With a flex of {Stone Shaping}, the entrance of stone fell away. Squinting at the sudden light, Tercius raised a hand to shield his eyes.

Lucky stirred, immediately jumping to his feet and rushing past Tercius, who had to jump to the side to avoid being trampled.

The late afternoon sun, a blazing ball that had only a couple of hours to set behind the western mountains, revealed so many changes. He had evidently slept through a sizable chunk of the day. There was no point continuing north today, not when he was so low on water, food, and daytime. The humanoid piles of ash, each one positioned exactly where the corpses were last night, were reason enough to only travel in the sun.

With rapid steps, he left the cave and strode out into the light fully. It was difficult to walk so much after five days of near-complete physical inactivity, but he was determined to wait no longer. The first thing he did was take a chunk of the stone from his entrance and make a large stone basin.

In it, he poured most of his remaining water.

Tercius stared, his green eyes wide open and glued on the pale and filthy stranger that looked back from the deadly calm pool of water. When he blinked, the stranger blinked back. There was a mark between his brows now, a strange-looking burn that had yet to heal.

His hair, for some reason, seemed so much longer than what it should be. Half of his forehead was covered in dark, slightly wavy hair, while the tips of his ears were completely covered.

It was like three or four months of hair growth had happened overnight.

As he washed away most of the grime from his cheeks, something else caught his eye in the reflection. One hand went over the fine hairs along his jawline and above the upper lip. Initially, he thought it was a smudge, but he now saw that the hairs there were no longer transparent, but rather as dark as coal. Looking a little bit better in the water, there was some definition to his face, a certain sharpness to his cheeks and nose and even eyebrows, that was simply not there just days ago.

"Did I spend five days in that cave or five years?"

The question came with some alarm, but also some morbid curiosity. Like Perdinar said, it was likely energia’s fault— or rather his fault. He often minded the ways his growing body kept getting in his way, and it was likely that energia was responding to that idea to some degree. He was aging himself, if only so his physical age was more closely to his mental one. The discrepancy had bothered him since he was a baby, but now seeing this happen, he had many questions and worries.

At thirteen, he had looked like a young fifteen-year-old, but now with the wisps of facial hair and sharpened features he might pass as sixteen or even seventeen, if he stretched it. If he continued messing with larger than normal amounts of energia like he intended, what if he ended up becoming a thirty or forty-year-old man in just a couple of years?

That was not going to fly well with the people around him…

Scrubbing just his hands and face polluted almost all of his remaining drinking water reserves, so a trip back to the canyon was inevitable. Perhaps a swim and a more thorough wash there would rid him of the caveman look. The darkness of the cave had been a blessing, for he was not sure if he could stomach eating anything with hands as dirty as they were.

Tercius glanced at Lucky. The ram was happily munching off a small tree, just outside the cave. He looked down at his pants and his lips curled. A rather sizable chunk of one brown legging was missing. The voracious eater was not picky about what he chewed on.

The trip back down to the canyon and then up through the forest to his cave was a tight one, but he still managed to bathe off the filth and smell in the freezing waters, fill up all of his waterskins, and return in time to close his cave just before the last rays of sun disappeared. The cold was biting deep, but he forced himself to use the thinner spare clothes he had in reserve while the washed clothes and blankets dried on a wall, near the fire he prepared in his cave. Lucky had protested returning back into the cave so much that Tercius had to lure him in with his favorite treats and then give the ram some of that special sleep medicine.

Then, finally clean, fed, properly sated, and free of any immediate obligations, he returned to the void of {Distant Mind}.

“There you are, mortal!” the spirit chirped from his small sphere, broadcasting the message everywhere through the darkness. “Where have you been?! Zerakronoz has been summoning you for some time now! You are to attend Zerakronoz immediately when Zerakronoz calls!”

One dark tendril reached into the clouds. “I heard no call…”

“Zerakronoz will not suffer for the likes of you to ignore Zerakronoz!”

“I was not ignoring you, Zer. I was—”

“Blasphemy! You will speak Zerakronoz’s name as is proper! Zerakronoz will suffer none of this abominable desecration of Zerakronoz’s most glorious name!”

If Tercius had eyes, he would be rolling them. “Yes, well… In regards to your summons, I truly have no idea what you are talking about,”

“Human, you will let Zerakronoz speak or Zerakronoz will—”

“Let me guess. Revenge by lightning that will painfully transition to my eventual death. Did I get it right?”

The bird paused, as if assessing something. Then it swelled up, filled with offense. “Zerakronoz can feel that mocking! You better take care, mortal! Zerakronoz will not be addressed in this way!”

“You’re right, I’m sorry. But what’s really bothering you, Zer? You can tell me. I am your attendant now.”

“Attendant comes when Zerakronoz summons!”

“But I didn’t hear you calling.”

“Zerakronoz cares not for your mortal deficiencies! But you will be here when Zerakronoz calls, or there will be a reckoning of—”

Tercius couldn’t resist another interruption. “Thunder and lightning?”

“Yes! And rain!” the bird chirped.

“I figured.”

“Mortal, there is a grave problem afoot! One that must be addressed immediately!”

“What, was there a spirit trying to infiltrate the Well?”

Zerakronoz deflated like a disappointed balloon. “No… not even one. And Zerakronoz is so hungry after spending so much of Zerakronoz…” Suddenly the spirit’s attention snapped back to Tercius. “You, mortal! What kind of an attendant are you? Why aren’t you feeding Zerakronoz already?!”

The spirit really wasn’t the brightest star in the sky, was he? Not even a mediocre one… “I was never taught the prayers for your kind… I only know the ones for Divine Balance…”

The bird thoughts came off like a scoff, but then they all stilled as the full weight of Tercius’ thoughts sunk in. “You don’t know how to pray to Her?! How is Zerakronoz to eat then?! What kind of an attendant are you?!”

"The uneducated kind, Zer. But you picked me, remember? You can't complain about my ignorance. And what's the grave problem you mentioned, if not the baby spirits?"

The bird brooded as dark clouds emerged in its personal sphere, all of them filled with worry. Finally, with immense hesitation, it spoke, “Zerakronoz… Zerakronoz can’t speak to Her… Zerakronoz tries and tries, but… nothing happens.”

Happiness surged through Tercius as one worry of his fell away, but he kept the sensation well away from the spirit. “I see…”

“This has never occurred to Zerakronoz before…”

“You will think of something, I’m sure. Tell me, when you are here, can you still defend the Well? What if a wily spirit manages to sneak past you? Ohhh, I can just imagine the talk…”

In a puff of white clouds, Zerakronoz was gone, its personal space vanishing along with it, leaving Tercius' space in complete darkness once more. Tercius waited for a bit then his thoughts stretched out comfortably, reaching far and wide, only to reinforce the dark and thick net of enduring thoughts he wove and left there.

*** *** ***

Just to experience it in relative safety, just in case he needed to use it after, Tercius went ahead and used the {Spirit Pact}.

The universe seemed to expand into countless infinitely small fractals, then reconstruct in some special way. In front of him, the plumes of fire now danced in slow-motion. He tried moving a hand normally and it came along crawling. He observed his arm drag itself as he reached for a throwing knife.

While his arm and hand traveled over a half a meter of space, there was time now to observe the reflections of the fire in the knife’s polished side, to see the images of Lucky and himself. As his fingers curled around the handle, he felt the bare metal in his hand, he felt the way the grooves of the handle fit so nearly around his fingers. He did all that while counting.

Twelve.

With a mental push, the Skill’s effect left him.

He let his grip on the knife fall and he returned to the position he was in, only to repeat the entire process again.

Two, but very close to three.

It was a crude way to go about measuring it, but he had no precise measuring devices here. So, he concluded after a few more tries, for every real elapsed second, he experienced four. It was somewhere above four, but more precise measuring would have to wait.

He couldn’t help but think how powerful this Skill could prove in certain situations, even with the considerable on his magia. He could only imagine what it could do at higher levels… What if he could stretch out a minute into a day… Couple that with a focused {Distant Mind} and he could spend entire weeks or months in mere hours…

That thought alone was almost enough to tempt him to keep Zerakronoz forever…

*** *** ***

As the sun dawned and those creatures rushed to hide, Tercius prepared himself to finally leave the cave that he had spent nearly six days in. He dressed into his shabby-looking dried clothes, packed his things, and placed it all on Lucky back. He closed the entrance behind himself and he and Lucky were off.

Tercius guided Lucky through the rising forest for the entire morning and well past the afternoon, staying well away from troublesome-looking magia signatures, while always heading straight for the looming northern mountains. Instead of going through the forested valley, Tercius decided that it was time for Lucky to show his rock-climbing prowess. Without the trees to bother and impede them, the ram went up the steep gray and bare rocks with an ease that Tercius found on flat ground.

For an anxious half an hour, Tercius held onto the saddle for dear life and regretted choosing the route.

For his tenth night in the Izmittor mountain range, Tercius chose to make a cave at a hard-to-access place on the top of the mountainside. On the balcony in front of his shelter, he had a view of everything in dozens of kilometers and he used the sun and the view to reorient himself according to the map he had. There were no trees anywhere around his third shelter, but he had collected bundles of branches along the way and when the night fell and a bone-cutting wind started to sneak in through his air vents, he started a fire.

After the spirit disappeared, Tercius was left alone to contemplate the mess he was in and the mess he was just entering. Not a single one of those creatures bothered him that night. While their speed was not in question, none of them were very good climbers.

Well past midday on the eleventh day of his travels, Tercius saw plumes of dark smoke rising towards the blue skies in the thousands.