The creature came out of the ground the way violence always did, without adequate warning and in a place no one had been watching.

  It erupted through the sand a few meters from the cave entrance, and the sound it made as it broke the surface was somewhere between a shriek and a crack, the carapace catching the pale moonlight as it rose, black and gold and enormous, shedding cascades of sand from its segments as it oriented itself.

  The shriek it released was a physical thing.

  Tunde felt it in his back teeth and in the base of his skull simultaneously.

  He stood completely still.

  "Move!" Thorne's voice broke through the stunned silence like a hand through paper.

  Elyria's grip on his arm made the decision for him, pulling him sideways and hard as the creature's front segments crashed down into the exact space where they had been standing.

  The impact shattered the rocky ground, fragments of stone skipping away across the sand. The creature did not pause to assess the result.

  It turned with a speed that something of its size had no right to, sweeping toward the source of the disturbance with the efficient certainty of something that had never needed to see to hunt.

  "Vibration," Thorne said, placing himself between the creature and the cave entrance with the unhurried deliberateness of someone taking up a position they intend to hold.

  "It can't see. Every footstep you take is a beacon. Move quietly or don't move at all."

  Tunde activated his sight and looked at the creature properly for the first time.

  It was massive.

  Ten, perhaps twelve body lengths from the first segment to the last visible portion of its tail, each segment armored in that same black and gold carapace that absorbed and redirected his sight rather than letting it pass through cleanly.

  The Ethra running through it was golden and dense, moving with a pressure he could feel even at a distance, and it moved in patterns he did not yet have the language to fully read.

  No obvious weak points presented themselves the way they had on the savages.

  The creature simply blazed with a uniform intensity that suggested the concept of weak points had not been relevant to anything that had previously tried to fight it.

  "Peak Tier 2," Elyria said quietly, her metal blades spinning in a tight orbit around her with a sound like drawn breath.

  "Early Tier 3," Thorne said, without looking back at them.

  Elyria went very still for a moment.

  Then she looked at the creature and then at Thorne, with the expression of someone revising several calculations at once.

  "Get out of the cave," Thorne said.

  "Both of you. Go around the far side and keep your movement small."

  "No," Tunde said.

  Thorne turned to look at him. The look he gave was not angry, not dismissive, simply the look of someone who has heard an incorrect answer and is waiting to see if the person who gave it understands why.

  Tunde understood why.

  His Ethra sight was flickering at the edges, the strain of maintaining it while his heart was still recovering from the day's expenditure showing itself in the quality of his vision.

  His breathing was not entirely steady. He was standing in front of a creature that an Adept had identified as an early Tier 3 entity, and he was an Initiate who had first unlocked his heart less than a day ago, and everything reasonable and logical in the world was on Thorne's side of the argument.

  He still said no.

  Because the alternative was standing somewhere safe while someone else put themselves between him and something dangerous, and he had done that enough times already. He had done it his entire life.

  Thorne held his gaze for one second. Then he turned back to the creature and shot forward.

  The collision between Thorne and the centipede's leading segment sent a pressure wave outward that pushed Tunde back a step.

  The creature shrieked, a sound that carried a new note of something that might have been surprise, and then the fight became a series of impacts and counters that were difficult to follow at anything below Disciple speed.

  Elyria's hand closed on his arm, and she moved, not gently, hauling him deeper into the cave with a grip that communicated, clearly and without ambiguity, that this was not a moment for principled stands.

  She released him when they were far enough in that the entrance was a pale rectangle of moonlight in the dark.

  Then she turned to face him, and her expression had the particular quality of someone who is about to say something true and is not going to apologize for it.

  "There is a line," she said.

  "Between bravery and stupidity. In this world, that line is thinner than you think, and crossing it in the wrong direction is how Initiates die. Not in impressive ways. In stupid ways. In ways that don't accomplish anything."

  Tunde said nothing. The ground shook from the battle at the entrance.

  "You killed a few savages," Elyria continued, and her voice was not unkind, but it was not gentle either.

  "You did it well, considering. But those savages were Initiates at best, barely past the point of using Ethra at all, relying on bodies fortified by the bones they absorbed and nothing else. What's out there is a different category of problem entirely."

  "I know," Tunde said.

  "Do you? Because knowing and feeling it are different things, and right now you feel powerful because you broke through to Initiate, and you have a relic on your wrist that has done things relics are not supposed to do. That feeling is the most dangerous thing about this rank." She crouched slightly, bringing her silver eyes level with his.

  "A billion Initiates feel that exact feeling at the moment they break through. They die in their thousands every day across Adamath. The feeling is not evidence of actual power. It is a biological response to a small increase in actual power, and it will get you killed if you let it make your decisions."

  Tunde absorbed this.

  "You're speaking from experience," he said.

  Something crossed her face briefly. "

  I'm speaking from observation," she said, which was not quite the same answer.

  "The point stands. The best we can do, at our rank, is keep our heads low and use every moment to get stronger. Not die proving points to creatures that don't know we exist."

  The cave shook again, harder. Somewhere outside, something impacted the ground with force enough to displace a quantity of rock that was reflected in the tremors running through the floor. Dust fell from the ceiling.

  Tunde sat down against the cave wall, looked at his hands, breathed, and accepted that she was right.

  "You should check on him," he said, after a moment.

  Elyria snorted.

  "A peak Tier 2 is the ceiling of my practical capability, and only if I have adequate metals and the favorable conditions." She paused, glancing toward the entrance.

  "A Tier 3 is above my reach. If I went out there, I would be a distraction at best, and a liability at worst, and Thorne does not need either."

  "Creatures are tiered separately from rankers?" Tunde asked, pulling the question out to fill the waiting with something useful.

  She nodded, settling herself against the opposite wall with the particular posture of someone who has spent time sitting in places they would prefer not to be sitting in.

  "Tier 1 through Tier 9, roughly corresponding to the nine ranks of advancement. A Tier 1 creature is theoretically within the range of an Initiate. A Tier 9 is beyond the practical capability of anyone in recorded history."

  "That seems straightforward," Tunde said.

  "It isn't," she said.

  "The tiers are a general framework, not a guarantee. A Tier 1 creature is not simply an Initiate in animal form. Creatures at every tier are physically more powerful than rankers at the equivalent level, often significantly so, double or triple the strength in direct exchange, and many compensate for whatever they lack in Ethra sophistication with instinct and aggression that has been refined over generations of hunting. Low tier creatures also rarely come alone. Tier 1 through Tier 3 specifically tend to operate in groups."

  "So an Initiate should not fight a Tier 1 alone," Tunde said.

  "An Initiate should not fight a Tier 1 at all unless they have either very powerful Ethra, or the kind of skill that takes years to develop, or a significant tactical advantage." She paused.

  "Or if they have no other option, in which case they should fight as cleverly as possible and accept that survival is the only meaningful goal."

  The ground shook again. A sound came from outside that Tunde could not place, something between a hiss and a roar with a wet undertone that suggested something had been ruptured.

  "Cultivate," Elyria said.

  "Your heart is close to empty from the day's use. The Ethra in the air here is thin, but thin is better than nothing. Breathe it in, draw it toward your heart, release what your body can't use. It's the same process as breathing, just deliberate."

  "Thorne doesn't have essence fruits left?" Tunde asked.

  "He has Disciple and Adept grade resources. If you consumed either of those right now, your heart would not survive the experience." She said it matter of factly, with no particular drama.

  "Breathe. The air Ethra here is arid, but it's present. Use what you have."

  He closed his eyes and tried.

  The problem was that he could usually see Ethra, and with his heart emptied, the sight that depended on it was not functioning well enough to be useful.

  He was trying to work without his primary tool, which left him with something he could not see and was not sure he could feel in its current sparse state.

  He breathed anyway, pulling each inhale slowly, trying to hold the intention of drawing something inward even without being able to confirm it was working.

  "Can you feel it?" Elyria asked.

  "I'm trying," he said.

  "That's not what I asked."

  He breathed again, deeper, and somewhere in the slow repetition of it he found the edge of something. Not a vision, just a sensation, the faintest trace of warmth at the boundary of his lungs, moving inward toward his heart with each breath.

  "Barely," he said.

  "That's enough for now. Keep going."

  They sat in the dark and the cold while the battle outside did things to the ground that neither of them commented on, and Tunde breathed, and the thin Ethra of the arid cave made its slow way into his depleted heart one thread at a time.

  Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

  ****

  Thorne emerged from the cave entrance thirty minutes later.

  He was dragging four large carcasses.

  The creatures were enormous even in death, the segmented bodies filling the passage from wall to almost wall, and Thorne moved them the way one moves furniture that has been placed inconveniently, with the matter of fact purposefulness of a task that needed to be completed.

  Half of his body was in a state that should have been incapacitating. The acid that the centipedes apparently used in some phase of combat or defense had done extensive work on his left side from shoulder to hip, the skin bubbling and raw and shedding in places, the smell of it sharp and chemical and deeply wrong.

  Thorne walked as though none of this was occurring.

  "There you are," he said.

  Tunde stared. He was aware that he was staring and could not entirely stop himself.

  "Your skin," he said.

  Thorne glanced at his left side with the mild interest of someone checking whether they had stepped in something.

  "It'll close in a few minutes. Acid has limited options against what I am."

  He looked at Elyria.

  "Your void ring. These carcasses need to travel with us."

  Elyria looked at the four dead centipedes, at their acid coated surfaces, at the general condition of them, and back at Thorne.

  "Absolutely not," she said.

  "They would contaminate everything in there."

  "The carapaces alone are worth over a hundred lumens each," Thorne said.

  "I don't care what they're worth, they're not going in my ring."

  Thorne looked at her for a moment, then at Tunde, with an expression that was doing something thoughtful.

  "He'll need them," he said.

  "The sale proceeds would cover the essence fruits and elixirs required to push him toward Disciple."

  Elyria looked at Thorne.

  "Since when do you have an investment in his advancement?"

  Thorne paused.

  He appeared to consider the question seriously, which was notable because he did not usually appear to consider questions seriously before answering them.

  "Since he pulled me out of a cell," he said, in the tone of someone stating a simple accounting.

  "The debt is minor, but it exists."

  Elyria studied him for a moment longer, then looked away without responding, which seemed to be her version of accepting the answer.

  Thorne crouched beside the first carcass and went to work with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had done this before.

  His hands moved with precision, separating carapace from the softer materials beneath, his flesh already beginning the process of repairing the acid damage on his side, the skin knitting back together in the slow, deliberate way of something growing rather than healing.

  From within the first opened body, he withdrew a small round orb, yellow, with mist moving inside it in slow currents. He placed it on the ground beside him. Then he looked at Tunde.

  "How did you come to have it?" he asked. "

  The relic. Tell me from the beginning."

  Tunde glanced at Elyria, who gave him nothing in particular to interpret.

  He looked back at Thorne, at the calm black eyes with their red centers, and weighed the question against what he knew and what he didn't.

  What he knew was that he was an Initiate in a world he did not understand, with a relic he could not explain, in the company of two people who were, by any practical measure, the closest thing to allies he had ever had.

  What he didn't know was extensive enough to fill several libraries.

  He told them.

  He started from the pit, the smell of it, the texture of the darkness, the way death had felt like the logical conclusion to a life that had been building toward it.

  He told them about the skeletal figure in the worn black robe, the way it had moved through the weight of hundreds of dead bodies to reach him, the shattering of the manacle that had bound him, and the way it had replaced that shattering with something else.

  The cube. The pebble. The agony of absorption. He told them about waking to the morning and the man with the painted face, and the way the cuff had defended him without his understanding or instruction.

  When he finished, Thorne had been still for a long moment, the second core in his hand, turning it slowly.

  "The black robe," he said.

  "Worn. Not ceremonial."

  Elyria shook her head before he finished the thought.

  "Not the Cult of Death. I've seen their imagery. They wear grey, which has always struck me as an odd choice for followers of death, but it's consistent." She paused.

  "Something older, maybe. Or something that doesn't organize itself the way cults do."

  "Something older," Thorne said, and the way he said it suggested the possibility did not make him comfortable, which made Tunde quietly uncomfortable in turn.

  Thorne set the second core beside the first and moved to the third carcass.

  "A weapon of this nature and function, blood bound, capable of absorption and refinement and shapeshifting, capable of forcing a heart open without a cultivation resource, should be nothing less than a blessed relic of considerable grade." He paused.

  "I've seen one before. Once, at a significant distance, and only for a moment."

  "I've seen one as well," Elyria said quietly.

  "The Regent of Forests carried one when she came to my continent."

  Thorne's hands stilled briefly.

  "You were in proximity to a Regent during a battle?"

  "My clan's stronghold was nearby. The forest itself was part of the defense, along with significant warding. We were protected." A pause, something complicated in her voice.

  "I was too young and too frightened to appreciate what I was witnessing. I've thought about it many times since."

  Thorne grunted, something between acknowledgement and respect.

  "Now," he said, turning to Tunde with an expression that had become instructional.

  "Activate the weapon."

  Tunde looked at the manacle. He felt the familiar tug of will he had used before to shift it into blade form, the intention reaching outward from somewhere in his chest.

  The result was immediate and total.

  His legs gave out. He went down to his hands and knees, the breath knocked sideways out of him by a sensation that was less like pain and more like being emptied, completely and instantaneously, of every resource his body had accumulated.

  His vision turned grey at the edges, and the grey closed inward rapidly. He heard Elyria's sharp intake of breath, felt her hands on his shoulders, and focused entirely on the simple mechanical task of moving air through his lungs.

  "What just happened?" he managed, after a moment.

  "The relic attempted to draw the Ethra required to function," Thorne said, from somewhere above him, his voice carrying the calm of someone observing a predictable outcome.

  "Your heart did not have sufficient reserves. The attempt emptied what little you had recovered."

  "You could have told him that beforehand," Elyria said, with an edge in her voice.

  "He needed to understand the gap between what that weapon requires and what he currently provides," Thorne said.

  "Words don't communicate that gap. Experience does."

  "He could have been seriously harmed."

  "He wasn't. And now he knows." Thorne's voice shifted slightly.

  "The condition he's in is called Ethra deprivation. It occurs when the body is entirely emptied of its Ethra reserve. At higher ranks, it's survivable as a tactical complication. At Initiate rank, in the middle of a genuine fight, it is death. The body cannot draw Ethra from outside sources fast enough to compensate, and without Ethra, the enhancements that allow a ranker to function at all simply cease." He paused.

  "Do not do that again."

  Tunde lay on his side and breathed and decided that the anger he felt about the lesson's delivery method was, in fact, less important than the lesson itself.

  Elyria had settled beside him, her silver eyes watching him with an expression that split the distance between irritation at Thorne and genuine concern for Tunde. She helped him shift into a sitting position against the cave wall, and he managed it, slowly.

  "Breathe," Thorne said.

  "Slow and deep. I'm going to teach you the cultivation method that the Heralds give to new Initiates without a fighting style yet. It is not a good method. It is a functional one. But it will serve until you have something better."

  Elyria's head came up sharply.

  "You were with the Heralds," she said, not quite a question.

  "Was," Thorne said.

  "Specifically, the Legion branch of the Heralds. I doubt the welcome I'd receive upon return would be the warm variety."

  Elyria was quiet for a moment, filing this away.

  "The method," Thorne continued, settling himself in front of Tunde with the focused attention of someone transferring practical information,

  "Is called the Ethra Attunement Cultivation Method. The name is accurate and unimpressive in equal measure. What it does is simple: you breathe with intention. Not ordinary breathing. Deliberate breathing, where each inhale is directed inward past your lungs and toward your Ethra heart, and each heartbeat draws on the ambient Ethra in the air around you, pulling it in and holding it briefly before the exhale releases what the heart cannot use." He paused.

  "Close your eyes. Find the beat. Use it."

  Tunde closed his eyes.

  The heartbeat was there, present and familiar despite everything, a steady point in the grey emptiness that his Ethra reserves had become.

  He breathed in, slow and long, and tried to hold the intention of it, directing each breath not just into his lungs but further, following the path the cultivation earlier had traced, and he waited.

  The first trickle came as barely a sensation, less than warmth, just the faint indication that something was moving in the right direction. His heart received it, and the beat following that one was marginally steadier.

  Then the manacle vibrated.

  His eyes almost opened. He held them shut by an act of will and stayed with the sensation, which was not the sharp, invasive pulse he had felt before but something quieter and more deliberate, a presence in the back of his mind like something becoming aware of what was happening and choosing to participate.

  The Ethra he was drawing in from the air reached his wrist and stopped there for a moment, and in that moment something happened to it that he could not fully describe.

  It was like watching water become cleaner as it passed through a medium, except he was not watching; he was feeling, and what came out the other side into his heart was more concentrated than what had gone in, richer, carrying more potential per unit of volume than raw ambient Ethra had any reason to carry.

  The half that remained after the relic's processing arrived in his heart with a warmth that was out of proportion to its quantity.

  He breathed again.

  And again.

  Each cycle reinforced the last, the process finding its rhythm, and Tunde stopped thinking about it and simply existed inside it, his awareness narrowing down to the breath and the beat and the slow, incremental filling of something that had been completely empty.

  The cave ceased to be cold. The hard ground ceased to matter. The entire day, from the pit to the present moment, ceased to be something he needed to carry.

  He breathed.

  ****

  The light that found his eyelids when he finally noticed it was the pale, tentative light of early morning, coming through the cave entrance at a low angle that turned the dust motes gold. He had been sitting in the same position all night.

  He opened his eyes.

  Thorne was nearby, seated on a flat piece of rock with one of the centipede's barbed limbs in his hand and a smooth stone in the other, working the edge of the limb with the patient repetition of someone who finds the process meditative.

  The red pinpricks of his eyes were steady and focused. The acid damage from the night before was entirely gone, the skin on his left side smooth and uninterrupted, as though it had never been otherwise.

  Elyria was seated a little further away, cross-legged, in her own cultivation posture, eyes closed, the metal blades that were her constant companions orbiting her slowly in a wide, lazy pattern that suggested she was pulling Ethra through them as she breathed.

  Tunde looked at the manacle and then at his own hands and became aware that he felt well.

  Not recovered, not merely functional, but genuinely well in a way he could not remember feeling before, as though the cultivation had not simply refilled what had been emptied but had done something structural in the process, something that the relic's refinement had contributed to.

  His heart was full.

  Not the modest fill of the previous days, but brimming, Ethra circulating through his body in currents he could feel in his fingertips and behind his eyes, reinforcing muscle and bone and the hundred small systems his body maintained without his awareness.

  He activated his sight and the cave lit up around him in rich, layered color, the golden lines in the rock walls moving with a depth and clarity that felt different from yesterday.

  Thorne noticed his movement.

  "Better?" he asked.

  "Yes," Tunde said, meaning it completely.

  Thorne set the barbed limb down and looked at him with an assessment that was not unfriendly. He nodded at the pile of carapaces he had separated and stacked against the cave wall.

  "Pick one."

  Tunde rose and went to the pile. The carapaces were large, easily as long as his arm, the surface of them a dense matte black with gold threading through in almost regular patterns. He lifted the first one. It was surprisingly, almost implausibly light.

  Thorne watched.

  "The density of the material is in its composition, not its weight," he said. "A Sandshard centipede carapace resists Ethra-enhanced strikes from anything below Disciple level. Disciple grade tools can cut it, but not easily. The armor merchants in any frontier city will pay well for them."

  "You're giving them to me?" Tunde asked.

  "I'm paying a debt," Thorne said, with the bluntness of someone who does not find this sentiment complicated.

  "You and your companions helped me out of that cell. The debt is minor, but I don't carry minor debts any more than I carry large ones." He held out a bone blade, one of the shaped ones he had made from the centipede's limbs.

  "You'll need something to trade with and something to fight with until that relic of yours is less likely to kill you than assist you. Here."

  Tunde took the blade. He turned it in his hands, feeling the weight of it, the balance. It was crude compared to the dark silver weapon the manacle produced, but it was solid and dependable in a way that asked nothing of him in return.

  "Thank you," he said.

  "Don't," Thorne said.

  "Not for this. In the world you've entered, gratitude is fine between people who understand each other, but don't give it freely to people who haven't earned it and don't give it at all to people who will use it as leverage. No one does anything for free here, Tunde. Including me. Remember that and you'll navigate better."

  Tunde looked at him for a moment, at the pale skin and the black eyes and the quiet authority the man carried without appearing to try, and nodded.

  They worked in silence for a while, Tunde following Thorne's instruction in scraping the remnant material from the underside of the carapaces, the bone blade doing the work steadily.

  The sun outside was climbing, the pale light at the cave entrance brightening by degrees, and the Wastelands were coming back to their daytime state of heat and hostility.

  "The relic refined the Ethra," Tunde said, when the silence had gone on long enough for him to find the words he wanted.

  "When I was cultivating. It drew the ambient Ethra as it entered my body and did something to it before releasing it into my heart. I'm not sure what, but what came through was better than what went in. Cleaner, maybe. More concentrated."

  Thorne's hands paused on the carapace he was working. He looked at the manacle with an expression that was very still and very attentive.

  "Describe the sensation precisely," he said.

  Tunde did, choosing his words carefully, trying to find the accurate description rather than the approximate one. Thorne listened without interrupting, which was its own form of attention, the kind that indicated the information was being taken seriously.

  When Tunde finished, Thorne was quiet for a long moment.

  "Ethra refinement is not a standard function," he said finally.

  "It is an application that some cultivators develop as a skill over years of practice, and even then, it functions as an active technique rather than a passive one. A relic that performs it automatically, on ambient Ethra, for a blood-bound user of Initiate rank." He paused.

  "I want you to understand what I'm about to tell you."

  Tunde looked at him.

  "Do not speak of this. Not the refinement, not the absorption, not the shapeshifting, not the forced breakthrough. Not to anyone. Not in passing, not in trust, not under any circumstances until you are strong enough that the people who want it cannot take it from you." His voice was level and serious and entirely without the theatrics he occasionally employed when making a point.

  "The relic is blood-bound to you, which means to use it, someone would need to bind it to their own blood first. That process requires your death. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"

  Tunde looked down at the manacle.

  It sat against his skin, dormant and cool, the inscriptions resting in the metal in their sleeping patterns, innocent in the way that something capable of great consequence can appear innocent when it is not doing anything.

  He thought about the skeletal figure in the pit, the patient deliberateness with which it had moved through the weight of hundreds of dead to reach him, the precision with which it had placed the cube in his hands.

  He thought about the possibility that none of that had been accidental.

  "I understand," he said.

  "Good," Thorne said, and returned to the carapace.

  The word he had used, legendary, sat quietly in the space between them, neither amplified nor retracted, simply present, a fact that Tunde would have to learn to carry alongside everything else he was carrying.

  He looked at the blade in his hand. He looked at the carapaces stacked against the wall. He looked at the cave entrance and the growing light beyond it.

  He breathed.