Mark forced himself to smile. “No, I’m not with any of these ‘Families.’ Truth be told, I don’t even know what they are.”

Rosie cackled. “Oh dear, lad. You will soon enough.”

Mark tried to smile again at her comment, but the way she said it was a tad too disturbing for real mirth.

“Ah grob fenk—”

Mark immediately cut off his speech when it came out garbled.

“What’s was that?” Rosie said, but Mark was already focusing wholly on his hand.

It had started to twitch.

No. No-no-no. Keep it together.

Mark was well aware of how epileptics were treated in olden times, and it wasn’t good. He had no idea if the same prejudices held here, but he desperately didn’t want to be cast aside by this nice family, so he shoved his hand under his cloak, hiding the spasming from view. Internally he kept chastising the limb, trying to will it to stop its motion.

Gavin said something, but Mark couldn’t understand; the seizure twisting the boy’s words into something unintelligible.

Now both Rosie and Gavin were looking at Mark with concern. He knew he would be in a full-blown grand mal soon, and the last thing he wanted was to fall off the back edge of the cart, so he pushed backwards, only for his unwrapped hand to bump into the staff he had tossed up earlier.

Immediately, Mark felt a powerful connection to the staff that hadn’t been there before. He knew this feeling, this resonance. The wood cried out for that turmoil inside him, and Mark instinctively fed that desire, pushing the building storm away from him and into the wood.

Threads of resonance ripped free of Mark, sinking into the staff and opening a path to freedom. A way to make it through the seizure's onslaught without being overwhelmed, like a surfer who ducked beneath the waves and only padded in the troughs.

At first, Mark was in awe of his good fortune. But as the power fled him and built within the staff, he felt a resistance form. In horror, he realized that what he was experiencing wasn’t solace, it wasn’t a reprieve. At best it was a delaying tactic. What’s more, with every thread of resonance he pushed into the staff, the more resistance he felt. What started out as feeding a desire became rolling a boulder uphill. Yes, the storm was still being pushed into the staff, but now he had to actively hold it there, to keep it at bay. And if he let go, the entire thing would crash back down on him in a single, simultaneous torrent that he very well might not survive.

“You don’t look too good, Mr. Mark,” Gavin said.

Mark’s eyes flicked over to the boy, and he forced out a smile. “Just a bit chilled,” he croaked.

Rosie seemed less willing to accept his answer. She tapped him on the sleeve and held out her hand. “That’s the dehydration. Here, give me your hands. I’ll give them a nice warm rub.” The words were kind, but there was a serious set to her expression.

The force building in the staff was becoming a challenge for Mark, and he was growing concerned that he had made a terrible mistake.

“I don’t mean to alarm you,” Mark said, gathering his courage. This was happening, whether he wanted it to or not. “I have a condition called epil—”

“HOLD!” Darius hollered from up front. His voice reeked of concern.

Rosie’s eyes snapped over to Gavin. “Into the trunk.”

“Yes, ma,” the boy said, immediately diving into a container hidden amidst the ingots and barrels. Rosie turned to Mark.

“Come with me,” she said.

Mark tried to ward her off. He could feel his control slipping, and it could doom the whole family if they were relying on him. “I’m not very good in a fight—”

“You’re good enough for my food!” she snapped. “You’re good enough for my wagon! If you’re good enough to take from us, then you’re good enough to give.”

Mark stared at her in shock. Then her words sunk in, and he nodded. “Us poor folk got to stick together, right?”

She gave him a stiff nod, jumping off the wagon and into the rain. Mark couldn’t help but notice that she had no weapons whatsoever. Definitely a caster. All Mark had was his staff and a pair of hands that were shaking with increasing frequency, building in unison with the anxiety he felt in his chest. Still, she was right. He had accepted their help; he needed to at least try and reciprocate.

Mark held the staff tightly, uncaring that the lines raced visibly across wood and flesh in response to his touch, the storm of his seizure causing the whorls to trace an agitated frenzy that glowed with a shifting rainbow light. There was nothing he could do about it, though, so Mark turned to drop himself off the wagon tail, only to see Gavin’s saucer-wide eyes peeking out at him from under the cracked-open lid of the trunk.

As soon as the boy realized he’d been spotted, he let out a small yip and closed the lid with a slam.

Well, that secret’s out.

Not that Mark had a choice. The only weapon he had was the staff, and he was pretty sure that if he let go, there would be serious repercussions.

Hopping off the wagon, Mark landed on the wet stone and took a moment to brace himself before walking into the rain. He needed to maintain control, and with every second, he was pouring more of the chaotic storm within him out into the staff, increasing the difficulty of holding it back.

“You can do this,” Mark said, begging his body to listen to his brain.

With his hands clenched around the staff, knuckles starch white wherever they weren’t covered in madly racing lines, Mark stepped into the rain.

The downpour drenched him instantly, splattering his face and slicking down his hair. Despite this, he didn’t pull up the hood of his cloak. Maybe he was soaked to the bone, but at least he had his peripheral vision. It seemed Darius agreed with Mark’s assessment—when he stepped around the back of the wagon, the man had his hood down as well, his head scanning intently up and down the road. When he saw Mark, he nodded, though his eyebrows pursed together when Mark spasmed and dropped to a knee in the middle of the road.

Mark braced himself against the wheel of the wagon, his whole body shaking as though he’d just been pulled from an icy lake. He stared down at the road beneath his feet, at the drops of rain impacting the puddles in the cracks between the cobblestones.

Back on your goddamned feet! Mark roared at himself from within his own head.

Driving the butt of his staff into the ground, Mark pushed against the seizure, forcing it into the staff.

Even as Mark’s shaking slowed, the weapon began to glow with vibrant racing light, the lines like cracks in the prison wall of a rainbow sun. Mark ignored it and forced himself to his feet. He was barely able to manage the task, but he raised his eyes to look at Darius regardless.

The man stared at him incredulously.

“Please tell me yer a caster,” he said.

Mark gritted his teeth and dodged the question. “What is it? Bandits?”

Darius shook his head. “If only. Bandits I can handle, but bandits don’t spook the horses. This—”

The big man held up a hand. “Shh…”

Everyone held as still as they could, but the falling rain and the whinnying of the nervous horses conspired against their attempts to stay silent. Mark glanced at Darius and Rosie. They both looked deeply concerned. To Mark’s surprise, Rosie’s eyes flashed a golden colour, deepening into a solid bronze, and she swept them across the forest, walking slowly down the road as she looked for whatever had spooked the horses.

Rosie got maybe a dozen metres down the road before she spun back towards the wagon and screamed, “RUN, GAVIN!”

The road exploded in a bloom of cobblestones that ricocheted off an opaque golden shield that suddenly appeared around Rosie, crashing down around her in gigantic thuds that would have smashed the wagon to bits if Darius had continued any farther down the road. The state of the wagon was hardly their greatest concern, though, as everyone realized when it became apparent that the explosion in the road was not a blast, but the result of a creature bursting from beneath the stones. And the thing that emerged was an utter nightmare.

White and hairless, it had the body of a spider so gigantic that it rivalled the horses. Adding to the horror of the thing was the fact that instead of a head, there was the upper body of an enormously muscled pale man, covered in slabs of carapace armour and with forearms that terminated in vicious, metallic-looking metre-long blades. He had no eyes, and his mouth hung slack and loose in a manner that suggested whatever intelligence might have once existed in this beast, it had long since fled.

Ignoring the shielded form of Rosie, the creature leapt at Darius, but the big man was able to sweep his hammer in a parry that knocked the creature’s bladed arms aside, allowing him to step back and stay positioned between the creature and the wagon.

“What in the gods’ name is a nimh doing on the surface?” Darius shouted, horror evident in his voice.

“H-how do we kill it?” Mark chattered. He should have been paralyzed with fear, but all his mental energy was dedicated to keeping the seizure at bay.

The opaque golden shield that had surrounded Rosie burst apart in a flash of brilliant light. From the light emerged an elegant and otherworldly figure, her skin glowing and her body held aloft by four iridescent wings reminiscent of a dragonfly. Much larger than Rosie, this form was closer to Mark’s height, albeit with a length of limb and ageless appearance that made human comparables seem foolish.

“We don’t kill it, my boy,” Rosie said in a voice that had taken on an otherworldly aura, full of high and low notes that echoed together in a harmonic chorus. Her hands began weaving a complex pattern that spawned an orb of silver between them, beginning as a loose conglomeration of light, but which soon condensed into a ball of raw power.

“This is not a fight for our survival,” she continued. “The best we can hope is to delay the nimh long enough for Gavin to get away.” Thrusting her hands forward, the ball of silver flew at the creature, impacting it with a crackling of power that blasted the nimh backwards along the road. The creature slid to a stop some 5-metres away but otherwise seemed unhurt by the light as it flickered and died out.

Rosie sighed. “That spell would destroy almost any foe beneath Level 30, but nimh were created millennia ago during a war between the realms of daemon and faerie to act as assassins. They are largely immune to faerie magic.”

Some part of Mark’s mind heard Rosie’s words, but the moment her spell had broken apart on the nimh’s body, his attention had been yanked away. For a moment, there had been… something. An echo of the resonance inside of him—a resonance that Mark was coming to realize was his connection to that power in the fog.

The nimh rushed at Darius and swung a bladed forearm, forcing the man to duck and swipe upwards with his hammer. The nimh wasn’t able to block, but it didn’t matter. Darius’s blow clanged off the creature, barely pushing it back and not coming close to breaking through the layers of rock-hard chitin. Darius tried to hit the demon again in the same spot, but he wasn’t fast enough and ended up getting struck by the back of the demon’s blade as it whipped its arm in a stinging backhand. If it had been the sharp side of the blade, it might have cut Darius in two, but even without the edge it was still enough to knock the burly man off his feet and send him sliding across the cobblestones.

Mark tried to follow the ebb and flow of the battle as it progressed, but his mind was now in an incoherent haze. He was losing his fight against the seizure, and the massive storm tied up in his staff had become too much to bear—no matter how hard he tried, it was starting to slide back down onto him. He tried to say something to Rosie, but all that came out was a babble of disjointed words. For a while, he managed to grip his staff firmly enough to remain on his feet, but then his legs spasmed, dropping him to one knee. The seizure built within him as the neurons in his brain fired in a feedback loop of growing intensity that shook his whole body, but somehow the crescendo stayed at bay. Still, it grew greater and greater, as did Mark’s terror that when it collapsed upon him, it would shatter his body. It was a monolith, a power of catastrophic proportions that his body couldn’t take.

This was no longer a seizure—it was a force of nature.

All around him, the battle swirled. Twice, Darius took wounds that would have broken a smaller man, but he raged forward with the desperation of a father protecting his son. Rosie, too, had been hit, but she had none of Darius’ raw bulk, and the glancing blow almost shattered her. She’d been knocked to the ground and responded with an avalanche of magic that bathed the nimh in a hurricane of golden light, but for all its power, the attack had almost no effect on the monster.

The golden light that surrounded Rosie faded to a dull sheen as her strength failed her. Still, she didn’t stop casting, and with every impact of her magic on the carapace of the nimh, there was a moment of wild resonance that beckoned to Mark.

During the nimh’s exchange with Rosie, it had been pushed back up the road, towards the wagon. Darius responded with a flurry of attacks meant to force the monster back up the road, away from the direction of Gavin’s escape, but it was no simple task, and before long, Darius was getting forced backwards toward the wagon as well.

It was all Mark could do to remain conscious. He kneeled in the rain, his grip on the staff the only thing keeping him upright, as he watched Darius and the nimh battle their way slowly towards him.

As Darius was forced back another step, he took a moment to glance at Mark. Despite the haze in Mark’s vision, he was able to make out the expression of utter disgust and fury that came over Darius’ face when he took in Mark’s pathetic form, and the man turned that anger into a powerful blow to one of the nimh’s legs. It was a solid blow, and the chitin bent under the weight of the impact, but the sudden pain caused the nimh to respond with a reflexive strike that was too fast for Darius to defend, catching the man hard on the chest and sending him tumbling through the rain until he finally stopped, lying bloody and motionless on the cobblestones.

“Da! No!”

Everyone’s eyes spun to the sound of the voice, the nimh included.

Mark looked up in shock. They had been operating under the belief that Gavin had fled down the road, but instead, the boy was still there, his head poking out of a gap in the canvas and staring in horror at the prone form of his father.

“Lad!” Darius shouted, somehow summoning the strength to raise his head in a lament over his failed duty to protect his child.

With an indiscriminate singularity of purpose, the nimh raced toward the wagon, bladed arms raised. Mark watched, frozen, only distantly aware of Rosie’s scream as she sent a ball of weak silver light at the creature. It was barely even a spell—little more than the final remains of a mother’s fading magic.

At that moment, Mark saw it all. All of the permutations of chance that lay before him, and he selected the one that produced the outcome he desired.

Luck -1

What the hells? No, I didn’t do that. That shouldn’t even be possible!

The storm inside Mark broke. Not as a biological imposition upon Mark’s unwilling body, but as an unfettered convulsion of raw energy; a transformation of the chaotic forces bound within his mind into a fundamental unit of creation.

Mark took that torrent of power and forced it out of himself, up into the staff. The whorling pattern exploded into a state of agitation so great that it was like looking into the eye of madness. Intense, multi-coloured light bathed the roadway, crackling through the lines in a shifting display that would have looked alien to anyone who hadn’t seen it before. But Mark had seen it before. Underground. Looming over him in the heart of the fog.

All of this happened so quickly that it was almost simultaneous with the casting of Rosie’s spell. The weak orb of silver magic flew across the battlefield and hit the nimh before it could get to the wagon, but broke apart predictably upon the creature’s inherent defences. Just as before, when Rosie’s spell was torn apart, it left behind a minute residue of raw magical energy that passed through, immediately beginning to dissipate now that there was no spell to hold it together. But this time, Mark wasn’t going to let that happen.

Reaching a hand out towards the nimh, Mark used it as a conduit to focus his mind on the resonance he felt within that tiny piece of magic, seizing it just as he’d seized the spectre in the fog. Then, with a flexing of one hand into a fist, he forced a connection between Rosie’s ball of fading magic and the raging power surging within him and his staff.

The world stopped moving.

Normally, the nimh’s magical defences were almost unparalleled. And while there was no way to say how well those natural defences might have weathered Mark’s attack had it been cast as a mere spell, the manner of Mark’s assault rendered the question irrelevant. By seizing on the broken remains of Rosie’s spell after they had passed through the nimh’s defences, Mark’s attack effectively bypassed those defences entirely, and to devastating consequences.

A torrent of energy flooded out of Mark as the world leapt back into action. Every twitch, every shake, every misfiring nerve evaporated as the roiling seizure of force escaped through that connection, pouring from his staff and body, through his now glowing, whorl encrusted fist and into that tiny mote of dissipating magic, causing it to explode into a surge of force so powerful that it was incomprehensible to Mark, and catastrophic to the nimh.

The nimh’s race towards the wagon halted as its limbs suddenly shook and spasmed, the actions of the muscles magnified to proportions far beyond the scope of a normal seizure. Its bladed arms lashed around wildly, slicing through its own body as they flailed, even cutting one of its legs so badly that it severed the limb completely, sending red blood spurting across the white, furry carapace. Meanwhile, the remaining legs jerked so violently that the air soon filled with the sound of tearing ligaments and cracking cobblestones, the latter getting torn out of the road by clawed feet that happened to catch purchase in the course of the demon’s thrashing.

Eventually, the thrashing grew to such proportions that the nimh flopped over onto its side and began bashing its own body over and over again into the stones of the road. Finally, as the last of the energy flooded through Mark and into the flailing creature, it jerked into one final crescendo and—with a loud crack that reverberated through the forest—the demon’s carapace shattered and it went still.

Mark dropped his staff and fell to all fours, panting as he stared at the enormous, broken body lying in the middle of the road, ichor pouring out of the gaping hole in its shell.

You have slain a Level 23 Adult Deep Nimh.

Are you kidding me with this???

13,500 XP Earned

RENOWN LEVEL UP!

Level 7 Achieved

RENOWN LEVEL UP!

Level 8 Achieved

RENOWN LEVEL UP!

Level 9 Achieved

RENOWN LEVEL UP!

Level 10 Achieved

XP: 19,250

XP to next Renown: 3,050

“Wowee, Mr. Mark!” Gavin said from the wagon above him. “Could you teach me how to do that? I have almost the same Renown as you.”

Mark snatched the notification page out of the air that had just appeared. “Not anymore,” he said. He looked up to see a now-normal-looking Rosie staring at him in wide-eyed shock.

“What did you do?” she said, almost accusingly. She got up off the ground and walked over to the mangled carcass of the nimh, then looked at Mark again. “What did you DO?”

When it became clear that Mark had no answer for her, Rosie shook her head and turned her attentions to her husband, who was only now struggling to sit upright. She pulled a vial from a pouch in her skirt and raced over, uncorking the bottle as she went. She forced the draught past Darius’ lips, and the healing potion brought colour back to the man’s face, as well as an audible sigh of relief as the wounds from the battle closed and his bones reset.

“Aye, that was needed,” he said, patting Rosie’s hand in thanks before pushing himself up off the road. Once he was steady on his feet, he took a couple of steps over to Mark and looked him up and down. Then he looked at the corpse of the nimh. Then back at Mark.

“Gods lad, I’d like to know the answer to Rosie’s question as well,” the blacksmith said in an exhausted tone. Then a piece of paper appeared in front of him. He took it in hand, and as he read, his eyes widened.

“A whole level of Renown! I didn’t think that would happen for at least another five years!” He spun to Rosie. “Do you have any idea what this means? There’s no way they can deny us the permits now!”

He looked at Mark with a grin, but it vanished and was replaced with shock. “Casúr’s forge! You gained four levels of Renown in a single battle?”

Mark smiled sheepishly and picked up his staff, ignoring the look on Rosie’s face when the now-sedate lines once again appeared on the wood. Using it to help himself to his feet, he walked over to the nimh and poked it.

“Uh, are these things common?” he said. God, please say no.

“Absolutely not,” Rosie said, much to Mark’s relief. “Go ten kilometres beneath the earth, and they’d still be rare. Someone brought this over from Daehon, and that is very bad news.” She looked at Darius. “I’m sorry, my love. I know you’ll want to start on the business as soon as we get to Palmyre, but I have to report this to the Queen.”

Darius sighed but nodded. “I understand. There is much to be done for the store before it can open anyway.” Then he turned his attention to Mark, hiking up his belt.

“Now… what in all the Planes was that? I’ve never heard of a spell that could kill a high-level nimh—a creature specifically created to have magical resistances—in a single cast. Not without it being highly regulated by the mage’s college. And it certainly wouldn’t be castable by a singl’d.”

Mark scratched the nape of his neck and grimaced. “That’s not going to be easy to answer.”

“Good thing we have time then, isn’t it?” Rosie said. She looked at Gavin and snapped her fingers. “You! Get out here and start stripping that carcass. It’ll be good Skill training, considering how high-level it is.”

“Aw, but mum, I want to hear the story!”

Rosie strode around the back of the wagon and grabbed Gavin by the ear, dragging him out of the vehicle. “And I wanted you to run! Do you realize we risked our lives for you, and you would have thrown that all away? By the gods… if you weren’t born with such a ludicrously high Luck attribute, you would be dead right now!”

Gavin cowered before the diminutive woman. “Sorry, ma.”

“Sorry doesn’t work for me,” Rosie said. “Your punishment is that you don’t get to hear the story.”

“But—!”

“No buts! Maybe Mr. Sullivan will let you hear it some other time, but for now, you’re working on that corpse.”

Gavin burst into tears, but Rosie didn’t bend. She merely fished some tools out of the back of the wagon and handed them to the boy. He trudged off into the rain, throwing a pout over his shoulder as he left.

Mark walked under the covered awning with Darius right behind him. As soon as he got there, a wave of exhaustion and dizziness washed over him, enough that he had to grab onto the edge of the wagon to support himself. Darius noticed and lifted Mark onto the back of the wagon, sharing a knowing glance with his wife.

“You did only have 6 levels of Renown when we found you, didn’t you?” Rosie said.

Mark nodded, unable to muster any more of a response.

“Then the story will have to wait. You just lay down.” She accompanied the instruction with a firm hand on Mark’s chest to force him to comply.

He mumbled that he was okay, but she was having none of it.

“Listen, my boy. You just expended a massive amount of mana. And if I’m correct, you will be passing out right around… now.”

If she said anything after that, Mark was too far gone to hear it.