With his future settled, Eld hoped to drift off quickly and face the morrow’s journey well-rested. But as he lay there, patiently waiting for sleep, his imagination wandered to the bittersweet images that had kept him going through the years of study and physical training.

  He pictured himself standing behind John, raining down fire on a monster swarm, robed in the red, black, and gold of a royal [Flame Caller]. It hurt to picture his dead destiny, so Eld pushed it away and tried to construct a new future in his mind to be excited about.

  He slipped the runed fire-starter from his adventuring backpack. His constant companion had betrayed him in the end. Eld deduced it was his use of the tool that must have confused the gods and cursed him with the ability [Rune Crafter].

  Holding it in his hands, he sought the skill knowledge the gods had granted his mind and tried to push mana into the metal square. Except, this time, Eld felt no drain on his mana reserves. Rather than lasting a few seconds, Eld could keep the flame lit with no effort. It danced in front of him, and Eld wondered what would happen if he tried to cycle mana through it multiple times more rapidly.

  Uncertain of how he might accomplish this, Eld mentally touched on the connection between his mana pool and the rune and pushed. As he did, Eld imagined the metal brick turning into a knife of fire held in his hands. Instead, the flame just enlarged. Worse yet, he felt the mana in his body begin to drain. Gaining his heart skill had opened up his ability to gain and use mana, but his pool was still too small to maintain the larger flame. He wasn’t paying the rune activation cost multiple times; he was just paying it once and sustaining it with a larger flow of mana.

  It took Eld five failed attempts before he figured out the trick to rapidly cycling his mana. Paying extra mana for a spell was like blowing wind into a flute. Paying for a single rune multiple times was closer to finding a rhythm. It was difficult to play one rhythm with your left hand and another with the right, but once you got them going at the same time, it was effortless to keep them. With practice, he knew he could get faster and faster.

  Unable to sleep until he could test his theory, Eld began to practice the rhythmic cycling of his mana.

  At first, progress was slow until Eld discovered he could tie the activation to a literal rhythm to speed himself up. As he tested different syllabic patterns, he found one that helped him flex the unfamiliar magical muscle with the right timing to hit a stride and begin rapid activations.

  “Ti-bi-tuh Ti-bi-tuh Ti-bi-tuh Ti-bi-tuh Ti-bi-tuh”

  Each activation sparked a flame in the candle, which slowly faded over five seconds. The more activations Eld could trigger before the flame went out increased the density of fire and heat as he recited his meaningless incantation.

  In a fit of excitement at his progress, he swung open his window and pointed his fire-starter at the sky. It took him only a second to find his rhythm, and within three, he was triggering the device so quickly that a blue flame had begun to form. For a moment, the flame dagger he’d imagined began to sharpen—until he felt a sharp pain in his hand as a sizzling sound hit his ear.

  Instinctively, he dropped the fire-starter, and it fell from his window to the street below. The flame faded as it lay on the cobbled street, but the rune-carved tool itself continued to glow red-hot as it clicked across the road. Eld looked at the red welt on his palm and winced. The flames had been hot, certainly, but the heat radiated from a point two inches from the device's head. It hadn’t even been enough to burn his palm, and certainly not enough to redden the metal of his iron tool.

  Silently, Eld snuck down to the street where he watched the device slowly cool. Gingerly, he grabbed the fire-starter and tried again to find the rhythm and trigger the device. He went slower, paid closer attention, and as he did, his hope of quickly figuring out how to abuse his new class died.

  It was the device itself. It wasn’t built to be triggered multiple times, and the speed at which mana was passing through it was causing it to heat rapidly. Eld frowned but was not defeated. It was a setback, and setbacks could be overcome… Maybe a stronger metal? Eld mused and then yawned.

  Remembering that tonight would likely be his last night in a proper bed for weeks, he begrudgingly returned to his room and tried to find elusive sleep.

  But sleep refused to come. As he tossed and turned, his thoughts drifted, pulling him back through the years to the night he was rescued from the playfort. The air was thick with the ghosts of that day, heavy with humidity and pollen.

  “Did you hear? Did you hear?” Micah shouted as he sprinted toward his friends, his younger sister Jesse trailing silently behind. “Adventurers are in town! A whole party—a [Knight], a [Pyromancer], and a [Ranger]!”

  “Some adventuring party,” John scoffed. “Thelia said they’re in town because the pollen is too thick for the mage, and he has a runny nose.”

  “But still! We should go see them and ask bunches of questions about how to be adventurers! I bet the [Pyromancer] could help you be a wizard, John!”

  In those days, Eld was a foot taller than John. Rather than just a few inches, it had been decided by group vote that Eld would be the party’s frontline combatant. John had never been happy with the arrangement, arguing that since Eld was the better reader, he should be the wizard. The argument always died when Eld asked if he wanted to wrestle for the position.

  “What’s more important, Eld? Training or questions?” John asked, his tone sharp.

  The question caught Eld off guard. The others looked to him for direction, but he was new to leadership and hated when John put him on the spot. Both sounded like good options, but in the stories he’d heard from the town militia veterans, it was always training that saved lives.

  “We can train until we’re tired, then catch them at the Alehouse,” he decided. “Visitors always end up at the Alehouse.”

  His friends nodded.

  “Sparring, then?” John asked, already moving toward his wooden staff, setting the day's activity before Eld could weigh in.

  Unsure how to rebut him, Eld just nodded and picked up his own staff. Micah grabbed two smaller sticks for swords, and Jesse filled her sling with pebbles.

  “Let's play Smear the Healer,” John suggested.

  Eld’s stomach tightened. He hated that one. It always played out the same way: Thelia would pick him as her guard, Micah would team up with John to rush her, and his side was left with Jesse, whose tossed stones were mostly ignored by the bigger boys. In theory, it was a three-on-two, but not the way John and Micah played. It always became a two-on-one, and lately, John had started hitting hard. Still, seeing the others nodding, Eld relented.

  “Fine,” he sighed, “but no face hits. My mom almost talked to your dad last time I came home with a bruise.”

  “Of course,” John replied, nodding.

  Team selection went as expected, and since the teams were technically three-on-two, John also got to start in the mound of gathered sticks. The children allied their fort.

  “Go!” John yelled.

  The duo charged as Jesse flung rocks, mostly at her brother. As predicted, Micah ignored the tiny pebbles as they barreled toward Thelia, who danced behind Eld, trying to keep them from circling her. Thelia was the tallest and fastest of them all, but if they got around him, it was only a matter of time before she went down.

  John approached. Eld set his stance, preparing for the shin blows John favored, when the smaller boy suddenly swung his staff high. A sharp crack echoed as the wood connected with his unguarded head. Eld staggered back, dazed. In that moment, Micah dodged past him and tackled Thelia before she could break into a run.

  “What was that?!” Eld shouted, his hand flying to his face as the skin began to purple. “We said no face shots!”

  “Yeah, well, you should have blocked it,” John shot back. “You think real enemies are going to avoid your face because you asked? Is that how you want to practice? Leaving your head undefended?”

  Heat flooded Eld’s cheeks. John had a point, but he should have said something so Eld knew he was still going to target his head. He was embarrassed by the quick loss and was trying to come up with a retort when John shoved him.

  “If you’re going to start crying over a light tap to the head, you should give up tanking.”

  Eld roared and tackled his smaller friend, pummeling him with his fists once they hit the ground. Micah and Thelia dragged him off, but the damage was done. John’s face was also beginning to swell. Eld’s anger evaporated, replaced by shame. He shook his friends off and stalked away to cool down.

  It was John who found him later, sitting behind the playfort sweating in the muggy summer heat.

  “Sorry,” Eld muttered as his friend approached.

  “It’s fine,” John responded tersely. “Not fine that you fell for such an easy bait, but I’ll be fine.”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Eld nodded, the rage simmering just beneath his skin.

  “I don’t think you’re a good enough tank for the party,” John stated flatly.

  “I know you think that,” Eld said, his voice cutting. “What are we going to do about it? Because I know I’m better at it than you!”

  It was the same way the fight always started, and Eld was ready to argue his side when John caught him off guard.

  “Why don't we settle this with a challenge?” John said. “I think there’s only one thing that makes a tank. It's not muscles, it’s not height, and it's not skill at arms. Those are important, and you have all three. What matters is if you have the courage to stand in the way when death is barreling toward your team. And Eld… I don’t think you have it.”

  “I am brave,” Eld insisted. “I will stand in the way when it matters. How can I prove it to you?”

  “Let's see who survives a night in the woods. I'll risk my life to be the party tank. Will you?”

  Rage warred with caution in Eld’s chest. “No one lasts a night in the Yedda woods unwarded. Even high-level adventurers don't come out here alone once the moons come out.”

  “Fine, not the whole night. First one to bail and run home concedes the role.”

  Eld hesitated, and John pressed his advantage. “Regardless of what you do, Eld, I'm staying. Even if I only last ten minutes, I'll come back, and the whole team will know I'm braver. When it matters, they’ll pick me to stand in front of them, not you.”

  Eld winced. John had been undermining his courage for a year. He imagined Thelia looking at him with disgust and made up his mind. If John could last ten minutes, he would last twelve.

  As night fell, Eld hunkered down in the playfort, staff in hand. The wood creaked around him as the shadows of the Yedda woods grew long and distorted. John had vanished before sunset. Shaking from the cold, Eld tucked himself beneath a low branch and listened as the forest came alive under the silver-red of the Warrior’s Moon. His bruise throbbed, then slowly began to fade as the moon’s red light washed over him.

  Twilight collapsed into night, and Emorin, the Realm Beneath, merged with the Yedda woods, two worlds colliding under the Warrior's Moon to become one.

  Fourteen minutes into the challenge, Eld’s nerve had frayed to a single, trembling thread. The cacophony of the forest was overwhelming. He was about to break for home when a flicker of movement caught his eye. He smiled, thinking it was John rushing home, but the shape that slowly materialized from the darkness stole the air from his lungs. He saw it not as a whole, but in pieces: a coiled texture that didn’t belong to the tree, a black, unblinking eye, and then the whole horrifying picture. Not ten feet away, a snake as thick as a chimney was wrapped around a massive oak. It was perfectly still, save for the forked tongue that shot out every few seconds to taste the air.

  A silent scream built in his throat, but he choked it down. He began to sidle along the inside of the fort toward an opening, his muscles burning with the strain of his controlled retreat. Step by measured step, Eld walked away from the fort.

  He froze as a rustling sound to his right distracted him. He sighed in relief when he saw it was just a regular deer and not a monster from Emorin. Faster than Eld could believe, a giant spider dashed forward. An earsplitting whine escaped from the deer as the chest-high spider bit into its leg and dragged it backwards into a nest in the ground. The earth seemed to collapse around the entrance, leaving nothing to signal that a spider's lair was beneath.

  He reached the edge of the field between the woods and the warded walls of his town. He was nearly clear to sprint to home and safety when he saw the spider. It stood to his right, eight unblinking eyes bigger than his fists, mere feet away.

  It was too late to run.

  The spider leaped. Instinct, not thought, threw him to the ground as it sailed over his head. Eld scrambled away and put a tree between himself and the monster, but fear was in control as his body forced him to suck in air in great, heaving breaths. He was hidden, but he knew it wouldn’t be for long. In a split second, Eld made his choice and dashed back the way he’d come, the spider skittering behind him on eight needle-like legs.

  A log leaned against the fort’s makeshift wall. Eld ran up its slick surface, praying a desperate idea would work, when his shoe slipped, costing him his balance. He fell just as the spider launched itself at him, missing only because he was lucky enough to slip, and it sailed over the wall and into the fort.

  For a moment, relief flooded him. Then, in the instant before he and the spider landed, there was a sound like shaved wood, a muted snap, and it was only Eld who fell to the earth. The impact knocked the breath from his lungs.

  For a heartbeat, there was nothing. It was the eerie silence of a nearby predator turning a hunter into prey. The enormous snake Eld had seen earlier had killed the spider. He knew that any sound at this moment could mean his own death. He pressed himself to remain silent, but his body demanded air, and fear was not strong enough to deny it. It demanded through the pain in his chest, and it overwhelmed his panic until a deafening gasp tore through the silence.

  Breath flooded back into his body, and the panic fled, leaving a sliver of composure with which to form a plan. He knew the snake was nearby. This was its hunting ground. He spotted a shallow gap between two great oaks and threw himself backward into the trees’ embrace, jamming his staff into the hollow like a useless spear. As rationality returned, he saw himself as the forest must: the weakest prey, an ant hiding beneath a leaf.

  Despair seized him. But before he could come up with an even riskier plan than hiding, Eld saw a flash of bright flame erupt in front of him, and an unseen spider just feet from his hiding place exploded into ash. The light illuminated the massive snake, which didn’t even flinch at the immolated spider before it.

  From the distance, a man's voice pierced the night. “I hear his breathing, I tell you! One of the boys is this way, hurry!”

  “Hauthis, stay in formation!” a waspish voice demanded. “You won't save anyone if you’re dead.”

  “I'm here...” Eld tried to call, but only a half-whispered plea escaped as the snake glided toward him.

  Another bolt of fire from the direction of the voices struck the snake, but it ignored the attack as it coiled to pounce.

  “Hauthis, go! He's got the kid cornered!” a female voice yelled.

  The snake shot forward, and Eld saw his death in its maw. Its jaw opened impossibly wide, brushing the tree trunks aside, rendering the protective hollow a useless shield. Then he heard someone activate a skill.

  [INTERCEPT]!

  In a blink, a figure in shining armor materialized between him and death. Eld screamed as the horrifying mouth snapped shut, swallowing his protector whole. Except it didn't swallow them.

  [Frontliner Shield], [Unmovable Object]

  The snake slammed against an invisible barrier extending from the man's kite shield. The impact was a dull, world-shaking thud. The beast bucked and pushed, but the armored man, Hauthis, stood frozen in the air, his long hair streaming behind him, solid as though he had become the center of a universe that moved around him.

  [Fireball], [Triple Shot]

  As the snake struggled, another blast of fire lit the night, but this was no mere firebolt. An explosion engulfed the snake's head, followed by three arrows that sank into the flesh around its eye. The creature flinched, falling back and vanishing into the forest.

  Fire washed around the shield, but it never flickered. Eld huddled behind Hauthis’s mighty form and looked up at the embodiment of a tank—dauntless, powerful, a man who put his body in the mouth of a beast with brazen confidence in his own survival, without any promise to the truth of that faith in the self.

  As the light faded, the waspish [Pyromancer] shouted through a stuffy nose, “Hauthis, grab the boy! I don’t have enough mana for many more of those.”

  Eld tried to thank the man, but his teeth chattered too hard for words. Hauthis’s hand clamped over his mouth. “I’ve gotcha, boy. Nod if your friend is nearby.”

  Eld shook his head.

  The knight sighed. “A shame. We used a hair from your parents to track you. Your friend’s dad said he didn’t have a single thing we could use to find the boy. We were hoping he would be close by.”

  “You have to save him,” Eld tried to yell, but the sound was muffled against the knight’s hand.

  “Shhh,” Hauthis whispered, his tone lacking any real hope. “We can't risk it. Maybe he found a place to ride this whole thing out.”

  “Exit time!” the mage whisper-shouted as the ranger moved into formation with the other three.

  Eld watched in awe as they moved silently through the forest. Every few minutes, a new beast would leap from the shadows, and one of the trio would strike out to defend him. They battled their way back to town, Hauthis always placing himself between Eld and the forest’s great spiders. Finally, after an eternity of terror, Eld emerged from the Yedda woods, carried like a child in the arms of the mighty Hauthis. Seventeen minutes had passed since the sun had set, and the power of the Warrior Moon merged the beasts of night into the material plane.

  His relief was short-lived. The knight dropped him to the ground like a sack of potatoes.

  “Do you realize what you’ve risked with this foolish game?” he shouted. “Your friends told us you were arguing over who would be the party tank. Well, I’ve got news for you and your idiot friend, on the miracle he survives this night. Neither of you is fit to be a tank. Neither of you is fit to be an adventurer!”

  “I was proving my bravery,” Eld defended, but the angry knight was having none of his excuses as he verbally laid into Eld.

  “Does fighting your enemies naked prove you’re brave? No, it's just stupid! The difference between a tank and someone who gets his party killed is good judgment, a trait you have proven you lack. Give up your grand dreams, because the next time your stupidity gets you into trouble, we aren’t coming to save you.”

  Eld flinched at the rebuke.

  “Lay off him, Hauthis,” the ranger called, her flat tone suggesting more concern for her heroic image than for Eld’s feelings.

  “I won’t lay off, Beck. His foolishness has most likely killed his friend. If he doesn’t learn, he’ll kill someone else.”

  Hauthis pushed past the crowd of worried townsfolk, leaving Eld to weep as his parents rushed toward him.

  Eld sat atop the town walls with his family, praying to the God of Protection. It was clear when he arrived in the village that everyone, including the adventurers, had given up on John. Thelia had slammed into his arms, weeping and asking where he had last seen John, but no pleading on her behalf could move the adventurers to go back into the woods for the boy whose own father hadn't bothered to get out of bed. Eld’s parents tried to pull him home, but he refused, kicking and screaming, demanding they watch the dark forest until sunrise.

  As dawn broke with no sign of John, his dad began to speak.

  "Did you know, son, that there is a god of the dead?"

  Eld didn't answer. He didn't have to, as a bleak pall of sadness surrounded him.

  "Breckitt. You know him as the god of celebrations and journeys — that's mostly what he is out here, because death rarely comes unexpectedly to our cut of the kingdom. But across Dria, he's better known for shepherding souls from this life to the next." His father paused, searching for the right words. "Breckitt teaches us that all journeys are one. That death is just a bridge we all must cross, another part of the road. Not the end of it."

  His father's voice wavered. "John started life on a hard road, Eld. Harder than most. And if he's… if Breckitt has taken him across that bridge, then maybe there's some comfort in knowing the road gets easier on the other side. His sisters don't always get enough to eat, and his father — well. You know how John's father is." He trailed off, then put his arm around Eld's shoulder, squeezing too tight, the way people do when they don't know what else to offer.

  Eld listened but didn’t hear. Guilt, shame, and grief warred within him. The knight was right. John was right. He could never stand in the jaws of that beast. He had barely lasted fourteen minutes.

  Please, let John come home, he prayed to any god that would listen. I’ll give anything. He can be the tank. I’ll be the wizard. I’ll learn numbers and letters. I’ll do anything if he just comes home safe.

  As Eld made his silent vow, he saw the impossible.

  Limping slowly from the treeline as if called force by divine intervention was the scraggly silhouette of a child.

  “By Haygran’s Flame that’s not possible.” His dad gasped as a smile split Eld’s face.

  His straw blonde hair was a mess, his clothes were torn, but it was John, and he was alive, walking proudly toward the town. Eld smiled through his tears, knowing that when they told the tales of their party, the story of their tank surviving a night in the high-level Yedda woods, before he even had a heart skill, would be sung by bards throughout the land.