Dev gasped as his head cleared the surface of the mud, giving him a glimpse of late afternoon light illuminating the island. He let out a mental sigh of relief as he saw that his essence sight had truly dimmed, so he only had a faint impression of the area around him.

  ‘So this is our new world,’ Elluvian’s voice sounded out in Dev’s mind, and he felt his eyes trace across the sky, stopping on each of the moons.

  ‘Could you stop that?’ he snapped inside his head. ‘We need to get out of this mud pit and then get to somewhere safe. Then we can admire the view.’

  ‘I don’t think you realize how incredible this view is, but fine.’

  Dev felt his body return to his control, and carefully paddled towards the edge.

  ‘No.. be careful. Try to stay flat on your back.’ Justin sounded out. ‘Trust me, I’ve done this before.’

  ‘Then why don’t you do it now?’ he retorted. Immediately, his body left his control and automatically evened itself out, gently pushing towards the edge of the pool, where it clambered out and stood up on its own.

  As his body started looking around, he reclaimed control.

  ‘Where do we want to go?’ Dev asked. ‘The Dreaming Prince said that we were in the central regions of the island.’

  ‘I think this is up to Elluvian.’ Tae said. ‘If we can get a set out of the way quick, that would be good. Do you feel that the life essence in the swamp is a good fit for you?’

  ‘I’m not sure. It feels wilder than I’m used to.’

  ‘Guys?’ Justin chimed in, trepidatiously. ‘Anyone else feeling some pressure from the bladder?’

  ‘Oh, come on.’ Dev grumbled. ‘Well, we might as well get this over with.’

  ——

  Several very awkward minutes filled with humming later, Dev turned to the south. Hopefully, they could make a solid amount of progress before the middle of the afternoon.

  As they walked, they were surrounded by the sounds of local wildlife.

  ‘This is much more pleasant that our time up here before,’ Elluvian commented.

  ‘No head-splitting pain, for one,” Tae replied sardonically.

  Suddenly, Dev felt his head jerk to the side. ‘Look over there! I think those are swamp potatoes.’

  Dev let Justin walk them over to what he was looking at, but voiced his doubts on the way over. ‘Are you sure? Those don’t resemble any potato plants I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘You said you were in the mountains, right?’ Justin said as he reached down and pulled the plants up. ‘Mountain potatoes are different from swamp potatoes.’

  Indeed, as the plants came out of the ground, Dev saw bulbs on the end, indicating that these were the first bits of food any of them had seen in a couple of days.

  ‘Thank the empire you found that.’ Tae said. ‘Our stomach was killing me.’

  Reclaiming control, Dev took his bag off his back. ‘Oh, great,’ he heard Elluvian say. ‘Everything is going to be completely covered in mud.’

  Indeed, it looked bad, but as Dev fumbled his way through opening it up properly, he let out a sigh of relief. While mud had coated the outside of the bag, the inside was mostly clean. He reached past the crumpled tent, quickly finding the water bottle.

  ‘Okay, who put the tent up wrong?’ Justin asked as Dev cleaned the potatoes. ‘I remember seeing that earlier as well.’

  After a brief moment of silence, Tae spoke up, saying ‘It was me. I’ve never used a tent before, but I didn’t want to leave it behind when I woke up in it.’

  Justin grumbled at him in the background, only stopping when Dev finally took a bite of the potatoes. There were only a few ounces, but that still felt more filling than any of the meals he’d had previously on the islands.

  After another hour of walking, it was getting close to darkness, and they worked to find a flat place to set up camp.

  Dev shrugged the backpack off his shoulders and went to work untangling the tent and setting it up.

  ‘This is taking too long,’ Justin said, ‘How about I set it up?’

  Dev mentally took a step back and felt Justin take over again, quickly setting the tent up.

  ‘You’ve done this before, haven’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, I spent most of my teenage summers being shipped from one scout camp to the other to keep me out of the house.’

  ‘Scout camp?’ Elluvian asked before Dev had the opportunity.

  ‘Boy Scouts. It’s a camping and leadership organization back home. I’ve camped in all sorts of areas. Do we have to talk about this? Can’t we just admire the view?’

  ‘We’re going to have to talk about this eventually,’ Dev responded. ‘We’re kind of stuck with each other.’

  ‘But we can drop it for now,’ Elluvian suggested. ‘I think we’re all curious about this unique world we’ve found ourselves in.’

  ‘Fine, what do you want to know?’

  Dev felt one of the others take hold of his body, then point in the sky, looking at a smaller, crescent-shaped purple moon. ‘What’s that one called?’ he heard Tae ask.

  ‘It’s Portentia, the Sage’s moon. It has an eighteen-day cycle through the heavens.’

  ‘And that one?’ he asked, pointing at a deep red moon.

  ‘Amaryllis, the flower moon. One of the few moons with an atmosphere and its own life, it changes color in a thirty-day cycle. It looks like we’re right at the midpoint of the cycle. At the other end, it will be a bluish silver.’

  His body jerked to point at a larger yellowish moon. He heard Justin in his mind, saying, ‘That looks like Earth’s moon.’

  ‘Chesidae, the slow moon. It only completes a cycle once every seven months.’

  ‘Are there any other life-bearing moons?’ Elluvian asked.

  Dev took control of his body and scanned the sky. After a moment, he fixed his eyes on a bright green dot in the sky. Pointing, he said, ‘That’s Luellan. It’s the smallest of the visible moons and supposed to be completely covered in some form of forests. I can’t see any of the other moons with life on them right now.’

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  They continued on like that for several hours, them asking about the moons and Dev answering. By the end, he was actually getting into it, answering their questions with some enthusiasm.

  Finally, he decided that he’d had enough. ‘I hate to cut this short, but we need to get to sleep. I want to make it to another island tomorrow. We’ve hardly eaten anything in a couple of days.’ The swamp had been picked clean of the foods any of them were familiar with, leaving them with only the slimmest of pickings.

  They made their way into the tent, where Dev tried to get to sleep.

  ‘Itsy bitsy teeny weeny little bitty froggy.’

  He tried to shut out Justin’s singing.

  ‘Jump, jump, jump little froggy.’

  ‘Spiders and flies are—’

  ‘Would you cut it out?’ Dev snapped. ‘We’re supposed to be trying to sleep.’

  ‘Fine.’ Justin fell silent.

  After a few minutes, Dev slipped away into dreamland.

  ------

  When Dev woke up, he was already outside the tent.

  ‘Hey, you sleep way to easily, and way to deep.’ Tae said as soon as Dev took control of his limbs.

  ‘What?’ Dev asked, suddenly concerned, ‘What happened?

  ‘We’ve been up for thirty minutes.’ Elluvian answered. ‘The other two got bored and decided to leave the tent.’

  ‘Hey, you didn’t stop us.’ Justin protested.

  Elluvian didn’t answer. Instead, with Justin’s help, Dev quickly stored the tent, eager to satiate the gnawing pit of hunger in his abdomen.

  ‘Who wants to walk?’ Dev asked. Nobody answered, so he sighed and started walking on his own.

  ‘I’m bored,’ Justin said a few minutes later. ‘Anyone want to talk about anything?’

  ‘What are we planning to do about our situation?’ Elluvian asked. ‘Obviously, first priority is securing food. But what next? Justin, do you want to try for the Apollo inheritance?’

  ‘Maybe? It’s probably worth a try. I’m not much of one for bows, but some solar fire wouldn’t necessarily go amiss.’

  ‘Dev, do you want to go to the temple of the Dreaming Prince immediately, or do you want to wait?’

  ‘I don’t really care.’ Dev said, not wanting to think about it too hard while walking. ‘I need to wait until you three have yours anyway before I can start building my meridians.’

  ‘That leaves me and Tae. I think we’ll just have to keep an eye out for something promising.’

  ‘Actually,’ Dev interjected, ‘I had a thought about that earlier. There might be some inheritances related to the islands themselves. They stay in the air using rune magic, after all.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Tae said. ‘But how would we access such an area? Would it be on the bottom of the islands?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Elluvian answered. ‘I guess we keep an eye out around the edges of the islands for purple rune essence.’

  ‘And what about for you?’ Dev asked. ‘You already said that you weren’t going to try for something in the swamp. Do you just want to keep an eye out?’

  Elluvian hesitated, then agreed, saying, ‘We have enough time. I’m sure I’ll find something that feels right.’

  ‘Hey, If there isn’t anything else going on, do you mind if I do something about our cleanliness situation?’ Tae asked. ‘We seriously stink right now.’

  ‘What do you want to do?’ Dev asked. ‘The water around here isn’t really fit to clean in, and the canteen doesn’t hold enough.’

  ‘I’m a runic archivist. I know enough runes to create a temporary source of conjured water. It will probably disappear before the next island appears, leaving us clean and dry.’

  ‘Go ahead, then.’

  Dev felt as his body began moving with great precision, using a stick to draw a somewhat complex rune circle on the ground.

  ‘That’s more complicated than I expected,’ Dev said as water began falling from the sky.

  ‘It’s not too complicated,’ Tae said. ‘The hardest part is changing the generation location to above us. Now quickly, get in before the runes are washed away.’

  ------

  It was the middle of the afternoon when they spotted the next island floating out of the east. The island started out as a small white dot, resolving itself into a massive snowscape, dotted with spots of green and gray, some small mountains rising a couple thousand feet in the air.

  ‘Woah,’ Justin said, his voice hushed. ‘It’s one thing to know you’re on a flying island. It’s a whole different thing to see a second island flying towards you.’

  ‘Do we want to cross over?’ Dev asked. ‘I’m not any better at taiga survival than swamp survival. And we’re still wet.’

  ‘I think we have to.’ Elluvian said. ‘This place is barren, we haven’t seen anything we could forage since yesterday. Plus, who knows if the next island will be any better?’

  ‘And the water should be gone soon,’ Tae said.

  The others quickly concurred, and Dev was surprised when he felt Justin take over and begin stretching.

  ‘Do we really need to stretch?’ he asked.

  ‘If we don’t want to feel like we’ve been run over by a bus, we do. It’s good for us.’

  Elluvian agreed, saying, ‘Even when I trained with the royal guards, after cultivating, we were still expected to stretch. I don’t know what a bus is, but I suspect Justin’s analysis is correct. I don’t think the benefits of stretching ever go away.’

  ‘If you insist.’ Then what Elluvian said hit him. ‘Wait, you’ve cultivated before? So you already have a meridian blueprint?’

  ‘Well, yes, but I don’t think it fits.’ Elluvian said. ‘I—’

  Tae cut him off. ‘Hey, I think we need to think about running now. The islands are getting closer.’

  Dev looked up, just in time to see the force bridge initiating itself far to the left, the lights rapidly approaching. They were fifty feet away from the edge, so he started sprinting as soon as the lights got close.

  ‘Don’t sprint, we have plenty of time,’ Elluvian said, ‘No point in tiring us out unnecessarily.’

  Dev slowed, saying, ‘How about we try not to backseat drive? If you want to offer commentary, you can either take charge or it can wait for a less critical time.’

  He jogged his way across. As he reached the other end, he felt his body be turned around to look at the bridge.

  ‘Hey, no need to get pushy.’ Dev snapped.

  ‘Sorry,’ Justin replied, not sounding very sincere. ‘Hey, this bridge reminds me of something from my world called the Bifrost. Do you have that here?’

  ‘The Bifrost?’ Dev inquired.

  ‘A legendary magical rainbow bridge said to lead to the home of the gods. You don’t have anything like that here?’

  ‘No, not that I know of,’ Dev said. ‘But the gods don’t have much to do with Solumbra. I think it’s the same as with the internet and dimensional travel.’

  ‘Wait, you have an internet?’ Tae said.

  ‘And dimensional travel?’ Justin tacked on.

  ‘Sure we have an internet. But it’s not connected to the rest of the empire. Apparently there isn’t enough space between heaven and earth for it here. Same with dimensional travel.’

  ‘Like what the Dreaming prince mentioned with the ascension?’ Elluvian asked.

  ‘Yes. No. I don’t know! Could we please focus on scouting the area and getting some food in us? This won’t matter until we leave the islands anyway.’

  ‘Fine,’ Justin said. ‘Is there any food around?’

  He turned around to a landscape covered in a blanket of white snow, and light flurries falling from the sky, ash he did, the water finally dissipated from his skin, causing him to let out a sigh of relief.

  Now that he was here, the green dots were clearly a variety of coniferous trees, spread out on the landscape.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t really recognize anything for foraging.’

  He walked them forward, scanning for things he could identify.

  ‘Nothing. Just trees and snow. And I have no clue how we’d go hunting.’

  ‘Wait.’ Justin said. ‘I think those are spruce trees. We might be able to eat the tips of the branches. I heard about that once.’

  ‘But what if they aren’t? I don’t want to poison us. And in the time it takes to test the food, we may as well go to a better island.’

  ‘Just trust me.’

  ‘Fine,’ Dev snapped the tip off one of the tree branches, examining it closely. Sticking it in his mouth, he crunched down, finding a sort of resiny citrus taste.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” he heard someone call out. He froze.

  ‘Oh, great. Our first social interaction. Who wants to handle this?’