…The Perilous Realm, or Perilous Vale as it is also occasionally so named, is a place shrouded in antiquated myth and legend. The oldest folk tales from that region speak of it being the original transition between the realms of Mundus and the realm of Elf-hame. Certainly several telling relics of that ancient era when the tribes of men and the Ri of the Fae peoples lived in a more harmonious relationship can be found in its extremities, not least a golden thorn and one of their standing places. Other myths speak of an ancient founder of the Grey family achieving ascendance on one of its peaks, of a dragon’s lair deep beneath the land, or proclaim its circle of 12 ancient stones to be an ancient monument to the aspects who founded this world.

However, modern scholarly endeavour had largely preferred the more recent colloquial origin of the name. When this valley and the two to the south of it were the boundary between the Dark Vales, beyond which to the south lie the ducal territory of Belthorne, and the Kingdom of Evershire to the northeast across the mountains. The realm itself being ‘Perilous’ because of the frequent conflict between Belthorne Duchy on the one side and periodically the Abernathy Duchy, Grey Duchy and the Kingdom of Everkind over the mineral wealth in the western reaches.

These conflicts have been mostly concluded some years past, it must be said. With the discovery of Arborundum below the western mountains, the Duchies exerted considerable pressure and wealth and now the land is owned in perpetuity by the Belthorne and Meltras dukes due to their extensive networks at court and the receding influence of the Grey family in northern politics. The name now persists as much as a means to mock those grand dukes in certain quarters, despite many attempts to have the region formally recognised as the Crown of Meltras, after its 9 great peaks and its mineral wealth in precious metals and Arborundum…

Excerpt from –The Northern Continent: A Geography.

~by Sir Ebenezer Carnellon, Cartographer Royal to the Imperial Commonwealth.

~ Arai & Sana – Strange Vale ~

Sitting on the grassy bank overlooking one of the small lakes Arai found herself reviewing the information she had been recording in her jade scrip over the past three weeks. That alone was cause for worry. Almost three weeks. Nineteen days beyond the original seven they had so hoped would be the limit of their sojourn here. She still wasn’t sure if this was a single anomaly or a collection of anomalies. That they had encountered no apparent danger other than that mist, after the ‘first’ day in this place somehow didn’t help much either. The danger here wasn’t big monsters or dangerous vegetation. The contents of this place were, in and of themselves, harmless.

-It was the slow, creeping danger that was slowly encroaching on them, she thought bitterly.

-Time, minus resources, plus no means to replenish equals slow lingering death.

So now she was sitting here putting half a week’s records into some kind of order because that at least helped to convince her that she was doing something meaningful.

The first and most salient point was that while they had some success traversing the slopes of this large vale, any attempt to head into the cloud levels and exit it anywhere, or visit the majority of the ruins, had so far been futile. They could walk for 10 minutes or an hour in the mists and always exit with roughly the same length of time spent backtracking.

The few ruins that were there were basically tumbled stone walls, collapsed roofs and overgrown structures. More intact ones were farmsteads, fortified houses, the odd watchtower and a few other rural buildings. The degree of abandonment could be very variable as well. Some looked like they had been left to go to ruin for a decade, others could have been deserted for centuries. There was some smashed pottery, crockery and even a well in one of the small courtyards. The roads they found were grassed over and abandoned.

Their exploration of the group around the well, where they had spent a day laboriously digging up one of the tiled floors to see what, if anything was underneath had revealed several floor levels underneath and after half a metre, foundations filled with broken roof tiles, more pottery and building rubble. Very unglamorous, in short. No hidden treasures, lost basements, hints as to the occupants or anything. The pottery was of a sleek and alien design, and quite a bit chunkier compared to what was used in West Flower Picking Town. Much of what they found was either red or white glazed, covered with designs in a whole variety of colours, usually depicting flowers, geometric shapes and some stylized scenes of daily life. The latter put her in mind of the Bodhi Pattern pottery of the western continent which was traded widely across most imperial regions and depicted stylized scenes of famous historical figures achieving enlightenment.

She had spent more time considering the overgrown fields, at least enough to record far too much in the way of spurious musings about it. Much of that she archived. What remained as less rampant speculation was that the people here had been smallholders not dissimilar to those who made their living off the valley around West Flower Picking Town. The design of the fields suggested vegetable and herb plots, now left to go fallow. The nature of the plants they might have grown, she couldn’t really speculate on, given the weird way that the plants were here. In another extensive walled compound they had found what had the look of an orchard, based on the regular placing of the trees, but with no flowers nor any evidence of them ever bearing fruit she could only hazard that they were normal looking apple trees. In short, all the ruins here were aggressively mortal and depressingly unglamorous.

“It doesn’t matter how much you stare at it, this place is just like a relict painting of a rural idyll in the mountains someplace,” Sana sighed from where she was slouched over a convenient rock nearby.

“Who would have thought that the ‘noble arts’ we were taught by mother would see us playing real or false with an anomalous landscape,” she agreed.

“Yeah. I mean, if you look at that place we explored yesterday, if you swapped the buildings with pagodas and workshops in the traditional style, it could be any old village in the province,” Sana sighed again.

Her sister made no mention of the gravestones. That little settlement had also had a graveyard. They hadn’t tried to dig one up, but all the gravestones had been smashed. A quick bit of mental arithmetic suggested to her that most of the settlement should be buried in there, given how homogenously worn the stones had been, yet there had been odd evidence suggesting a recent burial and stacked stones in broken piles to one side. The damage had also been of an age. Considering that place with a fresh eye, it occurred to her now that someone could have burnt it down and killed everyone in it. She hadn’t thought to look for burn damage hidden on the stones, and it would be too late to go back today.

Speaking of that, she looked at the distant slopes. “Today is going to be a ruin-less day it seems.”

“Mmmmm. Yeah,” her sister agreed.

“Any luck in working out a pattern there?” she leaned back to look at her sister properly.

“Not really,” Sana grunted, skimming a stone out onto the lake for emphasis.

“The swapping of the horizon scenery seems kind of random, or it’s working on a weird cycle that’s longer than variations every day or so over three weeks.”

“They seem to have moved when we were in the forest earlier this time,” she added.

Both of them fell silent again. Three weeks of this was starting to take something of a toll. She continued shuffling and editing the various records. Pulling some recorded images to illustrate things as appropriate. Assuming they ever got out of here, they could hand this straight to the Hunter Bureau and hopefully get a reasonable merit award for the ‘new’ knowledge regarding anomalies in Yin Eclipse.

-Or you die here of starvation and nobody ever finds anything, you just become another statistic, a voice in the back of her head finished.

Putting the scrip aside, she lay back on the bank with a long sigh and stared at the clouds scudding overhead. Not a ‘voice’ in her head, just her mental state making its thoughts known. She resisted the urge to see how many meals that consisted of actual ‘food’ she had left. It would still be three. A pot of Mrs Leng’s soup and two stuffed bread rolls.

By the time ‘afternoon’ rolled around again and started to become evening, the cloud over the horizon shifted and once again they found that the distant part of the anomaly had shifted. Staring at the horizon, Sana had pulled out her own scrip and was updating what she had written.

“Hasn’t East Fury swapped with South Grove this time?” she mused out loud after a few moments of staring at the mountains.

“Seems so,” she nodded, shuffling a few of the herbs she had picked up, as much out of habit as anything.

Her sister squinted at the horizon to their ‘west’. For her part, she put the herbs aside and started making another structured pile of rocks on the flat slab by the water’s edge. It was a slightly more functional map of sorts than what was being compiled on their jade tablets for now. Created as much to try to see what didn’t change each time as what did.

“There are only buildings on Thunder Crest… again.”

Spinning to stare at the horizon, Sana finally found the other major mountains. “The ones on East Grove and whatever you thought were rock-cut terraces on Snow Jade are gone as well. Both of those are on the western slope of Thunder Crest.”

She stared at the three rings of coloured stones signifying different types of ruin and movable ‘thing’. “So… They only appeared on the second day here and the fourth after the mist event. As far as we have seen, there have only been thunderclouds on Thunder Crest on the first day, as well. We don’t know about the sixth and seventh days either.

“We do know it messed with time… somehow,” Sana pointed out.

“True,” she agreed, pensively looking in the direction of the dipping sun.

Today it was going to set in the south, it seemed. There was a weird, illogical sense in that given how the weather was and the clouds rippling through the sky over the montane cloud forests beyond the valley. Every sunset was framed in a way to be either exotic or spectacular. In three weeks there hadn’t been a single one that was just ‘sun goes down behind clouds and it gets dark’. It also meant that it never set in the exact same spot around the horizon twice and moved very randomly from one day to the next, but she had stopped thinking about that.

The day-night cycle itself had been a constant fixture since the mist event, bar once four days ago where it had hung immobile at mid-ascent for an entire day before arbitrarily setting again in the same direction and then resuming some kind of ‘normality’ as any self-respecting solar body should. Neither of them was sure yet, what to make of the different constellations reflected in the sky. They didn’t change but were utterly alien. There was also only one moon, either quite a bit closer, or quite a bit bigger than either of the two outside. Then again, those weren’t so much ‘moons’, as the Military Authority headquarters and a piece of a fractured landmass that orbited a standing flow above the eclipse axis of the great world, thrown up there by some ancient conflict. This moon was silvery grey, veering towards blue sometimes. The sun was also a different colour, for what it was worth. More white-gold and less golden-blue.

“I guess we should go check out if anything changed on the valley floor?” she said finishing her bit of landscape mapping.

“It shouldn’t have, that won’t happen until the pre-dawn mists,” Sana mused, but no harm in checking.

…

Back at the same lake, an hour later, it transpired that nothing noticeable had in fact changed on the valley floor, at least that she saw.

“Same for you?” she asked Sana, who was already sat there.

“Yep. Nothing shifted. Unless bushes have been rotating or something,” Sana sighed again and threw a rock into the shallow lake, watching it go *Plop* in the gloom. It really was idyllic. Stressfully so in fact.

After a few more moments her sister crossed her legs and turned to stare at her.

“The other problem… is your body also burning energy too fast these last two days?”

She considered that. It was something her sister had noted the other day. To her shame, she had to admit she hadn’t really been paying attention and resolutely ignoring the little formation on the scrip that was designed to keep track of a few things like that if she needed it to. Checking it, she found the answer she didn’t really want to see.

“I take it from your sullen silence that’s a yes,” her sister groaned and stared at the dusky sky.

“Just to keep parity, I’ve had to eat one food pill a day, alongside the usual ration of food. With rationing, there should have been enough for two months each, but that almost halves it now…”

-Now we are certain that the food is perishing inside our storage devices, even though that shouldn’t be possible, she didn’t add out loud.

“More immediately, though,” Sana said after a few moments.

Pulling out the jar from her storage unit, she stared at it, where it obdurately sat on the grass beside the shoreline.

-Water. The drinkable kind.

Without qi replenishment to cover that passively, they needed to drink. A lot, it turned out.

“How much do you have left?” Sana said, frowning.

“Quarter of this big jar, I’ve been only drinking about a litre a day. You?”

“Less than a third of a jar, I was the one providing for the team the day before we got stuck in here and it was set to be replenished in the afternoon. Then we were chucked off the cliff,” Sana sighed, looking disconsolate.

She nodded and muttered sardonically, “Well I hope that the others get good use out of their two full water jars apiece."

That about finished the ‘daily’ routine of sorts. Given their memories, it was not strictly necessary, but there was something psychologically helpful she had found about it, worrisome as the conclusions always were. It quietly tormented her that she was glad that Sana was here, with her. She could sense it in her sister as well, a sense of not being able to really rationalise being stuck together with your closest friend, waiting for a miracle…

-Or more likely an agonising pseudo death, the unhelpful parts of her psyche that liked to come out to enjoy the dusk added.

That was the root of every problem, really. The untouchable spectre of death grinning away. There was absolutely no properly usable qi in this place at all.

There was… something. They had been aware of the qi-like things almost from the get-go, and sometimes, if she really focused she could feel something faintly while cycling her mantra, but it was always nebulous and the effort required to perceive it was many times what she could afford to spend on something that kept slipping away like a greased fish. There was also a marginal drain on all the unrefined qi in her body. It had been so subtle at first that she nearly missed it in the first few days, but after a week they were both certain. Something here was leeching, or maybe forcing unrefined qi out of their body moment by moment.

The second problem, the real issue that built off this, was not something she had ever thought would plausibly be the death of her. Both of their physical states were basically a twig snap away from the equivalent of making that final step to quasi-Golden Core. Setting aside the issue of how to advance their mantras to Mantra Seed once they got there, the process to get to that point was basically a waiting game that required nothing on their part. Their Physical Foundation would keep refining qi without them ever touching anything. Their mantra would just do its thing passively. And that, she was certain, in the depths of her mind, was what was going to see them as good as dead. It was slowly drawing in the remaining qi stored in their flesh and bones and transforming their bodies in the process.

It was, on a certain level, funny that the process of the refinement was somehow faster here. She had a few theories in that regard, but for their survivability, none of them were good.

“Any luck with the qi theories?” Sana asked, managing to skewer her thought processes as only her sister could.

“Nope… I’ve been watching it for dozens of cycles over the last few days and aside from the fact that it's converting far faster than you would expect, there is no reason I can pinpoint as to why that isn’t utter conjecture. Particularly when you add in that marginal drain,” she finished moving the rocks that delineated mountains around again in the final glimmers of the setting sun.

“The qi pills don’t work either, do they?” Sana said taking a bottle of them out and staring at them glumly, as she did at least four times every day. That she hadn’t thrown them away already was a testament to masochism, really, and the memory of how expensive the now useless balls of paper and dust were.

“They don’t,” she agreed.

“I guess we start again tomorrow?” Sana lay back on her rock and shoved a crude pillow made of rolled-up grass and herb leaves under her head.

She pulled a ‘pillow’ of her own out and lay back as well. It wasn’t that they were really sleeping, more using meditation to aggressively slow their metabolism for hours at a time. It was just easier to do it at night, and with there being nothing more threatening than tripping over a rock in this place, there was not much to be concerned for. Unless the mist monster returned.

“Yep. Tomorrow, we go again.”

…

Arai snapped open her eyes in the predawn light. Lying there silently, the sun had barely risen. No mist either. The change happening around her made her queasy for a second. The whole valley reconfiguring itself around them within the span of a single breath. Time was as it should be.

Sana was also awake now.

She had moved off her rock anyway but still dropped about half a foot when the ground surface just changed height arbitrarily. But that wasn’t what had focused both of them. It was the noise.

*tock*

*Tock*

*Thock*

*Thock*

Rhythmic and familiar. The sound of someone whacking wood with an axe. She lay in the grass, which had also grown by about half – 20 centimetres in a breath – trying to locate the sound. A few moments' focus told her it was across the lake, but…

A flight of birds drifted down, heading for the lake. Something splashed quite close. Either in the water or entering the water. A different bird called. Ambient sounds of life around the lake that had been missing before were suddenly all around them.

As the bird song settled into her consciousness, she stared blankly at the grass above her. It had seed heads. Flower heads. She was lying in a meadow of sedge. With a hand that was shaking faintly, despite her best intentions, she snagged a blade and chewed it for a few moments before closing her eyes and sighing darkly.

-Well, what did you expect? a part of her asked.

“It would be nice if those useless fate-thrashed heavens had eyes for once,” She muttered. The sky remained resolutely clear of abnormal signs.

Taking in the sounds once more, she tried to absorb qi with her mantra. As expected it was repelled, and if anything, the drain on her body seemed a bit more now. So all the weird unrealities of the world from before had been ‘fixed’ apart from the critical one that was going to see them dead. While she sulked a bit at that unfairness, she swiped a larger handful of seeds and chewed on them, just in case. They crunched and tasted as they should now, which was sort of nice, but when she swallowed them and paid attention, she could only shake her head. As a final confirmation of sorts, she rolled over and scooped a handful of water from the edge of the lake and sipped it.

-Yep, that was also unchanged. She got nothing in terms of nutrition. It reached her stomach, slowly dissipated. It even dissolved into all the right places… but it didn’t provide any qi or hydration. She might as well have drunk an illusion.

“It’s over the far shore, we can get closer under cover of the vegetation” Sana whispered, having crawled up beside her, eyeing the plants suspiciously.

“Don’t bother, I just checked,” she muttered “they still provide no nutritional value whatsoever. Or qi replenishment”

“Really?!” Sana hissed in annoyance.

“Heaven giveth and fate taketh” was all she could add, really.

“Heaven can go piss virgin’s blood,” her sister spat under her breath.

The rhythmic chopping of wood continued on and off as they stealthily made their way up the now rather shrub strewn and rocky slope and along the ridgeline of the hill to get a better look at the scene across the far shore.

On the beach were three people. Women, to be exact. One wearing a loose-fitting black and grey knee-length robe that was shrugged off and tied around her waist, black trousers and a loose-fitting white top under the tunic. She was happily using a lumber axe to chop driftwood with a fluidity that was impressive. The other two were busy sorting out something in a box, spreading out a rug of all things and putting down stuff on it. Fresh bread, cooked eggs, milk, some kind of meats and some other type of bread. With the breeze across the water, she could just catch hints of the freshness of the food, particularly the bread.

The woman chopping up firewood was of medium build and had a striking, athletic figure, with reddish-golden shoulder-length hair, loosely plaited and tied back in an odd but quite utilitarian style. Grey or maybe silvery-blue eyes and tanned skin like she spent a lot of time outdoors, but not particularly weather-beaten.

Of the other two, one was tall, with blonde hair, olive skin and green eyes and a combined appearance that you could really only summarise as ‘bring nation, will topple’. She wore a similar style of robe as the woman chopping wood but it was white and grey and brown rather than black grey and white and with a lot more elegant scroll embroidery sweeping across it. The other was shorter by a head, with golden-brown curly shoulder-length hair. She also wore a grey and brown robe, this one edged with blue and gold. Paler skin than the other two but also well ahead in the 'bring nation, will topple' department, she judged, even as she felt a bit bad for it.

“Stay? Closer? Away?” Sana signed unobtrusively beside her.

Considering the distance, and the cover, they could, in fact, get quite close, she guessed. On the other hand, they had no idea what strength these three possessed, let alone what sort of situation this was. It looked real, but that meant little as far as she was concerned. There was no sense of danger from them. A faint oppression, yes. More so from the woman who had been chopping wood though, than the other two.

“…”

She lay there in the grass watching the scene for a few more seconds before deciding.

“If they are strong, I think we are already spotted and they don’t care,” she signed.

“There is no inauspicious feeling like with the mist thing. So we might as well try to get a bit closer.”

“What do you think?”

“...” Sana stared at her pensively for a long moment before replying.

“Agreed, if they are strong we are spotted, if they are just part of this… moment? We might get something useful from observing them if nothing else.”

“It is risky though,” she noted.

“We are dead if we don’t get out of here,” her sister signed back glumly.

“How fatalistic, you’re meant to be the chirpy one,” she signed back with an encouraging smile.

“…”

Sana just sighed faintly and started to make her way forwards. Well, she thought. You can only try. Following after Sana, it only took them a few careful minutes of picking their way around the hill slope to get a vantage point over the group that was well hidden by some shrubs and a rocky outcrop.

They watched as the red-haired woman finally judged that she had chopped enough kindling and gathered up her logs, taking them over and dumping them beside a ring of stones. She glanced over at what appeared to be a breakfast picnic and sighed.

“Marcella, you forgot the fire kit didn’t you…?”

She blinked and glanced at Sana, who mouthed back. “No way. Is that Easten?”

She could only nod mutely, listening for a few more words before replying.

“It certainly seems so. More fluid than I know, and with an accent. She clearly said the woman’s name and that she forgot something for the fire.”

The shorter golden brown-haired one rummaged in the box and slapped her head. “Oops, Elaria. Seems I did”.

She grimaced, as did Sana, that accent was much rougher. It took her three tries replaying it in her head to decipher that the woman, Markela or maybe Marcela had apologised. At least they had their names, though.

“Red-haired woman is Elaria?” Sana signed.

“That was what I got… yes,” She agreed.

“As to the other one? Markella?” she signed back after another moment.

“Mar-sell-ah I think,” Sana spelt it out phonetically.

The accent didn’t seem to bother either of the two on the beach who just rolled their eyes.

*Tcch* the blonde woman clicked her tongue and pointed at the fire. Something moved in the air and the flames cracked around the wood a moment later.

“That kindov defies the point of the experience Halla”

She winced while Sana made a face at the colloquial phrasing and something about experience. The implication seemed to be that she should have lit it manually? There was a name at least; Halla.

Elaria rearranged the fire, shaking her head wryly, feeding it more wood; when she was happy putting what appeared to be some kind of kettle and a pan in it. The three sat and chatted idly while the water boiled, eating things from the box and talking about the valley it seemed. The conversation was fast and grammatically complex given she was working from a different dialect of the language at the very least. Thanks to Elaria, in no small part, who had a lack of any noticeable accent and excellent enunciation compared to the other two, she got one word in four most of the time and the context of some of the rest. Sana had started quietly recording the conversation on her scrip, using another of the more advanced functions.

The longer they listened, the more she thanked the fates that mother had spoken Easten and made an effort to teach it to them when they were young. To the point where they were locally fluent in it, to her satisfaction at least. Father was able to speak it much better than either of them and several more besides. A relic of his military days, he claimed. The issue for both of them was that while the written side saw a reasonable amount of use through the Pavilion, Easten was rarely spoken in West Flower Picking Town.

The Easten peoples themselves rarely traded across the mountain range. If they did so it was to either Blue Water City in the west, their province, or Yun Shan City in the east. The one time they visited their mother’s people beyond East Snow Jade Town, most people spoke imperial or the local language, Xanji, which wasn’t phonetic like Easten. The regions where Easten was written and spoken were thousands of miles beyond that around Xah Liji City. Subsequently neither got much practice in using it, not since mother passed away, anyway. Speaking it was just another reminder of how horrible their mother’s clan was.

The gist of the conversation itself was very mundane. Mostly it seemed to be about how pretty the valley was at this time of year. From what she could gather, Elaria had been here years before and it seemed that it hadn’t changed much. Marcella’s language was fast and ran a lot of words together somehow. In gist she seemed to not care for it that much and said it was quaint several times; she got that word easily enough. It was used dismissively in Easten as well. Halla seemed keen on the scenery as well and said she would like to climb some of the mountains. Which surprised Arai because she had the young woman down as very much the 'other people climb mountains for me’ type, proving that she was an atrocious judge of character by looks in this case.

It also turned out that the Halla was very keen on martial pursuits and outdoors things. Elaria said she hadn’t done much in the last few… years? Marcella just nodded sporadically and turned frying meat, eggs and bread on the pan occasionally.

After their meal was done, they packed up and left, walking along the far lakefront. The pair shadowed them cautiously, although none of the women so much as glanced in their direction at any point. The three turned onto what was quite a well-worn track and followed it across the valley.

Following after them, a few things definitely stood out. The quality of the roadway was several magnitudes better than it had been on ‘previous’ days. While the slopes were rugged, there were more tell-tale signs of management. Odd gaps in the forest that spoke of tree felling, fresh and well-used paths heading off at various points through the grass. She even fancied she saw smoke rising in the distance in a few places. There was also a total lack of the swirling low cloud. Not that that meant much. There had been days when it was clear before now, only for them to abruptly encounter it on the slopes within a short distance of entering the treeline.

The roadway eventually joined a properly maintained earthen roadway that wound up through the valley towards the tree line. At one point it passed the familiar circle of 12 stones that they had been within when the mist creature struck. Ever since that day it had been on this side of the valley. Halla made some comment about it that she couldn’t grasp as the group wandered past, before stepping out onto the roadway and following it up towards the valley slope and the distant towers.

“The towers are not ruined,” Sana signed, pointing to her left.

She followed her sister’s gesture. Indeed, the watchtowers on the periphery of the forest, further up the valley were not ruined. Nor, now that she squinted into the early morning sun, was the large collection of buildings beyond the lower treeline on the western slopes. She wasn’t sure how she hadn’t noticed that before. They were not exactly subtle.

Tracking after the group as they walked on up the road, the three eventually turned off onto a smaller track that wound upwards through the forest. A forest she now noted was broad-leafed ‘Adak’ and ‘Grey Feather’ trees for the most part. Morning mist and low cloud swirled through the forest as they climbed the path, and obscured much of the buildings beyond the wall. However, it was not the usual ‘fog’ boundary that had always appeared before now to stymie their progress.

For their part, the three women they were following seemed happy to meander through the trees around the path. Elaria and Halla poking at this and that and comparing various spirit herbs as they walked. Marcella chivvying them both along periodically when it looked like they were too involved in a single thing.

“The valley is bigger,” Sana poked her in the side and gestured back towards where they had come from.

Looking in that direction, across the valley, the mist and cloud also hung low across the mountains and obscured much of the horizon. From here she could indeed see the full extent of the morning mist in some of the dells and along the river across the valley. As her sister was making it clear, the valley area visible now was significantly larger than it had been previously. In the pre-dawn, it was admittedly breathtaking for its rugged pastoral beauty. Glancing back up the path she swore mentally, in the moment they had paused to enjoy the view the three had moved on a remarkable distance. It was a nervous scurry to catch up to the distance they had been before, threading through rocks and shrubs beneath the trees.

After almost 20 minutes’ more stealthy following, the forest slowly changed from deciduous to evergreen ‘Cloud Pine’ and ‘Whispering Birdsol’ trees. Their shadowing came to an end when the three women arrived at a gate in the perimeter wall of what was presumably the huge complex with towers beyond. Sat outside it, on stools, with a flaming brazier to keep them warm, were two guards. Both men wore loose knee-length robes of green and white with a golden symbol emblazoned on the chest that the women also all wore as badges on the sleeves of their robes. Both jumped up and saluted smartly, which got a laugh from all three women. As they watched carefully from the trees, Elaria said something else funny they couldn’t catch due to the distance, after which all five laughed. Then the three entered, and the gate closed behind them, leaving the two guards sat there looking bored and playing a card game of some kind using a third stool as a table.

They had to wait almost another thirty minutes to get a proper look at the buildings beyond, not that that was too disagreeable. It was nice to just sit in the forest and listen to it being a normal forest. Birds chirped, some other animals called. She was sure she saw a deer or three in the distance picking their way through the trees. Eventually, the sun shifted around the mountain and started to cut away at the morning mists. For a while buildings shadowed in relief as the sun from above slid past them until eventually most of the mist burned away.

The view was beyond her expectations, she had to admit. What rose above them in the mists was the red and white building they had seen before, at the very start. It was, however, very different. Before, the two great buildings had seemed off and incomplete. Now, she understood why. The nearer building was mostly white and grey stone, with red roofs and occasional decorations in blue, green or red stone. Beyond it, she could see the edges of the red buildings, great towers and spires in the middle distance.

The mountain above, which had been hidden in the mist, was also not as she remembered it. Now the great complex seemed to be on the edge of a higher plateau between two great peaks. Above the red and white buildings, the great grey edifice with its vast windows and monumental tower loomed like a great spur out of the mountain. Gardens and terraces rising up around its lower regions. Towers rose up the slope and the wall… walls she absently corrected herself. She could see several rings of walls now that she looked carefully. Even at this angle they extended quite a way, also cutting into the mountain until they too all re-joined the mighty fortress looking building higher up.

The roofs of the various levels were of different colours, some red, some grey/green, some dark grey and others nearly blue or orange. Towers rose with stylish patterns picked out in red and white in the stonework. Pennants with strange designs; animals, plants that were almost recognisable, weapons, shields, helmets and more. At one side appeared to be a series of stepped buildings that connected to the rest and that actually had a pagoda as part of it.

“That pagoda…” Sana said after a while.

“That has to just be a coincidence right?” she muttered, staring at it.

“It has to be. If it’s not, that’s… kind of scary, actually,” her sister sounded just as uncertain as she felt.

Almost 600 meters high, the pagoda rising in the distance amid the trees with its roof eaves decorated like dragons and phoenixes, columns picked out on different levels, was almost a perfect facsimile of the great pagoda within the great gardens of Blue Water City. Its roofs were even the same deep red, and the bricks were grey, blue and white. The height of the wall obscured all but the rooftops and treetops of the large area in front of much of it, but she thought she could pick out lower buildings in familiar styles as well. Almost as if there was a whole enclave of buildings in that familiar style, nestled between the alien grandeur of the red and white complexes. But again they could see roofs in a riot of colours, the occasional flag flying and smoke rising from chimneys.

Without further comment, for what could you say really, they both turned their gaze to the wall. It was only about twenty meters tall, but sturdy and made of what appeared to be some sort of dense greyish/white rock. Amusingly, she noticed someone had shoved a small rickety sign on the path just before the gate where the men guarded. The wording was simple enough and in a script that was close enough to Easten that they could puzzle it out after a few minutes;

‘Here ends the Perilous Realm’ – Welcome to Saint Roberta’s Academy Neophytes!’

It was clearly the name of this place, although the exact phrasing eluded her slightly. The sign implied that this was the end of the Perilous Realm, presumably the valley below. The name of the place above them was the place of learning of the ascendant or enlightened Ro-ber-ta. What a neo-phy-te was, she had no clue.

Below it, in a much more practised hand, someone else had added a simpler message.

‘If you’re at this gate, go around to the other side. You’re a student, and you’re lost.’

"It almost seems humorous, yet there are guards,” Sana signed.

The guards in question didn’t seem to notice them and were generally quite laid back. They sat there, trading card hands and talking or occasionally pointing at what appeared to be birds flying in the sky. In the end, they retreated back to the lake and their own little valley, which was looking a bit open now.

“So… this is really seriously odd,” she started.

“Yep,” Sana said dully.

Both stared at the lake for a while, trying to process what they had just seen and experienced. If a lot of it wasn’t currently recorded on her scrip, she would think she was still dreaming or had finally gone mad.

After a while, Sana ventured, “Do you think the barriers have gone to other directions?”

She shrugged. “It looked like it from the view… The only way to find out is to go look. I guess.”

…

The rest of that morning turned out to be very weird indeed. As near as she was able to tell, they were in fact both in this place and not. They could interact with most things, dig holes in the ground, pick plants, affect actual change to the world, but nobody gave them a second glance. In the end, they made their way out to one of the rural smallholdings, which now had a family of nine living in it and observed them just going about their daily tasks for almost an hour before she plucked up the courage to go ask one of the children for ‘directions’.

The child barely, if at all, noticed anything. Nothing she said to them seemed to register at all. It was only when she reached out and carefully patted the child on the shoulder as they bent over to look at some bug on the ground that they finally had a reaction of sorts. The poor child froze, looked around wildly to see what had ‘landed on its back’ and seeing nothing looked around a bit weirdly. When she did it a second time, they yelped, tore off their top, looking for a presumed bug and fled indoors, all without registering her presence.

Steeling herself for the parent that came rushing out, she was relieved to see they were barely at Qi Condensation. Rather than run right into her, the woman stopped a few feet away, looking around for whatever bug the child claimed had just landed on their back. Seeing nothing, the woman shook their head wryly and went back inside. Sana, stood nearby looking decidedly nervous, exhaled.

“So that is really odd,” she frowned, staring back at the house.

“More experimentation needed?” Sana said looking around.

“I think so. Clearly they can detect our physical interactions, but it’s like there’s a curtain or something between us and them?”

Walking over to the woodpile, she considered it speculatively and then took the axe and chopped a few logs. One of the older boys had been doing that earlier. As she sort of expected, the woman in the house was drawn by the sound. She stared at her for a long moment before shaking her head.

“What a lazy boy. I told him to chop it, yet he’s gone and got a temporary enchantment for the axe.”

The woman’s accent was thick, but she was able to get the gist of it. The woman assumed her son had got some minor art to make the axe chop wood on its own….? Setting aside how similar the broad strokes of the language were... she put the axe down and kicked a bucket over.

The woman stared at it, pensively then picked it up, looking around with narrowed eyes. Carefully, feeling really quite bad about it, she got a small bundle of hay and threw it at the woman. She swore and spun around. Seeing nothing she crossed her arms, muttered something unintelligible under her breath then clapped her hands twice. A circle of some art swirled around her for a second before glowing green, blue then white before dispersing.

“Great,” the woman sighed. “Someone up at the academy has clearly been messing with things best left alone. We are going to be beset with sprites it seems.”

They watched the woman head back inside again and come out with some kind of charm that she hung on the door, all the while muttering darkly under her breath. They watched as she called out for the smaller kids who all came running.

“It looks like we got spirits, if you see anything weird and glowing, throw a rock at it and call your father or me. Don’t go near the well, or the hay barn. They aren't malicious usually, but they drop you down a hole or drop a bale on you and it will be bad.”

“Yes, mommy.”

“Well duh.”

“I’ll beat them up and put them in a lantern, mommy!”

The responses as they watched were… predictably childish. The woman patted the three kids on the head and shooed them off again.

“What do you think,” she turned to Sana.

“You ask me, but who do I ask,” her sister looked around, pretending to seek out a third person.

She stared at her sister until she sighed and gave her thoughts. “Clearly, so long as we don’t push it, we are unnoticeable for whatever reason. I guess it’s the same thing stopping us from using qi?”

“Do you reckon we can actually injure anyone?” she asked after a long moment.

“I’d expect so, but it will be blamed on these… spiritual entities, was that what she said?”

Sana shaded her eyes and looked back along the valley to the rising towers. “My instinct says that doing so would be kind of bad though. Just because these folk can’t detect us in some way, doesn’t mean that other more powerful people from up there might not be able to?”

Pondering the limits of their environmental interaction, they left the farmstead behind and kept making their way along the vale, back towards the river. All around them were signs of land management. Animals grazed passively, totally ignoring them. Several old men were sat on stools smoking pipes and fishing in the broad shallows of the nearby river. They hovered nearby for a few moments, but their accents were so atrociously strong that it was impossible to decipher anything.

Further along the trackway, they met three armoured guards in mail, wearing the same colours as those on the gates, riding along sedately on horses. They gave them a cautious berth, but the three didn’t as much as glance at them as their horses slowly plodded by.

“I can’t see any of their realms,” Sana mused as they watched the three youngish looking men go. “Based on their manner and bearing I’d guess they were at least Soul Foundation, but that’s as far as my mantra’s intuitive aspects get me. They have excellent control of their auras, or all have artefacts to restrict it.”

After another hours walking, they finally found what she had been sort of but not really seeking. The golden tree and its little pile of rocks. Now, there were other oddments on the hill as well. A few mounds nearby with stones on them suggested tombs. The hill itself had several large poles festooned with ribbons and little charms.

“The symbol on that pole, isn’t it the one that was carved on the signboard of the farm we were at?” she wondered out loud, staring at one of the smaller poles.

Her sister stared at them curiously, poking one and then another. “It does seem that way.”

The only other thing on the hill that was new was a low stone basin with carvings of a reclining naked woman lounging in water on it. It looked like it had always been a part of the hilltop, but definitely it had not been there before. The carving on it, in Easten read

~ Saint A-ri-an-rhod, Ruler of Fortune, Bless our vale. ~

“Saint?” Sana frowned.

“Like a Bodhisattva?” she mused, also considering the carving.

“She looks like no Buddha I ever saw. Although that one over there,” Sana pointed to a carving of a cross-legged fat man with a beard sat on a rock near the pile of stones. “He does look kinda Buddha-like.”

After poking around the hilltop some more, they made their way back down it and returned to the pathway which soon joined another of the earthen roads. Over the hills, it was possible to make out the pall of rising smoke from chimneys.

“There were ruins in that direction weren’t there?” she consulted her scrip curiously.

Flicking back through the day's entries, they had indeed found a large swathe of tumbled stones between the hills beyond the river one time.

“I believe so, yes,” Sana said shading her eyes to peer into the distance.

It took very little time at all to reach the settlement, a collection of thirty or so houses and other buildings scattered around a crossroads and river crossing. They passed a few fields, full of what looked like wheat in various stages of growth and various somewhat familiar vegetables. Animals grazed, people went about their business in the rural way.

“For a place that claims to be called the 'Realm of Imminent Danger', it really is idyllic,” Sana observed dryly as they walked down to the main street, totally unnoticed.

“Uhuh,” she picked a stray apple up and tried to eat it, just in case. It tasted sweet and juicy, but as expected, she got no nutrition out of it at all.

The village square was a bustle of activity as people went about their daily tasks. Several traders were hawking wares from wagons on one side. Walking over curiously, they found the wares to be very mundane. Tools, books, food, various other sundries, fancy clothing and whatnot. Flipping through a book while nobody was really observing the pile, she found it written in a language she had never seen before. A loopy, probably phonetic alphabet and occasional pictures of cities or a dour portrait of a man or woman in exotic clothes.

They sat on a wall and watched the world go by until a bell rang somewhere and a lot of the folk put down what they were doing and headed into the stone building on the outskirts of town. The bell turned out to be from a tower next to it. They sauntered in after the throng and watched. The man at the front, in a white robe, extolled the people to do well by each other and look kindly on all things, from what she could gather. There was some extra bit about giving thanks for the bounty of the land and then they all sang a reasonably catchy prayer of some kind, before all giving offering of a few metal coins each, as they left again.

“So they have ancestral deities of some description,” she pondered, as they wandered down to the river's bank to see what was going on there.

The river bank had a few boats, and more people fishing, mainly. A small shrine to another presumed ancestral deity or saint, with a bunch of baskets of river clams, sat beside it.

“I mean, this is all so aggressively normal, I’m half suspecting we have been dropped into a lower world somehow?” her sister ran a hand through her hair and stared around.

“Yeah…” she picked up a stone and skimmed it across the water as they walked on.

That thought had been rising in the back of her mind as well for a while now. She wasn’t sure if she liked it more or less than the alternative theories they had come up with, of them being stuck in a vast illusionary anomaly, or some powerful beings dreamscape. Being trapped in a lower world was probably the least dangerous option. But on the other hand, it was also the most bothersome given their current circumstances.

“In any case, it changes little if we can’t find a way to retain qi,” Sana grimaced, throwing another rock into the swirling currents to their left.

She gave her sister a half-hearted poke in the side and scowled. “Why did you have to remind me about that? The last few hours have actually been tolerable compared to what came before.”