“Do we …” The Golem stopped in his tracks. He even spoke the same way Micah had two years ago, shy and small. His shoulders were hunched. He kept his head down and peered up past chiseled eyebrows. “Do we know each other?”

Ryan said nothing.

“I— I have a classmate. His name is Ryan? You look similar. Are you his older brother or something?”

Wisps of spectral fog escaped from the emergency exit. Fear spell, his mind grasped. This had to be an illusion.

The Golem took two steps forward, and Ryan took one step back.

“Look, uhm, my name is Micah Stranya. I went into the Tower and I got lost. There was this Kobold, and an explosion, and this voice and I— I don’t know where I went. It was dark and I had to swim—so far.”

His voice hitched. He took rapid breaths to fight back tears, then made a noise like snorting back snot through his stone nose.

Ryan hated Demir. He hated this spell. He hated whoever had messed with it, because someone must have for the Theatre to bring his fears to such vivid, uncanny life.

“I don’t know. I don't know where I went. I don’t know how long I have been gone. I was in a city. It was covered in ash, I think, and— and then there was this light and suddenly I was here. But the people are all monsters and nobody listens to me and— Please, you have to—” He spoke a mile a minute when he suddenly doubled over and screamed.

Ryan stopped himself three steps away before he could rush to his side. “What’s wrong?”

Micah held up a trembling hand, crooked fingers kept forcibly still as if he was afraid to move them out of fear of pain. Two of his fingernails crumbled away into dust. “It hurts,” he whimpered. “It hurts so much. The fire, my leg—it never ends. Please, help me.”

This is never going to end, Micah thought. The Kobold, the Rat Hermit, Maria—even the rangers and the Collector to an extent. Now these bird people and their errant spirit.

He caught the woman’s feathered arm to help her across the pit trap and tried not to wince when his grip pressed down on his missing fingernails. She left him to spearhead their column of lanterns through the dark. Tuhrie sang, and the people further ahead in line clashed with a beast from the Gardens that dashed from shadow to shadow.

Within the Tower and without, giants trampled through their lives and Micah, helpless, watched as others fought and expected him to stay behind.

He was last in line, behind that bird man Rhul, and Kyle, Andrew, Delilah, Golsa, and Quin. Kyle had taken a hit from that spirit, tumbled over meters of stone like a sack of bones, and was on his feet again. Micah doubted he would survive another hit. And that bird woman …

The spirit had killed her. Even though it was supposed to be on her side. Who would be next? One of his classmates?

… Me?

He hobbled ahead on mismatched legs, trying to ignore the … discomfort as he pushed himself. He had twisted his right leg on his landing, after a three meter drop, and he was beginning to feel more and more like … like he shouldn’t be walking on it. His aero was used up or else he would have cushioned his fall and revitalized himself.

He had to keep up.

Piles of rubble littered the ground and stone walls peeled in toward them like paper. They came to a spot where the thick stone of the ceiling ended in a jagged line. This floor they were on was a labyrinth of cubes stacked up into the mountainside. Those should have continued on above them for another story or two but when they stepped out beneath the open sky, they found a canyon of ruined stone instead.

Giant craters pocked the land. Broken cubes lay below them like a trash dump, and broken mechanisms jutted out from the rubble.

Here and there, a few remnants had survived in the shape of isles and rock spines. Shadows pooled in the ruins as the sun set until those were the only things visible in a lake of darkness.

Micah heard … rocks tumble. Claws scratching on stone. Something moved through the ruins below, invisible to them now. The Shadow Raptor.

This was the battlefield where Morgana had been slain.

“We saw the battle, you know?” Tuhrie broke off from her song to comment. “We watched from above. Some of us wanted to intervene—the guardians have their uses. Some of us wanted to help. World Ender Klaras was very concerned about First Contact.”

Like Maria’s valley after the Rat Hermit had killed it, people used this place both as a—somewhat—safe entrance to the eleventh floor and a reliable exit. A series of wide wooden bridges and rope bridges connected the isles to the opposite end of the ruin. There, a wide road had been carved through one of the house-sized roots that lay draped over the cliffside.

The first of his classmates stepped onto the bridges. The ropes shuffled and wooden planks clattered with a hollow echo. It emphasized the sudden silence—Tuhrie had stopped singing, the Raptor stopped its hunting calls. No mechanisms shifted around them anymore.

Pijeru paused on one of the isles and said something to his classmates behind her, but Micah didn’t catch the words. She didn’t wait for a response when she called out, “You wanted alongside them to fight!”

Micah could hear Tuhrie roll her eyes: “Anything to pass the time.”

Where was she? He loaded his slingshot and searched the darkness but too many bodies blocked his vision in the tunnel. Then, their light polluted his eyes. The closer he got to the group, the darker the world grew outside the lantern light.

The ledge before the bridge offered him a clearer view. He glimpsed … a twinkling in the distance like the first star to alight in the dusk: a portal on a hill. Their exit. It couldn’t be more than two kilometers away!

“Keep an eye on the ropes,” Delilah hissed a warning down the line. “She can move uninterfered metal with her mind.”

There was a pause, voices picked up, and someone called out a warning, “Sarah!”

Cathy whistled while his classmates slung spells and ammunition into the ruins.

Micah hurried to see what was happening but he wasn’t quick enough to press past the bodies on the rope bridge even if he wanted to. He leaned left over the rope as far as he could without teetering on the wooden plank and peered ahead.

He spotted torches headed toward them from the opposite side of the ruins—Brent and his group. They carried a large carcass tied to a stick like scouts returning from a hunt.

And caught between their two columns, a single isolated figure ran: Sarah. The Shadow Raptor clawed its way up a stone island and chased after her.

A shining arcane bolt streaked over it, and Micah saw the monster clearly for the first time. It looked like a feathered hybrid between an emu, an alligator, and a horse. Its feathers were a slick oily black that reflected rainbow colors when the light passed over them. Shadows stuck to them like fumes. It ran on two hind legs with a lithe tail to balance itself, and its snout was covered in a large emerald beak.

It was fast. It ran with its head low over a rope bridge and leaped onto a stone wall jutting out of the dark. The shadows clinging to its feathers snapped out like strings to lash it sideways to the stone. When it jumped again, they extended the long feathers of its front arms into wings to glide down onto the island right behind Sarah.

There was no way she would escape. Micah had to help!

His classmates had already begun to sprint but the moment they broke ranks, metal feathers shot at them like arrows from the dark.

They were small and silent, visible only when their metal caught the light and by the reactions of that which they cut. His classmates stumbled on rope bridges or ducked for cover. The ropes frayed as blades glanced off them. Micah felt a dull thud in his side and looked down to see a knife hanging from his gambeson like a pine needle.

It was exactly what Delilah had tried to warn them about.

Pijeru slowed or deflected knives while she pleaded with Tuhrie to stop.

Rhul dodged them with unnatural quickness instead. He could not smile with his beak but Micah caught a glimmer of something in his eyes. The man didn’t even flinch when a knife opened up a red line across his arm. He was enjoying this.

“Come now, Tuhrie. You have done better than this in our sparring matches.”

Tuhrie appeared from the darkness, swinging her legs up to perch on a wall. She sounded amused, “You would have me be ruthless against these children?”

“At least make it a challenge—” He trained his crossbow on her and took the shot. “An adventure!”

Tuhrie crouched in a flash and kicked off to backflip into the darkness. The stone exploded where the bolt hit, showering her with rocks, and Rhul twisted the fire into snakes to hunt her down.

Tuhrie answered in kind. She whipped her arm and the metal feathers harrying his classmates turned on a coin to shoot toward him—and to shoot toward Micah who had just overtaken him.

He turtled up. Knives struck him, thunked into the wood, and cut the ropes all around him. The bridge rocked like a rowing boat.

Drops of blood splattered onto the wooden planks in front of him and severed feathers drifted down from above—Rhul had leaped over him and aimed his crossbow into the dark.

His wounds trailed wisps of essence that Micah had never seen before, like flickering strings on a phantasmal wind. His severed feathers and blood rapidly faded until nothing but single corns of yellow sand remained.

He took the shot and landed on the stone island ahead, but the force of his leap made the bottom left rope of the bridge snap.

The planks dropped out beneath his boots. Micah lurched, the darkness yawning open below him—

Rhul caught his arm without looking. He seemed more interested in his fight with Tuhrie than helping, searching to see if his shot had landed.

Micah still sighed a breath of relief as he got one foot onto the island and stumbled past the bird man.

He only seemed to notice him then, glanced around, and—

Rhul shoved him.

Huh?

Micah tried to snatch his arm. He had already let go to keep walking and he missed as Rhul pulled back. He tried to grab the ledge then, the wooden post of the bridge, the taut line of rope that stretched over the edge below.

His hand smacked off the rock. He had to bend forward to reach. His fingers tried to dig under the rope to hold on but only managed to scrape against the cliff, digging tiny grooves into it.

He heard a voice—“Oh you thought, cunt!”—and lurched when something grabbed him from behind. Micah tilted forward so quickly his teeth snapped shut and his head nearly smacked into the rock.

Rowan, the tiny Waxwing familiar, had caught him by the back of his shirt and was trying to pull him up.

He quickly dug his fingers into the stone and grimaced against the renewed pain. And it was pain. No matter how much he tried not to think about it, no matter how much he had survived before this, there was only so much of it he could take on his own.

It hurts, he admitted to himself as he dragged himself up. Rowan chirruped and scratched his neck with tiny feet as it frantically fluttered against his skull, more a hindrance than help at that point, but it didn’t let go.

“Did you think we couldn’t see the way you looked at him?” Delilah’s voice snapped. She appeared at the ledge and reached down to help him up.

Rhul was on his knees next to them, glued there by … a beehive? Bees crawled over his face, and Kyle gripped a fist full of feathers and pointed a knife to his throat.

“You okay?”

Micah shook his head. His lungs burned. He could see that portal twinkling on a hill. He wished Ryan or Lisa were here. He wanted to go home.

Below, Brent tackled the Shadow Raptor like a bear and they tumbled over a wooden bridge. Sarah hung off the side of that bridge with one arm as Lukas pulled her up. Someone’s blood was splattered over the wood.

Tuhrie groaned in their ears, “Why would you take the bait, Rhul? I thought we were having fun.”

“Not much fun to be had with that eyesore next to me,” Rhul said.

“Shut it,” Kyle warned him but the man seemed unconcerned as he pressed the knife into his skin.

Why? Micah didn’t understand. He had noticed that hostility in Pijeru’s otherwise kind eyes when she looked at him but— Did all of these bird people feel this way about him? It was like the Golem spirits all over again. Like the Rat Hermit. Like Andrew and Forester. The other kids in the classroom. His siblings and parents …

It was such a childish feeling that welled up inside of him but he couldn’t ignore it: Why are they being mean to me when I haven’t even done anything to them?

Delilah helped him up and asked, “Are you so certain you can come back to life?”

Rhul glared at her and said something, but Tuhrie spoke over his reply.

“Not much fun to be had now that you are leaving, too. I thought this place would be more exciting, especially when the Pretender accepted my invitation, but without Morgana to maintain it …”

“A little help!?” Brent bellowed. He didn’t mean them, he meant their other twenty classmates who stood around him, but Micah jerked to attention nonetheless.

He took one look at Rhul and walked away. He didn’t even know the man. He wanted no part of … this.

[Aimed Shot] focused his vision to a point and he fueled mana into the enchantment of his slingshot. Light began to gather around the iron ball like condensation pulsing in the shape of a spiked star. He loosed and struck the Shadow Raptor across three islands, but its head barely snapped back at the impact.

Brent clutched a bleeding arm and scrambled away on the ground with his feet. Strings of shadow tried to reel him back in, pulling tents out of his skin, and Ajay severed them with a knife.

His classmates had thrown lassos over the beast and three people tried to haul it back by its legs and throat while it savaged an impromptu shield wall over Brent.

His other classmates fired at it from the edges of the island or from bridges to its left and right, but they only used weak spells and mundane ammunition. They were out of options.

Micah began to jog toward the battle and ignored Kyle calling after him. His hands and his leg still hurt. He couldn’t ignore those feelings any longer. So rather than try, he forced them down and just … let go.

His gait straightened. His arms moved with mechanical precision as he fired from a distance. His pain faded as if he had handed it to someone else.

He let go of his battered thoughts next. He only leaned on [Savagery] a bit. They had brutalized the Garden Great Ape after all. Even if they had the firepower to do that again, which they didn’t, where had it gotten them? A few hundred meters further away. They had a good two more kilometers left to run.

No, Micah leaned on [Savagery] only so much that it allowed him to lean on his Path as a whole.

For just a simple while, he wanted to pretend someone else could take over. That he could take a step back in his own body, in his mind, and focus on the task at hand.

Who do you want to preserve? a voice asked as if to crystallize his thoughts.

Everyone, Micah answered, … including myself.

Then his task was obvious: He had to kill the Pretender.

Micah … hesitated. Spirits were people. He didn’t want to kill a person.

It was no different from cleaning a wound, his Path explained, no different from ripping out weeds or eating a meal. To preserve one thing, you oftentimes had to sacrifice another.

And quickly. Before it was too late.

“You know,” Tuhrie spoke, “I just thought of a fun solution. How do you say, ‘Killing two birds with one stone?’”

“Tuhrie, force me not,” Pijeru warned her.

“Pretender—“

Okay, Micah thought. Do it.

The Shadow Raptor went still and stared off into the darkness. Its eyes drained into stardust outlines of twin voids. Deep inside those shone distant emerald stars.

Pijeru spun and hurled a crystal knife in the very same direction it had looked.

“—grant me love and play the part of—” Tuhrie’s voice stumbled as her breath left her, and Pijeru’s face twisted in pain, but her target still said the word, “Morgana.”

The Shadow Raptor did not move from its spot, but it exploded into motion nonetheless. A cloak of shifting metals swept over it. Thin legs burst from its midsection and stabbed into the wood. They had blocky spiral patterns like earth Golems, and rainbow hues like they were made of bismuth. Skeletal hands branched off from them without rhyme or reason, and one held a wand that had grown a single blue leaf.

Its body bulged and expanded as if explosions had gone off inside it. They formed plumes of flesh that rose up like chained bubbles only to be pulled back in and added to its mass—its form elongated down the length of the bridge.

His classmates scattered.

He rerouted the mana inside his body to flow through the wires he had constructed in his hands. It met the compacted stone essence there and he extended an offer to run one of its principle operations: emulation.

The mana complied. He billowed it out into twin clouds, something he’d seen done many a time before, and ran his hands through the floor as if it were sand. Where the stone met the mana, it moved and rearranged itself, forming—

[Of the Warrior Path explored!]

[Skill — Golem’s Grasp obtained!]

That. Twin gauntlets of stone weighed down his arms. His fingers couldn’t even reach the first knuckles inside them but as he clenched and unclenched his fists, the stone fingers bent with a flexible ease. The mana relayed his intentions.

He ran past his fleeing classmates and jumped onto the railing of the bridge, eyeing Morgana as it turned toward him. Its head had grown in size. It was more than half as tall as him and wore a thick metal mask similar to the Collector, but its was silver rather than bronze and he saw no shimmer of a protective ward, no lenses to cover its eyes. They were still twin voids.

He considered his blunt fingers … Not enough.

[Exert Dominion]. The bubble around him expanded with ease. It slapped the enemy in the face but as quickly as it had grown, he pulled the field of authority back in and reshaped it. He wrapped it around his fingers and pressed his will down, condensing it as he compacted stone fingertips into sharpened claws.

Morgana flicked its legs at him— He grabbed one. His stone gauntlet cracked under the casual force of the strike. Something in his shoulder wrenched. But he jumped and let the leg pull him up.

There wasn’t enough free aero inside of him for his next step, so he drew on the aero lining the channels of his spirit itself—it wouldn’t kill him, just wound him, but he would have time to recover if he survived. He only needed enough to create the weak blast to tip him forward.

He let go and dropped onto Morgana’s face. It tried to swat him off, but he slipped around and hung from the back of its head, fingers hooked inside its eye sockets.

Panels of glass began to crystallize inside of them. They pushed his fingers up so he leaned forward and dug his claws in. He met resistance there like touching skin and pressed through that as well. Morgana writhed—

Found you.

No, the Pretender underneath writhed in pain. It whipped its head left and right and twisted in on itself to swipe at him. The growing glass lenses cracked and pressed into his stone fingers, threatening to sever them.

He had barely wounded the spirit. His claws pierced it like a needle would the pupil of an eye. But he leaned forward now and dug his claws in deeper.

His dominion pierced into the spirit itself. It weighed on its shoulders, and he whispered a single word—threat and command—“Stop.”

The Pretender froze.

Its legs stopped where they hung over him and where they had torn out of its skin. Splatters of blood hung in the air. A plume of flesh stopped in the middle of its explosive expansion. The dust itself seemed to settle. Everything within his domain shimmered oddly as if it had been captured within a vibrating pane of glass.

But he could still feel the Pretender’s eyes trembling around his claws. He could also feel … more. Just past the borders of his dominion. An endless void and a vast being that lingered one step away as if waiting to step into the room.

Kill it …?

He wasn’t sure how much time he had bought them. He knew he could wound that vast being, claw out its eyes, but kill it …? He wasn’t even sure which would give out first, his tired muscles or his mana.

New plan.

He poked his head out from behind its metal mask and yelled, “Everyone stop! Or— or— or the spirit gets it!” It had been over a year since he had lied to anyone other than himself. His voice didn’t sound nearly as confident as it had a moment ago.

His classmates had already been running, some in the wrong direction, but even they stopped at his command. “Micah,” Mason called from an island over, “what did you—?”

“No, not you. The bird people, the— the— You. Move! Everyone from school run to the portal. I’ll hold them here for as long as I can!”

Not everyone reacted to his words, and those who did, didn’t move nearly as quickly as he would have hoped. They were wounded and wary of the situation.

“What about you!?” Brent called.

“I have my fingers in its eyeballs! It’s probably afraid to move but who knows how long that will last? So move!”

Mason shook his head. “We didn’t save you just to leave you behind now!”

There was that sentimentality again. His new task was simple: preserve the others. How was he supposed to do that when they refused to leave?

“I— My wind magic is already recharging. I drank some stamina tea. If you have more, leave it on one of the islands, but the moment you’re gone, I’ll just spidermonkey my way out of here,” he lied. “You’d slow me down. You can leave me behind!”

Laas stumbled past Mason and dragged on his arm, urging him to go.

Brent was wounded. Lukas reminded him of that fact, calling from somewhere behind him.

He couldn’t see him. He also couldn’t see Pijeru. Where was she? He glanced left and right but the giant metal head he was clinging to blocked some of his vision. “Pijeru, Rhul, Tuhrie— I’m sorry. I didn’t catch your name, fourth bird woman,” he said. “You all stop!”

“Kerataraian,” the fourth bird woman said as she strode toward him. Her beak rapidly parted and shut when she spoke her name, and her voice did something odd. It chiruped like there should be some more ‘ree’ and ‘fwee’ sounds overlapping her name. He thought he heard canopies rustling in a phantom wind. “And I will not ‘stop,’ child. Unhand the Pretender this instant or prepare to face the consequences for your peoples.”

“My …? I am trying to preserve my people! This spirit is a threat to our lives. Your comrade tried to kill me not a minute ago!” He jerked his chin at Rhul.

Kyle still crouched next to him, but he and Rowan were pilfering the man’s belongings now—his crossbow, his quiver of enchanted bolts, some smaller things he couldn’t make out from a distance.

“I understand your grievances,” Kerataraian said, “and yet I am telling you to unhand the Pretender for the good of your people. Do you have any idea of who you are threatening?”

She spoke and carried herself with such confidence, and her white and brown hawk feathers made her look more imposing than her comrades. But she didn’t sound angry at him or even concerned for herself. She sounded concerned for him.

He almost wanted to believe her. It was her eyes which filled him with doubt. They were green. The same dark shade of green as Tuhrie’s eyes, as the Pretender’s distant stars, the glimmer of hostility in Pijeru—the enemy.

“Micah!” Delilah called as she crossed the rope bridge. “Don’t do anything rash! We can talk about this!”

“Not leaving without you anyway!” Kyle added three steps behind her.

“If you can kill it,” Forester called with desperate confusion. “Then why haven’t you?”

He shot him a glare but when he turned, more and more of his classmates had slowed down and they began to speak up as if this were the time and place to have a discussion about this.

The portal was right there! He could see it twinkling in the distance. Something inside him longed for it like it was something he couldn’t have. Home. And it wasn’t. He forced the feeling down and barked, “Move! I gave you an order. Leave me here!”

That must have been the wrong thing to say. People scowled and planted their feet. He could feel the spirit trembling around his claws and didn’t understand.

Why? Why would nobody listen to him?

Ryan wanted to help him. To close the distance, hug him, console him, but he knew this was a trick. A nightmare created from his fears. The moment he let his guard down, the Golem—and it was a Golem, he told himself—would attack him all the while it wore Micah’s face.

He gripped his spear so tight the wood groaned and forced himself to ignore it.

“Wait, where are you going?” the Golem asked when he began to walk toward the door.

Ryan didn’t answer.

“Please, no. Don’t— Don’t ignore me!” The Golem lunged.

Ryan twisted his spear, but it stumbled the moment it stepped forward as if its right leg couldn’t hold its own weight. It only reached out with an open hand and grabbed his arm to steady itself. And it flinched when his spear came down.

He stopped. He couldn’t do it. Ryan couldn’t bring himself to hit him. “Let go.”

“I— Listen! My name is Micah Stranya. I live on Fairview Terrace 7 in Westhill. My parents—or your brother! I go to the same classroom as Ryan. Our teacher is Mr. Brecht?”

Ryan tried to pull his hand free, and Micah— the Golem lurched. He was surprisingly light for all that he was made of stone. Ryan could wrench himself free, but what would happen to him if he did? What if he stumbled? Or even if he pulled too hard, he worried his thin arm might crack.

He tried to slip his hand free of his glove instead.

“I don’t know if anyone is looking for me. They don’t know I went into the Tower, that I’m still here, that— that I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to lie to them. I should have listened, but I can’t find the way home anymore. Please, I just want to go home.”

His grip slackened as he sobbed, and Ryan’s hand slipped free. He stumbled back.

Micah’s eyes went wide. He tried to snatch his arm again but he was too slow. Ryan stepped backward toward the theatre door and when the other boy tried to follow, he limped on his right leg in obvious pain. He couldn’t chase him.

“Wait! I’m— I’m sorry!” he said and offered up his glove. “I shouldn’t have grabbed you like that but I— I don’t know what else to do. Please, don’t leave me here? Please?”

“That spirit might be innocent!” Delilah called.

“Pijeru captured Tuhrie!” Cathy leaned over the railing of another bridge. She sounded ecstatic with relief. “Quick, I need rope! Someone help me pull them up!”

“You don’t need to worry about Rhul!” Kyle shouted in a lazy tone.

“Micah?” Brent asked. “Hey, Micah! Relax. Take a deep breath.”

“We can talk about this—”

“How long can you hold it like that? Maybe we can tie it up—?”

“—or drop the bridge into the ruins,” Quin suggested. “Give me ten, no— five minutes! I might be able to scratch together some weak explosives.”

“Just kill it already!” Lukas snapped.

So many voices. Too many voices. Ordering him around, asking questions, ignoring him, begging him not to leave them, threatening him.

“Do not,” Kerataraian snapped after she heard Lukas. “That spirit is the closest being to true divinity any of you will ever meet. Attempt to harm them and their kin will crack your city like an egg, plunge your shards into the Plane of Seasons, and scatter your people to the winds, do you understand me? Unhand them! NOW!”

It was too much. He couldn’t hear their words, couldn’t tell who was speaking, only hear their discordant sentiments. His mind felt like a storm and no matter how much he tried, he couldn’t still it. So he took a step up into its eye instead and took a deep breath.

Micah considered and decided, “No.”