Thank the gods there were enough handholds on the cliff-face for Dain to climb, because two hours later, he did it.

  He threw himself over the lip of the chasm and lay there for a count of ten, panting into the grass. He’d always been a decent tree-climber with good muscles from years of carpentry work, and that was the only reason why he made the climb.

  “Still making me owe you from the grave, old man,” he muttered, then rolled up onto his feet.

  From the edge of the chasm, the sunken town looked like a giant wound in the earth. It wasn’t just Corvalenne that’d fallen. The immediate fields and forest circling it had sunk with it as well, and now that the storm was churning in full force—even fiercer than it was hours ago—the chasm was already filling with black water that churned like oil. If he’d stayed down there, he’d be swimming with the fishes… or whatever else that was already down there.

  “... Over there! I see it!” someone shouted in the distance.

  He immediately crouched and squinted—through the rain, past the treelines on the far opposite side of the chasm—to spy a thick line of torchlight threading through the forest. There were dozens of them, hundreds of them, and the flames were golden, not the thin blue of miner’s spirits or the green of herb-oils.

  Gold meant Auraline. Their soldiers liked their torches to match their banners.

  Now, if he were a smarter man—no, that wasn’t right. If he were a hungrier, colder, and more desperate man, he could circle around the chasm and wave his arms at them to surrender himself. There’d be heat and stew and the rough sort of blankets they issued to border garrisons within the hour. He could even sit in a tent and cough blood into a basin and say ‘the ground opened and ate us, sir’, and maybe someone would pat him on the head for telling the obvious.

  Then someone would ask him what’d caused the ground to open up, and he’d inevitably get his head lopped off.

  Of the three one-eyed, one of them had a lightning-type Elementum-Class relic, and the other had an earth-type Elementum-Class relic—specialties of Auraline and Obric respectively.

  It wasn’t like lightning and earth-type Elementum-Class relics were exclusively used by Auraline and Obric soldiers, but in this part of the continent, only Obric had vast and steady access to earth-type beasts whose parts could be offered for earth-type relics. The same went for Auraline with lightning-type beasts. It simply wasn’t easy for people to obtain Elementum-Class relics in either country unless they were already affiliated with their respective armies.

  Considering the golden-white hair and the ornate silver medallion as well, the lightning relic holder and the earth relic holder have to be relatively high up in their respective border armies.

  Chances are, if I go to the Auraline Border Army with the truth, that lightning relic holder will just find a way to silence me on the spot.

  He’d probably get blamed for Corvalenne’s destruction without a proper investigation and be executed for treason. The same would happen if he went over to Obric, though the reason for execution would be much simpler: he was a man from Auraline, and he was trespassing in their land. Or, even simpler yet, he’d be executed simply because he’d made a personal Altar. That’d get his tongue severed and his head chopped off in every single country in the world blessed and recognized by the Curator Church, which was… well, most of them.

  There'd be no strutting up to any border army and telling them the truth. Not when he wasn’t even sure how many one-eyed there actually were. For all he knew, there were hundreds and thousands of them hiding everywhere, looking to undermine the tentative peace between Auraline and Obric.

  And given that one-eyed man is from the supposedly neutral Curator Church, and also has the know-how to turn the entire town into an Altar so a portal could be opened…

  That one-eyed man had to be high up in the Curator Church’s ranks to be taught how to make such a massive Altar, which meant there was no faction he could trust.

  He glanced over his shoulder, narrowing his eyes. The forest was dark, all slick trunks and old moss and roots, but he had a better chance surviving there than with either border army coming here to investigate. The cold mist that clung to the mountains would be an ally tonight, and he’d be able to lose any pursuers once he was well and deep into the mountains.

  But which direction do I go?

  Between hiking through the mountains of Auraline and Obric, he’d also rather take his chances with Obric’s. It was a smaller country, but with far, far fewer soldiers, which meant fewer eyes to catch him. Auraline may be over eight times Obric’s size, but they had enough men to sniff him out a dozen times over, and he wasn’t planning on being paraded in chains.

  No living with my head held high until I’ve got concrete proof I didn’t destroy Corvalenne.

  So he gave the flooding town one last look. The water was still climbing rapidly—it’d drowned half of the houses already—so he couldn’t help but think that this was going to be his last time seeing the only home he’d ever known.

  … But he couldn’t stay.

  He clapped his hands, dipped his head, and—for a second—didn’t know who he’d pray to. Relic holders typically prayed to the Curator Gods they got most of their relics from, but he didn’t even know the name of his patron.

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  So he prayed to Corvalenne itself, and then he pulled away from the edge of the chasm, slipping into the trees.

  The nearest Obric town is… Granamere. Mining town. About a day’s hike away if I go fast.

  He’d never been to Granamere—he’d never been away from Corvalenne, for that matter—but he ran by feel. Moonlight was terribly weak with the dark clouds overhead, so he used the intermittent flashes of lightning for visibility. Every ten seconds or so, the flash of white and blue revealed his surroundings, and he took in whole pages of terrain at once: large boulders, channels of waters carving shallow trenches, and deep oaks felled across many a path.

  Then the lightning would end, and he navigated by pure memory and sheer instinct. He was no hunter-gatherer, but he did pride himself on his eyes.

  Shouts bled through the trees a few minutes into his run.

  He dropped to a crouch behind a fallen trunk and let the night breathe over him. In the near distance, a thread of light approached, then multiplied. They were a line of torches pacing through the forest, their flames a muddy red rather than Auraline gold.

  Obric soldiers.

  There was a dozen, then another dozen, then… he stopped counting. The line went on and on, and he grimaced as he heard a few more indecipherable shouts coming from the front of the torch lines.

  No good.

  Last thing I need is to play prize between two butcher stalls.

  But then a rustle went through the bushes behind him. Then another. Then there was a ripple of rustles like some giant combed their fingers through the canopy.

  He turned his head around slowly, trying to slot shapes out of shadow. His clarity was good—better than most men at level fifteen instead of level ten, which was the average—but his eyes weren’t that good to be able to pick out magical beasts that wanted to be hidden.

  He could guess plenty, though. There were enough forest beasts around Corvalenne to fill a ledger: moth-stags that fed on moss, giant barkcrabs that clung to the undersides of limbs, and slybone apes. He’d never seen the last one before. They were all beasts that’d never go near any human settlement in daylight, but now that Corvalenne was gone most of those beasts were only low Common grade, yes, but he was only Common-2 now, which meant most of them could still kill him quite easily.

  And he did not want to use his cursed relic again tonight.

  Once the red torch line veered further left and away from his log, he waited a few heartbeats—then a few more for good measure—before resuming his run.

  Hunger started chewing through his adrenaline. The cold would come in next with teeth, so he very quickly realized there was absolutely no way he’d make it to Granamere by sunrise at his current pace.

  Gotta find shelter and fire first, else I’ll curl up like a drowned cat.

  He searched around for fifteen more minutes, praying to every god for a bout of fortune. His prayers were answered. As he cut around a large tangle of windthrow trees, he caught a glimpse of a small cave made by two mossy boulders leaning into each other. Clumps of fallen logs and bushes sat right outside the entrance, camouflaging the whole thing. It wasn’t any larger than his bedroom, but it’d do.

  Approaching the cave with his prosthetic arm held out in front of him, he listened for a scratch of claw or a huff of breath. Thankfully, there was none of that. The cave was mostly uninhabited except for tiny, faint lights seeded into the cracks in the walls around him.

  Mushrooms.

  Glowcaps, burrower’s luck, and scatters of moonteeth…

  He’d only ever seen them in books and once in a traveling apothecary’s jar. Glowcaps in particular were a type of fungus that converted water into light, allowing them to glow faintly blue, but it was no replacement for a proper fire.

  As he crouched, he dragged a wet finger across the ground and walls. The dry, pale stone was slickenstone, if he recalled correctly, or the Obric miners’ name for it: spill-slate. Obric masons liked building roof baths and smokehouses out of these because it shed water faster than a duck’s back, meaning the cave was unnaturally dry for how wet the outside was.

  So when he heard more shouting in the distance, he immediately ducked into the cave without reserve.

  For a long minute, he didn’t move. Barely breathed, either. Only when the soldiers passed and the forest swallowed their torches did he let out a thin sigh, and there was relief in it, sure—but the tremor that ran through him wasn’t just from the nerves anymore.

  He was shivering outright now, teeth knocking as if someone had set a chisel against them.

  Not good.

  The adrenaline from the climb was still humming through him, masking the worst of it, but he knew the signs of cold shock. If he didn’t warm himself fast, he’d be another stiff for the forest beasts to gnaw on.

  Peering out of the cave, he attempted to search for dry twigs. No success, naturally. Finding something dry in this storm would be like finding silver in a dunghill. He eyed the scatter of stones and pebbles at his feet—plenty of flint, plenty of spark—but sparks meant nothing without tinder.

  As a fresh tremor rattled his jaw, he turned back to the cave, eyeing the mushrooms.

  They’re pretty dry, aren’t they?

  He walked over, plucked a moonteeth out of the wall, and rubbed one between his fingers. It didn’t even smear with damp. He could probably use these as fire fuel.

  Then his gaze landed on the clumps of glowcaps providing a little bit of light.

  … Wait.

  This glowcap isn’t…

  Frowning, he plucked one of the glowcaps from the stone and immediately turned it over. At first glance, it looked ordinary enough—the faint blue light shimmered across the cap, nothing unusual there—but when he tilted it and squinted into the stem, his frown turned into a grin.

  It had thread-thin veins on the inside as well, glowing faintly blue.

  I knew it.

  In normal glowcaps, the water-to-light conversion only takes place in the cap, so the stem shouldn’t be glowing on the inside as well.

  “You’re no regular glowcap at all,” he murmured. “You’re a manalight glowcap.”

  It was a rarer strain of glowcap that used the mana-to-light conversion process instead of water, which meant it wasn’t just a lantern in fungus form. It could also be used as a magic material… and he immediately recalled an offering recipe for a very, very specific relic that used manalight glowcaps as the main offerings.

  He twirled the mushroom between his fingers and made up his mind.

  “Alright,” he muttered, throwing his Altar to the ground. “Round two, Great Curator God."

  There was a relic he wanted to obtain.