that Leo understood to be a faucet. As the valve turned, a deep red pulp oozed out and into the jar. The man waited patiently for it to collect and fill up the container, then placed a wooden lid on top of the vessel and sealed it. He was about to start on the second jar when Leo finally had enough of it and stepped out of his hiding place.

”Step away from that thing,” the champion commanded, standing tall. ”I’ll even let you explain yourself like a normal human being.” The truth of which seemed more dubious by the moment as the figure turned and stood up, jar still in hand. He was human… was he? The skin, pasty and white, reminded of a Nuit, one of the undead, but Leo could see him breathing even when he did not speak. He had a gentle face with a fatherly smile that felt entirely inappropriate as he held a jar of still hot organic fluids. He had short, balding black hair partially covered by a black headband. Gaunt and thin, he wore an old-fashioned robe - silken and striped in yellow and black - the like of which Leo had never seen.

”Surely we all have to eat?” the man said in a high-pitched voice Leo could recognize as blatantly false in its politeness.

”Fair enough,” the Azenth growled, already at the edge of his patience. ”Except people have gone missing nearby and I am starting to see a pattern. Do you also have a taste for humans?”

”Once in the jar,” the man said with glee, ”you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference.” He dipped two fingers into the revolting fluid and sucked on them with abandon, giggling. ”I am Kurtz,” he said, as if that explained everything.

At that time, Leo knew the man had to die. He was past saving, only the flame could restore any value to his memory. When he spoke, it was with gravity. ”There’s an old tale about a lion who grows tired of hunting. He settles down in a cave and starts inviting all the other animals over. As they come in, he kills them all to eat them.”

”I know this tale!” Kurtz agreed with enthusiasm.

”But the fox, the fox sees plenty of tracks going in and no tracks coming out of the cave. She understands and walks away with her life.” Leo’s voice faded as he finished recounting the tale.

”Then,” the creepy figure quipped back, ”it would seem you’ve just wasted your opportunity to be the fox.”

Leo gave the faintest hint of a smile. ”You misunderstand. I am the lion. You are just squatting in my cave.” He lit his hand on fire. ”And now you die.”

[Leo Varniak]

It all happened in a flash. Leo formed a ball of Res in his hand, set it ablaze and threw it at a slight arc towards the being called Kurtz; a firebolt like countless before. The man, seemingly unfazed, lifted the jar and tossed it with calculated care, almost lazily; by some miracle, it intercepted Leo’s projectile in mid-air, making it explode in a bright red shower of fiery petals. The champion watched the blackened vessel fall towards the ground in slow motion, and it was with major surprise that he saw it shatter, spilling its dark fluids, well before it touched the cold, hard stone. Then he understood. A small solid sphere, no larger than a marble, flew straight through it and hissed its way towards his heart at remarkable speed.

Not only had Kurtz managed to block Leo’s spell without breaking a sweat, but he’d also used the jar to conceal his own Reimancy handiwork, allowing him to form an earth projectile and cast it unimpeded. There was no countering this, no dodging, no parrying. The champion’s eyes could see it, but his mind couldn’t prepare another spell in time. The only thing he could do, he did; he instinctively spread his left hand to cover his chest. The bullet pierced his palm, carving a wicked hole through glove, flesh, sinew and bone, and finally embedding itself in his ribcage, cracking two but having lost too much momentum to wound him fatally.

Leo staggered, eyes wide in shock, already bleeding profusely. ”Finished so soon?” Kurtz pouted, and gathered Res with beautiful regularity for a second attack. Leo simply couldn’t believe how fast this man was. There was no amassing of Res as much as a coordinated effort from every part of his being, the rivulets of polarized substance flowing together in fractal patterns. The sheer elegance of it was sublime. It had transcended the idea of casting magic and was well into the realm of being magic. It put anything Leo ever cast to utter shame - and not just him, either. He could not remember another Reimancer of this technical caliber. Such competence could only come from decades of daily drills performed under the guidance of an enlightened teacher. And the robes…

Ancient Alahean.

Leo saw the new projectile come to life in front of Kurtz’s barely outstretched hand. He saw it wiggle ever so slightly as it prepared to soar, eager to drink his blood and feast on his life. Clenching his teeth through the explosive pain, he conjured as much Res as he could on the index finger of his right hand and lit it into fire essence. It was a pathetic little flame, worthy at most of a candle, and it was also all he could muster given the circumstances. ”Make me deadly!” he screamed as he opened the floodgates of his heart of hearts and let the power of Ivak’s gnosis course through. That force - his birthright - had never let him down before. He felt it radiate from the mark on his back, invade his arteries and collect in his heart, feeding on burning rage. And as soon as it touched the tiny flame on Leo’s finger, it multiplied its potency beyond a mortal’s wildest imagination. The fire erupted forth, setting off a series of blazing explosions and engulfing everything under a red mantle of destruction.

Multiple shockwaves dislodged several of the cages; others were nearly melted by the heat, glowing red with the enormity of it. Fire fed upon metal and stone, even though such should never be the case in a sane world. Leo himself was almost blinded by the blaze, and found himself breathing heavily through the smoke. As the commotion died down and the raging fire began to gutter out, he strained his eyes to see what had been of Kurtz. And his world crashed once more when he caught sight of the pasty-skinned man standing still, unharmed, not having moved an inch from where Leo had last seen him. He looked like he was inside a soap bubble of sorts; he had apparently surrounded himself with a multi-layered shield of air interspersed with water. Leo had once entertained the possibility of such spells, but to actually see them performed without error and at a moment’s notice defied his very understanding.

”You certainly are a one-trick pony, lion of Ivak,” Kurtz smiled with the total indulgence of a professor holding class for a toddler. ”Do you fear the jar so much? Does the idea of becoming nourishment for Kurtz trouble you to this extent?”

”Die,” Leo growled, features contorted into a mask of anger and pain. He sensed that maintaining the protective bubble was keeping Kurtz from launching another attack, and took it as his cue to act. He shaped another firebolt, but this time coated it in an outer layer of air before casting it out with ferocity. The ball of fire crashed into the mage’s protective shield, the air veneer allowing it to break through all the various layers. And then Kurtz, who had doused his hand in air himself, simply swatted it away without a second thought. ”Don’t get me wrong, lion of Ivak. I appreciate what you’re doing. For someone so obviously self-taught such as yourself, you are actually quite admirable. Sadly, it is simply not enough for me.”

Leo’s blood kept trickling down into a growing pool on the floor. His heart pounding in his temple, his vision turning slightly blurred, his head feeling light and dizzy. ”I am not self-taught, you bastard,” he said, in between deep breathes, ”Ivak himself taught me in my dreams.”

”Is that so?” Kurtz smiled cruelly. ”You must taste like divinity yourself, then. I cannot wait.” The mage formed one more earth bullet and shot it right at Leo, who leapt to his side in an attempt to dodge. It ripped through the sleeve of his shirt and gifted him with a long gash down his left arm. He scrambled back to his feet, only to receive another projectile aimed at him. This one flew right past his head, tearing off the upper tip of his right ear. More blood gushed down the champion’s cheek.

”Sorry if I am making your agony unbearable… but bloodying the beast really does bring out the taste,” the wizard gave an apologetic smile as he prepared the next marble-sized concentrate of pain.

[Leo Varniak]

It had been a long time since Leo had last felt this helpless and at someone’s complete mercy; he could still remember watching his father Alvias get slaughtered at the hands of the newborn goddess, Ssena, far beyond his ability to help or support. This, however, was no goddess that he now faced against - just a mortal mage, no matter how good. Frustration consumed his psyche at being so completely outclassed in every department, pulsating in his mind with the physical pain of his wounds. He clenched his teeth, the shame of it all rising from deep within. There must be an opening, something he could do better than his enemy. If he stopped believing he could win this, then he was already as good as dead.

The next bullet flew true, and Leo took it with his left forearm - his hand already out of commission, it was the most expendable part of his body. Pain shot like lightning across his body, the bone cracking under the impact as the projectile actually ricocheted off, coated in vibrant blood. It dropped like an innocent pebble, a perfect sphere. A part of him wondered why not make them pointed, and thus much more likely to pierce through flesh, but then again this Kurtz seemed like the type to inflict sadistic damage just for the sake of it. Also, the roundness of it contributed to its insane casting speed, no doubt. Faster to form.

He could not just stand there and get killed. Desperately, he formed Res in the palm of his hand, but then his mind drew a blank - even if he got the spell completed, how could he possibly hit his opponent? Kurtz had demonstrated a mastery at disarming his greatest weapon, fire, and air seemed unable to get through either. Even in combination they hadn’t been enough. In frustration, all fragments of a plan long gone, he simply formed another firebolt and let it go, and then another and another. All flying in different trajectories, drawing serpentine trails of grey smoke as they were promptly nullified by tiny blobs of water appearing in mid-air. Intercepted without any conscious effort. Leo had been figured out. His possibilities, his limits, his quirks, his peculiarities.

”Be assured your death shall not be in vain,” Kurtz said in a jovial tone, ”you will be contributing to the advancement of humankind. We all help, each in our different ways.” He formed another ball of earth. Leo released another firebolt, which went wide and even missed its target.

’I’m here. Use me.’

Leo blinked, surprised, just in time to see Kurtz’s next inbound bullet and once again block it with his left arm. This time it dug deep into his biceps, spraying blood and sending another jolt of pain up and down his spine. Everything looked blurry, all sounds fuzzy and distant, like he was finally approaching Dira’s door. Whispers crawled at the edge of his consciousness as he drifted into overgiving - and again, that soft voice calling to him.

’I’m here. Use me.’

The mage cleared his throat. ”Well, it is quite impolite to be playing with food to this extent. I guess this is it, then.” The newest dart he fashioned into a long, sharp sliver, designed for deadly intent. He pointed it at Leo like a cruel compass leading the way to the country of dust. The Azenth could see it being formed and reformed in front of his eyes as the tiny voice continued to beg him to use… it. Was this presence calling to him from inside his heart? No, not quite - but close enough. It was something he had once known, he realized. Something he had visited while in a different state of mind. Something he had been and then forgotten because it did not match his reality. His lips parted slightly as a singular memory connected with him.

An earthen bullet whistled its deadly arc and pierced its target like a knife through hot butter. Kurtz gave a light frown at the cognitive dissonance of it all. Strange, for his blade of rock to still be hovering above his hand. His gaze traveled to the champion of Ivak, whose chest wound had resumed bleeding to a degree. Finally, Kurtz’s eyes traveled down and considered the hole in his own chest. His magical fragment of rock crumbled into nothingness. It was all clear now. The mage knew he had been struck by his own projectile.

Leo Zaital had not fashioned any material. He had simply taken the pellet still embedded in his chest - the very first one - and had shot it right back at his enemy; much faster and more efficient than reifying new material. But that was preposterous, because it would have required him to actually know earth. It was not something you could just improvise during a fight to the death. Of course, Kurtz could not have known that, descending into the depths of Mount Skyinarta to free Ivak from his prison, Leo had been transformed into an elemental spirit of sorts. He had been earth himself. He had not learned; he had remembered.

”How is this…” the pale Alahean began, rasping.

”You talk too much,” Leo bit on his lip, hard enough to draw blood, and focused his Res on the ball of rock buried in his left arm. Locking onto it, he forcefully tore it away from his flesh through the entry point and willed it towards Kurtz’s head at the speed of thought. It crushed his right eye in, coming out clean on the other side. The mage went down like a broken puppet, unmoving. Leo stood there, panting, for a long moment, almost basking in the stickiness of his own blood. A philosophical comment made it to his tongue as he allowed himself to breathe. ”Dumbass.”

A swift barking brought him back to reality. Still feeling dizzy and drained from the fight, he turned and saw the dog, still sitting in the cage where it had been all along, having somehow survived the bloody confrontation that had taken place here. No discernible breed evident in its appearance, it (a male, most likely) wore an old-looking, discolored collar. It barked again, as if signaling its desire to be freed from its cage. Leo gave a curt nod. ”Of course, of course.” Unsteady on his feet, he walked up to the cage and got the door unlocked with his one good arm. The dog leapt out, looked up at Leo and wiggled its tail, seemingly happy.

”How did you even wind up here?” Leo said softly, even the act of talking rendered difficult by the multiple wounds he had taken and the pain that came with them. ”Never mind, let’s get out of here. It’s no place for either of us.” He turned towards the corridor leading up, to the familiar light of Syna. He needed immediate medical attention, but none of the wounds he had taken seemed critical enough to endanger his life. All in all, it could have been much worse. He probably would never know who this mage was, and what he had been doing here in the Sea of Grass, so far away from home in both time and space. But he had won the day, and nothing else really mattered.

The soft rustling of silk froze him where he stood. Unwilling to believe, unprepared to believe, he turned his head ever so slowly.

Kurtz was getting back on his feet, still with that languid smile on his face. Leo could see through the hole in his head, though there was nothing to see there: his cranium was an empty hollow. The champion of Ivak felt his knees buckle at the sight.

”Truly a meeting of impossibilities, wouldn’t you agree?” the man proclaimed in that overzealous voice of his. ”But then, the impossible is just a matter of context, of when and where. Here and now, such things are not impossible.”

”What… what the petch are you?”

”I am Kurtz,” the man said, as if that explained everything. ”I am a shaper of worlds, a demiurge, and I have seen into your dark, shriveled heart, lion of Ivak. I apologize for my earlier behavior; you are certainly not destined for the jar. No, I have other uses for the likes of you - eventually.”

Leo swallowed, mentally preparing to continue the fight, but the other did not seem immediately hostile anymore. ”I invite you to visit my humble worlds. How many can you break before you are broken in turn? How many before you crack and lose yourself? We shall see.” Kurtz gave a long, excessive polite bow and then collapsed, turning back into a corpse as if this interlude had never taken place.

Except it had.

[Leo Varniak]

For three long chimes there was no sound to be heard across the hall save for Leo’s labored breathing and the dog’s own light panting. He stood motionless, teeth clenched, his only good arm trained on the corpse, ready to drown it in fire if he had to, and yet unwilling to do so if he didn’t. There was no way to know what might happen - what sort of trigger might be set off, and he was in no shape to sustain another fight. Eventually, he began to retreat, walking backwards. His eyes never left the fallen figure of Kurtz; there was too much here that he did not understand. The dog followed him wheezing, almost lazily and pretty much unperturbed.

Once he made it to the stairs, Leo turned his head just enough to confirm that the exit was still open. It seemed to be. Eager to leave this uncanny place behind, at least long enough to regroup, get healed and come up with a plan, the champion made short work of the steps and emerged on the outside with visible relief on his face. The sunlight blinded momentarily, but the sensation was more than welcome. Around him, the Sea of Grass continued to exist as it had for centuries, vegetation rustling in the light breeze. A cloud passed by, high above. The Azenth relaxed and began looking for his horse, Ember. The Sanctuary-bred Firemane was nowhere to be seen. Leo whistled in an attempt to attract her, but nothing happened. There was no reply.

Leo searched his immediate surroundings for a carcass - a sad possibility, but a very real one in the Sea of Grass. He could not have been away for long, but still long enough for a predator to have had its way with Ember; she would be sorely missed if that was the case. Yet there were no more traces of a dead horse than of a live one, nor any indication of a quick flight from an approaching menace. Nothing whatsoever. Leo could only conclude that the Drykas boy had taken Ember with him as he’d left, perhaps fearing for the horse’s safety… a very Drykas thing to do, however offensive. Leo knew where to find the boy; he could easily ask him in person after getting a healer to look at his wounds. They had stopped bleeding for the most part, but that didn’t mean they had stopped hurting. The pierced hand, in particular, looked like quite a grievous thing; Leo couldn’t bring himself to remove the glove to examine the crimson mess in greater detail. It would likely take someone with two or even three marks of Rak’keli to completely undo this level of damage.

He could still reach Riverfall on foot, he told himself, and hopefully before dark. With that thought in mind and the dog strangely still following him around, he estimated a general direction and began marching. It was, unfortunately, a very short march, because after a scant five chimes had passed, he stopped abruptly. Or rather, he was stopped abruptly. He did not immediately realize it, either - one moment he was striding on as rapidly as his wounds let him, the next moment he was sprawled on the grass, flailing his arms in pain. He rolled sideways, instinct kicking in as he readied himself for a counter-attack, sure as he was that he had been hit by some unseen enemy.

But there was nothing here, not even an enemy.

Cautious, he got back on his feet and took a step forward. He found himself unable to, as if he had just come across a hard surface - an invisible one. He pressed his hand against it, finding it repelled by what looked like a wall of thin air. ”What the…” He applied more strength, to no avail. He tried to bash it with his shoulder, to no avail. He kicked it, to no avail. He stepped back and shot a firebolt at it, and it crashed into it. To no avail. Leo had a decent background in magical theory (even if only by post-Valterrian standards, as Kurtz had made all too evident), but he couldn’t remember any magic or gnosis that could seal a place away from the rest of the world. Not like this. A terrible suspicion formed in the back of his mind as he placed his hand on the invisible barrier and began to walk alongside its perimeter, searching for an opening. The dog kept following him at a distance.

Little over a bell later, he had walked a full lap inside the wall, back to where he’d started. With a grand total of zero openings discovered, to boot - he appeared to have been locked in this area of the Sea of Grass by powers unknown, a couple square miles of nothingness with Kurtz’s cave lying approximately in the middle. The gravity of the situation began to set in - marooned, alone, wounded, hungry, thirsty. ”Boss…” he murmured through the powerful link that connected him to Ivak, truly worried for the first time since he’d made it back from Kalea. But if Ivak received the message, even he stayed silent. Leo felt unbearably alone.

He sat in the grass, completely at a loss. His wounds were aching, he felt dizzy and confused. The sun was setting. The dog sat down right in front of him with a light bark. Leo frowned. ”You taken a liking to me or something? I’ll eat you if I have to.” But as he said so, Kurtz’s unpleasant voice rang from a recent memory he wished he didn’t have. We all have to eat. It brought him a recollection of the filthy jar and he felt no better than the monster he’d just taken out. Or appeared to.

Leo watched the sun set and the day turn to night. With no other living creature nearby, he was at least reasonably safe; he pulled his cloak close as the temperature dropped, more out of a reflex than any actual need, and waited out the dark. The pain from his wounds kept him awake, and finally he decided to do something about it. With no prospect of healing in the short term, he should at least avoid them getting infected, so he did it his way - by setting each of them on fire for a brief moment. Watching the fire devour the hole in his left hand felt unsettling, but better than the alternative of letting the wound fester. He bandaged it as best he could, with a shred of his cloak. The chest wound he cauterized, but did not dress. He did not know how to, and cursed himself for his lack of preparation.

The pain allowed him no respite and no sleep throughout the night. At daybreak he stirred, sore and restless. He sucked the dew off the blades of grass, relishing even the tiniest droplets. It did not quench all of his thirst, but it could make a difference. He stood, furious, and regarded the dog as it calmly looked up at him. Leo grunted and reluctantly picked the animal up with his right arm, sheltering it from what was to come. ”Kurtz!” the champion screamed at the uncaring nature around him in the pale light of the dawn, ”so this would be your so-called world? I’ll show you what happens when you anger a Zaital!” Breathing in, Leo focused all of his frustration at the situation and let go of it in one, sudden burst of release.

And the Sea of Grass was on fire. It spread out from Leo like a curse, devouring and consuming in tall pillars of heat and flame. The fire put the sun to shame in the dim lighting as it ate through the vegetation, killing anything unfortunate enough to be alive. And life became death, and flowers became ashes, and wood became smoldering embers. Leo embraced the power, his face lit up by the blazing flames: he had become death, a destroyer of worlds. The Sea of Grass burned for the better part of the morning; by noon, even the smoke had largely dispersed, allowing him to gaze upon his handiwork. There was nothing left here save black ashes, a lake of crying cinders. He had walked into a fertile bastion of nature and made it into a wasteland. Leo Zaital was also this.

Surprisingly, the dog did not mind. It did not move as Leo exploded. It was not afraid of the flames. It could not have understood, but at least it did not judge. By now it was clear to Leo that this was no ordinary dog.

But not even the gnosis had been able to penetrate the barrier; the grass on the other side persisted, unaffected by the raging explosions. Leo walked through the cooling ashes, feeling the pointlessness of it all. He had destroyed everything, accomplishing nothing. Was he to die here, alone and surrounded by a testament to his own futile rage?

The dog barked, pointing at the entrance to Kurtz’s cave and rousing Leo from the dark place where his mind was. The champion blinked and stared at the canine. ”You trying to tell me something?” Somehow this did not seem so strange anymore. ”You may as well be right,” the Azenth conceded. Always relapsing into his old mistakes, responding to the unknown through destruction rather than understanding. He didn’t need fire now, but answers, and there was no place to look for them except deep down in the cave where he’d left Kurtz’s body. The mage had spoken of ‘worlds’ - plural - which implied the ability to relocate from one to another. Leo still wasn’t sure where he was, or whether he was still on Mizahar, but he felt this bit of knowledge was the key. If Kurtz - the real one, at least - had multiple worlds at his disposal, he must know of a way to travel across all of them. A way out.

”Let’s go ask him,” Leo nodded, and set out to look for the truth.

[Leo Varniak]

Kurtz’s body was still where he’d left him, splayed out in a grotesque bundle of limbs. Leo walked across the large subterranean hall with slow, measured steps; their echo filled the otherwise silent space between the mechanical cages. The braziers and torches were still burning despite no-one being around to replace and replenish them. As a connoisseur of the flames, it also surprised him to see them burn so vividly despite the stale air and lack of ventilation. It was all very odd. Leo fully explored the perimeter, looking first for any sign of exits and finding none. This in itself was puzzling - Kurtz had to have come from somewhere. But no matter how hard he searched, how carefully he felt the stones for secret passageways, he found nothing. Square hall, only one exit, and to him it had been an entrance.

His search was complete and fruitless, save for one thing. Unpleasant as it was, he had kept it for last, but he couldn’t further postpone it. His dark eyes focused with both disdain and unease on the mannequin-like corpse in the middle of the room, the broken jar resting next to it. The smell of rotting organic matter emanating from its spilled contents. Leo sighed - he wasn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty, but he’d rather confront a Druvin than do this right now. Still, he approached the body with due caution and squatted next to it, taking a closer look at Kurtz’s unnaturally pale facial features. He gave the cheek a light slap to see if anything unusual happened; he felt the slight resistance from muscles gone into rigor mortis, but there was no other reaction.

Winning over his own reluctance, he began to undo the mage’s robes, trying to keep his mind entirely scientific and focused on the task at hand - Ssena’s mark protected him against fear, but definitely not from disgust. He made a discovery right away as he noticed a long scar running vertically down Kurtz’s hairless torso. It went all the way from the base of the throat to the pelvis, and appeared to have been caused with deliberate intent by something extremely sharp. ”Surgery? Leo tossed the robes aside and the creature’s naked body was fully exposed for him to study; for it was difficult to call it a man now. The genitals seemed to have been removed and replaced with a hole that encompassed the anus. A multitude of various wounds had been stitched closed over and over again. The hole in the chest, caused by Leo’s first blow, had leaked only a slight amount of reddish fluid. This contrasted with everything Leo knew about the Nuit. No, this wasn’t one.

He needed to know more. He gathered Res in his mind, this time subconsciously applying the principles he’d seen used against him: not just a lump of essence, but a coordinated effort from his entire being, with every part of his body contributing to the effort. He thought he noticed a slight, but definite improvement in speed as he formed a thin, elongated shape in his mind. Breathing out, he reified it into earth - he could actually use earth now! It still didn’t feel as natural as fire and air did, but if past experience was any indication, familiarity would come with time and practice. He gripped the improvised scalpel in his right hand and observed it for obvious defects. The blade was slender and tapered to a point, sharp throughout its length. Too sharp for actual combat, where it’d just break, but perfect for this. Perfect for an autopsy.

”Oh, the joys of life,” he muttered under his breath at the thought that right now he could have been in bed, enjoying Eosi’s warm embrace. But no, he was about to cut up another perversely modified ancient mage. He performed a deep incision over the vertical scar running down the middle of the chest, and pried it open with his hands. It gave way easily, almost too easily, like a sheet of rubber. The sickening noise of flesh and cartilage being shuffled around made him queasy, and he was almost thankful he was doing this on an empty stomach. Underneath a layer of atrophied muscle, Leo saw a peculiar setup that he was pretty certain did not match the normal anatomy of the human body. The digestive tract was basically a long, grayish tube-looking thing that coiled several times around itself and formed a knot or two. He may not have been an expert, but several organs were missing altogether, Leo thought. No liver, no real stomach, no spleen, no kidneys.

But there were crystals, sticking out of the tissues at odd places. Leo grabbed at one and tore it off the piece of gut it was embedded into - the day kept getting better and better. It was a black prism, still emitting a soft amount of residual energy under the form of a light glow. As Leo moved it close to another crystal, they began reacting to each other, flashing with slightly greater intensity in a repeating pattern. ”Well, I guess this explains why he couldn’t eat his food whole,” Leo pondered. He lifted his eyes for a moment and saw the dog resting nearby, watching him with interest. He returned to his work. ”The more I think about this, the more it looks like some kind of mummy. Except it was mummified while it was still alive. Little by little, maybe. So it never really died.” He realized he was talking to the dog but didn’t care.

”Let’s check the head.” Gingerly, he poked the scalpel into the gaping hole where Kurtz’s eye used to be. Leo’s first impression during the fight had been correct. ”Empty. No traces of a brain.” Except, not quite. Rummaging inside, the earth blade caught with something hard; Leo lacked the finesse that came with experience, and solved his current predicament by hacking at the cranium with the blade, again and again. Thankfully the tissues were quite soft, and the forehead parted easily just above the eyes, allowing the champion a quick look inside like a pot whose lid had been removed. ”Hmm,” he hummed, moderately surprised. ”Wires.” There were indeed wires occupying that empty space, one attached to the back of the eye, several plugged into the spine, and a few more wrapped around what looked like a black pearl. Leo’s projectile had severed a couple of these, but he could still see the overall structure.

”I’ve read about this… magical wire before,” Leo commented dryly. He had no idea how it was made, but he knew it was used to transport Djed even across distances. ”Was this some sort of puppet, or…?” He reached into the open skull and ripped the small orb off rather unceremoniously. ”Your brain was… appropriately sized, I must say.” He held the item in his gloved hand and felt quite certain that it was made of the same crystalline material as the prisms he had found in the guts. ”Wish I’d gone to a real school. Maybe I’d know what this actually was.” But of course, Allistir Varniak had never wanted him to have an education - the bastard. Then again, school might not have helped here - he was looking at something too unique, too specific. Uncanny, deranged, yet superb in its own way. Leo now agreed that this warranted a champion’s intervention. He understood Ivak’s motivations.

Black pearl still in his hand, he gazed upon the sorry sight that was Kurtz’s mutilated body. He shook his head; one thought later, the mage’s remains were enveloped in flames and the acrid smell of charred flesh filled the room. ”Not that we’re any closer to a solution,” Leo had to admit. He had established nothing except that he had crossed paths with yet another form of evil to add to his collection. All he had was a piece of crystal still greasy with unidentified organic matter. Leo noticed it was still warm despite the Kurtz-doll having been dead for almost a full day, and that gave him a modicum of hope that it may still be of some use. It had been some sort of nexus that the creature carried inside its head, connected to both sensory organs - the eyes - and the actuating nerves of the spine. It had been a command center, then. Maybe this thing was Kurtz. He could try and take a walk with it and see if anything happened.

He decided against going outside. Kurtz’s body looked like it hadn’t seen the sun in a very long time, so he assumed it spent most of its time here, in the underground. Leo held out the pearl and once more went between the cages and along the walls. Patiently, over and over again. Less patiently, over and over again. Impatiently, over and over again. By the time he was only insisting out of a dearth of other ideas to try, the pearl buzzed softly in his hand. Leo froze in wonder and noticed he had been pointing it at one of the cages. A new possibility waded its way through his mind - he opened the torturous device and crawled inside. It had never occurred to him that the exit could be inside one of the deadly boxes!

And true enough, there were arcane symbols on the back wall of the cage that were not visible from the outside. Circles, triangles and various other shapes that left little doubt as to having further significance. The pearl hummed with increased strength as Leo brought it closer to the symbols; finally, they flared with true power as the crystal touched them. Hope flickered in him as the entire cage began to glow and the symbols turned a searing white. He reached out towards the back of the cage and his arm went right through, disappearing from view. He pulled it back and turned his head, meeting the dog’s gaze.

”I don’t even know what you are, but… come with me if you want to live,” Leo said, and went through the door between the worlds in one fluid motion. He could do this. He could navigate the breadcrumb trail until he found the real Kurtz, then he could deal with him and somehow find a way back to Riverfall. He had faced worse odds in his time, he told himself.

Then he realized he was suspended in mid air.

The view was breath-taking. Mountains, rivers, grasslands, beaches and an ocean so blue you would not believe. The privilege of watching the world from a cloud’s perspective was only given to a scant few mortals. Basking in the beauty of an untamed land, kissed by sunlight, grazed by the winds, watching it all unfold a mile or so below - words could not do it justice. It would be like explaining the color red to the blind: where would one even begin? Suffice to say, it was glorious. Infinity spreading in all directions. Feeling like a speck of dust floating in the cosmos.

Except Leo was forced to revise his initial assessment. He was not suspended in mid air. He was falling. Hard.

[Leo Varniak]

The only difference between flying and falling is in the landing, really - it’s something you can only tell after the fact. If you live to tell the tale, you may as well tell a tale you like, and say you flew, and flew true, but the heart of flying is really falling and being able to give an encore. As for Leo, till the last day of his life he would never be sure what to call this.

It’s not like he couldn’t do anything. The theory was all there; he had even daydreamed about the possibility before, in Wind Reach, when the idea of dropping into a chasm hadn’t looked so remote. He’d come up with precious few answers at the time, because a hard granite floor is a hard granite floor no matter what angle you’re looking at it from, but maybe, just maybe, it could be done on water. Not because water is any softer than granite when crashing into it at high speed from above - it isn’t - but because water, unlike granite, can be displaced. Probably. Possibly. If you’re lucky.

But you need to tick quite a few boxes before you can do that. First of all, and most importantly, you must not give up. It’s just a minority of people who would even stay conscious all the way to the ground; most would simply pass out from the sheer terror, or even die at the mercy of their own heart calling it quits (you have to know when to fold, my good pal). Leo considered himself brave, but in truth, he was nowhere as brave as he wanted. He might actually have lived to see the bottom, terrified and unable to concentrate as Djed slipped between his fingers, almost there but not quite, like a match that’s three sparks short of catching fire. Splat.

Except he was marked by Ssena. He could see the danger, in a detached sort of way, and he could even care about it, but he would not panic. He felt the air slap with ever increasing violence against his whole body, making it hard for him to even breathe. He could see the features on the ground - the shore, the rocks, the trees - slowly enlarge and then just a little faster. He could feel the blood rushing to his head as he plummeted vertically like an arrow. He spared one thought for Eosi and one for Ivak; the only people who would likely care if he died. It was as close to a will as he’d ever go. And then he fought.

The next step, again, involves falling (sorry, flying) into water. You don’t always get to choose this part, but luck is also a part of being alive, and this appeared to be Leo’s lucky day, in a very unlucky sort of way. He was pretty much above the sandy beach, and had a hard time deciding if he was going to hit the solid ground or the liquid. By the time he could be certain, it’d be too late to do anything. Which brings us to the next part: being able to steer your downward flight. Perhaps a better Reimancer than he might be able to float, generate enough of an air current to keep themselves in the air, at least for a little while. A lighter race, say a Pycon, would be good for that. Even so, countering all the speed he’d already acquired would be too great a task for pretty much any mortal wizard. All he could do was steer, and that’s all he did. Just a push of Air, and then another and a third one.

Things were still looking almost as grim, but now Leo saw himself on a clear collision course with the ocean. Next, he considered the matter of how deep the water was; and here he could give himself no answer beside ‘hopefully deep enough.’ Given how big and scary the ground was getting, there was no more time for further corrections; he had to begin work on the survival cocoon now, or face certain death. Leo drew Djed like never before (or so he felt), using the newfound tricks he’d learned from fighting Kurtz. He fashioned a chrysalis of thick air around his body, expanding it outwards as much as humanly possible. It was like his entire body was breathing and exhaling as it flew, with a few strands of unchanged Res keeping the structure close to his body and preventing it from dissipating right away.

There was no way to know how much was enough. Very likely, no amount in the world was enough. He fashioned the cocoon in such a way as to reach down, long and thin, like a drill. Longer and thicker - so thick, in fact, that he was starting to have trouble breathing. People dismiss air as light and vacuous, but that’s just because of how little there is of it. As with all things, the dose makes the poison.

And then he was out of time. He inhaled as best he could, bracing himself for the inevitable impact. It was a gorgeous day of sun and breeze, but the sea had never looked so monstrous and uncaring to him.

Do you honestly expect to survive this?

He blinked.

No.

The crash deafened him. In retrospect, it meant he was still alive, but that was about it. He attempted to keep his air cocoon from disintegrating as he sank into the sea, and suddenly everything around him went grey and dark. The air he had conjured was being pushed up, disrupting his setup and punching him from every angle as well as being ejected in all directions, but this was exactly the point of it. Every bit of energy that got dispersed was energy not going through his body.

He could faintly see foam and bubbles and walls of dark water raging against his shield, heating up from the sheer friction. A normal human might have been boiled in the process, but he was Ivak’s champion. Heat was never really a problem, which he was thankful for. Still, he was going down fast, not as fast as before, but very fast. And he’d not crashed very far from the shore, which meant he was soon to hit the -

He smashed into it, in a shrapnel of sand and pebbles. The upside was that it wasn’t a hard granite floor, but rather a hard basalt floor, which was no upside at all. Well, at least he did not get skewered on some spike. He came to a stop and for a moment found himself, miraculously conscious, lying belly down on a blanket of rock and ancient shells. He knew it’d be an instant or two before the pain would flare, but he didn’t even have that long a respite.

He just felt a single drop of water trickle down his cheek. With no further warning, the shield gave out in a hundred thousand raging bubbles, and the dark blanket of water enveloped what was left of him.

[Leo Varniak]

The air smelled like ash and nostalgia. This was so strange, Leo thought. He could not quite understand what was going on, but it seemed wrong somehow. Like reading some book someone ripped a few pages off here and there. Unable to even feel his body at all, he tried to open his eyes, with little success at first. He was floating in his inner world, completely severed from the outer one. All sensation forgotten, all purpose abandoned, he wondered if this was death felt like - just endless drifting through nothing, alone with your soul that’s both the vessel and the helmsman.

A soft whisper caught on the edges of his perception, but Leo could not make out what it said. He attempted to move his mouth and ask something, but nothing came of it and he soon lost the will to try. Just when he was about to pass out again, the voice whispered again in his ear. ”Leo.” The sound of his own name being spoken amidst the cosmic silence startled him, and he once more made an effort to get his eyes open. This time he could feel something stirring and wanting to move there, budging ever so slowly to reveal a murky off-white light that wasn’t much better than the dark.

There was a patch of blurry shadow in the middle of his field of vision that seemed to coalesce into a figure standing over him. It looked nostalgic somehow; the sense of familiarity shook his soul even before his mind could begin to decide why. The voice, too; it was one Leo had only heard a few times before and one he wished he could have heard more of it. ”Leo,” it repeated, a little more urgent. The misty figure solidified into a man wearing priestly robes still stained with blood.

”Alvias,” Leo murmured, and then switched to the proper form of address. ”Father.”

The resemblance between the two men was subtle, but undeniable. Alvias carried the burden of a lifetime spent on his quest and it showed on his weary face, but in his youth he must have looked a lot like Leo - the same mouth, the same cheekbones. He stood slightly taller than his son, but was also a little more heavily built. They were both floating in the indistinct dimness of non-being.

”Leo,” the man said, bending a little closer to his face. His neck was wrapped in thick white bandages, but those did not keep the blood from seeping through and reminding Leo that his father had been decapitated by the goddess Ssena.

”Am I dead?” Leo asked, his own voice a stranger to him.

”That is not the question you should be asking, son.” The older Azenth shook his head. ”The right question is, can I stand? Can I go on? Ask yourself that.”

In a rare display of obedience, Leo did just that. ”I don’t know. Everything feels so heavy. I can barely move my lips.”

”This is nothing,” Alvias said. ”Many generations of great men and women, all dead, are counting on you. They teeter on the edge of having fallen in vain, forgotten in obscurity. Only you can change that. You are a mechanism that has been in the works for centuries. Now you must function, son.”

”Every time I’ve ‘functioned’, father,” Leo replied, some sort of resentment building up in his core, ”I’ve killed more of those great men and women. All those times where I thought I was making progress? Turns out I just trading one piece for another. Petch, the exchange wasn’t even favorable most of the time. The whole ‘bred to do what we couldn’t’ angle is not going to cut it anymore. Ivak is free. Perhaps I should just keel over and die now.”

”Perhaps you should. But can you?” Alvias smiled. ”Fire doesn’t ask permission to burn. It just does. It will keep you getting up as many times as it needs to. It will squeeze the last ounce of greatness out of you until you have nothing more to give, and then it will discard you like everyone else before you. But man, will you be magnificent until that happens.”

Leo sighed. ”I knew it.” With extreme effort he pulled himself up into a sitting position, looking the other man in the eye. ”You are not Alvias. He was an appalling father, but he never wished for me to be just a tool.” He took a deep breath. ”Show me your real face, imposter.”

”As you wish,” the other one said. He brought his hands to his face, cupping it before he started digging into it with savagery. His nails ripped the skin off, revealing another bloodstained face underneath. It was Leo’s, but twisted into a mad tangle of expressions.

”Does this somehow make it easier on you?”, it sneered. ”And here I wanted to be all nice and poetic-like. I forgot we’re the guy who will rub salt in our own wounds to get stronger. Come on now, get your shyke together and let’s resume our pilgrimage through the valley of shadow of petching death. Or do you need to beat me up a little first?”

Leo thought about it for a moment, then he nodded. ”Yes.” And he punched the figure in the face, knocking it down. ”Let’s go.”

He opened his eyes, and he was drowning in a dark coffin of water. Thinking nothing, understanding nothing, he acted on pure instinct. His mentor, long before, had told him about the rudiments of empirical science and how hot things tend to be lighter than cold things, but this had nothing to do with why he activated his gnosis mark. He did it because he was confronted with the hostile unknown, and this is how he always reacted - by crushing it.

His mark liberated an obscene amount of heat in all directions. The water began to bubble and boil around him, and yet it grew hotter still. He was flaring like he never thought he could. Underneath the sea he was unleashing his own little Valterrian, and the hot water rose and he rose with it. A gigantic plume of vapor shot out of the waves, and Leo was catching his breath right in the middle of it, surrounded by hundreds of dead fish, all steamed and cooked to perfection.

He was alive, and as angry as any man who’s just been punched in the face should feel. He was in pain, but there is no upper limit to pain. Kurtz was going to find out.

[Leo Varniak]

What followed was a blur. Leo propelling himself towards the shore through the power of his gnosis, finally planting one foot in the sand, then the other. Shambling past the cresting waves and leaving two final footprints in the lonely gold tinted beach. Collapsing there under an alien sun, too tired even for pain, wondering if he’d ever open his eyes again.

His sleep brought no further dreams, and how long it lasted, he did not know. His body just flipped a switch when it decided it was safe for his mind to show up again, and it did not happen slowly. Leo’s eyes shot open, and he gasped upon finding himself somewhere else entirely. He was indoors, lying on a pile of straw in the middle of what looked like a small hut. The walls were flimsy things, cobbled together with crude mud bricks left to dry in the sun; the roof was also straw laid upon a foundation of long, thin branches. There was no door, but a rough fabric curtain of a dreary brownish color hung from the only opening in the hut, providing a minimum of privacy. The only furnishing consisted of a chamberpot.

Leo tried to get up. His body said no, it would rather him not. He looked down his torso and saw crude bandages in the form of palm leaves and dark fabric gauze wrapped around his upper body as well as his wounded hand. At least someone had tried to take care of him, though he wished it’d been someone with a little more civilization in them. He rolled sideways and let out a low grunt of discomfort. As if in response to that sound, a figure moved the curtain aside and stepped into the hut - causing Leo’s jaw to go slack for a moment.

The woman - for it was a woman - was apparently a mixed blood human, except it was difficult to say just what it was mixed with. She was tall and slim, but strongly built, with well-defined muscles shaping her arms and legs. Her skin was a deep brown and her hair an unkempt, shoulder-length mane of black, for the most part. That is, the parts of her skin that did not look like they had been grafted from an alligator. Glossy green scales covered one side of her face and the entirety of her right forearm down to the hand, which ended in a razor-sharp claw. Her right eye was a reptilian golden and seemed to move independently of the left. When she opened her mouth, she revealed a row of pointy teeth which Leo thought was way too many for a human.

”Ah, you awake at last, wrak-sul,” she said matter-of-factly but slightly awed, one eye warm and one cold. ”Was starting to think your soul had given up on life.”

”My soul is a strange little thing,” Leo said with a grimace, feeling his body with his good hand to keep himself from staring at the creature. It would do him no good to anger the natives, and gods knew it was what he did best. ”Are you the one who patched me up? You have my thanks.”

”It was an honor, wrak-sul,” the crocodile woman replied. She bowed her head in respect; for all that she appeared to be wearing yellow rags, Leo got the impression these were meant to be special rags. Important rags. ”I am Ishti, and we are the Diverse. We who are still alive salute you.”

”The Diverse?” Leo thought he’d heard this name before.

”Yes, wrak-sul. That is what we call ourselves, even though we are mere exiles. Please, do not exert yourself - there will be a time for explanations. Now you must recover your strength. Allow me to call for food.” Before Leo could stop her, Ishti flew out of the hut and clapped her human hand against the bestial one. ”The wrak-sul has risen!” he could hear the woman call out. ”Gather the clans! Send word to the king! Bring some food!”

One out of three things, he could agree with. He shifted uncomfortably in his straw bed and waited for his meal to be served, only to regret it as soon as it made its entrance alongside a burly Diverse man. He had bull’s horns and beady black eyes and liked to puff air with every breath. He was also carrying a crude iron platter with evident signs of rusting on which some sort of iron bowl was resting that was little better off for wear. The soup in the bowl looked dark as petroleum and just as appealing, with strange bits and pieces floating around. The smell was… pungent, to say the least. Leo stared one second too long and the taurine man felt the need to punctuate his expectations. ”Eat, wrak-sul.”

”You made this?” Leo asked, uncertain.

”Life made this,” the Diverse replied with an unexpected philosophical angle. ”You must eat.”

Leo sighed, grabbed the bowl and brought it to his lips. He pretty much drank the whole thing without stopping to taste it. It seemed to stay down, which was better than nothing. ”An… acquired taste, I suppose,” he murmured as he returned the thing to the server.

”It is good,” the other one nodded, ”feeds the strong and kills the weak. Like life.” And with that, he turned on the balls of his feed and stomped out of the little hut.

His stomach now full of life (and feeling exactly that way), the Azenth prayed to Ivak - asking him to watch over Eosi while he completed his assignment - then closed his eyes and drifted into more of the same dreamless sleep. He woke the next morning feeling much stronger, and had to begrudgingly admit the soup was indeed as nutritious as the taurine chef claimed. He actually found the strength to get up and step outside of the hut, which was one of about fifty huts in the village. They all looked alike, aside from minor differences in size and orientation, and they all formed a circle around a big patch of dirt and sand that passed for the town square. Around the village were palm trees, more palm trees, a small river somewhere, and off in the distance the sea, more easily heard than seen. A big mountain deeper inland. And palm trees.

There were also four Diverse beating the snot out of each other in the square, with other tribesmen watching and cheering. One with a lion’s mane sent another one flying that had a beak and a single feather upon his head. A third one capitalized on this by kicking the fallen warrior while he lay on the ground.

”Did you sleep well, wrak-sul?” Ishti’s voice called out from behind. Leo turned to watch her approach, his attention still on the brawl unfolding not far from them-

”I’ve had worse, he said with a light frown. ”Why are they fighting?”

The crocodile Diverse gave him a blank stare, as if he were speaking a different language. ”They are not fighting.” A kick to the face made someone spit a tooth. ”They are bonding. Don’t you think they are adorable?”

And by now Leo knew he was in deep shyke. Once again he had traded a bad hand for a worse one, a lunatic for a bunch of lunatics. ”I see. Will anyone try to bond with me?”

”Oh, certainly not, wrak-sul,” Ishti said, apologetic. ”They would not dare. You are amongst us, but you are not one of us. Touching you without your permission would be a sanctioned crime.”

That at least sounded good, Leo reasoned. ”Well, I think I’m ready for those explanations. Let’s start from the fact you all speak my language. I thought it was native to the place I come from.” The adorable noises of bonding continued in the background.

”Mizahar,” Ishti gave him an alligator smile. ”We know of that place. That is where you come from, am I correct? My kind has long been fond of working for yours. Your people would use wizards to call us from our mother world to theirs, so we could fight for them in their wars. I do not know what sort of wars. You’d never tell; we’d never ask.”

”You mean summoning then?”

”I mean when my kind would step into the swirling holes to go fight on the Great Battlefield, yes. That is what we call Mizahar. Not that I’ve ever seen it myself. It is lore that’s been passed down through the generations. We remember these tales with fondness but it causes us pain to know that our purpose is lost.”

Leo became pensive as he glanced at the Diverse lying in the dirt with a mask of blood on his face. The creature was likely done bonding for a while. ”So this is not your world. Nobody comes and summons you from here.”

Ishti shook her head. ”As I said yesterday, we are exiles. My mother before me and my grandmother before her. They were betrayed. Brought to this land with treachery, a swirling hole that did not lead back home. The clans that went to battle that day did not return. We have been here ever since.”

”Who did this to you?”

The Diverse pointed at the large mountain in the distance. ”The One Gods did. They lives on the mountain. They is named Kurtz.”