"Rise and shine, sleepyheads!" I sit up abruptly from the bare ground under my cloak, dazedly reaching for my weapons on reflex and see Garrick doing the same — though with substantially more speed and surety.

  As I blink the sleep away I see a face I'd just been…dreaming about and find myself blushing immediately. As is the only reasonable thing to do, I turn away to hide my face.

  "Dame Serafina, I can't say I was expecting another visitor to my humble campsite." Garrick is humorless despite the clear sardonic tone. "What brings you to my neck of the woods?"

  Marshalling all of my self-control, I will the heat from my cheeks around the same time I consciously clock how cold it is and immediately start shivering. Continuing my looking anywhere but at Serafina. A heavy frost and layer of snow has fallen around the camp, but only beyond a ring centered on the campfire — still burning bright despite the chill thanks to an Ignia concentrator akin to my cloak but more sophisticated that sits in the center.

  "Sorry for the surprise, Garrick. I was pursuing an escapee from the medical wards." Her voice trails off and I feel her eyes burning a hole in the back of my head as I turn around to give her a weak smile and stand.

  She looks…different. She still has what I would expect from her station: robes and a regal focusing stave. But they're armored to a similar degree to my fighting cloak, and beneath her white and gold robes I see the black and gold armor the Blackthorn knights are known for, though hers is notably lighter from what little I can see. Shapely, too.

  I cough as that particular intrusive thought momentarily stalls my brain out. "I… I'm, uh, sorr-."

  Serafina closes the gap between us quickly and puts a hand on my shoulder and my voice catches. "No, don't you apologize to me. I failed to uphold my end of our bargain. I wish you would have sought me out instead of doing…this." She gestures broadly at everything, "But, I understand. I didn't return to give you my findings after I talked to the seers and I knew full well your sleep had been troubled." Abruptly she pulls me in close into an embrace. "I ask your forgiveness for this, Nyssa."

  I stammer a weak response. She's maybe a foot shorter than me, so the hug has her well below my chin level — making it quite easy to hide my face as I catch the smell of whatever perfume she's wearing or whatever she washed her hair with. It reminds me instantly of a fragrance May used to wear all the time. Something based on pure Florii essence — the essence of flowers, pollination, and propagation — that lets whoever is smelling it smell their favorite flowers. Cherry blossoms, for me. Either that or she's just wearing cherry blossom perfume, I guess. "It's fine, Seraf— Dame Serafina. I was restless regardless and was considering leaving anyways, if I'm being honest. Nobody ordered me to stay put, so I was going to, uh, use that as my excuse."

  Garrick scoffs with a light chuckle. "Learned that one from Lan, Nyss?"

  Serafina steps back from me, smiling warmly. I definitely don't feel cold anymore. "That would definitely explain how you snuck out. Garrick," She casts a glance over her shoulder at him with a smile that manages to light up her strange void-black eyes. "She, without a hint of exaggeration, snuck out by hiding pillows in her bed to make it look like she was there and slinked out the window!" She returns to looking at me with seemingly honest mirth that makes me smile back. "Which, as it turns out, worked quite well for a while. Nimael saw your message and "you" still laying asleep and left you be all morning until Lady Lyriel noticed that there wasn't any passive essence pressure from your room some hours later. I'm pretty sure he'll be hearing about it for months. Though if the orders thing is all it takes for me to get you to do what I want, I'll have to keep that in mind." She winks — a further assault on my faltering self-control.

  It only momentarily distracts me, though. I feel more than a bit guilty despite the tone of Serafina's voice being light. "He's not going to get in trouble, right? It's not like he did anything wrong. Nimael, I mean."

  "Watcher above, Nyssa, you worry too much. Nobody is going to punish Nimael because he got fooled by someone he had no reason to be suspicious of. Though I imagine he won't let it happen again." She looses a melodic laugh before turning more serious. "So, that all aside, have you found anything promising, Garrick? This anomaly has me worried, so I would hope you've already solved it."

  Garrick — who has been breaking camp while I've been distracted — shrugs. "Nothing concrete yet. But I haven't made it down to the river yet. What I can confirm, though, is that if it lives, it's not actively seeping regional essence like most Calamities would. My number one tool for tracking them is the aetheric instability they leave in their wake and this one is either dead, or restraining itself from doing that." As he talks, he moves through the motions of packing up with a smoothness that I struggle to meaningfully help with. Anytime I manage to get "ahead" of him, I wind up just messing up his process and it leads to awkward fumbling. As such I take a step back with a small smile we both share. It's basically the same as back when I was kid. "I've heard rumors of dragons in the woods near here, though, so I was going to seek them — if they're still around or if the rumors are true. If they are, they aren't something we can risk getting blindsided by this strange anomaly. Planning to leave shortly. Will you be coming?"

  "Well, I don't see a reason to run away if I'm already out here. I did assure Lady Lyriel that I would bring her charge back with me, and I doubt if Nyssa will be ready to leave yet. How are your wounds? Have you been taking it easy?"

  The look she gives me with the question gives me the impression she already knows the answer, so I am straightforward about it. "I got taken by surprise by an evolved creeper on the road when I was resting, and then wound up getting involved in a nasty fight with some thugs protecting a local. Then just a minor scuffle with some trapped slimes and a couple shade thieves. Battered, but nothing broken."

  She gives me a distinctly unamused glare that makes me shrink. It softens after a moment, though, and she says, "So, three fights. One trivial, one middling, and the one against the thugs, I assume, was the most dangerous." As she details and applies some judgement, I feel a bit of a need to squirm growing. "Good job." Her face warms to a big smile. "While I'm a little miffed over this whole "stealing away in the middle of the night" thing, I can't rightly complain when you went ahead and did your job along the way, and to great success, even."

  As I start to relax a bit at Serafina's warm comments it's partially undercut by Garrick's next statement. "It was still an unnecessary risk."

  "I know, Garrick. I'm not going to deny that."

  Serafina chimes in, though, "Oh relax, Garrick. Nyssa has shown herself to be more than capable of making these decisions for herself. She'll be taking up her position officially in a few months, it's important that she gets a chance to spread her wings a bit, right, Nyssa? You've definitely got it under control overall, right?"

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  She looks at me significantly, "Yeah. I think I've done pretty well for myself so far, all things considered."

  Serafina claps once with a wide smile. "Besides, the stumbling points that you've hit were pretty much all exclusively out of your control. So we can't rightly hold that against you."

  Garrick grunts an assent as he hefts his carryall to his back. It's much more of a "carryeverything" than anything I carry, though. Where mine are small, contained belt pouches, Garrick's is a full-size expedition pack and able to store proportionally more. Once upon a time I got a look at everything he carries and it might as well be an entire house worth of travel and survival equipment, specialty tools, curatives, and countless little magicked items. "We should get moving. If you're up to it, Nyssa, you should lead. I know essence-sense isn't your forte, but with what we're seeking, it should be within your ability to find if it exists. But first we have to get down to that river. The cliff will eventually drop low enough to join the river, but then we'll have to backtrack." He looks at me, "What do you propose we do?"

  That sets me thinking. I walk over to the ledge and look down. It's probably a two hundred-foot drop. Climbable, but it will take time for all three of us to do safely. Garrick could use his Terra control to make steps or handholds along the way, which would simplify it, but that seems like the most obvious solution, so it's probably not what he's looking for.

  I pace along the ledge, considering for a few moments, trying to ignore the other two staring at me.

  An idea comes and I snap my gauntleted fingers. "Air cushion. It's a fall I can manage easily for myself. I'll just manifest semisolid air cushions along the way."

  Turning to both of them, I see Garrick giving me The Garrick Face, so I gain no ground there, but Serafina chimes in. "Sounds like a plan to me. I've got nothing but confidence. I've seen you use that spell to climb and run with ease. Making a bunch of weaker ones should work, I think."

  I smile, glad to hear support for my idea. "Try to keep in mind how much larger I am than either of you." It's about as much of an approval as I anticipated, so I'll take it. I know Garrick trusts me and would definitely speak up if he thought it were a bad plan, so it's basically as glowing a review as Serafina's was — just in Garrick-speak.

  I walk back away from the ledge about fifteen paces to drop into a sprinter's position. "Before either of you try to follow, toss a rock or something heavy into the column I leave behind to test it. I've done something like this once before and it worked fine, but no point in not taking the safe route."

  A pair of nods respond, so I nod back and start to do controlled breathing to draw in as much Aero as I can. It's worse than Ignia for me, but I have more command over it than the average trained person.

  Next, I focus on shaping, closing my eyes to do so. This spell will be more complex, so I hum my way through various mnemonics to help me form the more complex spellshapes to modify the otherwise familiar spell. The additional modifiers are something I do practice, but mostly academically and not as part of my normal routines, so I lose my progress a couple times and have to start over until I'm satisfied with the construction of the spell in my mind and how I think it should perform.

  [Skystep]

  [Barrier | Linger | Sustain | Underfoot | Aero]

  Shaped, I feel an immense pressure in my chest as I hold onto the spell, briefly storing it within my vessel to keep it stable and steady, ready to be released at a moment's notice. If I do it for too long, I'll experience poisoning effects very rapidly, but I'm about to fall so it won't be an issue.

  I raise slightly, scraping one foot into a launch position, and then release my breath one last time. With a sharp intake of effort, I fire off into motion. The fifteen walking steps from the ledge turn into five loping strides before I throw myself from the ledge and out into open air. I metered my jump so I would leave this trail of platforms out across the ravine to go over the river — that way if the worst-case scenario happens, Garrick and Serafina would be falling into the river, not onto stone ground.

  Reaching the point where my velocity starts to shift down instead of out , I release the spell and immediately feel myself pass through the forming barrier of captive wind. A moment later, right as I'm beginning to build speed again, another appears at my feet, bleeding off speed once more. Each time I pass through, there's a solid whump of air, as if a ball of air had been fired out of a cannon

  This goes on for about thirty more "impacts", with the last ten concentrated into the final fifty feet. In those last ten, My speed arrests to more or less zero, allowing me to actually land on the last platform solidly and step off to drop to the ground.

  Looking up, I see Garrick peering down. I quickly sign "Knight first, then cleric." in Vigil handspeech. He signs an assent and tosses a small boulder into the column. It doesn't make it terribly far — being so much lighter than a person — but does readily slow down, proving the efficacy of my plan before rolling off to the side and tumbling down with a mighty splash. Nodding, he then disappears from the ledge. A moment later, I see Garrick's massive bulk launched along an identical trajectory to my own jump. The platforms have to work much harder to slow him with each one seeming to nearly fully dissipate with each impact, only reforming a few seconds after the impacts. Each impact has me feel it in my soul. Expending extra essence with each and passing along Aero poisoning from the expenditure. The world slows fractionally with each whump in my perception.

  Unfortunately, Garrick is far heavier than me, so while they slow him to a nonlethal speed, he doesn't come to a graceful stop like I did, instead proving that my decision to aim for the river was a good one.

  He hits with a mighty splash, a huge displacement of water that sends spray halfway back up the chasm. In short order, Garrick extracts himself from the water. His armor immediately starts to eject the water from its seals and vents to dry him off: a process that sees a steady pool growing beneath him as he stands with his arms crossed. "Good plan. If it stopped me, It'll stop her for sure."

  I nod and cast my look back up to and see Serafina looking a little green around the gills with my helmet's sensory enhancement enchantments. I give her the "Go" sign and she noticeably swallows before stepping away. She takes more prep time than I'd expect, and when she finally leaps free of the cliff face, the jump seems awkward and offcenter.

  She hits the first barrier with about half of her body, coming up just a little bit short, which also send her spinning to miss the next barrier entirely.

  I look at the track she's on and see that she's not going to hit many if any of the remaining barriers and assuredly going to come up short of the river to land on the stony shore. My breath catches as I start to call more Aero and Ignia to imbue myself as fast as possible. But I feel something else come to my call, my Sanctus. I decide to trust it. I'm not going to let this happen.

  "Garrick, get ready." I command as I turn and launch myself into motion, the Sanctus doing exactly as I need it to. It settles mostly into my legs and mind where it always does. Each step carries me farther than any stride reasonably should, and I feel my sense of everything dilate down beyond the fastest speed I could ever achieve with Aero imbuements and beyond.

  Serafina is falling in slow motion, reaching out for the platforms in vain, and about halfway down in freefall.

  I hit the wall and leap, setting myself running up with every ounce of power I can muster. After a spare quarter second I see my moment and kick from the wall after lining up with Serafina so we collide.

  The impact of our armors colliding is deafening, but the clang is dulled as I wrap my arms around her as tight as I can, sending both of us back in the direction of the column of barriers with way too much speed. I twist as the series of whumps come in a staccato burst as the last ten pop in sequence to drop us both into the water far harder than Garrick. At the last second I twist and release a [Puff] to put my back to the water with Serafina atop me and wrapped tight.

  I hit the water with a deafening bang that my armor struggles to silence through all of my helmet enchantments, and barely a moment later feel my head and back strike the softer silty bed of the river. Softer doesn't mean "soft", though. And even through the force mitigation enchantments, the impact sends me straight into unconsciousness. My last thought as I release Serafina from limp arms is that the water is very cold as it starts to flood into the vents on my armor.