The next four days I had were unexpectedly eventful.

I met many groups on my patrols. I made just as many trades.

Of the many I did, one was an orchard owner with a broken wagon, trading help for a jam recipe. Then a lone human on the road, trading directions to Felzan for a small trinket—an Astalonian coin, minted over sixty years ago. I spoke to a troupe of performers asking for tales to inspire their plays and traded with a mercenary patrol on the lookout for monsters to exterminate.

The road held all sorts of people. Especially in the Heartlands. My boots took me far, carrying me from shadow to shadow, allowing me to cross great distances without Galesong by my side.

And with each trade I finished, I felt my weave grow stronger.

My control over my magic increased. It was in small increments—small enough that they hardly mattered individually. But the trades helped. They gave me boosts. Little increases in ability, compounded over the reputation hoped I build as a helpful stranger on the road. It would take much, much more for me to even come close to my full power while wearing Ashran’s faces. And the sooner I could do that…

I grinned. My songs would finally reach their full potential. I imagined it as I discarded my weave and flew up to the ship: my music, strengthened by my control over reality. My songs would allow listeners to taste and see and feel. It would change their perceptions to reflect the images I meant to convey with my music.

A voiceless performance, a one man act.

Who needed a troupe of performers when I could make the stories in my songs real?

The ship drew closer as I flew through the clouds and I pictured myself there: in a tavern, my bansuri in my hands, each note sprouting grass and bringing flowers. Each sound would be a breeze, carrying the scent of grassland and salt, and each chorus would be the crash of waves against a towering cliff face.

It was an exciting prospect. And once I was in Felzan, I would have all the time in the world to practice. I would start my legend there—Ashran, master bard, king of music, playing songs so masterful that they altered a man’s perception of reality itself.

I would be amazing.

And I’d get paid for it. Not in sentiment or interest, like I did my immortal trades. No—I would get coin.Actual money. Things I could use to buy food with. Or travel. Or even new instruments, classes on music, and if I was feeling ambitious, my own troupe! The idea of my own group of immortal-taught performers wooing crowds with cheap tricks amused me greatly.

Laughing to myself, I set down on the airship’s deck. The engines hummed below my feet. Charged once again. In a few minutes, we would be back on route to Felzan, and my dreams would begin the moment we docked.

“Rowan!” I heard a voice call, and I turned to Aami and Priscia.

I blinked.

Aami wasn’t shapeshifted into an amarid. No, she was in her natural, gooey form, coiled around Priscia’s back like a turtle’s shell. The chef in question tilted her head, looking around the deck in confusion.

“Ashran?” she asked. “Where?”

The shoggoth on her back pointed to me. “He’s standing over there. But he’s invisible to you, I think. He does that sometimes because he’s shy.”

I rolled my eyes at her and smiled, before snapping my fingers once. Ashran instantly draped over me, a new face forming once again. This one was less handsome than the last—thick-browed and thin-lipped, a scar running across the bridge of his nose. And as soon as this new layer of skin fell over me, the injuries and exhaustion of the past hour smashed into my back as well.

I grimaced, unprepared. I stumbled forward, my weave’s clothes torn and caked in mud and blood. Priscia gasped and rushed over, Aami blinking her eyes at me.

“You’re injured!” Priscia said, “What—”

“—Why did you injure yourself?” Aami asked me, flowing away from the cook’s back to poke my scratched face with a tentacle. She narrowed her eyes at me, “You look like a broken window chewed you up and spat you back out.”

I shook my head and smiled wryly, rolling my shoulders as the stiffness began to set in. “Your metaphors always sound so hungry.”

“That’s because I’m always hungry.”

“For food?”

She worbled and grinned with seven mouths, “For everything.”

While we spoke, Priscia fumbled with her purse. She retrieved a regenerative salve from it. One strong enough to close wounds like Ashran’s in an instant. She popped it open to treat me, but I held up a hand to stop her. I shook my head.

“Stop,” I said. “I don’t need it. I’m not really injured.”

She stared, “You’re bleeding.”

“My weave is bleeding. I’m fine. On the inside.”

Aami worbled beside us two, nodding in agreement. She patted Priscia’s back with a tentacle. “You should listen to him,” she said, her form twisting and reforming back into an amarid with tar-black leaves. The eyes on her body closed one by one. “If he was really tired or injured, he’d be complaining more.”

I nodded, “That’s true. I’d demand you fuss over me and cry if I was.”

Hesitating, Priscia put the salve back into her purse. She gave the two of us glances. Me with a new face, popping out of thin air with a body full of cuts, and Aami, who’d just gone from an eldritch horror to the pretty girl next door over the span of a few seconds. She shook her head.

“Sometimes I wonder if I’m in a hospital bed somewhere, hallucinating after accidentally ingesting one of miss Elanah’s poisons.”

“That wouldn’t happen. The poison would probably just melt a hole straight through your torso. Elanah doesn’t joke around with that stuff.”

“Oh! I actually tried drinking one from the lab, once. Before we left. It tasted funny.”

“Which one?”

“The silver thing. It tried to eat me.”

Priscia and I stared at her. Aami gave us a sheepish smile, looking away as she scratched at the side of her neck.

“It was kind of fun. Like chewing on angry candy.”

We kept staring until Aami pouted and dissolved, turning back into a mass of eyes and black slime that slithered through the tiny gaps in the deck. She sunk into the floor and someone below the deck screamed. There was a series of muffled apologies. Then a door slammed as someone ran away. Silence.

Well.

If the Blight Witch’s new baby was no match for that, then the whole realm was either doomed because we made a faulty product, or I was just best friends with an indestructible glutton.

It was somehow easier to believe that it was the latter.

“How did the two of you meet?” Priscia asked, and I turned to her, an eyebrow raised. “Aami doesn’t like talking about her home much. Just that you were the one who found her and got her out.”

She leaned forward, looking pale.

“Was she a bioweapon too? Experimented on?”

I laughed, “No, no she isn’t. And I didn’t find Aami—she found me. There was a lot of screaming then. I tried to kill her a couple times while I was running away.”

“That was you? She told me you smashed her into pulp!”

“Well, she told me you tried to poison her. But we all got along in the end, right? Now we’re all friends and you work for us. It’s a happy ending.”

“…How did my life get so weird?”

I put a hand on her shoulder and smiled, “You get used to it.”

“I’m not going to turn weird too, am I?”

“You’re an amarid chef that got deployed to the front lines, and is now coming home after befriending an eldritch entity and finding employment under an immortal. Also you like beans. You’re already weird.”

Priscia hung her head and walked away, murmuring under her breath. I let the poor cook go off on her own without company. I had other things to do.

Dropping my weave, the pain and fatigue from my little adventure immediately disappeared. My senses found themselves partially muted once again, and I took a step into a shadow that had me slipping into my room on the other side. I sighed in relief upon seeing my bed. I knew it wasn’t going to crawl away or anything, but actually seeing it was… relieving.

I dropped into it face-first. I laid there for a long few moments, my face heating up as I exhaled into the pillow. Then sighed again and sat up, unhooking my lute case from around my waist.

I brought out Vivian’s lute and laid down, holding it to my chest as I plucked at the strings. The music extended invisible tendrils into the air and pulled.

My eyes closed.

I channeled my sixth sense.

The essences came to life.

I felt them without looking. I tasted them without touching. They hovered over me, dancing across my room with each bouncing note. The sound of my lute hummed against my chest. Strengthening. Controlling. In this form, not limited by my weave, I could slow time and command the wind. I could summon fire and channel lightning. My playing could summon the sound of the sea and fill the air with salt.

But now, I would use it for something different.

A ball of essence emerged from my chest. It was a curling, twisting thing. Like a ball of snakes, each serpent made of coiling silk. A tapestry. And woven into each piece was a memory—some trades, some mine, some others. I heard snippets of conversation as I focused on it. Voices from far away.

That boy saved my trip! Lifted my wagon with both hands and helped me fix the wheel. Ashran was his name, I recall. Trollish lad.

Hoy, troupers! This the way to Felzan? I passed a man on the road that told me it was. Oh? Pale guy, white-haired halfling? Looks like he passed both of us on the road!

Drownstalker nest. That guy was right. Good thing he pointed us to it before it grew too big. Only asked for a good joke in exchange, too. Ha! Hope we run into him again—that guy Ashran. Good man.

Yes, I’m on my way. The delivery is in schedule, thanks to a stranger on the road.

I grinned, listening to each one. Each voice that echoed in my mind was a drop of power closer to the ocean I hoped to build. But there was a problem—my puddle of power was damaged. Little cracks and tears, spreading across the surface. Wounds. Fatigue. I focused on them, drawing foreign essences from the air and pulling them close.

I melted them down. Then I infused them into Ashran; I mended the tears with golden string and filled the cracks with molten silver. My weave’s injuries closed one by one. His fatigue melted away.

And by the time I was done, Ashran was as good as new. And even stronger than before.

I stood from the bed and snapped my fingers and my face changed again.

A squarish jaw, a chiseled chin. Thorny eyebrows and long hair draping over branches that rose from my head like antlers. Energy flooded my veins. My senses returned to me, sharper than ever. I turned to the mirror and grinned, finding Ashran’s ever-changing face grinning back at me. The need for sleep that previously filled me fell away.

Outside of my room, I heard footsteps walking down the hall. Excited conversations mixed with sighs of relief. I heard Aami making a fuss on the deck, and smiling, I stepped into the shadows and emerged from behind the mast.

There, the crew was gathered at the deck. Airship sailors clambered up the ropes and pointed. The sailwings bent and creaked, and I felt the ship tilt.

We descended past the clouds and the cheering began.

I walked to the railings and gazed down, the sailors respectfully making way for me to look. Aami and Priscia joined me, watching in wonder as the mist thinned and revealed the landscape in full.

Blue hummed.

Trees shone below us, suncatchers. Their leaves shone cyan in the night and under the rain, and sprawling bridges and walkways connected the houses hanging from the branches. Underneath them, a sprawling city of slate and silverwood glinted under the light of the trees, golden street lamps lining the roads like bottles of captured light. Glowbugs zipped over them, carrying bloated sacks full of honey between their legs.

Over the clamoring, I heard Aami cheer and Priscia laugh. I heard the sailors clap each other on the back and I heard the soldiers sent away from the front lines relax.

They were here.

Felzan.

I stared down at the massive city, and one thought was sure in my mind.

I was home.