Sam’s eyes blinked open to the sound of hoofbeats, and he sat up in the burnt circle of grass. Guess I gotta spend a little while longer on this mudball, Sam thought. Sam peered in the direction of the sound and spotted twenty riders kicking up a cloud of dust in the distance, their faces partially obscured by the grass.

The men were in a word, unsavory. Sam dropped back out of eyesight and considered his options. He might be able to beat twenty men, on a good day. Sam had seen crossbows, though, and most importantly, he was missing about a foot of ass kicking appendages.

Sam’s eyes drifted toward the spider’s burrow. It made his skin crawl, but survival was the name of the game. Sam left his crook where it was and rolled over to the black hole in the ground, keeping below the line of sight. The sides of the hole were crunchy, and little cascades of dirt fell over him, but it held. Sam grabbed the blackened chunk of grass and closed it over himself, sealing himself in the black of the spider’s den, just as the hoofbeats began to reverberate through the ground.

“What’s this?” Sam heard a man say.

“These are gone too, like the other one. Got caught up in an elfstorm.”

“Is this a spare axle?”

“Don’t know, top looks like a crook.”

“Alright, let’s start loading this stuff up, we don’t get a free score like this every day.”

“Agh, I found the elves, They’re stinking up the wagon.”

“Everyone shut up.” A commanding voice markedly older than the others, cut through the din of robbers.

“You see this depression here, where you found the crook?”

“Yeah?”

“Boys, there was a survivor.”

Sam kept his breathing as quiet as he could, his heart hammering in his ears.

“A giant of a man, about seven feet tall… With a peg leg.”

“Someone like that, Sanctuary would pay double the usual finder’s fee.”

“Exactly. Spread out and look for his tracks, I hope I don’t have to explain to you what kind of impression a peg leg makes.”

The men chortled and followed instructions, while Sam braced his shoulders against the trapdoor. If someone stepped on it, he wanted it to seem as solid as possible. Sam spent half an hour poised like that, his back and shoulders gradually growing stiff and aching.

“This is odd, I can’t find his tracks, It’s like an eagle came down and swept him away. Gone without a trace.”

“When you get to my age, boy, you learn that the simplest explanations…”

The trapdoor lifted up, and Sam’s eyes burned from the sudden invasion of light. A length of steel was held to his throat while a grizzled man with rotting teeth smiled at him.

“Are the most likely. Hello sunshine.”

“Good afternoon.” Sam said, eying the blade.

“Climb on out of there, would ya.”

“Sure,” Sam said, hauling himself out of the dirt to stand two heads above the leader.

“You here least night when things went south last night?” The leader of the twenty odd men surrounding Sam stowed the sword away and offered him his hand with brash confidence. Easy to be confident when your men have crossbows leveled at the other guy.

“Name’s Dave.”

“Sam. And yeah, I was here.” Sam said, taking his hand.

“You catch a fever?”

“I did.”

“That ever happened to you before?”

“No.” Not this body anyway.

The man clicked his tongue and spat. “Seems unlikely, given your size. I woulda guessed you already Molted as a boy.”

“You should see the rest of my family,” Sam said, his eyes half-lidded as he looked down at him. He could use a bit of force to change the angles of the crossbows, but only the ones he could see… he hadn’t learned how to see without eyes, yet.

“Do you know what we want?”

“I assume you’re going to try to sell me to Sanctuary.”

“No try about it, boy, Sanctuary will pay your weight in gold to have you, even without the foot. You’re going to come with us, or I’ll gut you and leave you to die on the plains. Your choice.”

Sam snorted. “And miss out on my weight in gold? I bet you’d put up with a lot of trouble for a reward like that.” Sam saw a smile blossom beneath the man’s generous beard.

“Varas.”

Before the old man finished saying the word, Sam felt an impact on the back of his neck, and his vision went blurry. Sam stumbled, and he felt two men jump on his back and press him to the ground, their stinking breath wafting to his nose. Two more men held down his legs, while another two wrestled his arms behind his back.

In moments, Sams hands and feet bound behind him, forcing him into an uncomfortable position that strained his spine, folding him like a poor man’s sandwich, made with a single slice of bread.

Hours later, Sam was slung over one of their horses, his spine still twisted at an awkward angle. Sam spat out a tuft of horse hair and adjusted his face. This was cruel and unusual, considering they could have just put him in the back of one of their stolen wagons.

Sam entertained himself by talking to the outlaw’s leader, an older guy by the name of Dave Cadillac. They seemed to respect the fact that he had a family name he could trace back to before the fall of man (or he claimed he could).

“So Dave,” Sam said, trying not to let horse hair into his mouth. “Why’s Tyranus paying for people who’ve Molted?”

“Imagine you’ll find out.” Dave said, his eyes squinting against the glare of the sea of grass that spread out in front of him.

“Some kind of arms race with Mississippi I bet.” Sam said.

Dave glanced at Sam with furrowed brows, then looked forward again, his expression set in stone. Dave was a bad conversationalist.

“How many days to Hope at this rate?” Sam asked.

“We’ll be there soon enough, it won’t do you any good to fret about it.” Dave reached out and tousled Sam’s hair, or he tried. Sam bit down the impulse to wipe the smile from his face. Now that Sam had identified pride as his defining feature, he was working to temper it with restraint and humility. Plus the look on his face when Sam kicked all their asses would be hilarious.

“Just curious. My destination was a bit farther, in the valley to the west of Hope. You guys must be saving me a week of travel time, at least.”

Dave guffawed and kicked his horse away, leaving Sam alone on the back of the sweating animal. It was getting in his mouth. Sam sealed his mouth shut and tried to breathe through his nose, but the smell became unbearable. Sam finally found an arrangement with his head tilted at an awkward angle, breathing through his teeth. Good enough.

Since he wasn’t actually walking, and he was fairly well strapped to the horse, Sam could go limp without any fear of falling, So Sam decided to work on his Isayatta. Sam closed his eyes and relaxed, and somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew he was going to wake up with a mouthful of horse sweat.

Sam opened his eyes, and he was standing on top of his Isayatta. The glowing ring was supported by another smaller one beneath it, forming the first link in the Channel. The Yuenan had swelled, the bright white ball of energy was roiling beneath his feet, and Sam looked away, a bit dizzy.

Sam couldn’t estimate exactly how much it had gained. It wasn’t dramatic, maybe between five and twenty percent, but things got odd when talking about volume. Sam held his hand out at arm’s length and compared the burning ball of light to his thumb. IT was about as wide end to end as his thumb was long. Maybe when Sam had time he would make some accurate measuring devices to use in this mind-space... if that was even possible.

Sam drew another ring of pure light from the Yuenan, and formed it into a circle beneath his latest, before binding them together with glowing strands of energy, making the beginnings of a tube. The bottom part of the Isayatta was like a straw, the closer it got to the burning ball of gas below him, the easier it would be to draw power, and the more concentrated that power would be.

The more Sam worked with the Yuenan, the easier, and more responsive it got. Sam had formed the latest ring with no sweat, and felt confident he could start working on the top of the Isayatta.

The top of this construction in his mind functioned a bit like a high-pressure nozzle at the end of an air hose, locking in pressurized magic power until Sam touched the top, unleashing a flood of magic all at once.

That was far more advanced though, so for now, Sam was simply laying the foundations according to Greg’s notes. Mostly. Thirty S4M units had studied architecture, so Sam felt confident he could engineer something better.

Golden beams of light with delicate seeming arches formed around a second ring that floated around his first, creating a frame for his pressure system. Sam capped his primary ring, sealing off his Isayatta. With a minor effort of will, Sam pressed down, and the entire structure sank, opening the flow between the second and first ring. Sam watched the glowing power from the Yuenan flow up, dissipating between the arches. From the outside, it would looke like the nozzle of an air pressurizer. It wasn’t actually pressurized, but it was the start of the kind of fine control Sam would need if he was going to master magic.

Sam Spent a good deal of time admiring his creation, making sure that every single part of it was as close to perfect as his mind’s eye could tell. In the middle of eyeballing the curve of the arch, Sam was overwhelmed by a yawn. A yawn in his imagination couldn’t be good. Maybe it was time to wake up, then get some actual rest.

Sam opened his eyes to the darkness of night pierced by a single, small flame with half a dozen men hovering around it. He lay on his side in the grass, staring at a fire with the faint taste of horse sweat in his mouth, with plenty of dust too. Sam spit, drawing Dave’s attention to him.

“Well, look who’s up. I’m amazed you were able to sleep like that.”

“I can’t feel my arm.” Sam said.

A kick pushed Sam onto his stomach and off his arm. “Better?”

“Sure,” Sam said into the grass, then closed his eyes and went back to sleep. Sam heard Dave swear to some god, but he didn’t bother listening to the rest.

The days went by quick, and Sam was able to progress to practicing some of the more difficult and energy intensive magics.

Sam hung his cheek over the horse’s shoulder, loosening the knots on his wrists while making some illusory rabbits for Dave’s men to chase. Illusions were a bit of an oddity, they were about the same difficulty to make either one person or everyone see the effect, but take that number to two, or three, but not the rest, and things became a juggling act.

“Over there!”

“It just went into its burrow!”

“I got it!”

If you got it, it wouldn’t still be running, dumbass!”

The highlight of Sam’s day was when he got two men to run headfirst into each other diving for the same rabbit. They hadn’t come across any more trapdoor spiders, although Sam was fairly confident there were plenty more to be had. Most likely the spiders were unwilling to come out when they heard a fairly large herd of horses and people passing by. They mostly ate stragglers.

Riding on the back of the horse, making sure his bonds weren’t tight enough to cause damage to his circulation, Sam had plenty of time to consider his escape. He had the memories of killing millions of people for reasons ranging from passion, to cold, merciless duty, but this Sam hadn’t killed anyone yet, not directly anyway. And Sam wanted to keep it that way.

There lay the problem. Magic was a huge advantage, But Sam didn’t know if he would be able to get away from twenty armed men without killing any of them. Then there was the fact they were hoping to sell him in Hope. Tyranus was unlikely to be the direct buyer, but Sam had made quite a splash the last time he’d been there, so it was a bit of a coin flip as to whether the buyer would recognize him.

Plus, Sam wanted to know more about why they were buying people who’d Molted. Was Tyranus just eating them as a side dish to the elves, or was there something more? Every strong country needed a strong army, and from what Sam had seen, Molting increased measurable performance indicators by a compound fifteen percent. Thanks S4MFL 01102. Or as Sam liked to call him, Florida-Secret-Experimental-Laboratory-Guard-Sam.

Fifteen percent might not sound like a lot, but in a race, would the one that went fifteen percent faster only win fifteen percent more? Hell no, they would dominate. Sam mused on that for a moment. That certainly explained that Maria woman, who seemed roughly three times stronger than her appearance suggested.

That would imply… eight Molts, give or take one.

So was Tyranus divvying the elves up, or having his disciples stand beside him while he ate them, letting them catch some of the magical backsplash?

Sam thought back to the tower in the center of the city. Come to think of it, he had the chills the first night he’d spent there. Did the building have a way of forcing a molt? Sam hadn’t seen, heard or smelled anything that would indicate to him that there might be elves being sacrificed regularly.

Sam recalled the softly glowing crystal in the walls of the tower. It was starting to seem like they may not have just been an aesthetic choice for night-lights. If Sam were to trace them back to their source, maybe he would find more captive elves.

Sam swallowed a lump of guilt. He hadn’t helped a damn person yet. he’d half-assed saving the two elf girls and they’d killed themselves, offing the slavers in the process. He hadn’t been able to help Faera, or save the girl in the Ungrin den. Now he had the choice between trying to save elves at the factory and saving elves in the city.

Lot of damsels, Sam mused to himself. Sam would have to keep his eye out for men in distress, but he had to consider the possibility that men were simply killed, not held hostage or taken as slaves. Sam’s attention was diverted from his musing when one of Dave’s minions came up beside him, panting and covered with a sheen of sweat.

“What’s the story on dinner?” Dave asked, looking down at the young man.

“Sorry, Dave, it’s like the rabbits around here were dropped here by Satan hisself to torment us.”

Sam giggled into the mane of the horse he was strapped to.

Dave fixed him with a murderous glare. “Something funny?”

“Nah,” Sam said, trying to fix his face. “Nope.”

Dave watched him for a moment longer before he addressed the young man with a chunk of nose missing.

“Quit wasting time and effort on the rabbits. If you were gonna catch ‘em, you woulda done it by now. Break into the stock in the wagons and see if you can find anything. If you can’t, slaughter one of the merchant’s horses, and we’ll make it last the rest of the trip. Also, get Gile to organize the night watch.”

The nostril impaired young man nodded, then cocked his head to the side. “Why Gile?”

“Cuz I think someone was having some fun with us this afternoon, tiring you boys out. They may be after our prize, here.” Dave said, casting a glance toward Sam. That old man was pretty sharp.

“Will do.” The lacky said and ran off.

“Can you untie me?” Sam asked once they were alone again. The steady sway of the horse felt like it was slowly grinding away his spine with the sharp edge of his shoulder blade.

“What kind of fool question is that?” Dave asked without taking his eyes off the plains, alert for danger.

“I give you my word I won’t attack any of your men or escape, all the way to Hope.” Sam said.

“I trust you about as far as I can throw you,” Dave said, spitting dust out onto the grass. “For a big guy like you, that’s not very far.”

“Huh,” Sam said, untying the knots around his hand with minor telekinesis. Using telekinesis without using your hands to direct it was a lot like writing or drawing pictures with the off hand. It could be done, but it was wobbly and messy. Anyone could do it with enough practice, however.

Sam sat up on the horse when Dave wasn’t looking and began to stretch. When the grizzled man’s gaze returned to Sam, his eyes widened, and he pawed for his weapon.

“Relax,” Sam said as Dave drew his sword. “I already promised not to kill you or escape. I decided there’s something I want to take care of in Hope.”

“Oh, so grateful your Majesty deigns to allow us to escort you to your destination. Now get off the horse.”

“just give me a second… to stretch…” Sam said, twisting his spine and stretching his arms with a yawn.

Dave took a swing at him.

Sam caught Dave’s wrist before the blow landed.

“Look, Dave, I’m perfectly happy to let you sell me to Hope, so-“

“Boys! The prize fish is loose and flopping around!”

The twenty odd men jumped Sam in a frenzy of punches and kicks, landing Sam in the same position he had been in half an hour ago, with plenty of extra bruises for good measure. And now he had a sack over his head. The stretching had been nice, though.

“Let that be a lesson,” Dave said, and Sam felt something land on the sack, presumably the old man’s spit.

“You’re making it difficult to respect the sanctity of life here,” Sam said. A boot made contact with his cheekbone. Sam suddenly began to wonder if he could move things inside of other things. The rocks he moved were inside of air, weren’t they? Could Sam tug a few well place blood vessels and give Dave an aneurism?

Must not kill them. Must not kill them, Sam chanted to himself while he felt the sack become sticky with blood from his forehead and cheek.

Sam spent the day trying to decipher a book another Sam had seen on the shelf at a lawyer’s office one time. It had described a technique elf mages used to see without their eyes. Greg had written about building a strong foundation as a mage, but he hadn’t mention sight without sight, so Sam was forced to pore over the handful of bargain store mumbo jumbo he’d seen in the past, in the mid twenty one twenties.

Use your mind as the screen, and your magic as the lens, allowing the world around you to come into focus through it. What the hell did that mean? Sam was stumped for while before he tried shaping the nebulous power inside him into a lens and holding it in front of his brain.

The sack on his head caught on fire.

Sam was able to loosen the bonds in time to drop to the ground and put his hair out before he took any serious damage to his scalp. Sam was rewarded for his efforts with another beating and being tied up again, this time with a leather sack over his head, rather than a burlap one.

Well, that was obviously not the right way to use your magic as a lens. Although it was interesting to note that it could be used as an actual lens, if the need ever arose.

After hours of trial and error, Sam had developed a sort of sensitive membrane that relayed images back to his mind. At first Sam could only perceive light and dark, but when he curved it, the image became more… Oh, son of a bitch.

Sam rolled his eyes under the hood, and began constructing an eye. Within an hour, he was seeing what was going on around him. Sam took some inspiration from goat eyes, and without a need for a nerve attachment, he was able to make an eye that could see in every direction at once. If it could be said to have a blind spot, it would be fractions of an inch away from the eyeball, where the six irises couldn’t see.

It was awkward and made Sam’s stomach churn at first, but it was undoubtedly useful. Sam added making night vision mode to his list of things to do. Sam’s head began to hurt when he tried to light Dave’s hair on fire using a lens while watching through the floating eye. It was more than Sam could handle at the moment. Sam added doing two things at once to his list.

Sam dismissed the magic and tried to relax against the horse, but his bruises kept him from getting any meaningful rest.