Juniper found Evie two days later, and breathed a sigh of relief that her friend hadn’t yet had her run-in with the masked ash snake.

Juniper kind of regretted not having asked Evie for a more detailed timeline on when she’d found the snake. For all she knew, Evie would only find the thing in the last few days of the thing. She didn’t mind hanging around her friend for almost two weeks, but Evie was bound to get suspicious before long.

It was also a waste of time. For every moment she followed Evie around like a lost puppy, Juniper exploring on her own. Though, there was no guarantee she’d find anything–most students didn’t after all.

It still rankled, not being able to take the lead or to contribute at all. If she did, she ran the chance of diverging too much from Evie’s original timeline, rendering all her waiting pointless.

Juniper breathed a sigh of relief two days later, when Evie stopped in her tracks and raised her hand.

“See this?” she asked, pointing at a translucent piece of debris on the ground.

Juniper squatted next to Juniper’s discovery, tilting her head quizzically. “Is that…?” she asked, though she had no clue what she was looking at. But she could guess from the context.

“Snake skin,” Evie said, nodding. “But do you see that gray cloudy pattern around the edges?”

“I see it. Does that mean anything?”

“I read somewhere that the masked ash snake’s shedded skin looks like this,” Evie said, eyes sparkling with excitement. “It’s fresh, too. There has to be one nearby.”

“How do you even know this?” Juniper asked, lifting an eyebrow. She knew Evie had tracked a rare snake, but she never considered how she might have achieved the feat. Apparently there was more to it than she thought.

“My family raises snakes,” Evie explained. “That’s how we made our fortune, originally.”

“I didn’t realize that was a thing.”

“Oh, it is. Do you have any idea how many species of snake there are? No, wait, don’t guess. It’s thousands,’ Evie explained, her eyes twinkling. “And most of them have some kind of use. Did you know the white angel snake has healing venom? It does.”

Juniper stared as her friend revealed to her a part of her Juniper had never known about.

“I didn’t know you liked snakes,” Juniper ventured.

“Kinda hard not to, when you grow up close to them,” Evie said. “Most other kids have puppies and kittens, but my childhood pet was a five meter long green tongued constrictor.” She smiled wistfully. “Ah, I miss little Rocky…”

Juniper was skeptical that a five meter snake deserved to be called little, but she kept that opinion to herself. “So, this masked ash snake is still nearby, you think?”

Evie nodded. “Yeah, the skin here is a few hours old, at most. There should be some other pieces nearby–it should give us a clue which way it went.” She paused, staring into the distance. “Abyss, if I could get a breeding pair of masked ash snakes back to my family…”

“We’ll find it,” Juniper assured her. She already knew Evie could find it on her own. Now that they’d found its trail, losing it was unlikely, and having two pairs of eyes looking around could only help.

As they searched, Juniper couldn’t help but scan the distance every once in a while. She couldn’t see anything, not through the dense forest, but she knew Drae would eventually catch Evie’s trail. If she could preempt that, somehow…

But Juniper never caught any wind of Drae or her group, and not long after, Evie found the second piece of snake skin.

“This one’s newer,” Evie declared after comparing the two pieces of shedded skin. Juniper hadn’t the vaguest idea what Evie had used to make that determination–they looked perfectly identical to her. But her friend was the snake expert, not her.

“So, it must have come this way?”

“Pretty much,” Evie agreed. “They usually travel fairly straight, so if there’s any more pieces of skin, they should be along this trajectory.” She pointed deeper into the forest.

“Let’s go find your breeding pair, then,” Juniper said with a grin, setting off in the direction Evie had shown.

“Abyss, I wish,” Evie said, chuckling lightly. “But that would be really unlikely. They’re rather solitary, you know?”

Juniper didn’t, but she nodded along anyway.

True to Evie’s prediction, the snake’s trail was easy to follow. Juniper followed behind Evie, keeping a vigilant lookout, but in spite of her worries, nothing looked amiss.

After a couple of hours of walking, Evie suddenly stopped, holding up a hand. Juniper walked straight into her.

“Shh!” Evie scolded, whispering. “It’s here.”

Juniper massaged her nose. “Where?”

Evie pointed to the root of a giant willow tree. “There. See the nest?” Juniper. “It’s a female–and it has eggs!” Evie’s eyes shone with excitement.

“How do we get them?” Juniper asked. They’d done half the work already–well, Evie had–but magical snakes were no slouches. Capturing either the eggs or the snake was bound to be difficult.

“It’s going to be tricky,” Evie agreed, looking thoughtful. “But not impossible. I’ll distract the mom–don’t worry about me, I know how to do it. Then, you come from behind and take the eggs. Muffled, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Juniper said, rolling her eyes. “But won’t the snake get mad when it realizes what we’ve done?”

“It will, so we’ll have to kill it,” Evie said. “One good blow to the head should do it. They’re not very strong.”

Juniper did a double take. “Wait, what? I thought you wanted to capture it.”

Evie shrugged. “The eggs are more valuable. Plus, I don’t think they’d let us with a live snake through the array. And anyway,” she gave Juniper a pointed look, “eggs hatch into snakes, June. I’ll get my breeding pair that way.”

“I know how eggs work,” Juniper grumbled.

Juniper gave her surroundings one last glance before putting the plan into motion.

It was pretty simple, as far as plans went, which suited Juniper just fine. Complex plans with many moving parts and dozens of contingencies had a tendency to go wrong in a way you never thought to plan for. Distract snake, steal eggs, bash snake in the head. Easy as pie.

The first two parts of the plan went smoothly–almost. Juniper nearly stumbled when she saw Evie’s idea of a distraction for the snake. She’d walked up to it, stopping about ten meters away, and then just… danced.

To Evie’s credit, the snake was absolutely entranced. It actually seemed to dance along, mimicking Evie’s sinuous moves.

Juniper loaded the eggs into her backpack, then left it on the ground as she slowly approached the snake from behind. She didn’t know what gave her away–with the muffling spell on, on top of her cautious movements, the snake shouldn’t have heard a thing. But as soon as she got to within three meters of the masked ash snake, it turned around, lunging at Juniper with its maw wide open.

Juniper threw herself to the ground, thanking the abyss she’d had the foresight to ditch the eggs first. The snake flew over her head, landing a few meters away. It slithered back to an upright position, then lunged again for round two.

Juniper braced herself, preparing to strike the snake with a blast of force as soon as it was in range of her hand. With the snake as fast as it was, it was a tricky proposition, but–

Suddenly, the snake froze over in the air. “Hit it, June!” Evie called out.

Before the snake could wriggle out of her telekinetic hold, Juniper delivered the final blow to the snake’s head. It fell limp to the ground as Evie released her spell.

“That was close,” Juniper breathed out.

“It was the vibrations,” Evie said, smacking her face. “I totally forgot about that. These kinds of snakes are sensitive to vibrations. So, even if you masked the sounds you were making–”

“It could feel me through the ground,” Juniper surmised. “Would have been nice to know beforehand.”

“I forgot,” Evie said with a shrug. “But it’s all good. We have the eggs now, and no one got hurt.”

“About that,” a new voice said, and Juniper and Evie’s heads snapped to the side to see Drae, Wayde and Nicholas appear from behind a tree. “No one got hurt yet.” Electricity crackled around her hand, making her point clear.

Juniper bristled at the implied threat. She’d known Drae and her posse to be cheats and thieves, but she didn’t think they’d ever be so blatant.

Juniper picked herself off the ground and considered the facts. It was three on two, with the three already familiar with violence. Juniper was too, after a fashion, but only in the mundane way. She’d never properly learned how to fight with magic.

Drae wouldn’t kill them–as much as it was considered that might made right, outright murder was one step too far. Juniper didn’t think Drae a murderer, anyway. She was a pragmatist who believed if someone was unable to hold on to a treasure, they didn’t have the right to keep it.

No, Drae would never go that far. But to beat them up and steal their things? Juniper guessed Professor Zaldia would even approve.

Their options, then, were either to give up the eggs, or to get beaten up and give up the eggs anyway. Juniper didn’t like the options, but the choice was clear. She opened her mouth–

“No,” Evie said, her voice cold. “Find your own treasures. This one is ours.” She glared at them with an intensity Juniper had never seen before. Was this the same cheery girl she knew…?

Well, now that Evie had made the choice for both of them, Juniper did her best to project an air of confidence. She didn’t know what Evie was planning, but Juniper didn’t want to be the reason her bluff was called.

The two groups stared at each other as the seconds stretched, the impasse seemingly unresolvable. Finally, Drae sighed.

“Right, then,” she said, the electricity around her hand crackling harder. “The hard way it is.”

The biggest hurdle for a Soul Connection stage practitioner was usually the lack of range. Luckily, Drae hadn’t been among the few to advance to Path Inscription yet, so when the surge of electricity reached out to Juniper, it was weak enough that she only stumbled a few steps.

Unluckily, the handful of seconds she needed to recover were enough for Wayde to plant his fist into her stomach, sending her careening into a tree, much like she’d done to the creep in the bar.

She had to admit, it sucked being on the receiving end of such a thing. Her body was reinforced compared to a mundane, so it didn’t do as much damage as it could have, but Wayde had not been holding back.

Juniper didn’t get to see much of the rest of the fight. By the time she’d managed to stand up, the three bullies had already ganged up on Evie.

She was out soon after, and Juniper watched the three as they disappeared into the forest with her backpack. She was back on her feet now, but she didn’t see the point in attacking them. What could she do alone that she couldn’t have done with Evie?

“You’re really not good at this,” Evie moaned as she picked herself up.

“What in the abyss were you thinking?” Juniper shot back. “We weren’t going to win that, and you knew it.”

“I was hoping you wouldn’t be dead weight,” Evie said, crossing her arms. She sighed and shook her head. “Nevermind. Sorry–I forgot you didn’t know how to fight.”

Juniper looked away. Now she was short the snake eggs and all her supplies.

She really should have taken that stupid combat elective.

***

Juniper and Evie split up after their humiliating defeat, on the premise that they could cover more ground separately. Juniper focused on searching away from any other people–if they’d found anything of note, she would have heard of it from Evie the first time around, so she figured she’d have more luck in the places left untouched.

Juniper found nothing, unless you counted a colony of jumping spiders that invaded her bedroll one night.

Oh, there were plenty of monsters, but none of any practical value other than the experience of fighting them–and after losing against Drae, Juniper wasn’t in the mood for another defeat.

After two tiring weeks, and with nothing to show for them, Juniper and the rest of her class returned to the academy.

On Monday morning, after a much awaited sleep in her actual bed, Juniper descended into the dormitory basement, ready to return to her study of Skystrall’s legacy.

She realized something was wrong as soon as she reached the entrance to the abandoned closet. The alarm ward she’d left had been tripped. A proper ward would have alerted her no matter how far she was. This one, though, was only really good enough to give her a small heads up when she was inside the room.

She entered the closet with trepidation. Just because someone had gone inside didn’t mean they’d found the book. She’d taken great pains to hide it even from a deep perusal.

She set each crate aside, until she reached the last one, where the book should have been.

Of course, Juniper should have known she wouldn’t be so lucky. Nothing was going her way this iteration.

The book was gone, and in its place sat a note. She recognized it immediately–it was one of Ghost’s.

It said, Bad luck this time. Try again?