“It makes perfect sense that it gets cold before it rains. Cold is a state of binding, and air being the unbound state, you need to execute a binding state in order to get to water, the partially bound state.”

This was one of four traveling companions on this little expedition, a self-professed sage who was possibly younger than Thomas. She reminded him … a little too strongly of himself at that age, and his now embarrassing certainty of his own correctness; he did miss feeling passionately about things, but he had been passionate out of an ignorance he had realized he had no motivation to actually change.

Or maybe he was projecting. Mostly she annoyed him; she spent most of her waking hours explaining things.

Not in the helpful, “Here's what monsters to look out for around here, and how to deal with them” kind of explaining Thomas felt like he could use. No, stuff like how fire worked. (It was apparently the state of unbinding). Or why the earth didn't flow. (It was a fully bound state). Or why wheels had to be a circle to work (because a circle was the unifying shape of earth and void, whatever that was supposed to mean).

The youthful sage, Klirre, was accompanied by her older sister, Pimn, who Thomas actually liked a little bit, if she was a little … offputting, at times. And finally were the two men, one a lithe pale-faced man with a ridiculous-looking fencing sword with an absurdly elaborate and enormous lacework pommel, and the other a big dude. Just. Big. Who carried what almost looked like a cartoon caveman club, except it looked like a normal-sized stick in his hands. Big dude was named Hasede, and Thomas had trouble deciding whether he hated his voice more – it was actually the most average voice Thomas had ever heard, and felt incongruous coming from the miniature giant – or Klirre's.

“That makes no sense. If cold is a state of binding, the earth couldn't be cold, because it's already in a fully-bound state.”

“A thing can be hot without there being fire; the level of binding or unbinding must reach a certain threshold for the state of things to transition between binding states.”

“Then cold isn't a state of binding, it's a necessary precondition and perhaps direct cause, but binding itself is independent of cold.”

“Binding isn't a binary state, it is a continuum; we can observe this in water, which is partially bound and partially unbound, and the most reactive of the three elemental binding states to either binding or unbinding forces.”

“That should suppose that hot water should weigh less than cold water, being closer to air, but it does not.” It was hard to tell, between Hasede and Klirre, who was more responsible for their inane conversations. Hasede denied basically anything anybody said, at length.

Thomas watched, nonplussed, as Hasede swept his massive club into the face of a silver fawn, with a crunching noise he could hear over the shouting, the body of the animal crumpling in a manner that was almost comical, at least until the shattered bones tore through the fawn's flank in a spray of blood that didn't entirely miss him.

Thomas spat the blood out, moving sideways as another silver fawn flashed past him; he felt a wave of heat, followed closely by a splattering, bubbling noise, followed in turn by the smells of burnt hair and meat. He didn't look; he had already seen what Pimn's fireballs did to the beasts, and didn't desire to see it a second time. Klirre ran past, shouting, to the fencer, Sprew, who was bleeding heavily from a gouge in his arm. Thomas didn't watch that, either, although healing was somewhere between fascinating and horrifying to watch; another silver fawn was making its way towards him, and he raised his arms into what he imagined to be a decent boxing stance; according to Hasede, practicing fighting like that, while it wouldn't make Thomas any better at hitting things or doing damage, could lead to Thomas gaining access to a Martial School, even without spending customization points on it. Klirre had disagreed on the specifics, although Thomas had trouble following the conversation, but agreed when pressed that it was possible to unlock a Martial School this way.

Thomas didn't unlock anything in that encounter, or the next couple, as they made their way towards Grimhaven.

The campfire shuddered and dwindled in the wind, the shadows growing as the light fled. Thomas pulled the blankets around him tighter, curled up in a ball with his face pressed to his knees, trying to balance getting fresh air to breath in, and limiting the cold that crept into each breath. He lay on his side, his face tight against the harsh dry heat of the fire, even as he shivered.

Thomas had departed their company at the next small town. On the one hand, the fights had been quite lopsided; Hasede could, on his own, smash his way through basically every encounter they had with the strange and frightful beasts that occupied this world. On the other hand, there was never a quiet moment, which Thomas was startled to realize he'd come to expect. Also, they were continuing towards Ironbarrow, and Thomas wasn't.

The temperature had dropped abruptly during the following day, followed by a rain that had only stopped a short time before. If not for the odd magical tokens which the party had introduced him to – literally, equipment tokens, which represented some kind of abstract sense of “Stuff” – he thought he might have frozen to death. He pulled one of the glowing blue discs out, shivering, and staring at it.

They were absurd; magic that could be converted into a small, well-defined set of items, all of which could be useful in the wild. Some things required more than one, which is where the magic of it had stopped making sense to Thomas. It wasn't something a reality had; they were convenient, but it was an oddly abstracted convenience. They were a tool you bought when you didn't know what tool you'd need, and they'd be that tool. Or if you were trying to reduce complicated considerations of specific articles of equipment into a less efficient but much more legible number. It was something only military logistics officers and game designers would think of.

The abstracted tool they represented was dry firewood and tinder, in this case. They could also be turned into food – manna, and the manna itself was cheaper to buy. Indeed, pretty much the only reason they did make a kind of sense, is that the tokens were more expensive, as a rule, than anything that could be created with them. But then, did anybody actually make shovels? Or did the shovels for sale just come from somebody who had used a token to create one, which was then sold as no longer necessary, having fulfilled the specific purpose it was summoned into being to perform?

Farmers grew food here for the rich; the poor ate manna. Maybe it was something the same way with tools? There probably were people who made shovels, but it was probably only for somebody who had the desire and ability to pay for something nice. And huh. Magic in this society sort of played the role that cheap mass manufacturing had performed in his. His … father had owned a cheaply-made shovel that bowed under any kind of pressure; somebody who actually dug for a living probably owned something nicer.

That probably meant an enchanted shovel. Would armor piercing help get through rocks and roots? His teeth started chattering involuntarily, and the cold interrupted his line of thinking again. Three tokens ended up being sufficient to summon something more like a sleeping bag than the thin blankets he had found suitable until now, at which point he did manage to get some sleep.

Piketown was as he had left it, even if he was not; he was whole again. He stared at the town ahead of him, people working as they had before. He had arrived here last, violated in a way he could not imagine. His teeth. His face. His shoulder. Other injuries, other scars.

And he returned whole. His hands moved to his face, running over it. Thomas slowly sank to the ground, his body beginning to shake. He … was more than whole, now. He had gone back out into the wilderness, seen further horrors – and had returned.

He breathed deeply, in and out. He didn't have a paper bag – what was the paper bag even supposed to do? - but it helped anyways. Thomas rose slowly back to his feet, a taught sensation in his mind, which he had barely even noticed, slowly relaxing; an odd kind of relief, from a barely-noticed pain. He was back, whole, debts repaid.