“YOU STUPID PIECE OF SHIT! I SHOULD NEVER HAVE—”

  “Alright!” I put both hands up in surrender. “Sorry Umbrahorn. I was just a bit confused.”

  “Confused?! So what, I’m just your punching bag for whenever you don’t know what to do?”

  Yes.

  “Of course not. Sorry. I just—wait, where are we, exactly?” It's the first time I’ve seen human architecture ever since our sortie began. Cobbled walls, patched by green and yellow moss, surround us. Vines crawl over the stones like the pythons of the marshland. My back is damp from lying on dewy stone.

  “I don’t know. Some sort of… ruin. Maybe a lost outpost of Havenmarch’s? What does it matter?”

  I look to our right and see that we are in fact laying in the crow’s nest of one of the outpost’s towers. Two other, taller towers stand sentinel across the cobbled grounds of the fortress. Half-cut walls and crumbling, brick-dusted rooms make for a mazy affair.

  Umbrahron curls around the left opening in his full form.

  I close my eyes and shake my head. Focus. The dream was a trick of your mind or Thraevirula or whatever—it doesn’t matter. You have people to kill.

  Yet for some reason, a great pain constricts my chest, like a twisting rotting root. My stomach heaves.

  I was so close.

  I could almost catch a glimpse…

  “Is he awake?” a voice calls. Kiren clambers up onto the tower, surprising me. A large cut swells above his left eyebrow, caking his cheek a dark maroon.

  “Kiren? What happened? Are you alright?” I ask, standing now.

  He breathes a sigh of relief upon seeing me. “I’m fine. I was more worried about you.”

  “Your eye. Where’s Zyla? She could patch it—”

  “We got separated from Saegor and Zyla.”

  What? I shake my head. “How?”

  “We went after you, dumbass,” Umbrahorn says from behind me.

  I look between both of them. They don’t seem to understand the idiocy of that statement.

  “Now,” I begin slowly. “Why in all the hells would you do that?”

  Umbrahorn snorts. “You can’t be this ungrateful—”

  “It's not about being ungrateful! I went after the Witch. Meaning, I had to go directly above the army of Sorayvlad and levy lightning at them. How did you lot think you could follow me?”

  “Wait, the Witch is with Sorayvlad?” Kiren asks.

  Unfortunately, Umbrahorn starts talking before I can answer his query. “Well, it would’ve been nice if you told us that, now wouldn’t it have? Oh, but no, you didn’t. Instead, you just said ‘I have to take care of something’ and fucked off,” Umbrahorn sneers, dropping his voice to parody mine.

  I grit my teeth. “Listen to me, I—”

  “He’s right, Raiten,” Kiren interrupts. I turn to him, and see, for once, a stern face meeting my gaze. “What were you thinking?”

  My face softens. My shoulders slack slightly. Why am I arguing this? They’re right.

  “I…” I pause, collecting my thoughts. My gaze falls to the tower platform. “I got angry, at that moment. Thought that, since I just used an amulet, I might as well not let it go to waste.”

  I step back and look at both of them equally. “I thought I could end it.”

  Umbrahorn’s snarl turns into a deep frown. Kiren, meanwhile, remains neutral-faced. He walks up to me.

  For some reason, I think he’s about to hug me. Seems like something he would do.

  So I’m surprised when his fist flies towards my face.

  I let it hit me square on. Rock back a few steps.

  “Kiren—” Umbrahorn begins to protest.

  “We are a troop!” Kiren exclaims. “A Mancer Troop. It's in our name. Do you know what that means, Raiten?”

  Before I can open my mouth to answer, he presses on. “That means we are a team. Teammates. Do you know what teammates don’t do, Raiten? They don’t go running off to blitz the enemy, just because they think they made a mistake. I mean… Dear Primordials, that was so stupid. What if you died huh? What would we have done?”

  “Sorry—”

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  “Let me finish,” he puts a hand up. Then, he takes a deep breath. “Look. I get it. Alright? I do. Really. From what you’ve told me about Masaru, I understand why you’re itching to kill him. But, that doesn’t mean you can take on a whole army alone. Especially not if the witch is there with them. Do you understand me?”

  I sigh. “It was a mistake. I… you’re right. I’m sorry.”

  A silence hangs between us for a moment. A frog makes a low, rumbling croak that is echoed by the warbles of blue birds that perch upon the crumbling stones.

  Kiren seemingly cringes at himself. He pats my shoulder.

  “Sorry for punching you. Got a bit worked up.”

  “No shit,” I chuckle.

  Umbrahorn claps his fins. “Yes yes, very nice and sweet that you made up. Now, tell us what happened? What did you see?”

  I take a seat by the edge of the platform, leaning my back against the high wall.

  “You first. How did you save me? What… happened after I went out?”

  …

  “Wait, what?!? You can’t be serious.”

  Kiren shakes his head. “I’m not joking. It's been a whole day Raiten.”

  I’m no longer leaning against the crow’s nest walls. Instead, I’m pacing about like a scientist on the brink of some revolutionary discovery. Only in my case, I’m just lamenting my stupidity.

  “You said that the spear hit you once. Right?” Umbrahorn asks.

  “I think. But… I don’t know. Everything was so chaotic. And I could barely see the spear. Somehow, it surprised me.”

  Kiren and Umbrahorn look at each other.

  I stop pacing. “What? What have you not told me?”

  “After Saegor blasted the spear away, we had to take a pause. Figure out what just attacked us. I thought it was some magicks of the weird circle. Saegor had a different theory,” Kiren pauses, as if he still can’t believe the next words. “He thought it was not of this world.”

  I sigh. “Of course it isn’t.”

  “You knew?”

  “No, I didn’t know, but there’s always something with me.”

  He ignores my cynicism. “Regardless, it didn’t operate like a normal rune-inscribed weapon would. And we didn’t see any markings of Incanta or Servanta on it. Those type of weapons have one directive or a chain of directives. This was… fluid. Adaptable.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because, let’s imagine for a moment, that this weapon was told two things:” Kiren begins. He puts one finger up. “First. Kill you.” Another finger. “Second, kill us. Though, it seemed to really ignore Zyla, her spirits, Umbrahorn and me, so maybe it was told to kill Saegor. Or maybe it was just doing some threat assessment.”

  He shakes his head. “It doesn’t really matter. No inscriber of Incanta or Servanta that I know can make a weapon adapt in the way that it did. And, the reason we know that is because, when we were talking about the damn thing—”

  “It crossed over us,” Umbrahorn interrupts. “Completely ignored us. And we didn’t even move that far.”

  “Meaning?” I ask.

  “Meaning,” Kiren begins, “that it refocused on you. Which… Shouldn’t happen. From the little rune-inscribing theory I know, no scholar or mage has gone beyond the most primitive of commanding. So, there’s no way that weapon could've adjusted like that unless it made its own decision.”

  “And that’s not all,” Umbrahorn cuts in once more. He draws an invisible figure in the air. “The spear, when I saw it screeching through the sky, was no longer a spear. It looked human-ish. Had all of your species’ ugly features.”

  “That’s when Umbrahorn and I split off. Saegor approved.” Kiren rolls his shoulder. “Though I don’t know how you ride Umbrahorn for so long. I could barely hang on.”

  “You should count yourself lucky that you got the opportunity to ride a GREAT—”

  “Yes, we know!” Kiren and I both shout simultaneously. The shark starts muttering to itself, which lightens the mood somehow.

  “So you caught me from falling?”

  “No, unfortunately, by the time Umbrahorn tracked you down, you were slumped on the branches of a black willow,” Kiren says. He winces at the memory. “I think you broke your back.”

  Huh. Maybe it was a good thing I was out cold. It would've been a nightmare if I woke up and wasn’t fully healed.

  I sigh and bend down to my knees, processing all that I just heard. Once again, luck saved my ass. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is someone up there looking out for me.

  I put my thumbs in my belt. My belt. Which… is surprisingly lighter than usual. Absent-mindedly, I feel around the thing for my sack.

  And keep feeling.

  And keep… feeling—Ah shit… there’s no way—

  I look up to Kiren, feel my stomach drop. He seems to understand immediately.

  “Your amulets!”

  So this is my punishment. My idiotic, stupid punishment.

  I run my hands through my hair. “The sack must’ve come undone from my belt after he hit me. Or after I landed or—Ah fuck!!” I bang my fist against the ground. Thankfully, Umbrahorn is sniffing already though.

  “Anything?” I ask.

  He holds up a fin then nods. “Yes. From what I can tell, it's a league or two North. So… still in the briars.”

  I stand. “Then we have to go now. I have to get them before—”

  Kiren grabs my arm. “Relax. No one will touch them. There’s nothing alive out there to touch them.”

  “But—”

  “Besides, we can’t leave now.”

  My eyes darken. “Why?”

  He opens his mouth. Instead of a response, a great rumble shudders up the watchtower. His grip on my arm tightens for stability, and I’m forced to grab his shoulder as our legs wobble beneath us. The ruins themselves seem to shake. Stones clatter and smash down—rubble unto rubble.

  And a screeching of all the hells and their fury comes forth from the darkening sky. I look up. See a flash of silver come crashing towards us.

  I don’t even have time to brace.

  But, instead of barrelling into our tower and killing us in one fell swoop, the “spear” halts in the sky, floating a fair distance above the stony outpost.

  I can see what Umbrahorn meant by its figure.

  However, in a lot of ways, he was also wrong. Because, while the spear does have a large, human-esque body—with a rounded face and imprints for nonexistent eyes whose sockets shimmer in the waning sunlight—it also has three left arms. No hands, just blades of sharp death. On its right, one large arm forms a hammer-hand.

  This is a little too familiar.

  Wait… There’s no way—I just sigh. Too tired of being surprised anymore.

  Still, seeing Crooked—the tree from the illusion-scape that Thraevirula trapped me in—now brought to full form in silvery glory, does make my blood boil. After all, in our last encounter, she ripped my leg to bloody ribbons.

  As if to mock me further, Crooked bows to me in the air, just as she did before we dueled in that blood rain storm.

  Kiren lets go of my shoulder and wraps Meteorfang around his arm.

  “Well, because of that.”

  Stars are liars. They promise guidance but bury their secrets in blood.

  Updates: 3–5 chapters per week, depending on how much blood I’m willing to let the stars drink.