In the hazy space between waking and sleep, Wren imagined, for just a moment, that Ghveris’s arm was still wrapped around her. She could feel the warmth of his body, feel his chest expand and contract against her back with each breath he took.

  But when she crossed that unseen line between dream and reality, he was gone, and she was alone again. The dream stone was still clutched against her chest, as it was every morning. Most days, she could no longer decide whether Master Grenfell’s enchantment was a blessing or a curse. She hated it, because it was a symbol of everything she couldn’t have; but the thought of throwing it away or losing it gave rise to a kind of panicked desperation.

  With a sigh, Wren rolled out of her linen bedroll - really, closer to a bedsheet than a blanket - and began pulling on her boots. After three days of travel overland, they should finally reach the bay on the western coast of Varuna today. It had a name once, and according to Elder Aira’s memories, people had lived there, in a small town along the shore. But like most of the settlements in Varuna, it had either been devastated by war, or abandoned in the wake of what happened at Godsgrave.

  It was also one of half a dozen sites that should have had a waystone, and did not. They’d found the first five years ago, when one of the Mages Guild teams had tried to make the journey to an uninhabited island so far to the south that it was nearly as cold as Kelthelis. The records on the ring showed a waystone, but activating the sigil was impossible. It had taken a nine-month voyage, undertaken by no less than three ships, to finally get people to the island to find out what had happened.

  The waystone had been destroyed, and the V?dic machinery had been thoroughly looted. Since that expedition, they’d encountered the same thing again and again. It had become predictable enough, at this point, that Wren didn’t really have any doubt what she was going to find at the end of this journey; but she’d volunteered to lead the team anyway, because Great Bats could make this kind of overland trek more easily than any other Alliance forces. Unfortunately, spending every day in the air as part of a swarm of bats meant there’d been no question that she had to leave Ghveris behind.

  Wren brushed the flap of her tent aside and stepped out into the early morning campsite. Half a dozen other tents - little more than billowing lengths of linen, hung over a central rope and then staked to the ground to keep bugs out - surrounded a cook-fire, where Blossom was turning a few roasting birds on a spit. There was a bow and quiver of arrows resting on the earth at the young woman’s side, which made Wren narrow her eyes.

  “You didn’t hunt in your cougar form?”

  “I knew you wanted to get moving early this morning,” Blossom said, avoiding Wren’s eyes. “I thought it would be faster if I did things this way.”

  Wren found herself a patch of ground near the fire, and lowered herself down. The palace at Bald Peak must be making her soft: she found herself wishing for a nice, padded cushion and a hot cup of tea to wake up with. “You aren’t going to get more comfortable with that form if you don’t use it,” she pointed out.

  “I’m not certain -” Blossom paused at movement from another tent. One of the hunters who’d had first watch stumbled out, gave them a bleary nod, and then made his way off far enough that he’d be able to relieve himself without making it everyone else’s problem.

  “You’re not certain about what?” Wren asked.

  “I wonder if there’s something wrong with me,” Blossom admitted, lowering her voice. “I didn’t feel like this with my bat form -”

  “You were flying so young you probably can’t remember a time you weren’t,” Wren pointed out.

  “No one else seems to have trouble. You have five forms, Auntie Wren, and you’ve never had a problem with any of them.” Blossom’s shoulders slumped, but she kept a close eye on the roasting birds, turning the spit automatically.

  Wren sighed, reached out with her arm, and dragged the younger woman up against her in a side hug. “You can take the form, right?”

  Blossom nodded.

  “Then nothing is wrong,” Wren assured her. “The magic is working. Some animals are just more difficult to get used to than others. Did I ever tell you how many times I crashed when I first tried to fly as an owl?”

  Her niece shook her head. “No? I don’t think so. You got that one quite a while ago.”

  “Well, I’d made up my mind I needed some kind of flying form that made sense in the north ages ago,” Wren said. “At least as far back as when we hit the Tomb of Celris for the first time - there just never seemed to be a moment to do it. I was going back and forth between a gyrfalcon and a snowy owl for a bit, but I finally went with the owl. Anyway, I figured I already knew how to fly as a bat, so how different could it be, right?”

  “I’m guessing from the way you’ve set this up the answer is very different.” Blossom finally smiled, and Wren considered her task accomplished.

  “Feathers. Feathers make a huge difference,” Wren said. “You know once you get going, get a bit of height as an owl, you can just glide? But anyway, the only one who’d bothered to take a flying form other than bat who I could find was Ghveris, and he hasn’t actually used any of his in a thousand years. He’s also not the best at explaining how anything works, I’m not sure if you’ve ever noticed that.”

  Blossom lowered her voice. “Not like that. Do it better,” she said, in her best approximation of the war-machine.

  “Exactly.” Wren nodded, and gave her niece another squeeze. “All of which is to say, you’ll figure it out, just like all the rest of us do. Don’t worry so much. Now cut me off a bit of that bird and let’s see if it's done.”

  ?

  Not more than a bell later, they’d all had a chance to get something in their bellies and break down the camp. Wren made certain the cookfire had been thoroughly smothered before she took bat form, and then they were off, beating their wings against the morning air for height, putting their backs to the sunrise.

  They could have pushed on through the night and made the bay before dawn; it wouldn’t have been a problem. But as much as bat chirps were the perfect tools for navigating and hunting prey in the darkness, sound was an imperfect tool for examining V?dic ruins. Wren wanted everyone to have their eyes about them, and she was certain that the moment they landed they would be taking down notes - which required human fingers and a source of light.

  In some ways, their destination reminded Wren of Coral Bay - though of course without the college or the town. The water was that same bright cerulean color, so clear that you could see every crab scuttling along the sand six feet beneath the surface. The waves lapped gently and quietly, not at all the kind of breakers you saw at the northern ports, where the sea was dark and cold.

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  There was no reef, but the shape of the bay meant that there didn’t need to be. From above, as they came flying in, Wren could see that it was almost entirely enclosed by two rocky arms, leaving only a small gap of open water to the wide ocean. Gale-driven waves would break on those rocks, sheltering any settlement from the worst of any storm.

  A thousand years of wind, tide and rain had scoured away any traces of the town: to Wren’s eye, any stretch of beach was much like any other, with no particular sign to give away the traces of ancient foundations or roads.

  The place where the waystone had been, however, was clear enough. On the northern stretch of rock, just above the channel of open water which led out to the sea, a circle of white stone had been broken into dozens of pieces. Even from above, it was obvious what had happened.

  Wren beat her wings to slow herself down as she descended, shifted in midair, and landed in human form, her boots grinding fragments of mana stone beneath her weight. All around her, the other Red Shield hunters touched down as well, moving out across the rocks to establish a perimeter. Not that Wren actually expected to find any of Ractia’s cultists here: once they destroyed a waystone, that usually meant they were finished with a location, and had already taken everything they needed.

  “Take a look around,” she commanded. “Let’s see if we can figure out what they took this time. If you find any V?dic inscriptions, we’re copying those down, just like usual.”

  It was Flying Fish, one of the hunters who’d been rescued from Godsgrave eighteen years before, who finally found what they were looking for. When he’d insisted on taking the heart of a bull shark for his second form, there had been quite a bit of teasing, as Wren recalled; but today, he showed them all the use of it.

  “Great machines beneath the water,” Flying Fish gasped, once he’d pulled himself back up onto the stones, where he dripped saltwater. “Like the machinery at the bridge rift. When the waves push against the machines, it turns great blades, and that motion is used to create mana.”

  “The blades are still there?” Wren asked, and Flying Fish nodded. “Then they’ve taken what they wanted from the control room. Let’s see if we can find the entrance.”

  They did, eventually, beneath a slope of broken rock that she guessed had been left with the precise intent of hiding what she and her hunters were looking for. They had to spend the entire afternoon clearing rubble before they had the door exposed. Thankfully, Ractia’s cultists had long since broken open whatever locks and enchantments might have once been there, and there was nothing left to bar the hunters’ passage. Inside, they found a map on a glass pane, mounted on one wall, and a shaft leading down.

  Wren was certain what had been taken before they made camp in the control room that night, but it took three more days to record everything they’d found, including the map of the rift and notes on every inscription they could find.

  “Capacitors again,” she said, with a sigh. The word still felt strange in her mouth, even if Sidonie and Aira both insisted it was the best translation from the original V?dic. Perhaps it was because a word that no one had ever used before in Lucanian, cobbled together to serve their purposes.

  “They must have thirty or forty at this point,” Blossom said. “Even if a few of them turn out to be broken, it's an absolutely absurd number. I can’t even imagine how much of a mana charge that many could hold.”

  Wild Cat frowned. “Why don’t they just use mana stone? Is it because they can’t find enough?”

  Blossom closed her notebook, but kept one finger in between the pages to mark her place while she answered. “It’s for a completely different purpose. Mana stone, you fill up slowly over time, usually by just letting it rest inside a rift. Or a mage can fill it up themselves, to store mana for later. It takes a bit of effort to move mana in or out, and it takes a little time. Not much, but a little.”

  Wren sat back to listen, and didn’t even try to keep a smile from her face. Her niece was one of the few Red Shields who’d spent a year at the Bald Peak College. While Blossom would never be able to cast a spell herself, she knew the theories well enough that her presence on these expeditions had become invaluable. In fact, Soaring Eagle had become so convinced of the value in having hunters trained in the knowledge of enchantments, V?dic machinery, history, and the details of what mana beasts came from what rifts, across the world, that the chief had begun to not-so-subtly encourage the youngest members of the tribe to follow in Blossom’s path.

  “A capacitor like this isn’t intended to hold mana indefinitely, like mana stone does,” Blossom continued. “It’s meant to take in a lot of mana, all at once, and then shunt it out again. You want to be using it immediately. The only reason to have this many capacitors is that, first, you’ve got an absolutely huge source of mana, something that’s moving power around faster than a mana stone battery can handle without breaking, and second, you need to use it all to fuel whatever spell or enchantment you’ve got.”

  “None of which is a comforting thought when it comes to Ractia,” Wren said. “We don’t have the slightest idea what she could be planning that takes this much mana, and we also don’t know where she plans to get it.” She tried not to let the frustration show in her voice.

  They’d spent eighteen years scouting every waystone on the entire planet, while Ractia had simply sent her cultists directly to wherever she wanted. Wren didn’t know how they could have done anything better, but it meant that they’d gotten very used to coming in to find the traces of whatever the cultists had done in a given rift, rather than actually catching Ractia’s people in action.

  The entire time, they’d thought that sooner or later, they would find which waystone Ractia had fled to after the battle at Nightfall Peak. It might take years, but she would be at a rift, somewhere. It was only a matter of going down the list, using the map on the ring to check each and every waystone, one by one, until they located her new base of operations.

  But now there were hardly any waystones left to check. It should have been exciting: surely, one of these last few locations would be the one they’d been looking for all this time. And yet, Wren couldn’t help but feel like they’d been deceived somehow. That wherever Ractia had gone to, it wasn’t any of the places they’d been looking, perhaps wasn’t on the map Elder Aira had shown them at the ring at all. And as confident as Liv tried to be in public, Wren knew that, in private, her friend was feeling the same way.

  Flying Fish did a bit of ocean hunting on their last day, throwing three enormous fish with great spears at the ends of their snouts up onto the rocks to be cooked over a fire. Dragging enough wood out onto the rocks to actually roast the things took longer than Wren would have liked. Her eagerness to get to the waystone had, now that she knew what was here, been transfigured entirely into an equal and opposite eagerness to get back again. It would be a long flight to the nearest functional and manned waystone, at Feic Seria, and it would take them back through the mountains. If any of the Red Shields could have made a Tether, they could have avoided the entire return journey, but that was an old complaint, and there was nothing to be done about it.

  Still, Silica could be counted on to send them all on to Bald Peak. Once they were home, Wren could make her report of what they’d found, and Ghveris would be waiting. The question of just what, exactly, Ractia could need so much mana for, and where she planned to get it, was something that people like Sidonie could dig into.

  But as the smell of grilled fish drifted on the ocean breeze, Wren couldn’t help but speculate, herself. She’d watched both Ractia and Liv cast spells that affected an entire battlefield, and that hadn’t required as much mana as Blossom seemed to be talking about. A spell that blanketed a city? A continent? Did the goddess intend to unleash one single, devastating strike that would destroy the entire Alliance in a single attack?

  And where would the mana come from? Wren had investigated dozens of rifts at this point, so many over the years that now they all began to bleed together in her mind. She’d seen how V?dic machinery converted the motion of the water or the wind into mana, how scorching blasts of mana sent by the great ring in the sky were captured.

  Perhaps that was the answer - when the ring around the world had collected too much mana to contain, it sent the excess to rifts down on the surface, causing overloads and eruptions. Sidonie was convinced that with enough work, it might actually be possible to fix the entire system, and prevent any rift from ever erupting again - but doing that would mean, eventually, creating a world where humans could not live - where there would be no refuge safe from mana sickness.

  Wren tried to imagine all of those stolen capacitors and batteries absorbing the mana shot down, all at once, from the ring, and then shunting the entire load into some sort of massive spell or enchantment. Just how much harm could Ractia do with that much power?

  Images of viscous, bloody orbs rising up from the corpses of an entire army, lashing about themselves with whips of gore, surfaced from Wren’s memories. A second Day of Blood, but so much worse.

  She clenched her fists. They couldn’t get back to Bald Peak quick enough.

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  Dramatis Personae

  Blossom - Red Shield Tribe. Daughter of Soaring Eagle and Calm Waters. All grown up! And a college girl :)

  Flying Fish - Red Shield Tribe. This dude ate the heart of a bull shark. Metal.

  Wild Cat - Red Shield Tribe, formerly in service to Ractia. Does not do magical theory or vaedic technology.

  Wren Wind Dancer - Daughter of Nighthawk, cousin of Calm Waters. Going to be having a few nightmares, perhaps.