“You’ve been gone longer than you may think.” The crimson bear leaned against me at the top of the thousand steps that led down to my village.

“How much longer?” A layer of fluffy white clouds lay below us and hid the bottom of the mountain. Anything could be waiting for me down there.

Or nothing.

I wasn’t really sure which of those options scared me more.

“I love you, Kyr. But you’re not going to be happy about what I have to tell you.” Mielyssi leaned up on her tiptoes and pressed her lips against my ear. She hugged me tight, arms around my throat, and a sudden breeze whipped her crimson hair around our faces. “I did something to keep you safe.”

“I’m off to fight a world-ending evil. Tell me what could be less safe than that.” I chuckled.

Mielyssi didn’t return my laugh.

“I told you all the other shamans were gone.” She sighed and looked out over the thick layer of stormy gray clouds below us. “They were murdered, Kyr. Hunted like wild beasts.”

“That’s impossible.” The Sevenfold Empire was enormous. It stretched thousands of miles in every direction from the Sacred City. Millions upon millions of people lived in its cities, and millions more lived in the countryside. Even if there were only a handful of shamans left, hunting them all down would take years, maybe longer. “I haven’t been gone long enough for that to happen.”

“I’m sorry.” The crimson bear swept me into a tight hug and held me close to her chest. Her heart pounded against mine and the power of her core flowed into mine with the warmth of the sun. “You were with me for decades, Kyr. Time passes differently in my realm than yours, so I can’t say for certain exactly how long you’ve been away from home. This isn’t how I wanted things to be, you have to believe me. The Feral Council thought this was their best chance at recovering after—”

“After what?” My blood had turned to icy slush in my veins. While I’d been having the time of my life, the world I’d left behind had moved on without me. My family, my friends, everything I’d known would be long gone to dust by now, while I still looked as young and healthy as the day I began my climb up Mount Shiki.

“After the world ended.” She buried her face in my neck, and a torrent of warm tears ran down my throat.

“This can’t be happening.” I felt like I’d been dragged out of a nice warm bed and tossed into an icy lake. I’d been more or less prepared to climb down the mountain to kick some ass in the name of good old mother nature. I was a hell of a lot less ready to hear that the whole world was fucked, and I’d lost almost everything important in my life.

“I can’t stay much longer. The sickness in the dream has already weakened me.” She clung to my neck and whispered urgently into my ear. “Find the spirits of forest and stream, search those who remember the old ways. The world you left behind is dead, Kyr. But you can breathe life into its embers. Heal it and there’s still a chance for us.”

“Come with me.” I didn’t want to face this alone. “Together, we can—”

“I’m always with you. Never forget that.” She stepped back and held me at arm’s length. Her face was red and streaked with tears. Her eyes were sunken in her skull, and her full cheeks and turned gaunt. She was so pale the raised scars on her skin stood out like brands. “I have to go. This world’s poison is killing me. You can do this.”

“I can’t.” I didn’t want to, either. This was some serious bullshit to put on my shoulders. If I lived to see the end of the day I’d be shocked as hell. “Please.”

I don’t know what I expected Mielyssi to say or do, but I sure as fuck didn’t expect her to laugh at me.

“Oh, Kyr.” She shook her head and strands of her faded crimson hair fell from her scalp in withered clumps. “Don’t be such a fucking pussy. I trained you for this. Do you think I’d waste my time preparing you to face this challenge if I didn’t think you could handle it? Now, shut up, and look behind you at the world that needs you.”

“You have to be fucking kidding me.” I cast a glance over my shoulder and didn’t see a fucking thing. I frowned at the bad joke and looked back to the crimson bear.

She was gone. All that remained was the lingering warmth of her lips against my ear, the already fading feel of her arms around my neck, and the wild, primal smell of her flesh. It was as if Mielyssi had never existed.

The path to the peak was gone, too. The steps up Mount Shiki’s stony flank ended in a wall of natural stone that looked like it had been there for as long as the mountain had existed.

“Fuck!” I shouted into the teeth of the icy wind

I railed against the unfairness of it all for a good ten minutes. An earthbound core shaman didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell against a nightmare that could kill the world. I was still a teenager for fuck’s sake. I was supposed to spend more time banging my spirit animal and learning how to do real magic before I got tossed out on my first big quest.

The mountain didn’t care what I had to say, and the wind tossed a faceful of ice to show how little of a fuck it gave about my predicament.

“Fine, whatever.” Standing at the top of Mount Shiki wouldn’t help me. I had ten thousand steps to go down, might as well get moving. Complaining about having the fate of the world yoked around my neck wouldn’t get me out of here any faster.

The first thousand stairs were the easiest, and the hardest. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed the warmth of the morning sun until it shone on my face as I took my first steps down the mountain. The air was crisp and clean, and every breath seemed to invigorate me. Despite the madness of the past fifteen minutes, it felt good to be home. This was my world, no matter what had happened to it.

At the same time every step I took was another step away from Mielyssi. I wrestled with the memories of her laugh, her wry wit, and all the ways her body had fit with mine. There was still some piece of her inside me, though that made it all the harder to leave the rest of her behind. If this was what love felt like, it was a wonder anyone ever bothered with it.

That shit hurt.

It still hurt when I’d descended through the cloud layer and lost the sun’s light. For a thousand steps I walked under a glowering sky that mirrored my spiritual funk with its gray churning thunderheads. Another thousand steps brought me to the first of the cherry trees that had been trained into a flowering archway above the sacred stairway. Their pale pink and white blossoms told me it was deep into spring, months after I’d first ascended.

No, not months.

Years. Many, many years.

The trees bore that out, anyway. They’d been well-manicured and graceful on my way up the mountain. On the way down, they were tangled and knotted, some of their branches spiraled toward the sky, others twisted down to their roots. There were ugly gaps in their boles left by their dead brothers and sisters, and the arch over the path seemed more of an accident than an intentional design.

Not even halfway down the mountain, and already the world looked like it had gone to shit.

Things didn’t get better when I reached the shrine at the stairway’s halfway point.

The ebonwood timbers that made up the shrine’s frame should have been sturdy and polished to a mirror’s sheen. Instead, patches of dry rot riddled the beams and bloated toadstools sprouted from the wood like cancerous tumors. The shrine’s door was missing, the iron hinges rusted away to rotten orange-red stubs, exposing the interior to the elements. Drifts of fresh cherry blossoms were the only spots of color in that drab, gray space. The thick prayer rug that dominated the center of the shrine was moth eaten and its colors leeched away by the colonies of sickly yellow mold that covered it like leprous ulcers.

A slanting beam of sunlight shown through a gap in the roof’s warped wooden slats to illuminate even more damage. The cherry wood altar that should have held spirit tokens had cracked apart to reveal the dessicated shell of a swallow’s nest. The urn of holy oil meant to light the paths of wayfarers had fallen to the floor when the altar collapsed, and its contents were now a black scab on the stone floor. A few prayer scripts surrounded the altar’s remains, so old and weathered they had the soft texture of rotting cloth and crumbled to dust at my touch.

“This is fucking insane.” The ruined shrine drove the truth of the crimson bear’s words home. The world I’d left behind was gone. Everyone I’d ever known was dead. I tried to imagine a world without my father’s stern words or my mother’s kindly face. It was impossible for me to wrap my head around the idea. I’d felt like I was with Mielyssi for weeks, maybe. It couldn’t have been decades.

And, yet, my eyes weren’t lying.

The strength and endurance I’d gained during my time with the crimson bear carried me down the last five thousand steps at a run. I couldn’t believe I’d lost everything until I laid eyes on my home village. If it was still there, then this all had to be some kind of delusion brought on by too much red meat or I’d had enough sex with a bear spirit to burn out my brain

I was in such a rush to reach the village my feet skidded off the front edges of the last cherry-blossom-strewn steps, and I had to catch myself on my war club to keep from falling flat on my face. The air at the bottom of the stairway was thick and foul with a reeking mist that made it hard to see more than a few yards in any direction. If it hadn’t been for the enormous iron towers that marked the way to my village, there’s no telling how long I would have wandered through that vile fog.

Shit just kept getting better.

A long chain bridge led from the plateau on Mount Shiki’s eastern flank to the edge of stony edge of Floating Village, where I’d grown up. The bridge’s surface was made up of heavy starwood planks that dangled from a pair of massive chains on a single braided strand of spider silk cord. The chains were mounted to two towers on either end of the bridge, their deep foundations sunk like the roots of ancient trees into the mountain and the slab of stone that my hometown sat on. An identical bridge on the west side of the town connected it to the Cliffs of Hedoran.

Those two bridges supported Floating Village above a deep ravine and gave the town its name. It was an impressive bit of engineering, though no one had ever been able to explain why, exactly, our ancestors had found it necessary to create an airborne village days away from the nearest real town.

The ancient engineers had done a hell of a job, anyway. The bridge hardly creaked as I crossed it, though the fierce wind that blew through the ravine caused the wooden beams to bounce and buck along the length of spider silk cord. After a few nail-biting minutes, I reached the edge of Floating Village and stepped onto more or less solid ground.

“Hello!” A whippoorwill responded with a haunting cry and flapped through the dense fog that covered everything like a poisonous cloak. “Great. Looks like no one’s home.”

The old path that had once led from the bridge to the village square had long-since been overgrown with dense patches of coarse sawgrass that reached my thighs and twined usulang vines that hid in the weeds and threatened to trip me every other step.

If the path was a disaster, my hometown was in even worse shape. The wooden buildings weren’t just neglected, they were destroyed. Black scorch marks climbed the few walls still standing. Doors had been wrenched off their hinges and tossed into the street for fungus and lichens to feast upon. Ugly yellow blight weeds had overrun the village’s cobbled paths, overturning stones to make room for more of their sickly siblings.

Even the ground had changed. The once-firm soil of Floating Village was spongy and dotted with deep puddles that sheltered croaking frogs and black snakes that swam in endless circles around their mirror-smooth surfaces. It was as if nature had gotten tired of humanity’s failings and decided to reclaim the world for herself once more.

“Hello!” I shouted again when I reached the village’s center.

I needed someone, anyone to answer me. The whole village couldn’t have been wiped out, not even in if I’d been gone decades. There had to be something left.

“Welcome back, heretic.” A tall man clad in green jade armor stepped through the fog. The sulfurous mist steamed away on contact with the thick plates that protected him. The man’s face was hidden behind a demonic brass mask that left only his eyes and lips visible. Golden sigils hovered above the surface of the armor, marking the warrior as one of the Emperor of the Sevenfold Sun’s Jade Seekers. These soldiers served humanity’s supreme ruler, personally. “We’ve waited a very long time for your return.”

More Jade Seekers appeared around me as if summoned from the mist. They all held crescent-bladed spears adorned with sparking talismans. They moved in perfect unison and surrounded me like a noose. They were clearly professional fighters, ready and willing to do violence on my poor body at the slightest provocation.

What was most disturbing about the warriors, though, wasn’t their scripted armor or fine weapons. In fact, it wasn’t something they had at all, it was something they lacked.

The Jade Seekers all had seabound cores, a full level above mine, and should have had ten nodes to store and channel sacred energy. But these assholes had zero nodes.

That was all kinds of goddamned wrong. Everything that lived needed at least a single node in their core to absorb and process their life force. With no way to absorb and use that power, a nodeless person would wither and die before they could draw their first breath.

My spirit sight dug deeper into the mystery in a flash. Each of the Jade Seekers’ had a single connection spot at the heart of their cores. It was much like the bond that tied me to the crimson bear, but it was incredibly strong. I sensed a horrible presence behind the connection and withdrew before I could attract its attention. Who, or what, the Jade Seekers were bound to was a mystery that could wait until after I was out of danger.

“I don’t want any trouble.” I leaned on my war club and raised my free hand to show the warriors I meant what I said. Starting a fight with five of the Emperor’s handpicked hunters seemed like a good way to get a blade through my guts. Even if I beat them all, doing so would mark me as an outlaw. I’d be hunted by their kind to the end of my days. “This was my home. What happened here?”

“This is no one’s home,” one of the Seekers snorted. “The Moonsilver Bat Kingdom broke faith with the Emperor. What you see here is the punishment for that treachery.”

None of the words that spilled out of the man’s mouth made any goddamned sense. My kingdom had safeguarded the dream meridians for thousands of years. They were the priests who’d shown the other kingdoms how to master the senjin energy that flowed through the world Hell, my ancestors had helped to found the Empire of the Sevenfold Sun. The idea that my people, even ones I’d never met, would betray all of that wasn’t just ludicrous, it was impossible.

“You’re wrong.” I shook my head vehemently. “There has to be another explanation. My people—”

“Enough of your babbling,” the first warrior coughed and spat a wad of phlegm at my feet. “After a hundred years, this damnable watch is finally over. Let’s kill the last of the Moonsilver scum. I want to go the fuck home.”

“This isn’t necessary.” None of my options here seemed good, so I held my ground and tried not to look too threatening until I could find an opening to make my move. “We don’t need to fight.”

“This won’t be a fight, savage.” The warriors were almost within striking range. “You’re already dead. Lie down. Save us some trouble and yourself a lot of pain.”

“Last chance,” I warned the men. I didn’t want to commit the crime of fighting Jade Seekers, but if they thought they could kill me without a struggle, they were out of their fucking minds.

The crimson bear’s spirit stirred within my heart as my new enemies moved around me. They shifted position and hefted their spears, ready to stick me like a pig. Any thoughts I had of a peaceful outcome vanished. They were here to murder me.

Fuck. That.

I channeled two nodes of rin energy into my techniques. The instant that power was released, the crimson bear’s power blossomed inside me. A toothy grin split my features and a deep-throated growl rumbled in my chest. My nails hardened into the brutal Crimson Claws and my skin stiffened into the Bear’s Mantle, as thick and durable as boiled leather.

The soldiers glanced at one another, then back at me. They adjusted their grips on their spears and swallowed hard. They’d been prepared to kill a young man armed only with a primitive weapon.

They weren’t so sure about a pissed off shaman.

“Drop your weapon and face your sentence,” their leader choked out. “Don’t make this harder on yourself than it has to be.”

The bear inside my core roared a challenge at the men who’d dare to threaten her mate. The world turned red, and my throat ached for the taste of blood.

It was time to kill.