I could barely remember the last time I had been on a horse-drawn cart instead of a train, but it wasn’t quite as bad as my childhood self had insisted it was. While House Byron did give us children physical training, we had ultimately still been a noble house focused on magic. Years of physical labor spent helping my second family’s apothecary had built my body far more than any of the limited training I’d ever received had, and the results were fairly apparent in how easily I handled the roughness of the cart.

Meanwhile, Jasmine looked as if she had been born to this. After we’d paid a silver moon each to rent the horse and wagon, she’d immediately volunteered to manage the horse. For good reason, too— she drove it like she’d been riding every day since she was young. Upon further thought, she actually might have. Some noble houses really prided themselves on keeping old traditions running.

We were four hours into our first day on the road. There was a plain wooden box about the same size as my body occupying the space next to me in the wagon. The ‘sensitive material’. We hadn’t bothered opening it, and likely wouldn’t unless it started making odd sounds.

The Sinlen Pass was a two day’s ride as the crow flew, but the mountain terrain combined with the dangerous flora and fauna of the region slowed even the most experienced journeymen. The path was narrow, barely allowing the hefty wagon to roll through, and we were drowning in a sea of vegetation, the massive trees native to the Sinlen Mountains letting only faint beams of sunlight pass through.

If our maps were correct, we would hit a small village at the end of the day. It was in the path of the Tayan-Yelian train, but it would’ve taken nearly a week to get there by train with how far around the mountains they went.

There would be Altered animals in our path, but that wouldn’t be much of a problem until after the village. I hoped.

I would be the one dealing with them, since Jasmine was manning the horse, but until we ran into trouble, all we had to do was sit around and chat.

“You’re surprisingly good with the horse,” I said. “Practice much?”

“House Rayes looooves its animals,” Jasmine said, drawing out her words. “It’d be more surprising if I wasn’t. Sometimes, visitors thought they misheard the directions and just wound up in a commoner’s farm.”

I snorted. “Noble cowherds, huh? Who would’ve thought?”

“It’s not like that,” Jasmine protested. “House Rayes is one of the minor suppliers of Altered for the Tayan Crown, so we need to be good with animals for that.”

“And yet you somehow ended up a class four Igni oathholder,” I said. “Not seeing where the god of energy works well with animals.”

“Special circumstances,” Jasmine answered, responding so fast that it felt practiced. “I’m a natural born. I didn’t contact Igni, it contacted me.”

I narrowed my eyes. That sounded like a lie, but if her real reason was something embarrassing like “I accidentally fell into a bonfire and made an oath” I wouldn’t press too hard. Still, something to keep in mind.

“On that topic,” Jasmine said. “I’m curious about your oath. I don’t think I’ve seen unstructured magic like that before.”

“That’s really the only thing I can manage right now,” I admitted. “Back in Syashan, nobody really knew any full spells.”

By which I meant that my tutors had been executed alongside the rest of House Byron, of course, but that was a little bit of an inconvenient truth.

“Yeah, but why is it like that?” she asked. “It’s like the inverse of mine, almost. Don’t think you managed to hide how weird your ‘light’ was.”

“Truth be told,” I said, “I don’t actually know my god. I don’t think it knows itself, either.”

“I’ve never heard of any god like that,” Jasmine said dubiously. “You must have found a really niche god.”

“Incredibly so,” I agreed. “I don’t know how I got into the position to get the oath, but I felt on some instinctual level that I could and I made it anyway.”

“You seemed to be particularly powerful too. I don’t think unstructured magic, even at class two, usually is as destructive as yours was.”

“Benefits of being sworn to a god too obscure for a name, perhaps.”

“A nameless god…” Jasmine mused. “That’s a really bad name.”

I gave her back a sidelong stare. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean I can’t just refer to your god as ‘the nameless god’. Too many damn syllables. How about Inome?”

“Inome? That sounds vaguely familiar.”

“It’s a word from the oathtongue that literally translates to ‘unnamed’ or ‘untitled’. It’s a bit on the nose, but then again so are all of them.”

“I like that,” I said. “You know a lot about this kind of stuff. Way more than I ever learned.”

“Benefits of a full noble education,” Jasmine shrugged. “It’s unfair and I wish it weren’t this way, but that’s how the world works right now.”

Right now? Her words sounded almost as if she had the ability to enact lasting change. How could someone from a minor noble House do that?

“It is what it is,” I said. “I don’t particularly like my circumstances either, but beggars can’t be choosers.”

“I don’t think it should be that way.” Jasmine turned from her spot at the front of the cart to give me a smile. “You should have been able to start your time at the University with the same resources as me.”

There would’ve been a time when I disagreed with that, but near a decade of living with commoners did have its effects.

“Good luck making that dream come true,” I sighed. “It’s a pretty one, I’ll admit that, but I’d sooner believe that the moon was splitting apart than the Tayan Crown dragging the common people up to the level of nobles.”

Jasmine was silent for a few seconds too long, so I added, “Gods smile upon the Crown and all that. I’m no traitor to the kingdom.”

“No, you’re right,” she said. “I’ve spent more time than you’d think up close and personal with the royal family, and I can’t disagree with you.”

“House Rayes is minor, isn’t it? How did you get close with the Crown?”

“It’s a long story,” Jasmine said.

“We’ve got nothing but time,” I replied.

And then, because the gods clearly hated me, I heard rustling in the foliage to our right.

I loosed the dagger immediately off instinct, and it was still almost too slow. A four-legged Altered beast pounced, its momentum temporarily caught by the unenhanced dagger. It’d barely penetrated, but it had stopped it from wholesale hopping onto our cart.

I rolled to a kneeling position, gathering unstructured magic as I did. I nearly fell over as the cart sped up, the horse taking off like its life depended on it. It probably actually did.

Jasmine began to cast something, but I was faster. I let the unstructured magic seep into another one of my daggers, and I tossed it.

The Altered had gotten to its feet and was crouched, legs preparing to launch it forward, but my second knife hit it with a muted thud. I heard it cry out in pain, and I turned away. It was already too late.

“That was close,” Jasmine said, still unshaken. “There shouldn’t be Altered at this point in the journey.”

“Yeah,” I frowned. “This is supposed to be near empty, isn’t it?”

“The Guild exterminates the area around the midway village yearly,” Jasmine said. “Then again, I’ve heard that it’s running low on high-level membership lately…”

“We’ll just have to be more on guard, then,” I said. “Shame.”

“Do you need to retrieve those daggers?” Jasmine asked. “I can turn us around for a second.”

“Those are the shittiest daggers I could buy,” I said. “I’ve got at least a dozen more, and they’re not my primary weapon either.”

I picked up the flail I’d purchased before we left. It had been too bulky to use immediately, so I’d opted for a dagger throw to dispatch the first Altered. The staff segment of the flail was built of grippy, reinforced wood, and the store had claimed the chain could unwind up to three meters. It worked well with my current capabilities, and it wouldn’t be lost as easily as a throwing knife.

“This is so weird,” Jasmine said. “We need to report this to the Guild once we finish up. Hopefully, the Altered here aren’t too tough.”

“I’ll keep an eye out,” I agreed, still holding my flail. “Anyway, you were saying something about how you met the Crown?”

“Oh, that,” Jasmine laughed. “So you see, maybe five years ago, my father designed a very particular Altered…”

We didn’t make it to the village without further incident, though we did arrive at it in one piece. In the day that it took us to maneuver our little wagon through the first part of the pass, we had four or five more encounters with Altered animals. None of them were any threat to us, isolated as they were. It would take more than a single monstrous goat or pig at a time to exhaust my reserves, let alone Jasmine’s. My flail was getting annoyingly bloody, though.

“I’m really concerned about this,” Jasmine said as the path began to widen and the sun began to creep away. It had to be the fifth or sixth time today she’d begun this conversation.

“Well, there’s not much we can do right now other than exterminate what we can,” I pointed out. “It’s abnormal, yeah, but it’s not enough of a concern at the moment to drop everything and find the Guild for.”

“I guess,” she sighed. “It’s good for getting our magic power up a little, at least.”

“It is?”

“You didn’t know?” she asked. “Your education seemed to be pretty thorough on oaths. Did they never cover how to increase your power?”

My family was executed before my oathholding tutor finished teaching me theory. “The Church was always more focused on prayer and practice. I suppose they just never got around to it.”

“We should be learning it in class soon enough anyhow,” Jasmine said, “but it’s pretty simple. Killing things gets you closer to the next oathholder rank in terms of magic capacity, and it does it a little better than prayer does.”

I eyed her suspiciously. I didn’t have any reason to distrust her words, but…

“So then…”

“Oh, you’re probably wondering how I’m class four,” she chuckled. “It’s pretty boring, actually. I clean up failed Altered for my family.”

Her statement was flippant, and she didn’t seem to have changed her body language at all. At the very least, she wasn’t obviously lying. Since I was her partner at the moment anyway, I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume I wasn’t sitting next to a serial killer.

As our latest conversation began to fade, the path ahead of us grew wider, coalescing into a road passing through the nameless village we’d marked as the first stopping point on our job. It was well put-together, for a town without a name, orderly streets and neatly built homes and stores. It was a refueling point for the train between Tayan and Yelian, so I supposed it made sense that it would be better than a smattering of ramshackle huts.

“Let’s find an inn,” I suggested. “It’s already getting dark, so it’s probably best to secure lodgings as soon as possible.

“I’ve, uh…” Jasmine ducked her head. “Never been in one.”

“Perks of being a noble, huh,” I said. “Not even while travelling?”

“Every city my family stops by at has another family with spare rooms or a guest house,” she admitted.

“At school?”

“My mother rented a house near the academy for me.”

“First time for everything,” I shrugged. “You’ll get to see how us peasants manage.”

A decade ago, the mere sight of the dingy inn we would be staying the night at might have disgusted me. Now, though, I had been a peasant family’s prodigy for nearly half my life. My standards had been made significantly more realistic over the years.

Unfortunately for Jasmine, it seemed that she was having trouble shaking off the mindset of a wealthy noble. She hid her distaste well, but there’d been an unmistakably disappointed expression on her face when we’d entered the inn, its shoddy wooden excuse for a door creaking as if it would fall apart at any moment.

It was interesting, really. She had no issue getting her hands dirty— I’d seen that when she had quite literally gotten covered in dust and grime at the Wognu mine. But this inn, which was still on the cleaner and safer end, seemed to offend her sensibilities.

“We don’t get a lot of visitors here.” The innkeeper here was a man who must have done hard labor when he was younger, judging by the callouses on his hands and his musculature. Despite that, he wasn’t very intimidating. He was no taller than I, and his hair was coming in grey at the roots.

I looked away from Jasmine. “Just passing through. Got a job to deliver some old man’s package fast.”

“Most of the people staying here say something like that,” the innkeeper said. “Nobody wants to visit here. Prefer it that way, honestly.”

I ignored his blatant attempt at baiting out a conversation. “How much for a room for the two of us? One night. As well as the price for the stables, please.”

The innkeeper took it in stride. “The stables are always free, but I don’t have many rooms, and there’s a travelling party coming the other way taking up most of them right now. I’ve got two rooms, one bed apiece. One moon a night for each.”

“Just one will be fine,” I said. Twelve coppers make one silver moon, twenty moons make a golden sun. We were only going to be getting around thirteen silvers for this job. No point in paying extra.

“Wait-“ Jasmine looked as if she wanted to say something, but I gave her a pointed glance. She closed her mouth.

“I get that you’ve got money, noble girl,” I whispered to her, “but flaunting that in an inn with other travellers? Especially when they’re most likely wandering bandits? Bad idea.”

Jasmine nodded, accepting my words. I wasn’t totally sure on the identities of the other occupants of the inn myself, but it was probably either bandits or adventurers, and both of those groups tended to be equally greedy and equally willing to cast morals aside.

Dinner was a simple affair, taken outside. The inn provided only a pittance of stale bread and tough meat, but thankfully we’d brought our own supplies. Jasmine produced a flame for us to boil water with, which we soaked a handful of dried noodles in before adding pieces of the meat included with our one-moon room. We ate together at a table worn by the elements and years of use, the package we were escorting by my side.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Jasmine said between bites. “Why is your raw magic so powerful?”

I looked around us, suddenly wary of the others that were supposed to be occupying the inn. I didn’t see anyone, but I still spoke with a lowered voice.

“I don’t know,” I said. “My god, uh—“

“Inome,” Jasmine supplied. “It’s a better name than whatever you had.”

“Inome, right,” I said, still controlling my voice. “When I got my oath, I wasn’t who I am now. I don’t know how a god so insignificant to not even have a name gets magic like this, but I don’t really question it.”

“It’s interesting,” she said. “You can’t even fully cast a spell, right?”

“There’s a trick or two that I call spells,” I said. “I know how to use them, but as far as I know I’m just using unstructured magic creatively.”

“And yet your magic is still devastatingly potent. I saw what happened to those Altered every time you hit them.”

I shrugged. “Just an abnormally destructive god, I suppose.”

“Hold on,” Jasmine said. “Could your god be Tryesh?”

I coughed at that. “I thought you got a good education. Tryesh is dead.”

“Not dead,” Jasmine said. “Gone during the Final Departure, never again seen by man.”

“I’d think Tryesh would still remember its own name,” I said dismissively. “And besides, wouldn’t quite a few people wind up with an oath to it if it wasn’t dead?”

“You’re no fun,” Jasmine grumbled. “Have you ever even tried to find a named god that fit it?”

“I did, actually,” I said. “But I don’t think it matches any of the major known gods. It’s most likely one of the undiscovered.”

“Do you think it would be from the third or fourth pantheon?” Jasmine asked.

I tilted my head, questioning. “Third or fourth pantheon?”

“Don’t tell me you never learnt this. Seriously? Not even at the Church?”

“The Church covered only the core eight,” I said. “Never anything else.”

Not to mention that my tutoring had been done under the assumption that I would be an Und oathholder eventually.

“Each of the core eight— the first pantheon— has eight minor gods associated with it— those minor gods have similar patterns in their magic,” Jasmine explained. “Eight minor gods per core god, that’s an additional sixty-four. That’s the second pantheon.”

“So the third are the eight related to each of those,” I said. “Five hundred twelve, for five eighty-four overall. And the fourth is…”

“Four thousand ninety-six. Four thousand six hundred eighty gods theoretically exist,” Jasmine said. “Do you know how many have been discovered?”

“Two thousand one hundred thirty-seven,” I replied. That much, at least, had been covered in my education.

“Thirty-nine,” Jasmine said. “Successful oaths to Kansiu, a third-pantheon god of literature were documented a couple years back, and recently discovered texts confirm the existence of a fourth-pantheon god named Mentye.”

I slurped a spoonful from my bowl before speaking again. “What’s Mentye the god of?”

“It’s a fourth-pantheon god,” Jasmine explained. “Gods of that level are unfocused. There’s still specific conditions to make oaths with any of them, but they do not hold domain over anything, which makes for a decent amount of raw power but no specialization.”

“I’ve never heard of someone holding an oath to one of them,” I said. “Actually, for the most part I’ve only seen oathholders of the core eight and… the second pantheon?”

“Yeah,” Jasmine agreed. “The supermajority of oathholders hold an oath to the first or second pantheons, since anything past that is poorly explored.”

“I’d imagine the specific focuses of the third pantheon would be useful against people used to dealing with the top two pantheons,” I said.

Jasmine nodded. “There’s definitely some merit in it, but the primary difficulty is in actually creating and upholding the oath.”

I placed my hand on my chin. “Yeah, that’s fair. I have some familiarity with what I need to do for my oath, though.”

Mostly killing. It helped if it was an innocent animal or something similar that didn’t suspect me. From what I’d read, a lot of oaths were messy to uphold like that, but I still didn’t quite feel like bringing it up at the moment.

Jasmine slapped her forehead. “I got so caught up in explaining that I forgot it was you with a third or fourth pantheon patron. What you said totally applies, because I for one have never seen anyone with raw magic that powerful.”

“Well, I think Inome does have a focus,” I said. “Just a hunch.”

I’d communicated with my god but once, all those years ago when I had established the connection for the first time. It had been that day that I had accepted the principle of ruin that my god embodied.

“So third pantheon, then,” Jasmine said.

I opened my mouth, but the door to the inn’s yard swung open and five young men and women dressed in light chain and leather armor walked out, each carrying a steaming bowl of something and the lot of them bantering.

“I’m just about done,” I said. “I think this is our cue to get going.”

Jasmine assented, and we gathered our things— the package we were delivering was awkwardly heavy, and it took the both of us to move it— and left.

“I’m going to grab my flail from the wagon,” I said. “Or at least a few more knives. I’ll sleep better with a weapon in the room.”

“I think I left my revolver there,” Jasmine said. “I’ll grab that too.”

I tilted my head and took a moment to give her a side-eyed glare. That revolver was worth more than its weight in gold, what with its world-class craftmanship and numerous inlaid jewels. And she’d just left it in a wagon in a stable in a run down inn.

I shook my head. Nobles these days.

Jasmine didn’t seem to notice, and we made our way to the wagon.

“Ugh, my flail is still bloody,” I said. It had all caked on and dried, too. “I’ll clean it off tomorrow. I’ll leave it here for now.”

I did grab another four daggers, though.

Jasmine found her ridiculously expensive revolver as I was gathering knives, so we headed back to our room, a simple one with a single cot but enough room for both of us to stretch our legs out on. Idle chatter about our lives before entering the Yaguan Mage University lasted us until long after the sun had finally fully set.

Eventually, I could feel the tendrils of sleep pulling at me, and it looked like Jasmine did as well, given the size of her yawn.

And when we had both acknowledged our need for sleep, the existence of the single cot in our room became a problem.

I could tell that the noble girl with me had never gone a night in her life sleeping on anything but a comfortable mattress. Her distaste for the dirt floor and straw cot were almost palpable, and yet—

“I’ll be fine on the floor,” I said again. “Take the cot, princess.”

“But—“ I could tell from the way she was fidgeting that there was no chance in hell she was going to sleep on the dirt, yet she also didn’t want me to ‘suffer’ through that.

Too sweet, especially for a noble, I thought. “If it bothers you that much, I can join you.”

Jasmine’s face went red, and she buried it in her hands.

I tilted my head. “You carried me in your lap when I was passed out earlier this week, and this bothers you?”

“Th-that was different!” She protested. “It was for your safety!”

“Well, it’s this or the floor,” I shrugged, hiding a grin.

She finally nodded hesitantly, still blushing fiercely.

There was just barely room enough for both of us, the warmth of her body pressing against mine not something I was likely to forget soon.

“Goodnight, noble girl,” I whispered.

“Goodnight, Lily,” Jasmine breathed back.

I listened to the sound of her breath, a peaceful lull that soon became steady and slow, until I finally drifted off to sleep myself.

Maybe adventuring isn’t so bad after all.

We woke to the sound of wood collapsing.

I blinked the sleep out of my eyes and rolled out of the cot, forcing myself into a state of alertness.

The inn was on fire.