“So where do the tuskies come from?” Madelaine was skipping. Skipping! Up the hill. Thomas didn't feel tired, but he felt the exertion, a subtle distinction that he would have missed before he came here. He felt no need to increase it; he just walked, legs moving almost on their own. Movement speed did what it said. He moved faster. Norris did not, so their party maintained the same pace.

“Nearby. I'd have to be able to find them myself, for the dedication to work. There's a … feel, for whether or not it will work.” Anne's eyes were searching ahead of them; Thomas wasn't certain what she was looking for, it was just more hills.

“What if you don't feel them?”

“I pull something else in instead.”

“What if you don't do that?”

“Sometimes nothing. But I have to decide early in the day, and once I've decided to use the hunt, I can't change my mind. At best I can shift the timing a little bit.”

“Oh.” There was silence for, perhaps, a full second. “Why have you used it every day?”

“Two reasons. First, you and Thomas should ascend as far as you can before we arrive. Second, if I don't use it, something else can show up instead.”

“So if you don't use it, it uses itself?”

“No, nothing like that. The dedication moves wild animals and monsters around, to make sure we meet what I want to meet; if, say, a pack of stormwolves were hunting us, they get moved somewhere else, and we meet what I want to meet instead.”

“Could you use it to meet a person?”

“No.” Then there was a pause. “Well, some people can use it that way. Bounty hunters can. Hunting people is an additional dedication, and there aren't a lot of legitimate purposes for it.” Thomas glanced over at that, then back forward, at the particularly high hill in front of them, which they'd been approaching for what felt like hours now. Huh. It would be hard to be a criminal here. Did it work in cities? Maybe that was why the thieves had had a hideout out in the middle of nowhere.

“Could you use it to find something that isn't an animal?”

“I can hunt the types of creatures that inhabit an area. Here, there are bugs, beasts, reptiles, birds, and venu.”

“What's a venu?”

Anne hesitated. Thomas glanced over, curious to the answer himself. At length, she replied. “The most common type of tree here, and its various spawn. They're carnivorous, and dangerous. Don't approach trees, Madelaine.” Thomas thought back to the trees he'd seen along the river outside Piketown – he hadn't seen any in a while.

“Trees can be carnivorous?”

“Yes. Their seeds are carnivorous, too. They hunt in packs; when they bring down a meal, they eat the meat, then dig down and bury themselves.” Anne looked over at Madelaine. “Don't approach trees. If we're together, we could probably kill one, The seeds aren't too terribly dangerous, either, but they can look like different things. Oh, good.”

Thomas looked up, and saw what she was reacting to; Arias was at the top of the hill, which they were now ascending, and pointing forward with a smile. At least he thought it was a smile, the clouds were unholy bright, and he had to squint against the light. Their small group gathered on the crest of the hill, looking into the distance. Thomas blinked at what first glance appeared to be a blur, still many hills away, and mostly obscured by a particularly tall example.

He slowly managed to figure out what he was looking at, and took a deep breath when it resolved itself. Distant towers, thin yet insanely tall, in a variety of bright and garish colors that kind of blurred together. Fine threads woven throughout; walkways, connecting them. He found himself breathless in wonder, as Madelaine stepped up beside him, raising a hand to shield her eyes as she tried to see what the rest of them were looking at. Norris was the first to speak.

“It still amazes me every time I lay eyes on it.” Thomas just nodded, his eyes having returned to the distant and intricate cityscape.

“They've expanded.” Anne's voice was quiet and reverent. “It's beautiful.”

“It looks like a pink hairball.” Madelaine scoffed, looking up and around at the adults. “Come on, let's keep going.” She didn't wait, and started down the hill, Arias following a moment later at a speed to get back ahead of her. Thomas hesitated, shifting his attention between the girl and the city, and … it kind of did look like a pink hairball. He sighed, his brief sense of wonder extinguished, and followed.

The sun was setting as they crested the next-tallest hill. They could see most of the city now, and it … was a deranged kind of majestic. A dense thicket of narrow towers in bright colors, mostly reds, greens, and yellows, the net effect of which made it look a kind of pinkish-white wherever Thomas wasn't looking directly at; the base of the city was encircled by tiny gray walls, although the towers did not constrain themselves to strict verticality, and the “city” ballooned outward about halfway up, forming a kind of … lumpy mushroom shape.

There was nothing to hunt, today; the beasts in the area were simply too thin. So instead Anne built a campfire, made out of a bundle of the odd gray torches they had used in the dungeon; conjured, he realized, when Norris produced one out of nothing. They cooked what remained of the meat of the prior day's hunt; the green slices of fatty meat from the jade hunters stirred something in Thomas' memory, but nothing concrete. Something about not eating green pigs, maybe? But Anne seemed certain of it, so he sat with the others as it cooked. It smelled fantastic.

“So what was your first day like, Thomas?” Thomas looked to Norris, who was using one torch to poke at another in the fire. The magus looked up, then flashed a grin. “Before we came across you, I mean.”

Thomas considered the question for a moment. He had told Balier the story, but it felt like a lifetime since even then. He started slowly, trying to remember how he felt. “I appeared in a dark, smelly place. Food was shoved in, and I realized I was being held prisoner. I didn't know what was going on, or where I was; I think I thought I had been kidnapped by cannibals.” Did they have cannibals here? “I figured out I could punch my way out, and ran away.”

Anne's back straightened a moment later, and she turned to stare at him. “You're the one who escaped?” It took Thomas a moment to figure that out. Oh. Oh yes! They went off looking for him, didn't they? She narrowed her eyes at him. “We spent a week out there looking for a shit-smeared … ” And she stopped, and slowly started shaking her head.

Norris, after a moment, started laughing. It was a sudden and startling sound; Thomas jerked at it, and swung his gaze to him, only to swing it back to Anne a moment later when she, too, started laughing. A gasping sort of sound – Arias, too. Madelaine, for her part, just looked confused. At least somebody wasn't laughing at him.

“In retrospect … ” Anne wiped her eyes, settling back down. “Maybe that should have been obvious. Okay. You owe us a week's wages when this is all said and done.” She'd refused his money for this trip; he wondered how frustrating that week had been for them. “Continue, continue.”

“Well, I found a stream, and started following it, assuming I'd find other people if I followed it long enough. But I thought the cannibals would catch me at any moment, and just kept moving.” He hesitated with a glance at Madelaine. “Then, uh, you found me.”

“So we did. That's it?” Norris, sounding amused again.

“I was afraid, embarrassed, and in pain. My feet hurt; I wasn't prepared for that much walking. And … ” He paused again, with another look to Madelaine, who was giving him a look which suggested she knew he was editing things out because of her. “And my mind wasn't working the way I was used to it working. The traits changed how I felt about things.”

“You have to prove you have overcome them.” Madelaine's frown at him deepened. “What are your traits, uh … Thomas?”

A pause. And then Norris' voice. “Lust and stoicism.” Thomas turned very slowly to stare at the man, who shrugged. “Leisa told me. Although I could have guessed the first.”

“Norris.” Anne's voice. “Again, you don't answer every question anybody asks.” She sounded more bored than annoyed with the admonition, and Norris just shrugged at her. Thomas shook his head; he didn't think he'd told Leisa. He had told Cenpre, though, a thought which made him feel … tired.

He considered getting his blanket out, and started looking around, when light caught his eye. He turned, and breathed in sharply. “Woah.”

The sky above Anchor was a moving kaleidoscope of fractured colors, seeming to billow and blow about – and surrounding that was a slow-moving spiral of blue-green clouds, dimmer than the brighter lights over the capital itself, and gentler. As he watched, a cloud of blue dripped up away from one of the distant threads, one of the impossibly thin towers, like water dripping off a needle – but up, and up, joining the other colors in the sky. Another drop rolled upward from the city into the sky. Another. Brilliant glowing drops of colored clouds rained upwards, and they did not blur together, but remained distinct in the sky overhead.

A gasp – Madelaine, he thought, finally turning to see what had gotten his attention.

“Oh. Yeah, I guess it is pretty.” Anne's voice, and he almost turned in shock, at the boredom there.

“Mana bleed.” Norris, who didn't sound bored. He actually sounded disgusted. Thomas did turn, then, looking at the two of them. Arias hadn't even looked up. “It's gotten worse since the last time I passed through. They were supposed to fix it.”

“It's beautiful.” Madelaine didn't look away from the lights as she spoke.

“It's bad.” Another voice – a new voice. Arias had a rapier drawn and pointed before Thomas had even started to turn to look, and had sheathed it again before he finished the motion. Shadows stepped into the light of their fire, resolving into three strangers. “Anne, Norris, Arias.” Strangers to him, at least.

“Shal, Zat. Who is the newcomer?” Arias replied, rising to move next to Thomas, to make room at the fire.

“I could ask the same.” The woman who had spoken out turned to Thomas and Madelaine. “I'm Shallor.” She was tall – maybe not as tall as Arias, but taller than Thomas – and stocky, with dark skin; as she moved into the light, Thomas saw glints of gleaming metal underneath her traveling cloak, although she moved gracefully and without a sound. “This is my companion Zatirias.” The thin pale man who was traveling with her nodded in Thomas' direction, then in Madelaine's. He was bald, with a thin, long mustache, which drooped down past his chin. Their third companion sat last; an uncomfortable-looking young man with blonde hair, wearing a robe that had been stitched together out of a mismatched set of furs and leathers. “And the new kid is Jims.”

“James. Or Jim.” The man replied, in an automatic kind of way.

“Well, Jims, I'm Anne.” The man looked up at the name. “Norris is the weasel to my left, Thomas is the beefcake to my right.” Thomas found that it was possible to do a dry spit-take at that, spluttering to nothing as Anne continued nonchalantly. “The lovely little girl is Madelaine, and then we have Princess Arias.” Something hit Anne's face, and she grinned, then stage-whispered. “She's pretending not to be a princess, but me and Madelaine know better.” Arias, searching the ground for something else to throw, gave a fist-sized rock a reluctant look, then apparently settled for rolling her eyes and leaning back on her elbows.

“Beefcake Thomas, good to meet you.” Shallor waved to him as she settled down next to the fire. “And yeah, mana bleed is beautiful.”

“It's a pollutant.” James added. Thomas' attention shifted away from Shal. “Causes dungeons to form and monsters to spawn.”

“Are you from home?” Madelaine asked, even as Thomas opened his mouth to ask the same question. James' attention focused in on her, then, noticing Thomas' expression, him as well.

“Oh! I think so.” He paused, running a hair through his hair, which … well, it looked like he did that a lot, because it was pointed in every direction. “Couldn't tell you the name, though.”

“Earth.” Thomas supplied. James and Madelaine both looked stricken a half second later – Thomas guessed as soon as they realized they had forgotten again – but James nodded.

“Yeah. When did you two get here?”

“I've been here for a whole week!” Madelaine announced proudly, then leaned forward conspiratorially. “I'm already level 8. Thomas has been here for-ev-er, and he's only, like, level nine.” Thomas grimaced at her, but Anne was the one to respond, before he could correct her, in tones that Thomas found himself surprised to hear, for it was a familiar way of talking that didn't mesh with Anne at all; a mother chiding her child.

“There's nothing wrong with that, Madelaine. Many people never go beyond their fifth ascension.” Anne turned to Shallor and Zatirias, shaking her head, and blinking a lot. “We're headed to Anchor to see what we can do to help. Mersin thinks things might be … ” She trailed off with a frown.

Zatirias nodded. “We thought James was the only one. Just found out yesterday, from the new mayor of Graystone.” His voice wasn't quite the rich baritone of Norris; it was deep, but with an undertone that Thomas didn't think he'd heard before, like somebody standing next to him was humming along with his speech. “Tenne's party should already be there, according to the mayor. He and Weld were in Graystone when Mersin's messenger arrived. Weld went off to gather others.”

“Any news from Confluence?”

“No evacuation has been ordered yet, but I think they're limiting traffic.” Thomas found himself sitting up straighter. What? He tried to remember his conversations with Anne and Balier, and found that …

“Hold on.” He interrupted their conversation, and got their undivided attention. It took him a moment to gather the courage to continue. “We're going there to try to help people, right?” He hadn't actually confirmed why they were going to the capital, just assuming they had all been on the same page. He thought back to his conversation with Anne, realizing how vague everything had been, how he had just assumed they had been talking about the same thing. Either they wouldn't be needed, or they wouldn't be able to do enough. He'd been thinking they'd get there, and be distributing food, and facing a depressing problem whose scale was beyond their ability to actually fix. He'd been trying not to think about the fact that they couldn't help everyone.

“Yes.” Anne's reply was somewhat annoyed. He pushed forward anyways.

“Okay, who are we going there to help?” Her annoyed expression softened, then, as she looked at him.

“Oh. I see.” She drew in a breath. “We will be helping the people from your home, yes. But there's a good possibility we're going to end up helping with an evacuation.”

“What? Why would you evacuate? Who would you evacuate? Where? What?”

“Confluence may evacuate this plane and remove the anchor.” Norris' voice. “It's standard procedure for cascading disasters.”

“Remove the anchor? The city?”

“Destroy the plane, Thomas. Something is wrong with it. Things are leaking in that shouldn't be.” Anne's voice again, gentle. He stared at her, then around at the others. James shared his horrified expression; Madelaine just looked confused.

“But … if people keep appearing … you can't evacuate everyone. There will still … be … ” He trailed off as he watched their grim expressions. Oh.

“Actually, I think they may leave the plane.” Zatirias had produced some kind of dried meatstick from somewhere, and started chewing it. Thomas blinked, suddenly noticing the man again; he had just kind of … slipped out of Thomas' attention. The others turned as well, and the man grinned. It was not a mirthful grin, exactly. “They'll probably quarantine it until they figure out what's going on. But if it's just leaking people, and nothing else, this plane would be far too valuable to destroy.”

That … Thomas shook his head. His attention turned back to the beautiful lights in the sky, while the conversation turned to other topics. The pollution that spawned dungeons and monsters and maybe worse. It was not, in fact, that everything here was terrible. Healing magic had convinced him of that. It's just that everything was terrible in different ways.

Zatirias' comment sounded terrible in a terribly familiar way. The mana light twinkled and spun in the sky.