They rose out of the nearby dunes like wraiths, cloaked in concealing garb and carrying long spears. There were four of them, each departing from a corner of the shallow bowl where the fallen creature lay. Loose sand cascaded off their bodies as they walked, and they seemed to skate across the desert surface. From within their cloaks they produced sharp knives, and heavy, chopping blades. The group converged on their kill and began to methodically dismantle it.

The boy watched with caution as the strangers moved with practiced haste, skinning and partitioning the meat amongst themselves. It was obvious that they were trained for this, not only for dressing the kill, but for the environment. Each one moved with easy grace across the unstable ground, a stark contrast to the heavy, trudging gait that the boy was forced to adopt. He was keenly aware of just how out of his depth he was, compared to these people. If it came to a fight, they would have an enormous mobility advantage.

Their forms were shadowed by the voluminous cloaks they wore, but what he could make out appeared human. Their skin was darker than his own, but not the unnatural shade of his teacher's. They had two arms and two legs, and their hands seemed the same as his own. It was oddly comforting, to realize that whatever tricks they were using to survive in the desert could be replicated, the boy simply lacked the knowledge. Less comforting was the fact that he knew literally nothing else about them.

The boy could name any number of fortress cities within the Kingdoms of Athun, and even a number of their neighbors. He could predict how a man hailing from Akarod might greet a stranger—with a friendly embrace, the tree-hugging peace-freaks—compared to one from Farathun (cautious neutrality), but he couldn't even begin to imagine how these strangers might view him. Nor could he guarantee that communication was even possible. He had been taught that the Common tongue was, well, common, throughout the world, but under Eurya he'd begun to question many of the claims he once took as sacrosanct.

How frustrating. The boy couldn't risk exposing himself, yet his problem remained. He needed a source of water. If these strangers were as human as they appeared, then they had the same needs as he. If he could gain access to their source...

But he had nothing to bargain with, and no reason to trust them. He settled down to wait, and to watch. The strangers cleaned their kill quickly, stripping it bare and leaving nothing behind but a bloodstain. Little could be read from such a thing. Perhaps the last few minutes of the creature's life, if that. Not enough for the boy's purposes.

He began to feel the mildest twinges of worry in the back of his mind. He could last several more days without water, it was true, but his strength would wane with their passing. He had been lucky to find this creature, lucky that it was something he was capable of tracking, lucky that it was something he was capable of killing. He hated the necessity of relying on luck, of blind circumstance, to survive. The idea that he would need to do so again, that the opportunity before him could not be seized, was—

Distressing.

But he had been raised by the Hero of Farathun, who had been intimately familiar with the kind of violence people could inflict on one another. The boy had an instinctive wariness beaten into him, a certain level of distrust for foreigners that would ensure a mercenary lived past his twenties. He would not allow himself to naively trust these strangers. Not without some sort of advantage. He had been taught better than that.

So, when the strangers wrapped the remains of their work in leather blankets and began to carry it away, the boy did not move. He did not call out, nor wave, nor give any indication of his presence. He simply watched as his best hope for survival gathered together and climbed the dune across from him with painful ease. He watched, silent and steady, as, one by one, they vanished over the next hill. And he kept himself perfectly, rigidly, terrifyingly still, as the last figure paused at the summit, and turned its eyes directly towards him.

The boy could only make out twin pinpricks of light. They glinted, like a cats, beneath the last dregs of light cast by the Twins. The stranger considered him for ten heart-stopping seconds, as the boy's muscles tensed, and his grip tightened around his sword. Then the figure shrugged its shoulder, and allowed a single leather-bound sack to fall into the sand at its feet. The glowing eyes dipped downward, a brief acknowledgement, and turned away.

And then, they were gone.

The boy exhaled a faltering breath, shaken to his very core.

"Well," he whispered quietly, the words accompanied by a hysterical giggle, "that was unnerving."

Several minutes passed, with the boy simply waiting for something to go horribly wrong. He half-expected an ambush from the strangers. It made no sense to him. There was no reason for someone to freely part with their resources, especially in a barren place like this. He didn't trust it, not for a second.

Eventually, he realized that hiding in place was doing him no favors. He tiptoed his way across the dunes, taking a wide angle around the package that the strangers left behind. The boy sat down within sight of it, now close enough to see the blood leaking out. It was a limb of the creature. A shank, it appeared. Carved up and ready for transport. The animal had been nearly as big as a horse. The sheer size of the shank would feed the boy for a week. The moisture in the meat would keep him going for days.

It was the most obvious bait he'd ever set eyes upon. Even more so than the gargantuan snake's bright red tongue. His mind spun out a dozen different horrible possibilities. The meat was poisoned, an attempt to safely remove a possible threat from the board. Maybe it was toxic for consumption, and the strangers used some sort of Memory technique to overcome it, that the boy couldn't possibly know. Perhaps they were simply hidden over the next hill, spears ready for his back to be turned. They'd already proved their ability to disappear into the dunes almost at will.

No, the boy wouldn't fall for their trap. Instead, he would wait. He would suss out their plan. He would be patient. He would not lick his lips, nor salivate uncontrollably. He had more discipline than that, and not nearly enough moisture to spare.

The boy settled in, burrowing himself once more into the sand.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Dusk fell into darkness, and Selene took her place in the sky. Her soft gaze brushed against the desert, tinting it silver. The desert stirred once more into a semblance of life. Creatures would be emerging from wherever they had taken shelter. For the boy, things would become more dangerous. His scant few days of travel had not given him more than a cursory hint of what might lie in wait behind the curtain of nightfall.

It was at this point that the boy admitted to himself, that the strangers probably were not lying in wait for him. They had clearly noticed him first, and had somehow realized his inexperience with the surroundings. The desert would kill him, so why dirty their hands? It made perfect sense, in his mind. They had no need to endanger themselves.

Which meant poison, or some other trick to injure him if he got close. Either way, the boy would not be touching the 'gift' that his canny foes had left behind. The loss of the meat hurt him deeply, but he had a better plan. The boy was no desert expert, but he knew a few things about wild beasts that would remain the same, no matter where they were. Where there was blood, scavengers were bound to follow.

This time, he kept his eyes peeled on the sky, just in case. He doubted that he'd encounter another roc—the prize was far too small—but paranoia was a mighty force. The boy didn't have to wait long. This time, because life existed to surprise him, the threat came from below. Sand shifted and bulged, as almost a dozen tiny lumps sprouted nearby the leather-wrapped shank. The miniature hills quickly split open, spilling out their contents.

Tiny, furry creatures scuttled across the sand, towards the scent of blood. Though small, and almost comically fuzzy, the boy could see that they were well armed. Their front paws bore a pair of enormous tunneling claws, and their lower jaws were overly large and filled to the brim with sharp teeth. Alone, they were no threat, the boy was probably twenty times their size, but as a pack they could prove to be a nuisance. A danger, even. He'd have to be careful.

The plan was much the same as before. Catch one, kill it, read its Memory for a watering hole. But once again, the boy ran into a problem. Namely, that the creatures could burrow. If they disappeared beneath the surface, he'd have no real ability to deal with them. He wasn't exactly stealthy, out here. He had chosen a spot relatively nearby, but he had little confidence that he could close the distance before they vanished underground.

That was without even mentioning the fact that there could be a hundred of the fucking things just lying in wait, and the boy would never know it until he was being swarmed. He was not okay with that outcome, and had no real way to avoid it.

Worse, the boy had little time to make a decision. The furry critters were already swarming the bait, and held none of the boy's reservations. He could hear the crunching of bone, and see the shank being rapidly broken into bite-sized chunks. The tiny scavengers were packing away the meat at an alarming rate, their tiny cheeks bulging outwards as they stripped their meal bare. At this rate, there wouldn't even be a bone left for the boy to read.

Once again, he was struck by his own weakness. His lack of ability.

It enraged him.

He needed a solution, and he needed it now. This was no longer about survival. His thoughts did not linger on the uncertain future. He was rooted in the here and now. He refused to let this moment pass him by. His teacher had told him that his stubborness was what drew her to him. He embraced it, fully, and pulled on the only strategy he could think of.

The Keeper called it the Longstride. The simple, yet enormously potent technique that Eurya had used to bisect the boy's birth-tree. It had been explained to him, briefly, by the Keeper, who had been sensible enough to realize that the young man would hold a dim view of the seemingly inane task of counting his own steps. It was the core of Eurya's most powerful combat technique; a violation of reality almost on the order of a Talent. With a single step, she could take many. She could cross vast distances in a flash of movement, occasionally merging it with a strike.

The boy didn't have the slightest clue how his teacher could do it. He wasn't even remotely ready for that kind of Memory manipulation. He lacked the ability and the knowledge. It was simply impossible.

For him.

His grip tightened around his blade. The same blade that his teacher had once wielded in his defense. The same blade that she held in her hand as she used that same Longstride technique against the false Hero. And before, in his meadow. Though she had not used the sword to cut his tree, it was still with her in the moment. Deep within its Memory, an echo of Eurya slumbered.

Without hesitation, without thought or preparation, without the slightest hint of caution, the boy ripped on that shadow of his teacher. It felt like dragging a mountain with a piece of twine. His head split at the effort, his sword sang in his hand, and lights flashed beneath his eyelids. He caught the barest shadow of something vast and ancient and unknowable as the Memory slammed into his mind!

And

he

saw—