Tercius tried to stay as still as possible. “It feels like a snake or something. What should I… do?”

“Snake? Oh, snakes. No snakes in forest. But—”

“What? What is it?”

“Don’t worry, they won’t harm us. The forest is with us,”

There was movement where Leawarra was and then, in a shower of sparks, the spare flammable torch caught fire, revealing the perpetrator in all of its glory.

Tercius swallowed.

Gnarly and covered in dirt, the root that moved over his boots and up his pants was attached to a misshapen mass of vines and roots and moss. Under the flickering torchlight, the strange being looked like something that a small child would create when given a task to make a turtle. Well, it somehow ended up being more of a dog that had four short legs and a shell. The roots that spread out of the center mass of its body spoke of an odd-tentacled cousin to an octopus or a nest of snakes that were all joined at their tails somewhere deep inside that hill of a shell.

The perpetrator was also not alone.

At the side of the tentacled turtle was a short child with a head that was just a bit too big for the rest of the humanoid body. Its face was a blank piece of bark, save for a small hole that was probably meant to imitate a mouth. Flowering vines streamed from behind the bark, flowing down the shoulders of roots in a mimicry of hair. In its hands it held a piece of land with a small bush growing out of it.

The third being was a bit harder to spot, as it stood in the darkness behind the blank-faced child and the tentacled turtle, but as Leawarra moved the torch a little the light revealed its short likeness. The moss-covered head had a small beak, two circular indentations for eyes, and two horns at the top of its head, bearing some passing reminiscence to an owl. The short torso crouched on short bent legs, while two pairs of small arms grew at the sides and a massive bushy tail extended behind the creature.

“Don’t worry. This happens in tribe.” Leawarra said.

He was not at all reassured by that, considering what she had told him about the ways of her tribe, but he kept still and silent, just observing the roots move. His {Spring of Crystal Thoughts} was a conscious thought away and he had to keep himself from using it. Leawarra stabbed the torch into the ground and went to her knees, words crossing her lips in a whisper.

Behind his back, Tercius felt Lucky stir from sleep. Tercius patted the beast’s side gently, smoothing out the short hairs of the underbelly. He whispered to Lucky that all was well and that he should sleep on, words of assurance which soothed him in turn and kept his mind away from the root-tentacles that covered his legs.

What exactly were these beings? Spirits or just quasi-sentient plants? What were they doing? What did they want? His energia? The seal on his Well was tightened just over a day ago and it should work perfectly for fourteen days at the very least…

“You must have… Skill, one that grows?” Leawarra asked.

“Ahh… yes. Why?” he whispered.

“You soon understand. Stand, but slowly. The roots won’t hurt you,”

Tercius’ breathing was deep as he gently and slowly shimmied himself from under the living root cover. Standing on his two legs eased a burden off of his shoulders.

“Use the Skill on that,” Leawarra pointed at the hands of the blank-faced child.

“Is this… one of those offerings you spoke of?”

“Like that, but… Sometimes, the Holy Ones come and seek… the shaman to grow things for them. Plants. Trees.” Leawarra explained in a low voice. “Sometimes they choose someone else to do it. It is great blessing and sign that Verdant Heart thinks of you with favor. So go. Grow.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, what exactly will happen—”

“No time for words. Just use the Skill on that,”

“Now wait a moment, Leawarra,” he whispered. “I should at least properly understand what is going on, before I—”

“Go!” Leawarra hissed in a low voice and gave him a small but firm push towards the trio of beings.

Tercius stumbled forward, trying to avoid stepping on any of the moving roots. He glared over his shoulder at the painted face of the red-headed woman, but then he turned around somewhat resigned.

Just grow it, Tercius.

Just approach three strange beings that appeared in the dark of the night in the middle of a forest and grow a shrub.

Some part of him suddenly wondered if he had fallen asleep and he was just experiencing this in a dream. There was that vivid dream back in Spheros that had seemed almost life-like. It wasn’t until he woke in the bed that he realized that he had been sleeping. Maybe this was like that.

He took two steps forward and crouched to the level of the short beings.

“So… I just… grow this?” he asked.

The tentacled turtle moved slowly to the side, revealing a hole below it. The blank-faced child moved slowly and lowered the bush into the hole, and the owl-head pointed at the bush with all four rodent-arms.

“I’ll take that as a yes,”

Leawarra brought the torch over, illuminating the hole and the sapling in it.

Tercius took a deep breath and threw a few glances at the beings as they moved back. His hands tentatively encircled the tree sapling and a sense of surging vitality charged his {Green Hands}. His palms gently moved over the sapling’s tiny leaves and the plant started to visibly shiver in the flickering torchlight.

The roots grew slowly and dug into the land, affirming the slowly growing trunk. The sapling grew one slow minute at a time, from the length of a finger to the length of a palm.

“I need water,” Tercius said to Leawarra. “Can you bring me—”

One of the roots of the tentacled turtle slowly moved and came to the hole and water started dripping out of it.

Tercius glanced at the three beings. Just how much did they understand human speech? Or was it that they saw that the tree needed water to grow more?

His hands held onto the sapling and it grew from a palm to two palms. At some point, Leawarra said that the torch was nearing its end and he was left in partial darkness as she went to make another one. As minutes turned to hours and the sapling continued to grow, the shell on the tentacled turtle's back continued to deflate inwards, turning from a model of a hill to that of a dormant volcano.

A cacophony of bestial roars pierced the calm night, sending shivers down his spine.

Tercius’ head snapped to where the sounds came from and Leawarra turned the torch.

“No worry, khereshak,” Leawarra said. “If they enter forest, they… gone,”

With a start, Lucky was up on his hooves.

“Lucky, come. Come. Leawarra can you point that torch this way?”

The frightened ram slowly came to him and Tercius patted the large muzzle soothingly. “Shh… It's fine, don’t worry about them,”

The roars got louder and closer, and heart-pounding moments passed. Then, just as suddenly as the roars came, they faded back into the night.

“Leawarra…” Tercius whispered. “Have you ever seen them?”

“No. I pray that I don’t. Few see dark ones and live,”

After Tercius calmed down the nervous ram and somehow managed to get him to go back to sleep, Leawarra urged him to return his attention to the waist-tall tree. Despite his urge for sleep, his grandmother’s lessons on optimal growth came to mind.

As the growing process was slow enough to give ample room for thought and creativity, Tercius started focusing more on growing offshoots off of the future tree’s main trunk. He used one hand to gently pull and bend branches to grow them the way he wanted while the other hand went along the bark and made his changes a little more permanent as the branch fattened from the width of a pinky finger to that of the thumb.

{Green Hands} [44] is now {Green Hands} [45]

The growth of the tree slowed and he noticed the signs that he should return to widening the roots and the trunk before he went further, so he did just that.

When the first rays of the sun came through the forest canopy, Tercius stood before a trident-shaped tree whose top reached almost the middle of his torso. The trunk was suitably wide and the base of a good tree was established. Tercius had gotten himself a bit carried away in his work, but he had no plans of growing it any further.

The tree was clearly in desperate need of some proper sunlight and not the replacement that his skill provided.

“All done,” he said to no one in particular.

The child, turtle, and owl moved slowly and silently closer to the tree, using hands, paws, or tentacles to touch the bark gently.

As one, all three turned to him.

“Kneel,” Leawarra whispered. “Trust me,”

Tercius looked at Leawarra and saw the urgency in her droopy eyes. It might be because he himself was tired and wanted to just get it over with, or because of the voice of his Mentor that spoke in the back of his mind advice for situations like these, or perhaps even because he did trust Leawarra a little bit, but he kneeled.

The three short beings encircled him slowly, each laying a limb or a tentacle on him. A groan of ecstasy escaped him as life itself filled his limbs and banished away all signs of soreness and tiredness.

*** *** ***

Word of a young stranger went through the forest village as a summer wildfire went through dry leaves.

Tales told by the men who had gone out to investigate the strange arrival in the night described the visitor as young and tall, but they warned the people to take care as the young man’s unmarked face painted an outlander.

Life in the village was hard and work was always plenty, but most days were dull and repetitive and many a mind was gripped by this passing anomaly. Some were disturbed by his presence in their sacred woods, others curious to see the reaction of the Holy Ones and their own shamans, their imagination going wild with possibilities.

By morning's arrival, be it young or old, the entire village was on its feet. Some of them clamored to go and see if Leawarra was alive and well, some out of genuine concern for one of their own, others using it as a mere pretext to go and see and learn more of this mysterious lowlander shaman. Some of them had strange ailments that needed a cure and saw an opportunity to seek help from someone who could give it to them, others had a daughter or two of marriageable age and sought to see if this young man might be a good addition to their family. If he proved well enough, regardless of his lowlander status or a lack of proper tongue as some tales spoke, then they would not mind giving him a nudge to put his roots in their forest.

A crowd gathered and grew, gathering courage and curiosity on a pile.

When the old shaman of the village woke, his two young pupils explained to him what had gotten so many people so excited and energized so early in the morning. Before long, he left his wooden longhouse, flanked by his pupils.

Too many tongues wagged all together and truth and tall tales mixed together, as such things were wont to happen when the mind of the crowd dulled to the intelligence of its lowest member.

Still, the words that reached the old shaman’s hairy ears were concerning.

A shaman of some other Divine was out there, in the Sacred Grove, and his people were on a path to see him, meet him, seek his help, and who knew what else.

The old man’s hairy brows furrowed as he stroked his long white beard and shook his head, the many trinkets of bone and wood so carefully woven into his white hair making a clamor.

“Where is Murrayn?” he asked.

“In his home, still sleeping like the dead,” a woman replied.

And so the old man slowly walked to Murrayn’s longhouse, his hunched back aching him with every step but he was too curious to see the work of this foreign ember that had his little leaves so aflame. As the woman said, Murrayn was asleep, his breathing regular. The pink scar on his leg was nothing big, but…

“Is my man going to be well, Elder?” one of Murrayn’s wives asked. “Did that stranger do something to him?”

“Hmm… It will be as the Verdant One wills. An offering or two in Her name would do no harm to your man.”

As the woman went to kneel in front of the household totem, the roots inside of him twisted with agreement and pleasure.

His eyes narrowed at the scar. “How deep was this?”

With hesitation, another woman of the hunter spoke. “We don’t know. It was like that when he was brought here,”

His sharp eyes surveyed the crowd. “Did anyone here see it when it was open and bleeding?”

Piece by piece, the old shaman collected the story from the people who followed him into Murrayn’s longhouse and he soon realized that these people knew very little of this visitor. He was tall, he was young, he had a giant ram following him, and he saved Murrayn’s and Leawarra’s life. What of his Skills, of his background? The people only speculated, wildly and loudly so.

He raised an open hand. “Silence!”

A hush fell over the longhouse, finally allowing him a moment to think.

The only person who would know the answers to his question was out there, with this visitor, in the Sacred Grove.

Closing his eyes, the old shaman reached out to the roots inside of him, and through them, his mind connected to the Sacred Grove. As always, he stood in awe of the sheer size and majesty of the slumbering forms of the Holy Ones. He first offered his respect and veneration and only when they acknowledged him, he asked his question to the trees. Soon enough, he got the answer where Leawarra was.

With a purpose in his step and a crowd at his back, the hunchbacked elder moved from the longhouse, through the village, and into the Sacred Grove. The forest's peace was disturbed by too many trampling feet, which made his face grimace in pain, but he knew that his little leaves were too taken by this foreign ember to turn them back.

No, he had to guide them close to this fire and keep them from being consumed by its words and tales.

Along the way, he received some disturbing news.

“The Holy Ones,” one man, who had spent his night observing the stubborn huntress, said. “They came to the outlander and Leawarra in the night. He… he grew a tree for them, Elder,”

This boded ill, the old shaman knew. An outlander favored by the Holy Ones? Which ones favored him?

The roots inside him were strangely silent when he asked.

He would have to see this for himself.

“If you want to follow after me, do so in complete silence. Understood?”

Grimacing with pains of age, the old shaman climbed up an incline and stepped around the exposed roots. At the top he stopped, waiting for his breath to return. As his old body struggled to do what it did with ease in years now past, his sharp eyes took in the scene.

Down below, on a small flat space was Leawarra, with her red braids and the dark green paints on her face that marked her as a Hunter of the Verdant Grove, so alike her beautiful grandmother that a mere sight at her took him back an entire age. Next to her was the beast they mentioned, a great ram so tall that its shoulders stood higher than any man or woman he ever saw. The corded muscles were visible under the gray hairs and the rectangular eyes were already observing him and the growing crowd that emerged up the incline. The outlander, tall and well-built and dark of hair, was sitting backward in the largest and strangest saddle the old shaman ever saw while adjusting bulging leather bags on the beast's back.

His sharp eyes searched and— He stopped dead in place. The trunk branched three ways and spiraled around each other, leaving plenty of space in the middle— The outlander grew all of that in a single night? That beardless boy grew that in a single night?

At the base of the tree were three small forms, forms which he last saw decades ago, back when he was only a pupil. Others would mistake them for a moss-covered rock or a bush, but he saw and remembered well enough.

The silence of the roots only confirmed it.

*** *** ***

Tercius was slowly packing his things and returning everything to its place on Lucky’s back when his neck crawled with cold shivers.

What was that? Or better yet, who was that? He continued tying the saddlebags in their place, but he discreetly looked around, blinking slowly.

“Why hurry?” Leawarra asked, passing him another bag.

"Because I have no time to lose," Tercius said. "I have to be somewhere in a few days, and I can't be late,"

“But I need—” Something stirred in the foliage on the hillside above them.

Standing there was a crowd of dozens, some of whom had come armed. Spears, bows, slings, and more were now above them.

“What the— Elder. What is… why is everyone here?” Leawarra gasped. “Did the Holy Ones call for you to come?”

As Leawarra turned to the side, every head that looked at them from above followed her gaze.

For a moment everyone stood still. Then, all as one, the crowd rushed down towards their clearing, falling on their knees as soon as they approached the tree. Spears, bows, slings, and more were now on the ground as the crowd had silent prayers on their lips and their palms placed together, their eyes firmly on the sleeping forms of the spirits that had made themselves comfortable below the tree he helped grow.

Lucky snorted and shook his horned head, clearly agitated by the presence of so many strange people. Tercius shared the same agitation even as he inwardly cursed. A little while longer and whatever this was would have been behind him and he would have been none the wiser of it. Whatever the goals of this armed assembly were, as far as he was concerned, they did not have anything to do with him. Nope.

Feeling a little drunk on that pleasant buzz that the spirits left him with, Tercius frowned and looked at the last of his things on the forest floor. Silently and carefully, he climbed down from Lucky’s back and then climbed back up to attach the final bags to their place.

One last look at the cleared forest floor and he nodded to himself. Nothing was left behind.

Well… Leawarra had still to answer his query, but something in him told him that waiting for the answer was not a good option.

Tercius tugged at the reins, turning Lucky northwards.

“No, wait! Tercius!” Leawarra shouted and ran to Lucky’s side. “The… old one… he wants to speak to you,”

“Leawarra, I really have to go…”

“No, no. Just short talk. No more,” she said and leaned forward, giving him a meaningful look. “Trust me,” she whispered.

Tercius frowned. With a single squeeze at Lucky’s sides, he could be off. But would he leave the forest?

In the group that came, there was likely a person— or more of them— who was in contact with the spirits of the forest. If that person didn’t want him to leave, then he would not leave it no matter what he had to say about it. Even thinking that he could leave, showed that the buzz the spirits left him with was having some influence on his decisions.

Tercius nodded and dismounted. “Lucky, stay.”

The people had sat on the ground in concentric circles around the tree, with plenty of space in the center, where a hunchbacked old man stood just a little bit away from the sleeping spirits, who seemed to have no care, or perhaps no awareness, of the multitudes of humans that surrounded them.

If nothing else, Tercius would like to have some of that confidence or ignorance the spirits had. Now he had to fake it.

"Good wood," the old man said in a thick accent, slowly turning his way. The old man's hair and long beard had dozens of tiny leaves of what looked to be bones and wood and the old man seemed to shake his head on purpose to make them collide. Like all faces in the crowd, his was also painted with lines of some dark green pigment.

“Thank you,”

“Good Skill. Strong,”

Is that what this was about? Tercius remained silent, but he gave a small incline of his head in response.

The old man pointed at Lucky. “You trade?”

“The ram is not for trade, no,”

The old man’s hawk eyes blinked and then the corners of his hair-covered mouth quivered. “Not beast. Goods. Metal. Tools…”

“I…” Tercius nodded, “may have something,”

“We trade then.”

The hunchbacked elder moved and waved for him to follow. They moved through the circle of people that looked at them with inquisitive eyes, some of them whispering to their fellows. Some among them only had eyes for the tree and the spirits below it, prayers on their lips.

“You travel alone? Hunters and traders always go in two or three or more. Keep safe that way.”

“I have Lucky with me,” Tercius pointed at the ram. “He’s my number two,”

“Great beast, yes. Strong. Useful.” the old man nodded appreciatively. “Travel far?”

“Far,”

“Leawarra,” the old man nodded to the redhead, “said you asked for guide north?”

Tercius threw a glance at Leawarra. She was observing them intently. “I asked her if she wanted to. She seems… trustworthy. She’s capable with the spear, I saw that much. She knows the land and the language. But she will have to find her own way home. I told her that as well.”

The old man nodded. “Guide to Balvarak, from where Deep One shakes the land? To Onyae, where Feathered One observes blue skies?”

“I don’t know the name of the place, but I know where I must go,”

The old man hummed and stroked his beard. “Leawarra… are you agreeable with this?”

“Elder, I need to go see Murrayn first,” Leawarra replied with haste, “but yes I am,”

“So eager…”

“I want to go into the world, Elder, as my mother and father did. You know that.”

“So I do…” the old man sighed. “Just be careful you don’t end up like them.”

Leawarra looked down, suddenly downcast.

The old man turned to him. “If you have enough to trade for her hands, she goes. If not…”

Tercius took down the things he brought along to trade with and the old man started bargaining on the spot, pointing at the things he wanted. Just as they started, Leawarra ran off into the forest. Other people also came by, looking at things Tercius had to offer.

She was back seemingly an eternity later, in the time of which Tercius ended up giving over the two pots and two healing potions to the old man.

The old man spit into his palm and extended it his way.

With a face of stone, Tercius mirrored the symbolic conclusion of the deal.

“He paid until Withering Day, Leawarra. If you want to stay with him after that, that is your business,” the old man said to her and she nodded.

“Now we traded and I don’t know your name…” the old man said.

That question started the deluge. Old people seemed to want to know everything about him. He evaded what questions he could and tried to be as vague as possible in what he couldn’t, completely forgoing outright lies. Eventually, the old hunchback stopped asking him personal questions, but then he insisted on a village-wide morning meal to send off Leawarra.

“Thank you, but perhaps at another time,” Tercius said. “We should really get going,”

Leawarra ran to him and grabbed him by the arm forcefully. “Offer of eating never refused.” she hissed into his ear. “Great insult.”

What kind of a stupid rule was that? “I meant no—”

“No words!” she said and moved to stand before him. “Elder, he does not know our ways,”

Horrified, Tercius took a step back. The old man’s eyes shone like white suns and thin green roots started peeling off of the facial paint. As the translucent roots moved away from the face they swelled in thickness.

Men and women started getting up and approaching to stand behind the hunchbacked elder, weapons in their hands.

Tercius took a few slow steps back towards Lucky.

“He disrespects our people, Leawarra. He insults me.” the old man said, a familiar deep echo to his every word.

“Please, Elder, calm yourself. He’s an outlander.” Leawarra said. “They likely don’t even know what hospitality and respect are.”

The old man took deep breaths, the roots slowly retracting back and disappearing. "So he is..." The glow to the old man's eyes disappeared. “We spoke. We traded. Now you go.”

Tercius swallowed and nodded. He glanced at Leawarra and she glanced at the old man.

“You go alone.” the old man said.

Without protest, Tercius packed his things and climbed on Lucky. With a squeeze at the ram's sides, they slowly started moving. The sizable mass of muscles moved and left hollow thumps of split hooves on the forest floor. Behind him, shouting started.

For a brief moment, Tercius considered just urging Lucky to go faster, but the woods ahead were full of dense and wild growth and both he and Lucky could easily get mangled by a branch or something.

Worse, galloping away might seem as if he was running away from them. To some of those minds, seeing him run away like that would be all the justification and pretext they needed to get bold and act on their own desires.

So, instead of reacting to their shouts in any way, Tercius swallowed his agitation and pushed it all down, using all he had at his disposal to keep Lucky at a trot when the great beast wanted nothing more than to bolt.

“Put that down!” Leawarra’s loud shouts came above those of the crowd. “No! Don’t! Elder, tell him!”

He turned to look back at what the commotion was about, only to see a small dark object grow bigger— the world went dark and a wave of cold weakness ran from the side of his head and down his entire body.

Shouts. Screams. Bleats.

The world was spinning and jumping and moving through a blur and he was spinning and jumping and moving in it, but he held onto Lucky with his legs and one hand. He painfully blinked the red away and grimaced and shook his head and it still fucking hurt. He separated the hand that cradled his half-shut eye and it came back red and sticky.

Wind and branches whipped at him as Lucky galloped and Tercius barely leaned forwards in the saddle and bowed his bobbing head low.

His bloody hand covered his open eye at the sudden blinding light.

The eye peeked open and saw trees no more. The morning sun was straight ahead, large and blinding.

The hand that gripped the reins pulled, trying to change the direction of the galloping beast. “No… no… Lucky… we must go… north…”

The words were hard to speak and a bit slurred. His head was swaying and he found it hard to pull the reins.

Tercius reached for {Distant Mind} and the pain went away as darkness descended.

The blurry veil that covered his mind out there was still with him here, but here it melted away somewhat— at least just enough to regain the capacity to realize what he had to do to get better. He waited for a moment longer before he released the Skill and the hand that gripped his head reluctantly moved to his neck and found the string. Following it, he found the vial at its end and brought it up for his teeth to unplug. The bitter liquid went down his throat with a groan, while half of it spilled down his neck and over his hand.

The deep thumps of Lucky’s hooves was all he heard as he called for {Distant Mind} to take him away again.

In the darkness he waited and felt better with each passing moment, a seething rage growing in him. It was not something that his Skill could dull. Over and over again, he saw that instant. The fuckers had thrown something at him, something small and dark, an object that had hit him just above the eye as he was turning around to see why Leawarra was shouting. If not for the stirrups and the wide saddle that were made to hold him in place well enough on their own, he might have fallen out.

Tercius waited, letting the potion do its work out there, before he let the Skill fade and the darkness of numbness be pulled back. Lucky was still galloping at full speed directly east and Tercius slowly re-established the {Teaching Bond} with the panicked beast before he set to correcting the course back north and then a bit west.

His Mentor had left him at the exact point from where he just had to travel north to reach the monastery and he knew just how many streams and rivers and deep canyons he had to come across and how to reorient himself according to those.

To spend the night at Leawarra’s village, he had gone off route east and he had planned to correct that, but now he had gone even further east.

He touched his forehead and felt the formed bump on his eyebrow. What his bloody hand didn’t feel anymore was the open gash. Be it from the potion or even that injection of vibrant magia that still made his entire body buzz oh so pleasantly even now, or perhaps a combination of both, the wound was already closed and his head felt much better, his vision completely clear.

"That's it," he said. "No more humans, Lucky. Fuck them and their safe shelters. We're making a cave tonight, you and I, just for the two of us. Let's see if two meters of stone are enough for us to survive on our own,"

*** *** ***

They moved at full speed for most of the morning, Tercius urging Lucky ahead as he wanted to put as much space between himself and those people.

By the time they reached a canyon-carving river somewhere around noon, Lucky was dead tired and thirsty and in dire need of some rest and recuperation.

They had gone straight through branches and hanging vines and neither of them came unscathed. The ram had blood trails all over him. Although the bump on Tercius’ eyebrow was gone and the scrapes on his arms and chest and face were mended, his shirt and pants were torn and despite spending hours taking them out when he saw them, he still had thorns all over.

Tercius’ narrow eyes scanned the forested surroundings of both sides of the canyon, his hands on the reins but ready to slip to his thighs and the knives there. They were in the open here on the cliffside, but this was a good spot to make a stop. One side was completely cut off by the wide gash in the land and as far as he knew, nothing in these parts of Izmittor could make that kind of a jump.

All he had to worry about was his side and the open skies. The sun alone was still a problem, but not as much as it was yesterday. Here at least he had trees and bushes to hide under. Neon-green veins covered his eyes and he searched the surroundings once more. Feeling a bit calmer than before, he slipped out of the saddle and took off a coil of rope, letting Lucky graze with a little less burden on his back.

They needed water— and a lot of it— to sate thirst and to wash the blood.

Plenty of fresh water was right below them, but the canyon’s stone walls were almost completely vertical and lined with jagged teeth that pointed straight up. There was no going down there, not even for Lucky the Cliffscaler.

Perhaps, with some rope and something like a stone amphora, he could fetch water while Lucky masticated on the foliage. He rummaged around the surroundings and collected a pile of stones, then sat at its side, his fingers sinking into the stone as {Stone Shaping} worked its magic and moved the stone around, leaving the dirt to fall behind. The amphora he made was rough work, with finger-marks all over it, but it was good enough for him. Tercius tied the rope around the neck of his creation and hefted it up.

“Oof—” As gently as he could, he lowered it back down. “No… this won’t work. I need to trim some fat off of this thing…”

He kept thinning the walls and then even reducing the initial size until the amphora lost more than two-thirds of the weight. Slowly, he lowered his creation and as the amphora plunged under the pull of the river, the cord tightened and pulled at him. Tercius pulled it back, only to find a nasty surprise.

The bottom of the stone amphora was gone, the jagged edges cracked as if something smashed them.

Tercius’ face fell. “I should make it more shallow…”

Just getting water for him and Lucky’s needs was a hassle that took him upwards of half an hour.

All the while he kept thinking just how much it would take him to make a proper defensible shelter for the night and the answer was at least half a dozen sun-lit hours— hours that would have been better spent traveling.

By avoiding humans and their shelters, he would extend his journey by a day at least. Still, even as he considered that, Tercius did not for one regret his decision one bit. He would get through this on his own.

At least he was back on the right track towards the monastery.

Finally clean of blood and potion, his belly filled with biscuits and water, Tercius sat on the grass and heaved a sigh as he looked at the other side of the canyon.

The wide canyon and river inside it that went from east to west was a feature that was present both on the map he had been given and then further described in the books he read. The river was created out of numerous smaller rivers that all started somewhere in the glacial mountain lakes of central Izmittor and ended in the ocean. According to the map, the wide canyon only had a few spots where he could attempt to cross it by mundane means. At these narrow points, Lucky was supposed to be able to jump over— if no erosion of the ground occurred in the past few millennia.

One of the alternatives he had was following the river all the way east, up into the central mountain range, and then cross the smaller tributaries one by one.

Another alternative was just telekinetically moving himself and Lucky across the gaping wound in the earth.

The last option was the easy one, but his Mentor warned him to be careful with using telekinesis in these mountains, far more than he should be careful of using Skills like {Magia Sight} or even energia itself. Active use of magia and energia would get him the undivided attention of spirits and clergy. Active use of telekinesis would get him an instant death sentence.

Tercius sighed. Decisions, decisions…