Chapter 6: Only a Wizard

  A ruined cottage was spread before them.

  It did not belong in a dungeon.

  Cole stood in the threshold of the Trial Gate’s exit and stared, half expecting the walls to snap back into stone the moment he blinked. Instead, the scene held. A small glade opened under a gray-green sky. Trees ringed the clearing, their trunks dark and straight, their leaves a deep, almost wet emerald. Somewhere nearby a stream burbled, the sound steady and calm in a way that made his skin crawl.

  There were grasses and wildflowers everywhere. Little white blooms. Purple ones. Yellow bursts of dandelions. A soft wind slid through the clearing, cool against his face, and it brought the scent of damp soil and crushed leaves.

  For one heartbeat, it almost felt peaceful.

  Then his shoulder pulsed. His ankle throbbed. His stomach turned, still sour from adrenaline and blood and the memory of a sword inching through his shield.

  Cole exhaled slowly.

  “It’s almost beautiful,” he said, voice rough. “It would be if I trusted it.”

  Pain throbbed all over him at this point. It had spread into the background of his awareness with a constant hum. Sometimes it spiked and reminded him it could still get worse. He was only pushing forward out of sheer determination to survive.

  Faelen took a step into the glade, head turning, eyes narrowing.

  “There’s something in the cottage,” the elf said.

  Cole followed his gaze.

  The cottage sat about twenty yards away, half-collapsed, its roof caved in on one side. Weathered boards leaned at angles that should not have held. The doorway yawned black, shadowed. Vines crawled up one wall trying to reclaim it. A window frame hung crooked, no glass in it, just an empty square.

  Cole took one step toward it.

  That was when words unfurled in front of him.

  DRINK THE LIQUID IN THE BOTTLE ON THE TABLE.

  NOTE: ONLY A WIZARD MAY PASS THIS TRIAL GATE.

  Cole froze.

  He stared at the message, then glanced at Faelen to see if the elf could see it too.

  Faelen’s expression shifted, a grim little nod.

  “The Ethereal has told me that I am unable to pass this trial without the aide of a wizard,” Faelen said. “Which would be you, in this case.”

  Cole’s jaw tightened.

  “Of course it is,” he muttered. “Because why wouldn’t it be.”

  They stepped into the ruined cottage.

  The air inside was cooler, damp with rot and age. The floorboards were mostly gone, leaving patches of packed dirt and broken planks that creaked underfoot. Dust lay on everything in a fine gray film, disturbed only by their movement. The smell reminded Cole of an abandoned shed, except there was something else under it. Something sharp. Herbal. Bitter.

  In the center of the cottage, as if someone had placed it there carefully and then walked away, a dusty table sat broken in half. One side had collapsed, leaving the other half tilted.

  On it rested a single bottle.

  Black glass. Narrow neck. No label. No cork, just a simple stopper with wax hardened around the rim.

  Cole stared at it.

  “Drinking a strange liquid is not a good idea,” he said.

  His voice came out flatter than he expected. A tired statement of fact.

  Faelen shrugged, and it would have been casual if his eyes were not so intent.

  “We must move forward,” Faelen said. “This is the only way.”

  Cole didn’t like that phrase. The only way. He’d heard it too many times in his life, usually right before something went wrong.

  Faelen moved to the right side of the cottage, toward the back. He shoved aside some ruined items, boards and broken pottery, and uncovered a little nook in the corner. Someone had tried to build a workspace there. A crude stove, stone base, with a hanging cauldron on a metal rack. A set of bellows rested beside it. Beneath the cauldron was a firebox, blackened. It smelled faintly of smoke. It had been used recently despite the ruin.

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  Shelves had been bolted into the wall. They held jugs for liquid. A mortar and pestle. A little dish. Smaller built-in shelves meant to hold tiny containers, vials, ingredients.

  Cole’s eyes tracked over it all.

  It was too neat. Too staged.

  “It’s an alchemy bench,” Faelen said. “You can make them of different tiers. Some have different effects. Cauldrons too, work in the same way.”

  Cole glanced at him.

  “You seem to know a lot even though you can’t get the profession.”

  Faelen’s mouth twitched. This time it was closer to real amusement.

  “Spend as long as I have under the Ethereal and you pick up a thing or two,” the elf said.

  Cole leaned against the door frame for a moment, careful not to put too much weight on his bad ankle. His shoulder was still a slow burn. He could feel dried blood stiffening his shirt near the cut. The moment he let his body relax, the pain rushed in.

  “Yeah,” Cole said. “About that.”

  Faelen looked at him, wary.

  “Why aren’t you way more powerful?” Cole asked anyway. “If you’re so old and all. You should be far ahead of me, or am I misunderstanding tiers that much?”

  Faelen’s expression tightened in frustration.

  “We don’t have time for this,” Faelen said. Then he sighed. “I’ll answer this, but we need to get a move on. I am grateful to you, but I am dying. With less than a day to live now.”

  Cole rubbed the back of his neck, grimacing as the motion tugged at his shoulder.

  “Right,” he said. “Sorry.”

  Faelen shook his head.

  “I understand,” Faelen said. “I cannot fathom what it is like to be initiated, so I forget that not everyone grows up under the Ethereal.”

  He paused, then met Cole’s eyes.

  “Remember how I said you can end up under the thumb of a stronger faction?”

  Cole nodded. He remembered. He hadn’t liked it then either.

  “Alestaria belongs to a larger empire,” Faelen said. “The Five Crystal Empire. I won’t go into the details about it, but what you need to know is that at a certain point, you get stability under the Ethereal. Sapient beings, they adapt. Humans know this and it is no different with other races.”

  Cole swallowed. He didn’t like the word stability either.

  “We build,” Faelen continued. “We come up with ways to deal with threats. We automate. This creates comfort. So the reason I am not more powerful, despite my age, is quite simple.”

  Faelen lifted a hand, palm up, as if offering the truth physically.

  “I didn’t always pursue a life of progression,” he said.

  Cole blinked. That was not the answer he expected.

  “In fact,” Faelen continued, “I was quite content to live a simpler life, if you can call it that, where death was not my constant companion.”

  Faelen’s gaze drifted to the ruined stove and cauldron.

  “Or rather,” he added quietly, “it was, as the Ethereal is always testing and training in some ways. You can never remove all the danger out of life.”

  Cole nodded without thinking. Indianapolis. Night deliveries. Bad neighborhoods. People who thought a delivery driver was an easy target. The gun on his waist, because he’d learned what happened when you were unprepared.

  Faelen saw the nod and continued.

  “Because of this, I didn’t level much more than I absolutely had to in order to function,” Faelen said. “Circumstances changed for me only a few months ago, and I found myself adventuring. I fell in with a party, and we decided to take on this rift.”

  Faelen’s voice became quieter, and for the first time Cole heard something under the elf’s calm. Exhaustion. Loss.

  “Thus,” Faelen said, “here I am.”

  Cole grunted.

  There were more questions. Hundreds. He wanted to ask about Alestaria and the empire and what the Ethereal really was, whether it was a god or a machine or something worse. He wanted to ask about what happened when the decade of protection ended. He wanted to ask if Earth was already doomed.

  Mostly, he wanted to ask one selfish question.

  Is my son alive?

  He swallowed it down. Not now. Not here. Not while a bottle waited on a table.

  Cole stepped toward the table.

  The black bottle sat in the dust, mocking him.

  “I guess I can’t put this off anymore,” he said.

  His voice came out rough, but steady enough.

  He picked up the bottle.

  It was cool in his hand. He expected glass, but it felt slightly different, almost polished stone. He lifted it in a small salute toward Faelen, because if he didn’t make a joke, he was going to think too hard.

  “Bottoms up,” Cole muttered.

  His stomach tightened. Every instinct he had screamed at him that this little potion bottle did not contain anything good.

  He pulled the stopper and drank.

  The liquid was thick and bitter, it tasted of burnt herbs and iron. It coated his tongue. For half a second, nothing happened.

  Cole almost let himself hope.

  Then his stomach flared.

  Fire ate at his insides, sudden and savage. It hit so hard it stole his breath. Cole doubled over, a sound tearing out of him that was half a groan and half a gag.

  He retched.

  Nothing came up at first, just bile and spit, but his body kept trying anyway, convulsing, trying to purge the poison by force.

  His vision blurred at the edges.

  The cottage tilted.

  Cole caught himself on the broken table, knuckles white, sweat instantly slicking his skin.

  “Fucking hell,” he rasped.

  Faelen did not look surprised. His expression was sympathetic, which somehow made Cole angrier.

  “You knew,” Cole hissed.

  Faelen’s gaze flicked to him. “I suspected.”

  Cole wanted to throw the bottle at him. He wanted to throw it at the Ethereal. Instead, he just breathed through the pain, because breathing was the only thing keeping him upright.

  After a few moments, the worst of it eased.

  Cole straightened slowly, shaking.

  The fresh round of pain reignited everything else. Shoulder. Ankle. Head. Now stomach too, a deep, sick heat coiled inside him.

  A notification lit up in front of him.

  He almost laughed. Of course it did.

  TIER I TOXIN INGESTED.

  TIME TO LETHALITY: 1 DAY.

  Then more text, cold and precise.

  TRIAL PARAMETERS: ALCHEMY PROFESSION.

  SUCCESS GRANTS: BLACK HALO ALCHEMY (NOVICE).

  FAILURE RESULTS IN: DEATH.

  OBJECTIVE: CRAFT REQUIRED POTIONS USING INGREDIENTS IN THE GLADE.

  REQUIRED POTIONS:

  PURGE TONIC (TIER I)

  MEND POTION (TIER I)

  Cole stared at the message for a moment, feeling his throat go dry.

  One day.

  He looked at the alchemy bench. The cauldron. The mortar and pestle. The empty shelves waiting for ingredients.

  He looked at the glade outside, trees swaying gently, flowers nodding in the wind. Pretending to be a peaceful woodland scene and not a death sentence wrapped in pretty scenery.

  Then he looked at Faelen.

  Cole swallowed, tasting bitter toxin on the back of his tongue.

  “It’s do or die,” he said.

  Faelen nodded, face grim.

  “Yes,” the elf said. “Literally.”