The Pretender pushed up on their tiptoes to whisper to Kerataraian. A green and black shimmer passed from their lips into her ears. The colors danced in her eyes as the grass danced in a low breeze, and the dusk stilled as if straining its ears to listen in.

But whatever words they might have spoken, so full of hidden meanings, they were lost in the crashing of the blades.

Her eyes widened. For a brief moment, sound filled the hill in the form of his classmates’ quiet murmurs. Before the Pretender whispered again.

They moved on to Rhul, whose expression darkened, to Pijeru, who gasped, and knelt in the grass at the edge of the potion light to speak to Tuhrie with a fond smile.

Finally, Micah caught an impression of musical notes, as if that breeze had stolen the letters off a shop window. They seemed to raise the woman from her grave. She levitated upright and drew a knife from her plume, eyes darting left and right. But the Pretender kept speaking and her eyelids drooped.

Pijeru rammed a knee into their shoulder. The Pretender startled and looked up. She leveled a stern gaze down at them until the spirit bowed their head and stepped away.

Then, in unison, the four avashay held out their arms and conjured spectral feathers above their outstretched hands.

Their expressions twisted in consternation. Pijeru winced as if away from a piercing noise, Kerataraian trembled, and Rhul’s feathers puffed out, while Tuhrie cocked her head as if beholding something in a dream.

Vines of essences rose from their arms to paint in the feathers—brown, red, green, silver. And their finished boons were … small, skeletal things. Something Micah might expect to find near a chicken coop in the dirt, not brilliant prizes.

A cold shower ran down his spine nevertheless, because those tufts of color represented years of work, and they‘d been so swift and united in the creation of their votives.

They had bargained protection from the Pretender for themselves, but had they done the same for their enemies?

The spirit swept an arm out and a river of black and green winds snaked over the grass of the hill. It buffeted the feathers, and they fluttered and flashes like the rapidly-turning pages of a spellbook. With each new page, they expanded. From tufts to fishbones, to vibrant leaves, to the long flight feathers one might use as a quill.

But these feathers were made from ink themselves, spotted with starlight, and tipped with nebulas in their original colors. The stardust wandered inside the darkness like clouds across the night sky.

The Pretender collected the feathers one by one. They orbited on a tilted axis around their hand, and they offered them to Delilah.

She chose a green feather. The Pretender plucked it out of orbit and missed— did not miss. The feather stayed— did not stay.

His vision flickered like someone had turned a page over the world. And where the ‘border’ of the page swept past the Pretender, they clutched a fifth feather between their clawed thumb and index finger, identical to the first.

Delilah blinked, accepted the boon, and stuffed it in her mouth.

“You’re eating it?” Golsa gasped.

The [Witch] hummed as she chewed it like a fruit stick. She tore off part of the vane and fed it to Rowan on her shoulder, then pushed the feather into one cheek to reply, “This is what I wanted from the start.”

“Yeah, but … We can just eat it?”

The Pretender approached her. “If you would like.”

She hesitated and chose a red feather. A line swept over the hill, his vision flickered, and the Pretender held out a duplicate to her.

“What about dosage? Overdosing? Formulae? Diet considerations …?”

His classmates looked to Delilah for answers. So did Micah, and his heart sank. That same black and green wind danced in her eyes now.

She didn’t sound any different when she gave a thoughtful hum. “You don’t have to worry about that if you consume it like I did, but otherwise … I’m not an expert. And you do have time to research those things if you would like, or consult an actual expert if you can.”

She raised her voice, “All of you. The feathers will last forty-eight hours unpreserved, but if you attempt to use them in any recipes or rituals, be careful. You might end up diminishing them or breaking the protective intent the Pretender imbued them with. And like with primers, your bodies won’t be able to adapt quickly enough if you use a formula to pump as much value out of the boons as quickly as possible. Take your time. Invest in safeguards.”

Some of his classmates hung on her every word while others ignored her as they would a teacher preaching workshop safety—at first. Then Delilah began to glow.

The black and green colors danced over her, skin and clothes, like light reflected off a pond, and motes of distortion drifted from her like mana decay.

Micah wasn’t sure how much of that his classmates could see, but when those motes drifted into their potion light, they glowed like lime green fireflies and his classmates looked.

“My self,” Delilah sounded smug, “rejecting the unknown.” She watched the fireflies with an almost sad expression. “Hopefully not too much of it …”

“Uhm,” Cathy raised a finger and spoke up, “shouldn’t you normally wait to consume something like this until you can meditate …?”

“Oh, yeah!” Delilah perked up. “If meditation helps you, absolutely do that. It helps to do things that resonate with you in general. Work on your alchemy skills, train your combat skills, study, practice hobbies, spend time with your family. If you don’t have a potion to guide the boon into doing what you want it to do, it helps to remind yourself who you are to control it.

“But you have time. It’ll take us a while to work through something this powerful. Days, weeks, or even months.” She laughed. “I hope I won’t glow in the dark the entire time.”

Golsa took in her explanation with a deep frown and placed her feather in a jar.

The hill flickered again, and Mason held a duplicate of Kerataraian’s brown feather in a thick cloth over his hands.

One after another, the Pretender continued to grant them their boons, and the scene flickered again and again as his classmates picked their feathers. But after the first ten duplications or so, the line that swept over their hill … slowed.

Was the Pretender exhausting itself? That was good, but being able to follow the line as it swept over the world was unnerving.

Sarah, one of the final people to choose a feather, picked Tuhrie’s silver one and the scene did not flicker at all. The Pretender split a duplicate directly from the original as if dividing a slime into two.

“It does not differ from the other copies I have made,” they promised her. “Furthermore, we should decide who among you would like the originals.” Someone would have to take the original boons off their hands. They couldn’t go back to their creators.

Micah had a vested interest in making sure of that, but something distracted him—there was a line over the hill behind them after all. Against the shadows of the dusk, it looked like absolute darkness. And shortly after he had noticed it, that line cracked.

His eyes swept over the scene. His classmates stood in a curved horizontal line halfway to the portal. Small clusters had formed like cliques. Anne-Katherine followed the Pretender around to oversee the distribution of their boons and to answer any questions their classmates might have—reassuring them with her presence alone when the Pretender came near. It was still that same spirit who had attacked them and turned into monsters after all.

Pijeru still doted on a sleeping Tuhrie. Kerataraiain spoke with Rhul a few steps down from them all. His arms were bound with an enchanted rope Kyle had provided.

Their positioning and their body posture did not look aggressive. Their eyes were clearly exhausted and unhappy but— Kerataraian noticed the cracks in the air and there was a look of recognition in her eyes.

Micah marched toward her, barking, “Portal! Now!”

“Knife!” Rhul thrust his bound arms out to point at him.

The hawkish bird woman said, “Stop!” His classmates scrambled back, drawing weapons, asking questions, running to safety.

Micah pointed his knife toward the cracks. “We had a deal.” He had told her. He had warned her what would happen if she forced his hand.

“We have not broken that deal.”

“Do you want your blood money or not?” Rhul sounded almost afraid as he scrambled away from him.

Micah was about to throw his knife when someone tackled him. A giant figure. Not a bird person or a monster. Brent!?

The [Cook] stretched his arm over his waist and tried to disarm him. Micah searched his eyes for a green glow but— He hadn’t even picked a feather yet? A spell then? Who else was compromised?

He was out of resources, out of tools, and far too exhausted to wrestle someone a third again his height and twice his weight, but Micah tried. And Brent was wounded. He jabbed a fist into his gut and tried to squirm free, but the big guy took the hint with barely a flinch.

He shook his hand in a vice until he dropped the knife, wrapped his one good arm around him, and hauled him over his waist like a duffel bag.

Micah dug his claws— his fingers into his wounded arm at the same time as Brent turned sideways … putting himself between him and the avashay. “Stop that,” he snapped.

Micah stilled. Huh?

“We have not broken our deal, either,” Brent said. “Not yet.”

“You better explain that.” Kyle pointed at the growing cracks in the sky.

Cathy had scrambled away from the Pretender and held her wand in her hand, pointed away from the enemies. “We just— We’re all on edge. No more surprises, please?”

“You sent two people to contact your allies,” Kerataraian said, “we contacted our own the moment we noticed you, and again after Pijeru had neutralized Tuhrie. They will arrive shortly but, if you let us speak to them, they should not attempt to harm you.”

“The fine and the medical aid,” Delilah said, “you were supposed to pass those on through our representatives later … if necessary. Did you know this was going to happen?”

“A warning would have been nice,” Brent grumbled. “Some of us are a little twitchy.”

“Portal,” Micah repeated and squirmed, “just to be safe. We can’t trust them! Let go.” He didn’t appreciate being carried around like luggage. There were giants that needed slaying. Maybe.

“Please not!” Pijeru clasped her hands over her head and bowed between the curtains of her wings. She looked up with anguish in her eyes. “This is my guilt, not theirs! I am our communications officer but I was … shortly distracted.” She glanced at Tuhrie. “And I am currently not capable my responsibility to fulfill. Our allies were themselves probably concerned because I them did not answer.”

“Exactly.” Keratarain gave an irritated chirp that reminded him of Ryan. “They don’t know what the situation is down here. So no, I did not know this would happen. There will be doctors. Perhaps not enough. And your money … we might be able to arrange something if you stay.”

“And these doctors are going to get here how, exactly?” Kyle sounded reasonable for the two seconds it took to say that, then shouted, “What the fuck is that?”

The cracks had spread meters through the air, outward and interconnected within. They gave the impression that the world was a glass orb that had been struck. Shards within the spiderwebs depicted the hill, the Root, the dusk sky. They wiggled free and dropped … into nothingness.

Trails of glowing clear sand sank like powdered glass on a torrent of wind to match last night’s stormwinds.

Kerataraian cocked her head in confusion. “Do you not have spatial tunnels?”

The glass buckled and something—someone—shot out. They looked like a smaller Kerataraian, but with paler plumage. Their feathers were mostly a tan brown with spots of fluffy white. They also wore a vest with many little pockets, carried a satchel, and had a pair of goggles strapped like a belt around their head.

They soared a few meters, missed their landing, and stumbled forward only to thrust their wings up and shout, “BRIGHT EVENING HUMANS! I am so happy to—”

Whatever else they said, another crack, audible this time, the whining wind, and a deep yawning noise drowned them out.

More shards of space fell away. A central force pushed the spiderweb outward to form a giant expanding tunnel through space, large enough to fit a cart. It cut into the hill and created a road for the regimented crowd of bird people who waited inside.

Guards, or soldiers, in thick grey vests marched out. Someone who might have been a lieutenant broke rank to chase after the runaway. A few nurses in scrubs with odd fishnet layers and hoods waited in a distant stone dungeon lit by crystal lanterns.

That … was not what Micah would have expected their home to look like.

The lieutenant looked like Rhul. Their green feathers transitioned into a variety of colors, so Micah assumed he was a man. He noticed them and awkwardly froze in the middle of his chase.

Then, as if his training had kicked in, he drew himself up and commanded them with a voice somewhere between a demonic bird’s screech and a barking dog, “Drop your weapons! Now!”

The first row of soldiers pointed a wall of enchanted shields, wands, and crossbows at them.

Halfway between the lieutenant and their group, the pale bird person spun and gasped, “Krirk!” They sounded affronted, but the words and tones that spilled from their beak afterward were in their own language. Micah swore the bird person spoke ten words with two overlapping voices per second. It was impossible to follow.

They gesticulated madly, too, at him, his classmates, at the Pretender and Tuhrie, at the soldiers aiming weapons at them, and the ones aiming their weapons at everything else on the hill.

The lieutenant shrunk together under the river of words, although he looked more embarrassed and annoyed than admonished.

“It is safe,” the Pretender said. “For you, too. You can sheathe your weapons.”

The echoes of meaning in their voice were muted, as per their pact, but their ‘suggestion’ still sounded smug.

Brent set him down. Cathy nodded enthusiastically, and most of his classmates made a show of putting their weapons away, but not all of them.

The soldiers escorted the medical staff out with first aid kits and healing potions, and Kerataraian and Cathy went to speak with the newcomers. Micah was about to shout that someone should go with her when Mason did it on his own. “I’d like to check your medicine.”

He relaxed. Pijeru might have informed them by now that they were all [Alchemists] so he doubted they would try to poison them, but he still found it hard to trust this situation. It wasn’t safe. What could he do to—?

“You still fight like an attack dog, huh?” Brent interrupted his anxious thoughts. He glanced down at Micah and did a double-take. “Nice eyes. That your uh, magical lens Skill?”

“Huh?”

The guy frowned, reached into a side pocket, and handed him a rectangular climbing mirror. “I knew something looked off about you earlier—aside from the giant golem hands. What was up with those, anyway?” He smiled.

Don’t, a voice inside him said. Even with [Controlled Breathing], the air felt thin and his breaths wavered as if some part of him wanted to hyperventilate. Just don’t think about it.

He didn’t want to, but Micah made himself look in the mirror.

Deep, dark blue eyes like unrefined lapis lazuli stared back at him, almost luminescent in the dark.

He blinked, wiped a thumb over the glass, and pulled his skin under his eye down for a closer look, but then his eyes were brown again. As they should be … Right?

“I think I’ve seen you do that a few times. Never noticed it before …?”

Micah shook his head and handed the mirror back.

“Pretender,” a voice called from the edge of the portal. It was not nearly as forceful as the lieutenant’s had been, but it carried weight when it spoke the spirit’s name and drew the eyes of many.

The speaker did not match the voice. They were short and squat, with long brown and grey feathers that reminded Micah of the woman who had died. Woris. Their small curved beak looked somewhat similar to an owl.

They wore a drab sleeveless shirt and baggy shorts. The only splashes of colors on them were their many embroidered scarves in wide loops around their neck, and the dozens of enchanted trinkets they had hooked onto their belt.

“World Ender Klaras.” The Pretender sounded delighted and, for once, Micah chased the echoes of meaning behind their words, but they were too faint to decipher. What was that? A rank? Title?

“Stonesinger Zwiraian,” they addressed a bird person with dark grey feathers who stood next to Klaras. “What a pleasure it is to run into you both on this fine evening. Which wind carried you away from your offices?”

His hopes rose. Briefly. Micah expected this Klaras to maybe be mad or strict, a general dressing an insubordinate soldier down in public, but their eyes looked as exhausted as he felt. They were red and puffy like the ruffled feathers of their head.

Klaras trembled as they took in the scene on the hill and almost looked like they were about to cry. “You have caused enough excitement for one day, wouldn’t you agree? It would be a help to my people if you returned with us now.”

“I cannot? I have yet to fulfill my pact with these children. I must bestow all of them and Pijeru with a boon.”

Klaras took in a trembling breath. “And how long will that you take?”

“If the children do not run from me …?”

Some of his classmates who had been sneaking up the hill froze.

Brent chuckled grimly and jogged toward the spirit. “That’s a call to action if I ever heard one.” If they finished handing out the last few boons, they would leave? Just like that?

Micah found a boulder. He needed to sit.

Cathy and the pale bird person with the goggles—Hatrak, they introduced themselves as—shook hands in front of Kerataraian. And it was hard to tell which one of the two looked more enthusiastic. The bird man, maybe. Her eyes were weary and she kept stealing anxious glances at the soldiers around her, and her classmates. But she chattered at a clip to rival his own, and they went back and forth somewhere between interrupting one another and finishing each other’s sentences. All the while they still shook hands.

Off to the side, Mason spoke to the lieutenant and one of the medical staff, and they approached the first of his wounded classmates, offering treatment.

A group of soldiers carried Tuhrie through the portal and when Pijeru tried to follow them, the dark bird person next to Klaras pushed out an arm to block her, their wings spread out like a curtain. They nodded at the Pretender. She would have to stay to await her boon.

Another page turned over the hill, and his vision flickered. Brent accepted a duplicate of one of Rhul’s red feathers and slowly turned it over like a knife in his hand with a thoughtful expression.

The Pretender noticed Micah glaring at them and winked.

Had they pretended to be exhausted, or had the short-lived excitement of their misunderstanding replenished some of their magic?

“You know,” Brent spoke up, and he used the volume his body offered him for once to interrupt the ongoing conversations, “we did kill that monster. It’d be a shame to let its meat go to waste. If anyone wants to stay a while longer, well, few things mend bridges like food. I would love to cook us all a meal …?”