While the search for answers continued in the astral space, the support camp was suddenly swarmed with bronze-rankers Danielle and Thalia deemed insufficiently reliable to participate. There was also a pair of silver-rankers, one of whom was named Gloria Phael. She had no interest in running the camp but didn’t want a commoner in a position of authority, so she rallied the bronze rankers, ousted Vincent and installed her son in his place.

The administrative skills of the new camp leader left something to be desired and since Jason had stayed on as his assistant, he did his best to keep things running smoothly. This quickly proved infeasible as the new camp leader had little interest in doing, or even hearing about things. This was remedied by having Jason removed as well.

Left idle, Jason spent his time with Gary and Rufus, who was still barely moving. He would robotically eat a spirit coin when prompted by Gary, but never talked. Gary took Jason aside because they were running out of coins and needed clean clothes. Their possessions had all been stored in Farrah’s storage space.

Jason went and found Vincent.

“That worthless, wet sack of nothing actually had me confined to the tent,” Vincent complained.

“Are they enforcing that?” Jason asked.

“No, but its still humiliating.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Jason said. “Gary and I need to do something, so we need you to keep an eye on Rufus.”

Vincent had been giving Rufus his distance, at Gary’s suggestion.

“Of course,” Vincent said.

He and Gary went out into the desert. They found a flat space of red, rocky earth, far from the prying eyes of the camp and Jason took out the casket containing Farrah’s body. He had been keeping it in his own storage space since she was brought out through the aperture. She was in a magical casket that would preserve her until she was returned to her family. Jason once had the sombre task of placing another adventurer in an identical casket, and now understood why friends and family were not the ones sent to recover a fallen adventurer.

Jason started laying out a ritual circle with salt, with Farrah’s casket at the centre. Using the powdered cores of lesser monsters, he tested the circle, correcting it again and again.

“I keep messing it up,” he said, voice catching.

“Take your time,” Gary told him. It went unspoken that Jason could have extracted the items from Farrah’s storage space by looting her body like a monster. They both knew it could be done, but neither man suggested such a defilement.

Still trying to get the circle right, Jason had to stop. His vision was swimming with tears as he remembered Farrah instructing him on his very first magic circle.

“I was just thinking about when we summoned my familiar,” he said. “Remember how we snuck off the other side of the manor so Anisa wouldn’t find us?”

Gary laughed, reminiscent mirth weighed down with sadness. After days of sombre reflection, the sound was strange and alien.

“You wouldn’t tell us what it was, but we knew she wouldn’t like it, coming from an apocalypse stone.”

“Farrah walked me through the ritual circle. It was a complex one for my first time.”

“You passed out again. You were constantly falling unconscious, back then.”

“Getting hit in the head with a shovel will do that. I sometimes wonder if I don’t have some lingering damage from all that cranial trauma.”

“We’ve wondered that too,” Gary said and they shared a sad smile.

Jason finished the circle and performed the ritual by reciting an incantation. Items from Farrah's dimensional space started appearing around her casket. By the time it was done, it formed a small hill of crates, boxes, bookshelves, cupboards, wardrobes, furniture and various loose items.

“I don’t have room for all this in my inventory,” Jason said. “Some of it won’t fit at all. She had a banquet table in there?”

“How big an item can you fit?” Gary asked.

“About the size of a regular dining table. Maybe half the size of that great long thing. Who needs a banquet table on hand?”

“You’d be surprised,” Gary said. “It doesn’t matter if you can’t fit everything. There are dimensional bags in here somewhere. The banquet table should fit into a bronze-rank one.”

They started sorting through everything; the accumulation of a life. They found the dimensional bags, placing Gary’s things in one and Rufus’ in another. That was only a portion of the pile; the rest they started putting in the remaining bags.

Jason brushed his hand along the spines of books on one of several bookcases.

“She always wanted me to pay more attention to magical theory,” he said.

“Take them,” Gary said. “She’d want you to have them.”

“You’re sure?”

“Just make sure you read them,” he instructed Jason. “You have no idea how often she complained that you wouldn’t learn magic properly. She saw so much potential in you.”

“I don’t know about that,” Jason said, “but I’ll try to live up to it.”

Returning to the support camp, Jason and Gary were heading for the large dormitory tent where they had left Rufus. As they drew closer, they heard a commotion coming from the tent and people evacuating it.

“MY SON ALMOST DIED BECAUSE YOU COULDN’T HOLD THE LINE!”

Gary and Jason went into the tent. Rufus was standing, his expressionless gaze on a man who had clutched the front of Rufus’ clothes in a first. He was yelling invective at Rufus, blasting out his bronze-rank aura. Everyone else had either backed-off or left entirely.

“What good were you?” the man continued to shout in Rufus’ face. “You couldn’t even protect yourselves!”

“I do not like where this is going,” Gary said, stepping forward.

“Still nothing to say?” the man kept yelling. “That worthless friend of yours wasn’t worth the dirt her blood stained!”

Rufus’ expression remained blank, but a golden sword appeared in the hand at his side. Gary’s hand was faster and stronger, clamping down on Rufus’ arm and holding it in place. Gary’s other hand formed a fist, which crashed into the face of the yelling man without Gary so much as looking at him. His gaze was on Rufus, who looked back at him blankly.

“You dare?” the man asked disbelievingly from the floor. Gary turned to face him.

“Leave. Otherwise, I will let him kill you.”

“He wouldn’t dare!”

“Look at him and say that again,” Gary said, stepping aside while keeping a solid grip on Rufus’ arm. Rufus looked down at the man and the man looked back. What he saw in Rufus’ empty eyes unnerved him more than the sword in Rufus’ hand and he scrambled away, out of the tent.

After a brief discussion, Gary and Jason decided that the camp was no good for Rufus. Vincent wanted to stay behind and try and help the camp, futile as his efforts may be.

Jason had supplied himself for the desert and they set out from the camp in the early hours, shortly before sunrise. Their destination was Boko, where Jason had first arrived via Hester’s portal. The support camp was in the middle of nowhere but Jason had the city on his map and there was no danger of getting lost. It would be a trek of days without a sand skimmer, but that was largely the point. Nothing but quiet, empty space.

Rufus followed along passively as they walked. It was reminiscent of their journey through the desert when they first met. After hours of walking in silence, Jason started talking about their first encounter. Trapped with Rufus, Gary and Farrah in that basement, then the sacrifice chamber. The terrifying spectacle of Farrah’s volcano powers. After the tale had run its course, Gary started telling stories from before Jason had met the trio. He told about how they met while fighting a zombie plague that had wiped out a massive town. He talked of other adventures they had undertaken together. He spoke of how they champed at the bit under the supervision of one silver-ranker or another.

“We had little chance to control our own fates,” Rufus said. His first words in days startling the others into stopping.

“We came out here to get away from that,” Rufus continued, “yet she died under the command of silvers. Because she followed me.”

“Because of you?” Gary growled, voice thundering. “That’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard. You think she followed you around like a lost dog? Am I your pet cat? We came out here to control our own fates; you just said it yourself. She chose to be here, just like you. She knew the risks of this life and she died protecting people, like a hero.”

Gary marched up to Rufus and shoved him hard, sending him stumbling back and falling over. Rufus pushed himself up on his elbows, only to be shoved down again by an enormous foot. Rufus looked up at Gary, finally shaken out of his blank expression.

“If I hear you try and take her sacrifice away ever again,” Gary growled, “I’ll beat you halfway to death and then you and me will be done.”

Gary lifted his foot off Rufus’ chest and stormed off. Jason walked over and crouched next to Rufus, who lay on the hard ground with a shell-shocked expression. Jason looked down at Rufus, then over at Gary, marching on alone.

“We all lost her,” Jason told Rufus. “You’re not the only one who gets to mourn.”

Jason stood up and followed after Gary.

Emir emerged from the aperture into a camp that was in chaos. The original neat rows of tents had been added to in haphazard fashion, poorly adapting to the influx of people from the expedition.

“What in the world are they doing out here?”

He marched over to the management tent, only to find that it was missing. He extended his senses, the low-level anger in his aura bringing out goose-bumps in people all over the camp. He wasn't sufficiently familiar with Vincent Trenslow to pick his aura and didn't sense Jason anywhere in the camp.

He made his way to the closest bronze rank aura, terrifying its owner as he demanded the location of the management tent. It had been moved from its central location to an isolated rise outside the camp that had nice views and didn't smell of people. Emir stormed inside, where he found some bronze-ranker with his feet up as he reclined, eating grapes. The man shivered as he felt a gold-rank aura pressing down on him, almost falling to the floor as he scrambled to his feet.

“Who are you?” Emir asked.

“Cassius Phael, Lord Bahadir.”

“I’m not an aristocrat, Phael. Where is Vincent Trenslow?”

“Who?”

“The person in charge of this camp!”

“I’m in charge of this camp.”

“Why? Where is the person that used to be in charge?”

“No idea. We saw him off.”

“Saw him off?”

“We couldn’t let him tell nobles what to do. He was just some common filth.”

“Like me?”

Phael went white as milk.

“How did you end up in charge?” Emir asked.

“My mother told me to do it,” Phael said.

“Oh, dear gods. What about Asano?”

“Who?”

“Trenslow’s assistant.”

“The mouthy one? We got rid of him too.”

“Did Asano say anything about the five people whose tracking was lost?”

“Right, yes,” Phael said. “I found out he had people watching them. Can you believe it? The families they come from and he had people spying! Obviously, I got rid of them and warned the families.”

Emir looked at the idiot incredulously, taking a slow, calming breath.

“Do you know why Asano didn’t tell me about any of this?”

“He did try to go see you, but we stopped him. He was obviously just going to complain and toady, so we made sure he didn’t bother you.”

Emir ran a hand over his face.

“Suddenly I see the flaw in putting all the competent people on one side of the aperture and the rest on the other.”

“Sir?”

“Phael, where is Trenslow now?”

“I had to have him confined to one of the dormitory tents,” Phael said. “He kept coming in to make stupid suggestions. I'm the one in charge, now.”

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Emir said, keeping himself under control as his voice audibly teetered at the edge of breaking into a yell. “You are going to find Trenslow and tell him, along with anyone who objects, that I have personally placed him in charge of this camp. Then, figure out how to stay out of my sight, because if I ever see you again, I might just slap you so hard it changes your religion. Do understand what I’ve just told you?”

“I think so, sir. My family worships Vineyard, if that helps. He’s subordinate to the god of revels.”

“Oh, dear gods. Look, just tell me where I can find him.”

“The god of revels?”

“Trenslow, you cretin!”

Rufus trailed behind Gary and Jason at a distance for the rest of the day, the pair occasionally glancing back to make sure he was still there. Once darkness came, Jason and Gary made camp. They set out aura-suppressing tents that would shield them from the senses of unintelligent monsters and placed a warming stone that saved them making a fire. The arid air rapidly cooled once the sun went down, and while any adventurer could withstand it, they would rather not. Gary especially, as his fur had a natural ability to diffuse heat while offering little insulation.

Sitting on blankets on either side of the cylindrical heat stone, they were eventually joined by Rufus. His formerly blank expression now looked tired and haunted. They sat in silence for a long time before Rufus unexpectedly spoke.

“Remember that little village in the eastern reaches?” he asked Gary.

Gary looked at Rufus in surprise.

“The one with the flour mill?”

Rufus nodded and Gary burst out laughing.

“Am I missing something?” Jason asked.

“There was this flour mill,” Gary said. “Farrah wasn’t always so accurate with her unruly volcano powers and she blew up a flour mill. The explosion did kill the monster, though.”

“What kind of storytelling is that?” Rufus asked Gary. “You jumped right to the end.”

“If you want to tell it properly,” Gary said, “then tell it.”

“I will then,” Rufus said. “This was a few years ago, when Farrah and I had just hit bronze. Gary had been bronze for a few years when we met him, but he’d been slacking off.”

“I was focusing on my forge-craft, not slacking off.”

“So he claims,” Rufus said. “The three of us took this contract, way out in the eastern reaches. It was a long way and there weren’t a lot of takers, but it was a low-magic zone and we could go without supervision, so we accepted the contract.”

“I thought you told me coming out here was your first chance to take contracts without a silver-ranker over your shoulder.”

“Well, there was this one instance,” Rufus said. “It didn’t go very well.”

“They made us go back and deliver a bunch of food,” Gary said, “on account of having blown-up their flour mill.”

“What did I just say about jumping to the end?” Rufus asked. “So, we set out for the eastern reaches, and the mission seemed plagued from the start. One of the heidels went lame in the middle of nowhere, and none of us were healers. That was when we found out that heidels don’t respond well to healing potions…”