Dain reached out just in time to catch Serina before she hit the cobbles.

  Her weight made his knees buckle, but the sound that followed was far worse: the wet, rattling choke in her throat as blood bubbled between her lips.

  But before he could do anything about it, the other two people on the belltower raised their prosthetic arms, and both the sky and the earth groaned like a god rising from its slumber.

  Shouts exploded across the town. Children shrieked, timbers snapped, and whole roofs fell into streets now tearing apart. The bellchime trees around shed their metal leaves in a storm of ringing coins as thunder rumbled harder and harder, and swirling cracks in the ground started appearing all over.

  For his part, Dain only regained his footing and held Serina even tighter.

  “Hey!” he snapped. “Don’t close your eyes! Don't! You’re the precocious brat of Corvalenne, and brats don’t fold easily, right?”

  His gaze snapped to his wagon. The only thing in this town uglier than the splitting earth was his shoddy wagon, but it was all he had, and she’d stand a better chance inside it than in his arms while the town was coming apart.

  He heaved her into the wagon, placing her under the tarp cover. As he heard the center of town sinking into a giant chasm first—shops keeling sideways, people screaming—he went back outside and tore open crates, tossed aside pendants, and scowled at a jar of dust he’d always suspected was just powdered brick.

  None of it mattered now. Apart from his Tag, he had one other halfway-decent relic. He knew he still had it. Where in the gods’ rotten reliquaries had he buried it?

  The garden around them started to wobble, bushes and hedges sliding into the jagged fissures heading their way. He cursed under his breath, flinging aside more worthless stock: goblets, glass shards, and tin charms that’d never seen a breath of true magic. “Where is it, where is it—”

  Then his fingers closed around a small, smooth metal sphere.

  A simple Shield Orb, buried in rags at the bottom of a crate.

  “Got you!”

  He clasped both hands around it and shoved mana into it. The orb immediately cracked like an eggshell, spilling golden light spread out into a sphere around him, the wagon, and—most importantly—Serina.

  The mana shield muffled the roar of disaster around them into a dull thrum, and then a split second later, the ground simply vanished as a giant fissure swallowed the earth beneath them.

  The last thing Dain saw as his stomach dropped was the entire town plummeting alongside him, and a thousand prismatic hands emerging from the colossal portal in the sky.

  Rain poured down when the mana shield finally sputtered out like a candle in a draft, but it was a thundercrack that finally jolted Dain awake.

  He was alive.

  At least an hour or two must’ve passed, because the dark storm clouds had taken over the sky, the colossal portal was gone, and rain slammed into his back hard enough to sting. Faint moonlight reflected off the water sheeted across the ground. That was the only reason he could see, even if it was just a little bit.

  Lying face-down in the shallow water, his first instinct was to try to push himself up.

  No use. Pain bit him so sharply he hissed and forgot how to breathe for a second. He glanced right and immediately found the problem: a giant boulder loved his arm enough to sit on it. Arms weren’t supposed to be crushed like that.

  Good news: it hurt so much he was sure he wasn’t actually feeling all of it. Bad news: everything else.

  He swallowed, tasting iron and rain as he planted his forehead against the ground.

  “Serina?” he rasped. “You… you there?”

  No answer but thunder.

  He rolled his cheek against the ground, grunting, and levered himself up with his left arm. The park was gone. Rather, the park had been dragged a hundred meters down, then dashed across the chasm alongside the rest of the town.

  To his left were giant lumps of stone where once there’d been houses. To his right was the bellchime tree, uprooted and split in half. His wagon lay ten paces in front of him, lying on its side, and all of his crates had vomited his trinkets across the ground.

  Under any other circumstance, he’d bemoan the loss of all of his wares—he was sure none of his low-grade relics survived the plummet—but tonight was different, so he was quiet.

  Right in front of him, just a few steps away, Serina lay on the ground with a hole in her chest and her eyes still wide open.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t know death. It’d only been twelve years since the Black Exhibit War ended, and gods, he still remembered the day the Kingdom of Auraline marched armies of relic-holding soldiers across the border. He still remembered that black day when they’d launched a volley of storm javelins across the border, wrecking Corvalenne and three other towns in the region as collateral damage. Half of the town didn't make it through that, of course, and the other half who did—him included—took years to recover and rebuild the town.

  Death wasn’t unfamiliar.

  But he stared at Serina, eyes hard, and then raised his head towards the edges of the chasm. He didn’t need the rain stabbing his back or the wind cutting across his wounds to know one cruel surety:

  Nobody was coming to help him.

  Not back then.

  Not right now.

  … Push.

  Get up.

  He braced his knees, set his left palm against the boulder crushing his right arm, and shoved. Nothing. He shoved again, harder.

  Damnit, you… piece… of… shit!

  He’d spent too many mornings hauling timber and too many evenings ferrying cut blocks at the carpenters’ yard to bow to a rock now. He leaned his entire shoulder into the boulder as well, shifting his weight, and as the pain peaked and his right arm started to scream—the boulder lifted just enough for him to jerk his arm out.

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  Rolling onto his back, panting, he cradled his crushed limb. Not good. It looked… folded. The skin was broken, swollen, and it’d already purpled with the elbow locked at a strange angle. He couldn’t even feel his fingers.

  Perfect.

  No nerves means no arguments.

  Biting his teeth, he crawled into his toppled wagon one inch at a time. Once he hauled himself under the tarp, he reached up and ripped off a tattered corner piece, wrapping it around his bloody right arm.

  Clean or not, I gotta at least stop the blee—

  A sharp crunch of stone came from the front, just beyond the tattered tarp.

  He held his breath and faced straight down. He stopped moving. He didn’t even dare peek out the sides of his wagon to see what was standing outside, because despite the heavy pitter-patters of rain and thunder, he heard its breathing clearly.

  A wolf’s long and guttural breaths.

  It wasn’t until the breathing moved away that he finally dared lift his head, peering through the small tears in the tarp.

  A large, dark, and furry shadow glided between boulders. A three-eyed barawolf. They were known to roam the mountains around Corvalenne as distant, distant cousins of All-Seeing Dragons, but they were loners who weren’t fond of hunting in packs, so they weren’t usually much of a threat to the town. Picking off loners harvesting herbs in the forest was more up their alley.

  But this one’s small. Way too small even for a cub.

  It must’ve been wandering around the outskirts of the town when it accidentally fell in—or it could’ve been drawn down here by the scent of blood. It didn’t matter.

  He pushed himself up and sat against the tarp, exhaling through clenched teeth. For some reason, the barawolf didn’t seem interested in feasting on Serina’s body. Maybe it wanted to hunt live prey like him.

  Now, he had a pretty decent hiding spot, but other survivors may not be as lucky as him. It’d be ugly if the barawolf found someone just wandering around, half-dazed and bleeding all over like him.

  There was no other choice. He had to kill it before it could kill anyone.

  First things first.

  Take inventory.

  Wiping water off his brows, he started rifling through the wreckage of his wagon with his good hand, cursing each useless shard and cracked bauble that’d once pretended to be a relic. True enough, no useless relic of his survived the fall in one piece. There was nothing he could wield against the barawolf directly.

  Then he remembered what that masked man had shouted before his two companions sank the entire town. He looked down anxiously and sighed a breath of relief when he saw there was no hole in his chest—well, he’d feel it if he had one—because that meant his mana core was still in his chest.

  Living beings—and their body parts—can’t be offered to a Curator God for relics.

  I didn’t die from the fall, so that iridescent god’s hands couldn’t take my mana core from me.

  Without a mana core, he wouldn’t be able to use any relics. Not that he had any relics now, but raw magic materials… those he had plenty of. He found pouches of seabone wires, sacks of metalglass shards, embersap resin, black dirt, and plenty more scrap materials here and there. It was enough to bargain with the Curator Gods for a potentially powerful relic—if only he had an Altar to contact them with.

  And that thought bloomed into something far more dangerous.

  … I can make my own Altar.

  In the aftermath of the Black Exhibit War twelve years ago, there was only one law agreed upon by every country in the world: no Altar that’d allow people to open portals to the Curator Gods shall stand outside of Church-sanctioned locations like crown capitals, consecrated chapels, and high-population settlements in economical regions.

  Far be it for the entire world to actually agree on something after the world war, except for this one edict that prohibited the common man from trading magic materials for relics with the gods themselves. If word got out that he even so much as attempted to build his Altar, it would be immediate execution—his, and, if the Church were generous, only his entire extended family line.

  But what did that matter now?

  The town was already destroyed. He was already half-dead. If he couldn't get his hands on a relic and take out that barawolf, then he might as well kill himself now to save the barawolf the trouble.

  “Curse the treaty,” he muttered. “Curse the Church.”

  He set to work, first prying a plank from the wagon’s sideboard about the length of his arm and scrubbing it clean with his sleeve. This plank would be the base of the Altar. On its edge, he laid a rectangular frame of seabone wires, weighed it down with metalglass shards, and drew several overlapping ritual circles across the board with embersap smeared over black dirt.

  The work was clumsy and rushed. One hand fumbled where two were required. He only vaguely remembered—based on the books he’d begged Old Hugo to buy for him as a boy—the general composition of the seven types of Altars, each that’d open a different portal to a different Curator God, but a vague memory was enough.

  About two minutes later, he leaned back, panting. Almost finished. The Altar looked like one now. There was only one piece left to complete it: the ichor gem.

  He reached into a false panel under the toppled black chest, where he’d hidden it years ago. It was a small, amber-colored gem threaded with smoky veins that he’d bought for a steal when he first started working as a relic merchant. He had to spend nearly all of his savings at the time just to get it, but the traveling merchant he'd bought it from had been too rich to care about haggling as desperately as he had.

  Now, he could’ve sold it some time ago for far, far more than he’d paid for it, but he’d always kept it tucked away because—perhaps—a part of him had never discarded the intrusive thought that one day, he’d have to make his own Altar.

  “Well,” he whispered, closing one eye to squint through the bright gem. “Exhibit me damned.”

  He held the ichor gem over the board, steadied his shaking hand, and then crushed it in his fist. Golden blood streamed out in thick rivulets, dripping across the board and bleeding into the ritual circles he’d drawn over it.

  The Altar immediately flared with golden light.

  Yes!

  Relief tugged at his mouth in a pained grin. He’d done it. Now, if he hadn’t made a mistake, his ritual circles should be dedicated to Ninazu, the Master of the Elemental Ward, who accepted magic materials in return for Elementum-Class relics. That was because right now, nothing short of an Elementum-Class relic would be able to bring down that barawolf.

  But then the glow changed.

  It seeped from soft gold into purple, deep and rotting. The Altar blazed brighter and brighter until his wagon was drowned in its unnatural light, and the glow swelled into a beacon that any beast in the chasm could definitely see.

  … Huh?

  He shuffled back on his knees, blinking slowly as his Altar itself warped. The flat wooden surface twisted into a reddish-purple vortex, churning like a pool of oil catching fire.

  And from the portal, four hands emerged.

  They were long, starved things the color of leached bone, tipped with sharp nails black as obsidian. A murmur followed: a lady’s layered voice crawling on top of itself, speaking in syllables from no tongue he’d ever heard.

  His grin fell to ash.

  …. This isn’t Ninazu.

  Every Curator God has a different-colored portal, and Ninazu’s portal is supposed to be bright gold.

  Who the hell is this?

  As the four pale hands gripped the edge of the portal and pried it wider, his chest tightened.

  Which Curator God did I call?