I appeared a thousand feet up in the air, and immediately caught myself on the flight spell. The air was thin up here, given I was a thousand feet above a mountain, but not so thin that I was in true danger – it wasn’t some mythically tall mountain on the edge beyond which the air was too thin to fly. Perhaps I might have had trouble breathing, if not for the fact I was wearing an orb of air around my head, conjuring air from another plane.

  It was cold, though, and the obsidian I was holding quickly dropped in temperature. Within moments, the glassy black surface had gone from burning my skin to merely being warm. They didn't fully cool, and I suspected the liquid fire magic within wouldn’t allow it. And after having gotten up close and personal to the lava lake, I was even more excited about the liquid fire within the rocks. The lake had moved and flowed like water, not like true lava, and it had even lapped at the shores as if it was an ordinary lake. I didn’t know what was going on, or what had caused it, but I was excited. For now, though, I withdrew a leather bag from my locker and placed the stones within, then tied the bag to my belt.

  As I did, I got a look at my arms and hands. I had known the potent fire was burning me, but my skin was bright red and covered in dozens of blisters. If it weren’t for my bloodline, I was certain I’d have suffered far worse, and would be in agony. I debated dousing the wounds in my last remaining healing potion, but… no. I had enough fire to keep up the low-burning physical enhancements until I arrived back at the house. I took out my staff and conjured a trio of air elementals, replaced my staff with my broom, and flew off.

  As soon as I landed, Yushin released the magic, and my friends rushed out of the house. Salem’s eyes widened, and Jackson rushed over, his hands glowing gold as he hovered them an inch or so over my arms, where the blisters were the worst.

  “Behold, I will bring it health and cure; and I will cure them and will reveal unto them the abundance of peace and truth,” intoned Jackson, and I watched as the blistered retreated. The skin remained red and raw looking, and Jackson frowned, but looked up at me.

  “I’ll need some time to reach for more of Effervesce’s healing,” he said. “This world is far from him, and the power is sluggish to respond. Besides, I was never a master healer.”

  I disjointed my bloodline then, and felt a dull ache rush through my arms and hands where I had been holding the gems. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I had feared, and I thanked Jackson’s healing for that.

  “That’s fine,” I said, shaking my head. “If we can find a couple of the disease dogs, I’ll use siphon vitality on them. I’ll be honest, I have no qualms about casting it on plague bearing, poison wielding, rabid monsters.”

  That got a couple of nods, and we started moving into the stone cottage. Once we’d taken our seats around the table, Yushin was the first to break the silence.

  “Were you successful?”

  I grinned and untied the leather bag, spilling the obsidian shards out onto the table.

  “I estimate that these two are seventh circle, while these are fifth and sixth,” I explained, pushing one of the seventh to Jackson, and pulling one toward me. The warm stone did cause a twinge of pain in my hands, but I was able to push it down.

  “Even if we dinnae find anything else, we’ll still make out like bandits,” Salem commented. “Selling multiple high circle components, even split four ways, is quite the haul. I see now why you’re so interested in becomin’ a planeswalker, Emrys.”

  “It is quite lucrative. With Fable able to open portals, and Charm able to collect things, it’s no wonder that the shop can sell their stuff for so much cheaper than typical market rates,” I mused. “Even if they only knew of one or two worlds like this one, it would still be a gold mine. Better, really.”

  The table fell silent for a little bit as we processed. Yushin might not need the money now, but I wasn’t sure that would always be true. Jackson was borderline destitute, given how much he gave to his church, though in fairness he received just as much back. Salem wasn’t poor, but nor was his family half as wealthy as the Shé clan.

  “What now?” Jackson asked into the open air. “We’ve still got the rest of today and all of tomorrow until we meet with the moles.”

  “We need to head into the forest for Salem, and to collect some wood,” I said. “While we’re here, we should also collect as much dead wood as we can. Hopefully whatever we find in the forest is more pleasant. Like the moles.”

  “Why do we need to collect dead wood?” Yushin asked, but Salem and Jackson were already nodding their agreement to my statement.

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  “Etherius locker,” Salem explained. “It needs wood from a plane that’s not your own, but that you’re not antithetically opposed to. None of us are opposed here, and we have some… I wouldn’t call them allies, but not enemies. Most of the aggressive life here has been dumb, an’ would have done it to anyone.”

  “Do we want to do that for the rest of the day?” I asked, glancing at the sun. “We’ve got time.”

  “Let’s not venture deep,” Jackson said, scratching his beard. “Your ether reserves must be strained from blowing through all that spellcasting at once. It might be a good idea to scout it, before going deeper tomorrow. But before that… Do you have the ether reserves for siphon vitality?”

  At my nod, Jackson and Yushin agreed to fly out and find a couple of disease dogs, coming back some time later with three of the monsters bound up in a shadow tying spell that was absolutely Yushin’s handiwork. I paused a moment before casting the life sapping spell on three bound opponents. Even if they were effectively rabid, it just didn’t feel right. I’d have no problem killing them in a fight, but this felt wrong.

  I acknowledged the feeling and let it flow through me. It was good to feel it – if I had been as in the hold of the Creep as I’d been earlier in the year, I might have simply written off their lives as less important than my burns without a thought. I was still placing my health over land-poisoning, destructive monsters, but I wasn’t doing so thoughtlesslessly. Green magic rushed out from the canine monsters and flowed into my hands. One died, but the other two were simply left drained. Jackson immolated them, murmuring a prayer. As soon as he touched each of the monsters heads, there was a flash of white and golden light, and they vanished. I perked up and glanced at Salem, then back at Jackson.

  “I don’t suppose that spell – or, uh, prayer? – could remove the aberrant taint from Salem?”

  “If it could, I’d have done so long ago,” Jackson said sadly. “No. it can offer the succor of a swift death to those who have been tainted by poison or disease or aberrant taint and cannot ever come to their senses again. If I were to attempt it, either nothing would happen, or Salem would die. There is no third option.”

  “Could Effervesce do it directly?” I asked, and to my surprise, Yushin was the one to answer.

  “That is not how aberrants and deities operate. If Effervesce was to take the bloodline, he would become tainted by the aberrant, same as if you gave it to a human. The only gods who would be willing to do something of that sort are very dark ones, the sort who are already half-aberrants themselves.”

  “He might be able to, with sufficient investment, help make a more complete seal,” Jackson offered. “I’ve also heard rumors of him being able to burn out the bloodline itself, but to my understanding when he does that, there is no replacing it. It’s permanently burning off a portion of the soul. And that’s with sufficient investment to act.”

  “I’d… rather avoid that,” Salem said, shaking his head. “Maybe I’m bein’ foolish, but a part of me still wants to become a normal were-raven like my family, or learn to control the transformation, or something.”

  That more or less ended the discussion, but not my own personal thoughts on the topic. I had no plans to reach out to demons and dark gods often, but this might be the right case to do something of the sort. I simply needed to get good enough to contact and barter with a god. That wasn’t simple, but nor was it impossible. Toadweather had done it, after all. She’d all but stated that she’d killed a god when she was younger.

  I didn’t have too long to dwell on those thoughts, however, as we moved to the edge of the forest and began collecting wood. We were careful to only take the dead wood that had already fallen, and nothing that came from a tree itself, for three main reasons. First, there were wood elementals. I didn’t often use summon lesser elemental to call them, nor had I needed to call a petal toad often, but this plane was full enough of life that I didn’t want to risk it. Second, I’d found hints of the fae among the giant moles. It hadn’t been much, but it suggested this plane straddled between elemental and faerie, which meant magical trees were entirely reasonable. Third, the moles themselves had mentioned little green, wet creatures in the marsh, as well as formless spirits in the forest. That was ample reason to avoid hurting the trees, in my opinion.

  We collected a good bit of dead wood from the borders of both the forest where Salem could sense psychic-adjacent creatures within and the marshy area with giant mushrooms, and in our collecting, we did a good bit of scouting as well.

  The first thing we discovered were the green creatures the moles had spoken of. Within the waters of the marsh were grindylows, yet another creature that was halfway between faerie and elemental. While they weren’t true fae like the vodyanoy or greenteeths, they also weren’t truly water elementals. They were nasty, though – as soon as any of our feet landed near the water, a little green monster with long claws would erupt out, grab us, and try and pull us down. They were the size of a toddler, but had the strength of a fully grown, strong laborer. Yushin and I were forced to pull a friend from the water more than once.

  Though the grindylows weren’t horribly dangerous, I felt like they had to be hiding something. They emerged from seemingly nowhere, and I could have sworn that, when I examined them with ethersight, I caught tiny flashes of strange magic.

  As if by contrast, the forest was largely peaceful, and even when Salem used his arcane eyes to scout out far ahead, there was nothing save for a handful of strangely colored beetles. We decided that the following day would be dedicated to exploring it, and looking for whatever source of psionic power, or close enough to it, that Salem had detected when we arrived. That plan sounded great, and we spent the night working on our various magical projects, including Yushin’s ritual. But for all it sounded good, the entire thing went awry the instant we returned to the forest, and a shimmering woman made of green leaves and light stepped from the trees.

  “What are you doing here, mortals?”

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