Tunde found the stream deeper in the tunnel, following the sound of it before he saw it, a thin ribbon of cold water moving through a channel it had carved for itself in the rock over what must have been a very long time.

  He knelt beside it and got to work.

  The black substance came off slowly. He used sand from the channel bed to scrub at it, the grit doing the work his hands alone could not, and the cold of the water was sharp enough to keep his mind present when it wanted to drift.

  He let it drift anyway, just enough, letting the events of the last several hours arrange themselves into something he could look at without his thoughts scattering.

  He had been thrown into a pit to die. He had died, or something close enough to it that the distinction felt academic.

  He had woken up beside a skeleton that should not have been able to move and had been given something he could not fully name yet.

  He had been captured, imprisoned, freed, had killed people, had broken open a cell with a blade that used to be a manacle, had unlocked a power he had not known existed inside him, and was now an Initiate, whatever that meant in full, sitting in a stolen tunnel scrubbing impurities off his skin with wet sand while somewhere behind him an Adept looted a dead cannibal chief's personal quarters.

  He submerged himself fully in the stream and held the cold for a moment, feeling the essence of the fruit he had eaten still moving through him, warm against the cold water, reinforcing and rebuilding in ways he was only beginning to be able to feel.

  He raised the manacle above the surface and looked at it.

  The inscriptions were dormant now, the red and black lines resting in the metal as though sleeping, content for the moment.

  He traced one of the patterns with his thumb, following it until it curved back into itself in a loop he could not find the beginning or end of.

  Whatever this was, wherever it had come from, it had done more for him in the span of a single day than the entirety of his previous life had managed.

  That was not ingratitude toward his life, only an accounting of it.

  He stayed in the water until he was as clean as cold water and determination could make him, and then he emerged.

  The robe he found among the items in the passage was plain black, clearly taken from someone who no longer needed it.

  He did not let himself think about that for too long. It fit him well enough, cut for someone of a similar lean frame, and when he looked down at himself, he looked for the first time in his memory, like a person rather than a possession.

  He made his way back through the tunnels to where Elyria and Thorne had gathered everything the settlement had offered up.

  His sight was still running, and the room was alive with color.

  Several items pulsed with the clean greens and blues of things that carried Ethra untainted by the particular paths the savages had followed.

  Raw meat sat in one pile, vegetables and fruits in another, and he hoped, without examining the thought too closely, that the meat was from animals. Elyria looked up when he entered, and something in her expression relaxed slightly.

  "You look respectable," she said, with a small smile.

  "Something closer to an actual ranker."

  Thorne glanced up from what he was sorting through.

  "Feeling better?"

  Tunde considered the question honestly.

  "A bit," he said.

  Thorne nodded, apparently satisfied with the accuracy of that assessment.

  "We found lumens as well. More than I expected from a wasteland settlement." He looked at Tunde.

  "Same currency as wherever you came from?"

  "Yes," Tunde said.

  "Though in our settlement, we rarely saw more than ten in a month."

  The silence that followed his words had a particular texture to it.

  Elyria's expression moved through several things rapidly.

  "Ten lumens," she repeated.

  "Is that not enough?" Tunde asked.

  "Ten lumens," she said again, as though repetition might make it make more sense,

  "Would not cover a single night in a modest room in the cheapest district of a minor city."

  Tunde did not respond to that because he did not know what to do with it. The number had always felt abstract to him anyway, something the elders spoke of without ever fully explaining.

  Thorne had gone still with the particular stillness of someone who had heard something that required processing.

  He looked at Tunde with a different quality of attention than he usually carried, something slower and more careful.

  "Where exactly did you say you came from?"

  Tunde met the black and red gaze directly.

  "Across the sea. I heard the great ones refer to the land as Crystalreach."

  What happened next was notable because Thorne did not react to things the way ordinary people did. He had stood in front of a chief of monstrous proportions without blinking.

  He had absorbed the bodies of the dead without visible discomfort. He processed violence with the same expression one might bring to a meal. And yet, at the word Crystalreach, he went completely still.

  Elyria's eyes had widened.

  "That's impossible," Thorne said.

  Tunde frowned.

  Why?"

  "How long were you at sea?" Elyria asked, her voice softer now, carrying something careful in it.

  He shook his head.

  "I cannot say with certainty. The days blurred together. Months, I think. Many months."

  Thorne murmured something under his breath, turning slightly away as though working through a calculation.

  "Then it had to be them. The Weavers." He paused.

  "What were they thinking, crossing the great expanse with a cargo of mortals?"

  "They weren't thinking about the mortals," Elyria said quietly.

  "That's rather the point."

  "Weavers?" Tunde asked.

  "Forget you heard that," Thorne said, without looking at him.

  "You're not remotely strong enough to do anything useful with the information."

  Tunde felt something sharp move through his chest at that. "It concerns my home," he said.

  "It concerns forces several orders of magnitude beyond what you currently are," Thorne replied, not unkindly but with the flatness of someone delivering a fact rather than an opinion.

  "Which means thinking about it before you have the strength to act on it is just a way of carrying weight you can't use."

  Elyria looked at Tunde with an expression that acknowledged the unfairness of the answer while not disputing it.

  "What he means is that you need to consolidate your rank first. Your heart only just opened. You haven't even manifested your Ethra veins yet."

  Tunde's face must have communicated his confusion clearly, because Thorne looked at him, exhaled through his nose, and said,

  "Sit down."

  Tunde sat.

  Thorne studied him for a moment as though organizing his thoughts into something a new Initiate could receive without the structure collapsing.

  "Before questions," Thorne said,

  "I want you to understand something foundational. Burn it into whatever part of your brain handles the things that matter." He paused.

  "Might is right. That is the first and last law of this world. It is not a pleasant truth, but it is the operative one. It is why your people were used and discarded. It is why you were on that ship. It is why you were in that pit. And if my suspicion about where you came from is correct, it is the lens through which you need to see everything that comes next."

  He raised a hand.

  "No questions yet. Listen."

  Tunde closed his mouth.

  "There are nine ranks of advancement on Adamath. You are currently at the lowest." He counted them out without ceremony.

  "Initiate, Disciple, Adept, Lord, High Lord, Master, High Master, Regent, and at the peak of all recorded possibility, the Hegemon rank, which no one in documented history has ever reached." He looked at Tunde with the particular steadiness of someone making sure the information is landing.

  "You are an Initiate. The being you would need to speak to, the one who holds answers about your continent and your people, would be a Regent at minimum. Do you understand the scope of that distance?"

  Tunde considered it for a moment.

  "What does the gap between a Regent and an Initiate actually feel like?"

  Elyria made a sound that was almost a laugh.

  Thorne's mouth curved slightly.

  "Imagine the deepest trench in the ocean," he said.

  "Now imagine the highest point in the sky above it. Put yourself at the bottom of the trench. That is roughly the gap."

  Tunde absorbed this without flinching, which seemed to interest Thorne.

  "How do I close it?" Tunde asked.

  "By surviving things that should kill you," Thorne said.

  "By fighting, struggling, taking risks that any sensible person would decline, and becoming better through the accumulation of all the things that don't manage to end you." He paused.

  "That is how everyone on Adamath gets stronger. There is no other method, only variations of it."

  "Is that how the two of you reached where you are?" Tunde asked.

  Elyria coughed quietly.

  "My path involved a nexus key that malfunctioned," she said, in the tone of someone who considers this sufficient explanation and is not prepared to offer more.

  Thorne glanced at her with something that might have been amusement in a different face.

  "Silvershade?"

  She nodded once, shortly.

  "That explains some things," he said.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  "There are four continents," Elyria said to Tunde, taking back the thread of the conversation.

  "Silvershade, Ironthorn, Crystalreach, and the one we are currently standing on, Bloodfire."

  "The broader geography can wait," Thorne said, his voice sharpening slightly.

  He looked around at the room, at the walls, at nothing in particular, with the focused attention of someone who has just remembered something they should have been thinking about all along.

  "This settlement was too organized. Too resourced. A peak Adept among what presents as a wasteland cannibal clan, with a supply of Ethra orbs and a collection of items that has no business being this far from civilization. Someone was backing them."

  Elyria straightened slightly.

  "Which means someone knows this settlement existed, which means someone may know it has been destroyed, which means we should not be here when whoever that is decides to investigate." He looked at Tunde.

  "Where to? We find the nearest frontier town, resupply, and then separate paths. I know someone in Red Crown City."

  Elyria tapped her left hand against her thigh, and a ring appeared on her finger, black and unassuming, the kind of object that looked like nothing and was clearly something.

  She held her hand out toward the collected items, and the room emptied itself into it with the smooth, unhurried efficiency of water finding a drain.

  Tunde stared at the empty space where a considerable pile of goods had been a moment before.

  "Can I have one of those?" he asked.

  Thorne laughed. It was a short, genuine sound, which made it remarkable.

  ****

  The sun hit them as they emerged from the destroyed building, hot and flat and indifferent to everything that had happened beneath it.

  Elyria shaded her eyes and looked around the ruined settlement with the expression of someone checking that the problem was as fully resolved as it appeared.

  "North," Thorne said, looking up at the sun with the practiced ease of someone who had been reading skies for a long time.

  "The Talahan Empire is north of here. A week at our pace." He glanced at Tunde.

  "Two weeks at the pace we'll actually be moving."

  "It's all sand and rock," Tunde said, looking out at the landscape stretching away from them in every direction without a visible end.

  "Sand, rock, and everything that lives in it," Thorne said.

  "The Wastelands attract people who cannot afford or cannot survive anywhere that has rules. Factionless Ethra users, hunted ones, bandits, raiders. You won't see anyone above Adept rank out here because no one above Adept rank would waste the time. But that still leaves a considerable range of things that can kill an Initiate without working particularly hard."

  "I would give anything for an air Ethra affinity," Elyria said, squinting at the heat shimmer on the horizon with profound distaste.

  "You'll survive," Thorne said, without sympathy.

  He turned to Tunde with the expression of someone who has decided to do something practical.

  "Close your eyes. Find your Ethra heart. You know where it is now."

  Tunde closed his eyes.

  The heartbeat was there immediately, solid and familiar, more present than it had been even this morning. The motes of light moved through him in slow circulation, faint and flickering at the edges but steady at the center, like a fire that has found its fuel and settled into a sustainable burn.

  "You feel it," Thorne said. It was not a question.

  "Yes."

  "The Ethra moving through you is yours to direct. It is not a passive force. It answers intention. Push it toward your legs, all of it, deliberately and consciously, and hold it there."

  It took several attempts.

  The first two, the Ethra dispersed before it arrived, losing its concentration somewhere between intention and execution.

  The third time, he found the trick of it, which was less like forcing water through a channel and more like tilting a surface and letting the water find its own way downhill.

  He felt his legs fill with it, a warmth that built rapidly into something that felt like readiness compressed into muscle and bone.

  He jumped without deciding to.

  The ground dropped away faster than he had expected and came back up slower, and for a moment he hung in the air several meters above where he had been standing, the landscape spread out around him with a sudden, unexpected openness, and then the ground came back up and he landed with a solidity that his previous body would not have managed without stumbling.

  He looked at Thorne with an expression he could not fully keep professional.

  Thorne nodded once.

  "He's yours," he said to Elyria, and became a blur that resolved itself, after a moment, into a shape on the horizon.

  Elyria looked at Tunde.

  "Keep up," she said, and went after him.

  Tunde ran.

  ****

  The day was long and the Wastelands were consistent in their hostility, offering nothing that was not some variation of dust, heat, rock formations that looked identical to each other, and the occasional distant movement that his Ethra sight marked as living and moving and not human.

  He could feel Thorne even when he could not see him, the red and green outline moving ahead at a pace that Tunde would not be able to match for a very long time, steady and unhurried and always precisely far enough ahead to make its point without disappearing entirely. Elyria ran beside him, adjusting her stride to a pace that cost her nothing while pushing him steadily, a calibration she performed without discussion or acknowledgement.

  His Ethra burned.

  That was the only way to describe it. Each sustained push drew from the reserve in his heart, and the reserve did not replenish at the speed he was spending it, the motes of light thinning with every burst of speed until he felt them flicker at the edges and had to ease back before they guttered entirely.

  He stopped three times over the course of the day to let the circulation rebuild, crouching in the dust with his hands on his knees and his breath coming hard, watching the golden lines in the ground pulse with Ethra he could see but not yet draw on efficiently.

  Elyria waited each time without commentary, which he appreciated more than he would have appreciated encouragement.

  When dusk came, it came quickly, the sky changing from white hot to a deep amber and then to a darkness that was more absolute than anything above ground had a right to be.

  The temperature dropped with an abruptness that made the heat of the day feel like a deliberate cruelty.

  The cave they found was damp and cold and low-ceilinged, but it was defensible on three sides, and the entrance was narrow enough that nothing large could enter quickly.

  Thorne was already inside when they arrived, sitting in the dark as though the dark were a comfortable chair. Elyria pressed in behind Tunde and made a sound of quiet suffering at the temperature.

  "I would accept any fire," she said, "regardless of the source."

  "Sand bandits operate through this region," Thorne said.

  "Dust and sand Ethra users who prey on caravans. A fire is an invitation."

  Elyria pressed her lips together and did not argue.

  Tunde sat, feeling every muscle in his legs register the day's work simultaneously, and stretched his limbs one at a time with the methodical attention of someone doing maintenance on equipment.

  He let his sight open without directing it, and the cave revealed itself in lines and colors, the rock walls threaded through with veins of gold Ethra that moved with the slow, geological patience of something that had been flowing for centuries.

  "Have you named it yet?" Elyria asked.

  He looked at her.

  "The ability. The sight. It is unusual enough to warrant a name." She paused.

  "I have not encountered it presented this way before. Seeing the Ethra of the world as color and line rather than simply feeling its presence."

  "I haven't heard of it either," Thorne said, without particular inflection,

  "And I have encountered more Ethra types than most." He leaned against the wall, his pale face catching none of the light because there was none.

  "What interests me more is the relic. The manacle. It advanced you without a resource. It absorbed Ethra from the orb and used it to force your heart open. That is not a function I have encountered in a relic before."

  Tunde looked at the cuff. It sat cold against his skin, dormant as it always was when it was not doing something drastic.

  "I don't know what it is," he said.

  "I don't know where it came from or how it found me."

  "Things like that don't find people by accident," Thorne said.

  "That's something to think about when you have a quieter moment."

  Tunde looked back at the golden lines in the cave wall.

  "Ethra sight," he said quietly.

  Thorne made a sound in the dark that might have been approval.

  "It's a bold name," Elyria said, with a slight smile.

  "It's an accurate one," Tunde said.

  She tilted her head, acknowledging that.

  A comfortable silence settled for a moment, the kind that develops between people who have survived the same day together and have not yet decided what they are to each other beyond that.

  Elyria broke it.

  "The question none of us has addressed is what comes next. After Red Crown City."

  Thorne's voice came from the darkness without preamble.

  "We part ways. I have someone to find and a matter to settle. I said as much."

  "And leave him to manage alone?" Elyria asked, a pointed quality entering the question.

  Thorne was quiet for a moment.

  "He's your concern if you want him to be. I'm not in the business of collecting Initiates."

  Elyria turned to Tunde.

  "I won't be staying long in the city. I need to reach the Tralon Technocracy before the year is out." A pause, and something complicated moved through her silver eyes.

  "I'm sorry. I know that's not a useful answer."

  "The Technocracy?" Thorne said.

  "That's a significant distance from where we are, and the rank requirement for their Aspirant Trials is Adept. You're at Disciple."

  "I'm aware of the gap," she said, without particular heat.

  "You'd be moving through Ironthorn territory to get there," he continued.

  "At minimum."

  "I'm aware of the route as well."

  Thorne whistled low.

  "Strange to see a Silvershade native pursuing the artificer path. I imagine the Wild Wardens had opinions about that."

  Something closed in Elyria's face.

  "My family is deeply committed to the Wardens," she said, in the tone of someone selecting each word with care.

  "All of them, every generation, following the Wild Ethra paths, forest and element and soil. All of them except me." A brief silence.

  "I was born with metal Ethra. I tried, for longer than I should have, to make myself into something the path would accept. Nothing I did was sufficient. Eventually, with the assistance of certain family members who were kinder than most, I obtained a nexus key and came here."

  "Or tried to," Thorne said.

  "Or tried to," she agreed.

  "Nexus keys are Paragon tier craftsmanship at minimum," Thorne said.

  The observation had a quality to it, not accusatory but not casual either.

  "We all have our stories," Elyria said simply.

  "I'll share mine when you share yours."

  Thorne reclined against the cave wall without responding, which was apparently its own answer.

  "There are eight cults," Elyria said, turning back to Tunde, who had been following this exchange with the careful attention he gave to things he did not fully understand.

  "We mentioned them before. They are the true architecture of power on Adamath. Kingdoms and empires are structures of governance, and they contain powerful people, but in the reckoning of the world's actual forces, they are notable features in someone else's landscape."

  "Because of the Regents and Hegemons behind them," Thorne added.

  "Each continent has its dominant powers," Elyria continued.

  "Bloodfire, where we are, hosts two, the Cult of Baelthor, called the Heralds, and the Cult of Mekrandor, called the Artificer's Guild. Silvershade is home to the Cult of Nyathogu, the Veilweavers, and the Cult of Sylvagorn, the Wild Wardens."

  "The Wardens and the Weavers have been at each other's throats for longer than anyone alive can remember," Thorne said.

  "Do they fight openly?" Tunde asked.

  "They have," Thorne said.

  "And when entities of that scale decide to settle their disagreements through force, the collateral tends to be measured in populations. It's why a certain fragile equilibrium holds. The damage a full cult war would do to the world that everyone, including the cults, requires for their continued existence, provides a reason for restraint that simple politics would not."

  Tunde looked at the golden lines in the cave wall and thought about the scale of what was being described to him and what it meant for a person who had been, until very recently, a slave in a settlement that received ten lumens a month.

  "Who are Baelthor and Mekrandor?" he asked.

  Elyria's expression shifted slightly, something careful entering it.

  "Supposedly, they were Hegemons. The peak of what is possible for a living being on Adamath. Beyond the constraints of time and mortality as ordinary people experience them. Cosmic forces in the most literal sense of the phrase." She paused.

  "No one has seen or confirmed anything about them in recorded history."

  Thorne said nothing. He was staring at the cave entrance with an expression Tunde could not read, the red pinpricks in his black eyes very still.

  "The Heralds," Tunde said, testing the name.

  "That's the cult you were part of."

  Thorne returned from wherever his attention had been.

  "Was part of," he confirmed.

  "As a Disciple, serving under a Lord." His voice remained level. "Someone within the structure decided the people with me and I had become more useful as a transaction than as members. We were sold to the followers of the Regent of Undeath."

  "There's a cult of Undeath?" Tunde asked.

  "Not formally recognized. But those who follow the Regent's path call themselves a cult, and they operate with sufficient organization to make the distinction academic." Thorne's jaw tightened slightly.

  "What I want is the head of the Lord who sold us. Red Crown City is where I begin looking for him."

  The information settled over the cave like additional cold.

  Tunde sat with it for a while, feeling his Ethra heart beat its slow, patient rhythm in his chest, watching the golden lines move through the rock, and thinking about what he wanted.

  They both had directions, both had purposes that had been shaped by things done to them, by loss and betrayal, and paths that had been cut off.

  He had none of that clarity yet. He had questions, and the slowly forming understanding that answers required strength, and strength required everything Thorne had described.

  "How do I advance?" he asked.

  "What does the practical path look like?"

  Thorne glanced at him.

  "For someone with resources? Essence-rich foods, cultivation elixirs, structured training under someone who knows what they're doing. Rapid and relatively smooth."

  "For someone without?" Tunde asked.

  "Fighting," Thorne said.

  "Taking work that puts you in contact with things that can kill you and surviving it anyway. The cults and large organizations hoard the resources. Everyone else fights for what spills over."

  "Mercenary work," Tunde said.

  Elyria made a sharp sound.

  "No. Don't. Not yet, not at your rank."

  "She's not wrong that it's dangerous," Thorne said.

  "But she's also sitting on resources that most people don't have access to, which makes the alternative paths she'd suggest less available to you."

  Elyria looked at him with an expression he didn't bother returning.

  "What mercenary work involves," Elyria said, controlling her tone,

  "Is hunting creatures. Powerful ones, in dangerous territories. Their parts have value for various reasons, cultivation among them. The creatures themselves are often far more powerful than the people hunting them, which is why the mortality rate is what it is."

  "The Regent of Mist fused aspects of a Master grade mist tiger to her own Ethra heart when she was at Lord rank," Thorne said.

  "She was lucky to encounter it at all, luckier still to survive it. The result changed her trajectory entirely."

  "She is also hated across Silvershade for it," Elyria said flatly.

  "Most transformative choices produce opposition," Thorne replied, with the tone of someone who speaks from experience.

  Tunde looked at them both.

  "I'll do whatever it takes," he said.

  "I'm not saying that to sound impressive. I mean it practically. The answers I need, the understanding of what happened to my people and why, require a strength I don't have. So I need to get it."

  Something shifted in the cave. Not dramatically, not with particular ceremony, but both Thorne and Elyria were looking at him with a quality of attention they had not been giving him a moment before.

  Thorne nodded slowly.

  "Hold onto that," he said.

  "The clarity of it, specifically. People who know exactly why they're getting stronger tend to get stronger faster than people who are doing it for abstract reasons."

  "The path is hard," Elyria said softly.

  "I don't say that to discourage you. I say it because it's true and you deserve to know what you're committing to."

  "I know what hard is," Tunde said.

  She looked at him for a moment and then nodded. The nod had the quality of something accepted rather than simply acknowledged.

  The cave shook.

  It was not a tremor of the earth, not the random settling of rock. It was rhythmic and purposeful, something moving beneath the sand outside with the directional certainty of something that knew where it was going.

  Elyria was on her feet before the second impact finished.

  "What is that?"

  Thorne was already at the cave entrance, looking out at the desert with narrowed eyes.

  "Our first complication," he said.

  Tunde let his sight open and looked down.

  The Ethra beneath the sand was golden and vast and moving toward them in a shape that resolved itself, as he tracked its outline, into something long and segmented and deeply uninterested in anything except whatever it had decided they were.

  The scale of it was difficult to process. The leading edge alone was wider than the tunnel they had escaped through.

  "Creature," he said.

  "Under the sand. Moving this way."

  Thorne looked at him.

  "Size?"

  "Large," Tunde said.

  "Very large."

  "Sandshard centipede," Thorne said, with the grimness of someone confirming a suspicion they had hoped was wrong.

  The sand outside the cave entrance began to shift.