I woke up the following morning before dawn, startled awake, when a branch snapped in the forest to the left of the clearing. My hand fell to the handle of my belt knife, a small rondel dagger, as I listened to my surroundings. Whatever was in the forest was small and hooved, but there were at least a dozen of the creatures, none of which were being careful to hide their presence.

  I kept still and waited to see how the beasts would react and what they were. I waited for twenty minutes, knuckles white against the hilt of my knife, for the first of the animals to leave the forest. The creature entered the clearing and bleated quietly. The sound of its call both put me at ease and called forth the rest of the herd.

  I instantly knew what surrounded me. Bicorns were peaceful little creatures, one of the many rejected breeds from the Hydralgo Dominion’s venture into cross-breeding the perfect war horse. The failed offspring of the Dominion’s guardian beast Argos and one of the great powers in the Emerald Ocean, a herd of spirit goats that I only knew as the Mothers. Like a lot of the Dominion’s failed experiments bicorns got lumped into a group of animals known as the offspring, and ever since the Dominion released them into the wild, they’d been menaces on the outskirts of the Emerald Ocean and wherever else they found a home.

  Luckily for me, bicorns were herbivores and intensely fearful creatures. Their only real defenses were the two three-inch horns that sprouted from the top of their heads, and their prodigious speed. The issue with the species was that their necks were too weak to charge anything without snapping, so its only option for survival was to run. Generations upon generations later and the species had fear so built into their being that a well-attuned Magi can feel the terror of a bicorn from a mile away.

  It would have been child’s play to scare away the herd, but a quirk stopped me. As bicorns reached the end of their lifespan, without fail, they sought the territory claimed by the Mothers like a final pilgrimage. Bicorns rarely ascended to become spirit beasts, so their journeys across the Emerald Ocean often resulted in their deaths, but no bicorn had ever refused to not make the trip.

  That need to return to their Mothers often resulted in the herd that was below me as groups of elderly bicorn formed and travelled together. Elderly bicorns were paragons of Decay and within the Cult it was taboo to disturb their herds.

  Once I was sure all of them had left the clearing, I hopped off the hammock and saw my camp was upturned and a single bicorn had curled up in the scattered ashes of my fire. I stalked up to the animal and felt under its nose. The grandfather’s shallow breaths greeted my finger. Carefully, I reached up to pet the creature. As soon as it felt my touch, its eyes shot open and rectangular pupils hidden behind newly formed cataracts darted around.

  “Easy grandfather.” I soothed. “No harm will come to you; your herd has already left.”

  My words had no effect on the elder’s fear, but they allowed it to know where the threat was. Shaky legs lifted the bicorn and after a feeble kick it chased after the rest of its herd, instinct allowed it to unerringly follow the trail to its Mothers.

  The rest of the morning passed uneventfully and by the time the sun was fully in the sky, I had reached the edge of the tree line. The game trail I’d followed to reach here had widened slowly but steadily as I neared the border of the forest until it turned into a proper foot path.

  Bark cracked underneath my fingers as I held myself steady with the tree next to me. Endless blue encompassed the sky all around me. The sun blazed on the horizon, half hidden behind rolling hills. I breathed deliberately and took in the sight before me. I felt like a rabbit at the edge of a clearing, wary of the hawk above. Never in my life had I seen the unbroken sky.

  Wide clearings in the outer rings of the forest had been my only experience so far, but even that was like a picture of the sky framed by the canopy of the Emerald Ocean. The rest of my life, the sun had always reached me in scattered rays and beams as it traversed the branches of the forests. Shade and shadow had always been a companion and stood here before the endless plains of the Teles frontier. I felt exposed in a way I had never known before.

  There are places within the Weeping Forest where the tree cover is so dense that miles at a time are locked into permanent night. I felt like I stood before the inverse and it felt equally unfriendly. My first steps out of the forest were slow, my eyes faced not ahead of me but towards the sky, wary of predators. I kept to the path, ever vigilant of the sky above me, naked without the protection of the trees.

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  I walked for miles with my shield raised, ready to defend against attacks from aerial predators, but nothing broke the endless blue. Not even a cloud passed above me and eventually I lowered my shield. During that time, the footpath I followed expanded into a proper road.

  The road was old, built years, if not decades ago. Grasses and weeds encroached from the sides and every so often I’d pass a bush that grown through the worn-down paving stones. Old as it was road remained easier to traverse than the forest floor and the distance between me and Woodsedge quickly shortened.

  As I walked, the fear of being exposed faded slightly, enough that I could take in the majesty of the open horizon. When I reached the top of one of the many hills, I often stopped to look in every direction. Behind me, the Emerald Ocean was a wall of greens and browns that stretched from one end of the horizon to the next, but when I turned in every other direction, the horizon contained only unbroken blue. It looked like if I picked a direction, I could continue walking forever until I reached the frontier of the material plane.

  Hours later I swept my hand through the waist high grasses that encroached on the sides of road. The wind danced amongst the grasses and made them shimmer in the light like ripples on the water. The sky had remained cloudless, and the sun beat down on me relentlessly. In normal circumstances, I would have taken a break and hidden beneath the shade of a great oak or entered the shelter of a willow’s branches. Here, there was no reprieve from the sun, and I was forced to march through the dry heat.

  When the sun started to set and fade to orange, I was still nowhere close to Woodsedge and forced to set up camp at the side of the road. The land was far from ideal, a small plateau on top of a hill, but it was the only flat land I’d seen in miles and would have to do. With no trees nearby, I couldn’t hang my hammock anywhere, and to combat the lack of shelter, I would have to eat my meal cold tonight.

  All my hesitations about the campsite vanished with my first prairie sunset. Even before the sun had dipped below the horizon, the sky was lit in a riot of warm colors. Reds, oranges, and yellows danced together and cast light like the glow from a fire. When the sun lowered just enough to touch the distant horizon, it lit up the world like a candle. Warm colors emanated from that point in the sky and framed the world in its glow. As the sun disappeared, the reds shifted to pinks and purples as the moon rose on the opposite side of the world and dyed the land in the colors of twilight.

  I rose the next morning frustrated that I hadn’t been in a safe enough place to activate my skills. But the sunrise, almost equal to the sunset in its majesty, was a balm. Before I left camp, I used a portion of tinderhoof to light a pile of dead grasses I’d enclosed with loose paving stones, cooked some of the [Witch’s] butter, and paired it with some glowhorns and a portion of hard tack.

  It wasn’t until sunset that I finally saw a hint of Woodsedge. What started as specks of grey on an otherwise green landscape grew and grew until monoliths of stone emerged from a distant horizon. Evenly spaced towers secured the miles of wall that stretched the horizon in front of me.

  With bated breath, I cleared the top of the hill and the full scale of Woodsedge came into view. The city was massive and spanned miles in either direction. Diamond shaped towers dotted the wall, their conical roofs were all painted a deep green that contrasted against the dull grey stone of the wall.

  Growing up, the adventure books I read always depicted the outside of a city as clustered with shanty towns of cobbled together buildings little better than lean-tos. Woodsedge had none of that. A series of small defensive structures clustered around and on the road as it ran up to the walls and into the city.

  The plains had been deafeningly quiet compared to the life of the forest, the rustle of grasses in the breeze, the chirps and squeaks of small animals and insects. Never once had I heard a battle between predator and prey, or heard an animal roar out their claim for territory, but as I approached the city, I could hear noise again.

  It was still muffled behind the walls, but as I drew nearer, I could hear the machines of industry toil, people call out to another, and a plethora of other unidentifiable sounds. I missed the sounds of the forest already and longed to be beneath the canopy again and although the noises I heard within the city were nothing like in the forest, the level of sound comforted me in the same way the near silence of the plains got under my skin.

  In the center of the defensive structures and built before a massive iron secured and reinforced wooden gate, was a small administrative building. Which even from this distance, I could catch sight of a weary-looking group of armed people enter. When I stepped towards the gate and past the last of the mobile barriers that lined the road, one guard waved me over. His other hand idly adjusted his rusted helmet.

  Every piece of the man’s armor was in a state of decay. Rust coated the riveted plates of his jacket, portions of which had turned green. Underneath his armored jacket was a gambeson I could see because of the cracks and gaps in the leather of his armor. The linen looked off, like it was dry rotted and would crumble with a touch. His sword was ‘sheathed’ but the material had decayed so much that I could see the chipped blade’s jagged edge with clarity.

  Unlike his equipment, the guard who called me over looked well-groomed. He was clean shaven, clean, and smelled vaguely floral even from ten feet away.

  “Evening sir. Reason for entry?” The guard spoke with cool disinterest, like he’d seen all he needed to from a glance and was waiting for me to leave.

  “I’m joining the Guild.” I said, hoping brevity would see me into the town.

  The guard opened his mouth, as if about to repeat the next line in a well-rehearsed speech, but came up short. He peered at me through his helmet. The rusted eyebrow ridge worked to highlight the man’s piercing blue eyes.

  “Little old to just be joining the Guild, no?”

  “No sir.” I answered “Awakened just yesterday.”

  “Horse shit.” The guard said and lapsed back into the disinterest.

  I said nothing. I’d dealt with a lifetime of people asking me the same question and I’d received a lifetime of the same response.

  Beneath the disinterested visage I could feel the guard inspect me, to try and take my measure in the way only guards could. I said nothing. If I tried to force the point and get in, I knew I’d the guard would kill me, and if I tried to argue the point with the man, I’d be here forever, so I stood there and watched him back.

  “I guess it doesn’t really matter. Follow me.”

  The guard strode towards the admin building with a lazy, confidence filled stride. constructed entirely from wood, the building looked designed specifically to be taken down quickly. Obvious knots and loose joints held the entire building together. When the guard knocked on the door, he did so gently, but still the door rattled in the frame like the last leaf in winter.

  “[Inspector]! I’ve got another for the lamp!”