A ripple in fate can have far-reaching effects that are impossible to predict. Unfated are such a ripple, which is why I find them so fascinating.

~Balor, The Primordial God of Chaos

Crow woke up in bed, with a warm naked body pressed against him. It’d been quite some time since he’d slept that deeply, but Mad Mara was insatiable. Two whole days they practically spent inside this room. He definitely didn’t hate this feeling.

Mara’s skin remained soft and smooth despite their rough living, travel, fighting, and more. Staring at her sleeping face, with the dusting of freckles and messy strawberry-blonde hair covering half of it, he smiled. She was beautiful, but not in a way that would place her on any list, but Crow felt her allure went deeper than the shape of her body. She was the kind of girl that people talk about when they reminisce about the one that got away. Crow wasn’t going to live with that kind of regret.

He gasped as he felt Mara’s hand grab his manhood, and his reaction caused her body to shake with laughter. She didn’t stop there, and soon her soft moans weren’t enough to express her passion, and Crow had to muffle her mouth with his own. By the time they climbed out of bed to get something to eat, the sun was almost directly overhead.

Exiting the inn, more than a few people were giving them strange glances. Mara pretended not to see them, but Crow wasn’t completely able to hide his flushed cheeks. The amused patrons could only shake their heads. They spent the next hour at a café with an outdoor patio. They knew it was time to go, but they tried to squeeze every bit of enjoyment out of the time they had.

“Where do you think they are all going?” Mara asked, pointing at the groups of twos and threes heading toward the town square.

“No idea, let’s follow them,” Crow replied and dropped a few coins on the table before getting up.

At the center of town, there was a dried-up fountain that had its own legend. Crow didn’t fully know what that legend was, but he’d heard tidbits of conversation about it. Supposedly, the water that came from it could heal. However, none of the mortals still alive today had ever seen a single drop of water in the fountain. Even when it rained, not a drop of water could be found on it.

A man stood on top of the stone ring that circled the fountain and used his hands enthusiastically as he projected his voice, regaling the crowd with a story. The shock on Crow and Mara’s faces would have caused the storyteller to laugh hysterically had he seen them.

“…and then this evil Crow swooped in and stole all the treasure. It left the poor hero heartbroken. Why would the hero’s friend, Mr. Crow, betray him? Was there an enmity so great that he’d curse the hero with a horde of ghosts? Even left the man to die in such a horrible place.”

“The skin on this son of a bitch!” Mara scowled angrily.

“What happened next? Did the evil Crow and the hero’s faithful Cow get away?” A girl, no more than ten years of age, asked.

Mara’s fists clenched, and her body shook, and Crow had to pull her back. But he couldn’t stop her from yelling. “What about the perverted jackal filled with deceit and lies? I’ve heard this story before. Turns out the jackal lied to everyone, and they later found him gutted and hanging from a tree.”

“That’s true, the jackal—wait! There isn’t a jackal…” Acco paled and turned to look for an exit in a panic. He could see Crow trying desperately to hold Mara back and decided it was time to bolt.

“You dare call me a cow!? I’ll fucking kill you!” Mara roared, and Crow lost his grip on her as she plowed through the crowd.

Crow apologized to everyone as he chased after her. By the time he got through the crowd, Mara was already beating Acco to a pulp. At that point, Crow stopped running because he wasn’t about to stop her. If anything, he should help her. The only reason he wasn’t actively hunting Acco was that despite him stealing information, he never attempted to harm them.

“Nemesis! Make her stop! Please, I’m sorry.”

“You called a woman a cow. I’m not intervening. Even I have enough self-awareness to know you should never do that.” Crow laughed. “And why the fuck am I your nemesis? You stole from me—that makes you my nemesis.”

“Mrs. Cow—no, I mean—Ahhh!” Acco screamed. “Mara, I’m sorry, you are like a swan. A beautiful swan that has no peer.”

Mara’s punches slowed down.

“You two want to know a secret?”

“No,” Crow and Mara said at the same time, and Acco frowned.

“What kind of answer is that?”

“The smart kind,” Crow and Mara said simultaneously once more. Both looked at each other in shock and amusement.

“What the hell is happening?” Acco cried out. “Dammit, maybe you two should have been Astrologers instead of me.”

Crow froze. He was well aware of all the major nations and had a rough estimate of their abilities. So he knew their ability to coordinate was on a different level than most people. One such ability was the power to teleport. Was that how this bastard was bypassing formations?

As soon as the question popped into Crow’s head, he dismissed it. It might get him past a barrier, but formations were usually more formidable than that. Even if he could get past a barrier, a lot of the places they’d visited had multiple layers of traps. Things that were sensitive to mana fluctuations and even guardian beasts. Simple teleportation couldn’t get around all that. He probably had—

“Don’t overthink it,” Mara said, guessing Crow’s method of processing. “Astrologers are good at prediction. Which is helpful for low-level places like the tombs here, but unless he actually learns formations, his ability will be useless on higher floors.”

“That isn’t fair,” Acco was about to protest but then saw Mara raise a fist and shut up.

“Why didn’t you teleport when she was chasing you?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Acco’s grumpy voice caused Mara to chuckle.

“Don’t pout like a baby,” Mara taunted.

“Go away, co—ootie. Yeah, cutie. Time for you to go.”

“He isn’t wrong. Guards are coming,” Crow said. “And Acco, if you really are an Astrologer, you should probably not head back home.”

“We need to go,” Crow said, seeing some guards approaching them. “And Acco, if you really are an Astrologer, you should probably not head back to your people.”

“Trying to scare me?”

“No. Hex Vodun overran your Keystone, and forced them to retreat.”

Acco’s body deflated. “Is… is that really true?”

“It is.”

After a second, Acco’s eyes lit up, and his despondent attitude improved significantly.

“That’s great! Our Keystone, on the other side, is in a cave under the sea. It is protected by a void wyrm, so if they try to use the gate, they’ll end up on one of the three moons before they can even blink.”

Crow felt that Acco’s attitude was strange but couldn’t be bothered to understand the thief’s motivations. “Mara, let’s go.”

“He’s an idiot.” Mara climbed to her feet and dusted herself off.

“It’s fine. I’m just gaining experience until the Trial of Ascension. If my people already left this war, then all the better. I don’t have to worry about their safety.” Acco disappeared the moment he finished speaking.

“Told you, thick skin,” Mara said, seeing Crow was left speechless. Neither of them could really argue the logic, though. The Hex Vodun didn’t seem interested in invading through the Keystones, but Crow knew it wasn’t that simple. While there were other portals into the Basement of the tower, none of them were as stable as the Keystones, so they were angling to lock those down. But to what end?

They walked out of town, and the guards stopped tailing them.

“Do you think he is really an Astrologer?” Mara asked.

“I’m not sure. I thought they cultivated in groups, and those people were supposed to be closer than family. He really is a strange duck.”

They followed the road southeast along Skyfall but didn’t get far before Crow suddenly stopped. His strange movements even caught the attention of the guards who were still watching them.

His sight activated without him doing anything, and it left him disoriented. It was because it wasn’t through his own mind’s eye but through that of a crow—more than one. It was difficult at first to parse what he was seeing. Sometimes it was zoomed in from a singular crow’s viewpoint. Sometimes, he got a grasp of everything happening in the area through the eyes of multiple crows. Truthfully, it was nauseating, and he felt like puking but had no control over his body.

A town sprawled out before him. Its walls were decrepit and hadn’t been maintained in years. Still, it was a decent-sized place and much larger than the town he just left. Men lined the walls wearing black and silver tabards over their armor, but Crow had never seen their crest before.

Against the eastern wall, the Vodun Hex, with their undead army, tried to push their way into the city. On the western wall was a horde of beasts, but Crow couldn’t determine their level of power. An army of humans rode up from the south riding on a type of beast that he recognized. Those were the Jagged Stone Crawlers, lizards with rock-like skin that made them hard to notice in the southwestern desert where the Druid Order’s Keystone was. However, he didn’t recognize the army itself.

Oddly, no one went near the northern wall. Defenders and attackers avoid it like crazy, but Crow couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. A fluctuation in his vision gave him some awareness again, and he knew this was seeing a potential future. He could feel the energy coming across time and space, even sensed that the events occurring would happen no later than a month from now, probably sooner.

Crow felt at odds with this future because it didn’t feel like an outcome, and it wasn’t a warning either. If he had to point out what bothered him the most, everything felt too clean and organized. It was the corpses that terrified him the most. The sheer number of dead beasts, humans, and even undead was alarming. What is happening?

Mara grabbed his face and turned it so she could see into Crow’s eyes. His green irises were almost entirely golden at that moment, and in that golden light, she glimpsed into his vision.

Acco had decided to follow the two sneakily. He was curious why they continued to cross paths because he honestly wasn’t following them around on purpose. Almost every time he encountered them, it was pure coincidence, or it would have been if it hadn’t occurred nearly a dozen times. Seeing that they stopped, he teleported right next to them and saw the lovey-dovey embrace.

Snorting in disgust, he called out, “break it up, you two! We are in public.”

Since they ignored him, he tried to pry them apart by grabbing their shoulders. However, after touching them, he instantly felt the space and time mana channeling through Crow. More specifically, he felt the space mana because it forcibly activated his Source.

Acco had only felt this kind of feeling with the Stars of his Constellation, which was the group he grew up cultivating with. That bond between the Stars, which formed the Constellation, came from their spatial compatibility. There was no way to easily describe the technique of Astrologers, but it was like when they cultivated and fought, they shared a mind space. It was how they coordinated because they could sense each other’s movements and attacks before they were even initiated. That included the small hops through the void.

The reason Acco avoided Mara’s question was that fate dealt him a raw deal. Rarely, an Astrologer will lose all the bonds they formed with their Constellation. They even had a name for it—the Dark Star. Astrologers all believed that Dark Stars were bad omens, so Acco left before they bullied him. Afraid they might even resort to murder. Only his mother cried or even showed sympathy, and his father gladly escorted him to the Keystone.

None of that hurt as much as being shunned by the Stars of his own Constellation. Not one of them said goodbye or wished him well, which left him feeling soulless for the last six months. Fate was ruthless, and now it was taunting him by forcing him to form a new Constellation with two people that weren’t even Astrologers.

Never could he have imagined that Crow was a Seer and a powerful one at that. The power of a Seer didn’t come from within but came from beyond the heavens. The energy used to grant a vision was far greater than the combined power of their Sources. Even with Shields, they couldn’t come close to conjuring that much energy.

“Aww fuck, nemesis! I hate you—”

Pop!

A sound like thunder echoed over the area because of the air displacement as the three of them disappeared. All that was left was a small semi-spherical divot on the ground. The guards watching them from the edge of town stared in shock. And then all was silent.