The edges of his world were shaped in pain. His consciousness, a rudderless wreck, drifting on waves of agony.

  Smoke filled his lungs with the taste of soot and death. Heat blistered his skin. The roar of the inferno chased fleeing children across a blackened courtyard. Burning beams crushed bones and melted the screaming faces beneath.

  The echoing deaths looped inside his skull—a hundred victims of his Fire Elemental. A thousand accusatory tethers, the connections each soul had nurtured in life, now pointed directly at him. “You lived, and they died. It should have been you!”

  He gasped. Fire filled his lungs,

  “It… should’ve been… you…”

  The flames twisted, congealing into a familiar shape—a Guardian. Its fur was cinder, its eyes were pits of burning accusation. A hiss of superheated air, a voice of grinding ash, delivered the verdict.

  “Your fault,” Tyndral said. “You should’ve died next to me, Trenn. This is not your world. This is your fault!”

  The inferno vanished, replaced by a gentle pressure, the slide of a damp cloth against his split-open cheek. Firm hands working with detached purpose, cleaning the grit from a dozen new wounds that striped his body.

  “Your… fault…”

  A spike of pain pulled the curtain on the nightmare, momentarily bringing Trenn back to reality. His leg. A grating shift of bone on bone, a brutal realignment that sent a shockwave through his entire nervous system.

  His scream was a distant, disconnected thing. Someone else’s pain echoing in a body that was barely his own. The agony receded, replaced by muffled voices.

  One was familiar, clipped with a frantic urgency. Mara? The other was a calm, melodic current, a voice of ancient stone and quiet certainty.

  The inferno found him again, but this time it wore a familiar face. The Guardian Lodge burned around him. The trophy heads on the wall wept tears of soot. In the heart of the blaze stood Tyndral, his form a shimmering silhouette of heat and hate, his fur a shroud of living flame. The stench of burning pine and rendered fat was the air he breathed. A voice of grinding ash delivered his curse.

  “Their blood is on Mara’s hands because of you!”

  The accusation was a lance of ice in the inferno. The dream-pain bled into a real, searing agony that consumed his body. His face and chest burned. His arms seared. But his leg… his leg was a vortex where all other senses went to die.

  Consciousness returned as a blunt-force trauma.

  A heavy cage encased his leg from ankle to thigh. His body was mummified in linen stiff with dried blood. A scraping cadence vibrated up from the floorboards—the gait of some immense, many-legged insect.

  He kept his eyes shut and flexed the new muscle in his mind. The world bloomed in vibrating waves, a sonar map rendered in his skull. The room was cozy, its wooden walls a tight space. A rhythmic breathing came from a chair nearby—Mara, dozing.

  On a cot, another steady breath belonged to Ezy; the sonar registered the sealed smoothness of scar tissue where her eye and ear had been, and the abrupt end of her right arm.

  On a second cot lay Zeen. His breathing was shallow, his form rigid, catatonic. The sonar traced an intricate lattice of bone and wrapped cloth around his leg—a new splint. His pulse and breathing suggested he was awake, but he was motionless.

  Trenn tried to read the gnome’s emotions, but the tether that connected him to Zeen was weak, practical, and frayed. It was based on an arrangement that went south.

  “He lost everything… Your… Fault…” resonated in Trenn’s mind.

  The curse fractured as he forced his eyelids open. A window swam into focus. Outside, the charred silhouettes of trees slid past the glass in the moonlight. The passage was a silent, hypnotic rhythm.

  The trees are… moving?

  His mind scrambled for an explanation. The sheer physical impossibility of it was a vertigo that threatened to overwhelm the agony in his leg.

  He wrenched his gaze from the impossible view. Near the window, a wind chime stirred, its hollow melody a clatter of painted bird skulls and vertebrae, each painted with intricate dots and swirls.

  The room swam into focus. Polished wood walls held vibrant floral paintings, each framed by interlocking bone. On a small table, a colorful, polka dotted animal skull served as a planter; a green plant spilling from its hollowed eye socket in a defiant cascade of life. A throw pillow, tossed on a nearby chair, was embroidered with the image of a whimsical, dancing skeleton.

  The air in the room carried the scent of dried herbs and something like desert sage after a rain, a contrast to the cloying reek of ash that had defined his world. The shock in his gut began to curdle into a raw curiosity.

  A groan tore from his throat as he pushed himself upright. Fire lanced through his savaged body. His casted leg seized, a paralyzing flash sent him crashing back onto the cot. The sound pulled Mara from her sleep. She rose from the chair gracefully, her exhaustion burned away by instant alertness.

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  “Trenn! You’re awake!” she gasped.

  “Mara,” Trenn’s voice was a ragged rasp. He fought for another breath against the protest of his bruised ribs. “The cottage… Where are we? How are we moving? What’s happening?”

  She knelt by his cot. Worry, relief, and a deep, gnawing fear bled through their bond. The warrior's mask on her white furred face softened, though a weary resignation settled deep in her amber eyes.

  “We’re in Almitad’s house,” she said, her voice low. “It walks on undead spider legs. She’s driving it from her Ritual Chamber.”

  A wave of psychic vertigo washed over him, threatening to tear his fragile grip on consciousness loose. Undead… His mind, already a battlefield of phantom pains and borrowed deaths, recoiled from the sheer, cumulative absurdity.

  He had been hunted by tactical squirrels. He had adopted a living rock that turned into an obsidian bomb. He had dueled a gnomish battle-mech and traveled through a city of amber honeycombs.

  His brain, having been stretched to its absolute limit, did something he hadn't expected. It didn't break. It simply… made room. The concept of a house walking on undead spider legs slotted itself into the catalogue of impossibilities he now called his life, finding a neat, horrifying space right next to ‘crocodile god with a void for an eye’. He was too tired to be truly surprised anymore.

  “Almitad?” he echoed, his voice cracking. “Spider… legs?”

  "Yes." The word was a heavy stone dropping into the quiet. A shudder wracked her frame. The ripple of her unease traveled their tether like a breath of foul air.

  “The Beaver Kin woman who helped us. She’s an Exorcist—an adept in the arcanas of Enchantment, Runes, and Necromancy.” A beat of silence hung in the air, heavy with unspoken dread. “Her house stands on the undercarriage of a Giant Spider’s exoskeleton.”

  Trenn’s gaze flicked from Mara’s face to the whimsical skeleton on the pillow, then to the bird-skull wind chime. A piece of the horrifying puzzle clicked into place. “An Exorcist,” he repeated, the word tasting like ash.

  “Why did she help us? Why am I… alive?” he asked tentatively.

  “She lives in a nearby Beaver Kin city called ‘the Dam’.” She paused, gathering her thoughts. “The smoke reached them yesterday. When the sky turned grey, and the wind carried the scent of necromancy," Mara’s gaze unfocused, her voice taking on the cadence of a repeated story, "she knew right away. A hundred souls burning at once creates more than ghosts, Trenn. It forges a nexus of pain." A final, grim certainty settled in her voice. "According to her, the Ash-Wraiths were inevitable."

  She took a breath, a grudging respect entering her tone. "Almitad left to cleanse the Wayrest as soon as her people were safe. She had been traveling since dawn but stopped to wait out the night. She planned to exorcise the haunted grounds of the Wayrest in the morning… until we stumbled onto her porch, with a Dust-Devil in tow."

  “She saved us… because she could?”

  The Guardians had recruited him for a war. Zeen and Ezy were partners in survival and opportunity. But this Exorcist acted without debt or obligation?

  It wasn't just selfless, he realized. Almitad had been here to do a job. They hadn't just been saved by her; they had forced her hand, dragging the storm to her doorstep and forcing her to fight a battle she had been deliberately postponing until sunrise.

  Her power, the calm and steady way she had unmade the wraiths, was undeniable. She was a professional. A Hedge Mage, Mara had called her—a term that now carried the weight of Lady Yradone’s lessons.

  Every Hedge Mage needed a source, a wellspring of power to draw upon. The thought solidified in his mind, a burning, professional curiosity that momentarily overrode the pain.

  Is the Mana Source inside the cottage?

  There was a familiar hum, but it was attuned to a frequency he didn’t know. It was discordant, but pure. It was unsettling, but felt right. It wasn’t corrupted, it was… unnatural, and primordial at the same time.

  “The cottage… its Mana Source is strange,” he said, his voice quiet with focus as he reopened his eyes. “Like your new jagged claws.”

  Mara nodded, a flicker of dark understanding in her amber eyes. “What you’re feeling is the Necrotic Element,” Mara started. “I couldn’t understand how a natural Mana Source could come from inside a home… until I saw it.” She paused to turn her head towards the room’s exit.

  “Almitad has a Mana Bloom in her Ritual Chamber. It’s a flower that only grows in the Deep Woods of a Mana Forest. They’re the source of all mana, and wilt as soon as they’re plucked from the ground.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Trenn, “how is the Mana Bloom here, if it only grows in the Deep Woods?”

  Mara turned back to Trenn. “Because it’s dead, and reanimated. Almitad uses her necromantic enchantments, empowered by runes, to keep it in a permanent state of undeath.” A genuine awe softened her voice.

  “It’s brilliant, really. Like forging an enchanted weapon, but with an undead plant. According to Almitad, the bloom has been passed down from Exorcist to Exorcist, within the community of the Dam.” Mara’s eyes glazed as her memories brought her back to her beloved Mana Forest.

  “Whoever collected it must have known a Guardian.” The word caught in her throat. “There are thousands of us… them… in the Deep Woods. We…” She flinched, the slip a pained reminder of her unbinding. Her voice dropped to a murmur. “…they guard the Deep Woods jealously.”

  A phantom ripple of muscle passed through her fingers, a ghost of claws that were no longer extensions of the forest. “The bloom’s mana is permanently attuned to the Necrotic Element. Its pitch can’t be modulated.” She looked at her hands, at the source of her new power and her loss.

  “When I drew on its power, my own spell reacted… differently. It manifested a necrotic version of my natural weapon.”

  “Your claws… are spells?” Trenn asked, incredulous.

  “Of course,” Mara chuckled. “They’re Creation Arcana. Did you think I had three inches of claws somehow stored inside my fingers?”

  “Umm. Well, I guess?”

  Mara laughed. “Then why would I have lost my claws when my connection to mana was severed? I swear, Trenn, Wild Mages are the most ignorant spellcasters in the infiniverse.”

  A choked bark of laughter escaped him, instantly followed by a sharp wince of pain. The amusement on Mara’s vulpine features immediately softened.

  Mara’s voice dropped to a soothing murmur. “Almitad is taking us to the Dam. It’s a half-day’s travel from the ruin of Zeen’s Wayrest. An alchemist there brews potions that can knit bone and sinew.” She met his gaze, her amber eyes promising a measure of relief.

  “It’s not Healing Balm,” she admitted, the words heavy with their shared loss, “but it will quicken the mending. We’ll have proper beds. Safety.”

  Mara’s words hung in the air. The light in Trenn’s eyes died, his gaze fixed on her, becoming a vacant stare.

  “It’s already destroyed,” he rasped.

  Her expression faltered. “What? Trenn, what are you talking about?”

  The phantom sensation of spinning returned, a hundred ashen claws scraping the raw, flayed skin. Behind his eyes, the vision was clear: the massive dam, its side gouged open and hemorrhaging water. The timber metropolis built above it, a field of splintered ruin.

  He met her confused gaze, his own haunted.

  “The Dam,” he whispered. “I saw it, Mara. When the Ash-Wraiths had me in the sky. It’s gone.”

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