As soon as Tormacc crossed the boundary from the sea of plateaus to the mountains proper he could feel the change. The air was heavier, its weight pressing down on him, keeping his feet firmly planted on the ground. It felt like his clothes had increased in weight five times over, the once soft fibers now rough on his skin as if they were homespun hemp as opposed to softer, well-woven cotton. It was a drastic change, and while he knew it was coming, he didn’t expect it to come so abruptly. Or be so powerful. It was one thing hearing about the increased gravity, but dealing with it was another. Even breathing was harder, his lungs working overtime to keep oxygen flowing through his blood.

“We’ll be relying on you Athra from here on out,” Zedna said, her voice striking that perfect balance between calm and serious. Her voice made you realize that you should pay attention to what was being said as it was deathly important, but also that the person speaking was in control of the situation so there was no need to panic.

“I know. Will look. Right now, no wurms.”

“There shouldn’t be any this close to the border. Shouldn’t being the key word. The Stone Wurms are similar to the stone rats we just avoided in intelligence, so we can’t take anything for granted when facing them.”

Hearing Zedna mention the stone rats, Tormacc couldn’t help a shiver of fear from washing over him, causing him to break out in goosebumps. During their trip through the plateaus Athra had told them they were heading towards the lair of a stone rat horde. When Zedna decisively chose to make a rather long detour Tormacc asked her why they didn’t just fight their way through. Her response told him exactly how close had been to death when he had run into them before.

“Fight the stone rats?” Zedna had said. “Maybe if there were twenty of me. Those buggers are tenacious little bastards, and despite them being walking bundles of Essence I suggest you run the other way at first sight. There’s never just one stone rat, and when they gather in numbers, there’s little they can’t devour alive. Especially if they have more than one boss rat among them. I should mention that I wasn’t the original leader of the gang. I actually started it with five other people, and while they weren’t as strong as I am, they were close. Soon after we started the gang we decided we needed a hidden base camp and settled on taking over a stone rat lair for our own use. We won, but there’s a reason I ended up as the gang leader.”

Her ominous tone made it clear what happened to the other four founding members. Ignorance is bliss as they say, and Tormacc had certainly been ignorant of the danger he had been in and blissful of the amount of Essence gained. He likely needed that Essence, as without it he would have had a hard time fighting monsters like the Stone Giants, but thinking about the true power of the rat horde caused him to break out in a cold sweat. He wasn’t looking forward to rat-infested nightmares.

But the plateaus were behind him, which hopefully meant so were the stone rats. There were new dangers ahead, and he needed to stay focused. While Athra was their main form of detection, he was no slouch himself. He could easily imagine a scenario where they ran into a monster with the ability to hide from Athra’s stone sense, and if that happened he didn’t want to be caught with his pants down.

Keeping his eyes peeled, Tormacc examined the scenery as they moved farther into the mountains. The ground here was darker, where the plateaus and the blasted plains were browns and light greys, the mountains were a darker grey, everything seemingly muted under the immense pressure of the increased gravity. But just like the plains, the mountains also had a jagged beauty to them. Zedna was guiding them along some of the easier to traverse terrain, but there were harsher areas near their path, and watching landscapes of pointed shards jutting out from rugged gulleys evoked a sense of majesty. This was nature in its true form: wildly unrepentant in its harshness.

Without his memories Tormacc couldn’t say why he felt connected to the mountains, but he did. There was a feeling of familiarity, more so than in any other terrain type he had been in before. It made him wonder what his homeland was like. Did he come from the mountains? Were his people all living there, or just him? There must have been some people there with him, as he had a feeling that the selection for who entered The Tower wasn’t at random, as evidenced by the ritual he started out with. And the fact that The Tower was basically one big competition. It would make sense for there to be a rigorous selection process.

Glancing over at his two companions, he wondered what they thought of their missing memories. It never came up in his conversations with Athra, and he was too scared to broach the topic himself if she didn’t. And there was no way he would try and bring anything up with Zedna was wasn’t essential. He wasn’t quite scared of her, but she could be very intimidating.

Scratch that, he was definitely scared of her. It was hard not to be, especially when she stared at him with those burning yellow eyes. It made his skin crawl, her stare piercing right through him. But despite that, he actually found her rather congenial. She kept to herself, but that was understandable, as once they reached the exit portal it was unlikely they would ever meet again. The Tower had hundreds of millions of people in it after all, so unless you had plans to meet someone or they had a shop in the First City you could only leave it up to fate.

Because of that, it would have made sense if Zedna kept herself aloof, not bothering to interact with people who she could very easily see as baggage. They were necessary, as she needed them to get where she was going, but a pain to carry. Instead, she made sure to make small talk, joining him for meals and giving advice in a friendly manner, not at all upset when he didn’t know how to do something like set up a proper campsite to her specifications. It was a change from the dynamic he shared with Athra previously. The two of them had been equals, or close to it when she wasn’t calling him a little rock. Zedna was more like a teacher, guiding him along and keeping him on the right path.

Literally keeping them on the right path too, as she was in charge of trailblazing. He didn’t envy her the task. Because of the gravity, it was important that they stayed on relatively flat ground. While a fall down a cliff face wouldn’t kill any of them, it would still reset their progress and isolate them from the rest of the party. Of course, the danger involved increased exponentially if monsters were involved. Which they likely would be, as none of the three were clumsy enough to fall unless they were pushed.

The first few hours in the mountains were uneventful, the tense atmospheric pressure an empty harbinger of danger. They had entered the mountains in the early afternoon, and as dusk started to close in Athra called for a halt, her senses picking something up.

“Stop,” she said, her body going preternaturally still. “Is danger. Something over next ridge.”

“Do you have any idea what it is?” Zedna said, narrowing her eyes at the path ahead.

“Is not underground, so not Stone Wurms. Too small. Monsters, maybe our size, but heavier. More than ten enemies, less than twenty.”

“Do you have any ideas what they could be?” Tormacc asked Zedna, hoping her previous experience in the mountains could clue them in to the identity of the monsters.

“The mountains are huge,” she said. “It could be anything. But there tends to be a correlation between size and danger in this Shard, so I doubt it’s something we can’t handle. Athra, do you sense anything else around us?”

“Nothing.”

“Then I’ll take a look and see if I can take them out. Both of you wait here.”

Without giving time for any disagreement Zedna danced across the ground towards the upcoming ridge, her boots making no noise on the ground as she stealthily made her way over. Under normal circumstance, her feat wouldn’t be anything special, but Tormacc was shocked at her ability to move under the intense gravity. At the very least he knew he was far from being able to replicate it, the pressure too heavy for him to even think about stealth.

It only took a scant few seconds for Zedna to disappear out of sight, her form vanishing behind the rocky ridge. Tormacc wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but when only a few minutes later Zedna sauntered back over the ridge, all attempts at stealth gone, he almost did a double take. Surely she couldn’t have already killed the monsters, right?

As it turned out, she had. Seeing Zedna waving for them to join her, Tormacc and Athra hurried over, cresting the ridge to see what lay on the other side. Seeing the dead bodies strewn across the ground, Tormacc was once more impressed with Zedna’s prowess. There were sixteen corpses of vaguely humanoid-looking monsters, all in various stages of dismemberment. They were about the same height as he was, but their girth was much larger, and instead of the two upper limbs, they had four, all equally spaced around their body like the points on a compass.

“I’m guessing they’re some sort of stone troll,” Zedna said, nudging a corpse with her foot. “They didn’t die until I properly diced them up. I didn’t see any regeneration, but losing limbs and even their head seemed to have little effect if the rest of their body was still intact.”

“Do you think there are more of them?” Tormacc asked.

“It’s hard to say for sure, but most monsters in this Shard travel in packs, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there were. But if this is all they amount to then we should be in for a smooth journey.”

Tormacc didn’t want to underestimate the monsters, but it was hard not to, especially considering the manner in which Zedna took them down. It wasn’t surprising that she killed them, but doing so silently in what had to be less than a minute was impressive, especially under the extreme gravity. Or maybe he still didn’t have a good handle on her power and this was normal for her.

A few hours later and they decided to make camp for the night, as while Athra didn’t need to sleep, Tormacc and Zedna still did. They could have continued through the night and still been fine the next day, but doing that took its toll, so they had decided beforehand that if they were in the position to take a rest at night they would do so. If they weren’t under any pressure it only made sense to keep themselves at one hundred percent in case of emergencies.

The night was uneventful, as was their trip the following morning. It was only as the sun neared its peak in the sky that they encountered a roadblock to their travels. The path they were taking had been gradually narrowing down all throughout the morning. Zedna said this was a good sign, as it meant they were headed for a mountain pass. She had warned them ahead of time that they might run into a dead-end and be forced to turn around, but thankfully this wasn’t one of those times, as the narrow passage they were in eventually lead to the entrance of a deep valley.

Looking across it, Tormacc could barely make out a path continuing farther into the mountains far away on the other side. This was good news, as it meant they could continue on. But what wasn’t good news was the valley itself, or, more specifically, the monsters inhabiting it. As he swept his gaze across the valley floor far below Tormacc could see what had to be thousands of the monsters Zedna had killed yesterday toiling away, and if the tunnels they were entering and exiting were any indication, those thousands were just the tip of the iceberg.