Rockfin shed scales when they were distressed. Material to track the rockfin was not hard to get; all Serenity had to do was visit the treehouse they’d locked him in and there was plenty. The scales ranged in size from large, hard armor plating to small, delicate-looking ovals. Serenity decided that a few of the smaller scales would be easier to carry and use.

That was the easy part of finding the portal. Tracking the rockfin back was far harder than tracking Bob had been; not only did the rockfin not stay on roads, it didn’t even stay near the surface. Instead, it liked to travel far below the ground. Serenity tried tracking it on foot, but after an hour of hunting for where the rockfin came up, it was clear that the spell he was using simply wouldn’t do it from the surface. Serenity had to either increase its range or not be on the surface.

Was the portal even on the surface? Serenity wasn’t certain if that was a requirement or not. He knew that marine species could have portals that were wholly underwater; they were widely considered to have a huge advantage invading most worlds, unless there was another species that was either marine or amphibious. Of course, they had their own disadvantages.

The more he thought about it, the more Serenity decided that the portal itself was probably underground. Maybe he could do the equivalent of the ley line mapping spell? It was a single line, after all; as long as it didn’t go too far, it was entirely possible that he had enough mana to support it. Finding a past trace was far more difficult than locating something currently present and connected, but there was only one line and he had more mana than Phoebe.

Serenity followed the trace back to the settlement crystal. As he got close, he realized his boots were sinking into the earth. Closer examination showed that - at least near where it surfaced - the rockfin disturbed the ground as it went through. He’d sort of noticed that originally, but he hadn’t paid it much attention at the time. It was probably why the rockfin went deep, but unless he wanted to dig his way to the portal, the fact that the rockfin was actually digging didn’t really help him much. It’d be a good alternate way to find it without magic; he could follow the gaps in the soil.

Perhaps there was something Doyle could rent that would be able to manage it? Serenity knew there were things that could go underground without disturbing the surface, but he wasn’t exactly an expert in digging equipment. If it could fit through the gaps without having to come up periodically that would be better, but that would really require a person to go down there.

Serenity started to head off towards the dungeon entrance; Doyle had pointed it out that morning. He took two steps, then turned around. “I wonder…”

Serenity shifted to his Void Sovereign shape. He knew he could fit through gaps, even small gaps. He also knew that there had to be periodic rests where he pulled himself together or he’d start feeling ill. He’d never tried to push past that; he suspected it would be bad and didn’t want to find out the hard way.

Getting through the piled-up earth was easier than Serenity expected. The spaces weren’t large and they weren’t well connected, but there were a LOT of them. He went through all of them and was able to move almost as quickly as normal.

Which meant slower than his normal walking speed in another form. The only way he could move quickly as a Void Sovereign was to concentrate himself into a small area - the size of his normal body, for example - and then expand to the maximum size of a Void Sovereign. That was fast, but only for the initial expansion. Compressing back down took long enough that simply moving normally was faster; he’d tried and it wasn’t even remotely close in speed over the long haul.

Normal movement wasn’t fast, whether he was compressed into a smaller area or not. It somewhat reminded Serenity of a snake, which could strike faster than it would otherwise move.

Even if he did move more like a fog or smoke than anything else. Serenity supposed he should be grateful that he could move at all; he still didn’t understand how it worked. As far as he could tell, his body was basically like smoke when he was fully expanded; there was no way he should be able to move without magic, much less hold someone the way he had Rissa and Josaiah, but he could. Clearly there was something going on he wasn’t recognizing.

Serenity had a long time to think about it and not much else to think about as he made his way down the tunnel. His phone was still present in the back of his mind, so he knew exactly how long it was taking, but he didn’t have a signal; he couldn’t even get GPS.

After a bit more than an hour and a half, he started feeling wrong, like he was dissolving or losing connection or something. Fortunately, he’d taken the time to come up with a plan for that as well as thinking about how he moved.

Serenity pulled himself together as best he could and built a spellform infused with his Solid Affinity to push the earth around him up. He needed to pack it together so that it would support itself and not have more simply fall down into whatever space he made.

It was a fiddly spell to begin with; Serenity knew there were better ways to do it, but they’d never quite made sense to him. How could you move something without knowing where it was?

There were probably reasons he had a Space Concept instead of a Solid Concept. They weren’t mutually exclusive, but he’d preferred Space. He knew that in someone else, an Affinity as high as his would have been pushed into gaining the Concept, but 17% wasn’t even one of his high Affinities. It’d been overshadowed by other things. Mostly by his Death Affinity.

It was like pushing with his hands. Only he didn’t have hands, because hands wouldn’t fit here.

He pushed and he pushed. A small space opened and he pulled as much of himself into it as he could while he continued pushing up with the spell.

It was slow, but it was working. Slowly. He tried to pull as much of himself into the small space as it slowly expanded and as he slowly forgot why he was doing it.

It hurt. Why did it hurt?

Have to hold the spell. Have to hold the spell. Keep pushing. Make space.

Gather together. Condense. As tight as possible.

Too separate. Distance. Loss. It hurts.

Come back.

Closer together. Push up. Hold the spell.

In a pasture somewhere slightly outside the zone surrounding Serenity Settlement, a mound of dirt slowly bubbled up from below. The surrounding pasture first deformed and then buckled, as the grass tore. Dirt fountained up from the center of the mound; some clods went as far as fifteen feet. A column of compressed earth followed, then fell to the side, forming a hole in the ground.

After the column of dirt came a short cylinder of darkness. The bottom of the cylinder trailed off into wisps, which continued to slowly stream out of the hole long after the ground stopped moving.

Once it was in open air, the darkness seemed to fall together into a ball. It hovered slightly above ground level.

There was no one present to see it, but if someone had, they might have said it looked like it shivered. It stayed like that for over an hour.

abstract computing mode online

major system fault noted

rebooting physical infrastructure

4:13 PM

Serenity woke up. He ached all over, from the tip of his snout to the tips of his wings and the claws on all four feet. If anything, the pair of tiny horns on his head ached the most.

It was the worst he’d felt since he nearly died in the Tutorial. Both of those were -

Well, no, that wasn’t true. He really hadn’t felt much after he was shot in the head, had he? All right then, it was the worst he’d felt since Moira stabbed him. That was definitely worse.

That wasn’t the worst of it. He couldn’t think straight.

He tried to think of when it had been this bad. It was familiar, but he couldn’t think of why.

When he came back in time?

No. He’d been confused, that was similar. And everything was wrong, that was similar. But his thoughts were still clear.

No, this was familiar because of something much farther back than that.

When?

5:37 PM

Serenity swam through the muddiness of his thoughts. It was slow going, yet he knew why he couldn’t figure out when his mind had felt like this.

His body hadn’t hurt so much. He knew that. His body had been … incapable of pain?

Yes, that was right. The last time he’d felt so out of it, so incapable, was when he was a draugr. Not at the beginning; he was thinking more than then, but later. When he’d finally started to recover, but before he’d managed to push his Species onto a new Path. Before he’d become a Sage Draugr. Before he’d known that was an option.

Serenity felt accomplished to have made the connection.

5:52 PM

He was here for a reason, wasn’t he?

Yes, yes he was. He was looking for something. Something underground. He’d been underground. Then something happened. But what?

What would hurt him this badly? It wasn’t anything anyone else had done. He knew that. It was a mistake?

Yes, a mistake. He’d … thought he had plenty of time. He’d thought there was time to fix things. Only it took too long and then it hurt.

Yes, that was right. He knew what happened. He’d spent too much time in Void Sovereign form with the … whatever … that made up his body separated, moving around the dirt.

That meant … that meant … he’d left part of himself behind. That was why he felt terrible, why he couldn’t think.

He didn’t want to go back in the hole.

He didn’t want to shift back to Void Sovereign form.

It hurt. He hurt. And he knew that was how he hurt himself.

But it was also the only way to fix it. The only way he could think of. But he couldn’t think.

And it wasn’t getting better. It was getting worse.

6:27 PM

Shifting form wasn’t fast. He’d decided to shift, then … slowly … he became insubstantial.

Shifting didn’t feel freeing. It was like punching a bruise, except there was nothing there to punch. A mental bruise.

He was finally done. The hole was still there.

Serenity slid over to it, then started forcing himself to go down. The movement was easy, but the mental fortitude to descend back to where he’d just been so badly hurt was not.

He had to, so he did it anyway.

The hole he’d punched upwards was mostly clear of dirt - certainly clear enough he didn’t have to split at all. That helped. It wasn’t large, perhaps the diameter of a softball, but that was enough. He became long and skinny, four or five times as long as he was wide, but he was all one. It was as small as he could compress; he knew he should be able to get smaller, but anything less than that and he became too confused to keep moving.

There was no new pain, but the separation-pain kept growing.

When he reached the bottom of the hole, he had to force himself to split. He needed to find the missing pieces of himself. They were probably close, but they were lost. He hoped none had gone the wrong way.

7:13 PM

Serenity flowed out of the hole in the ground again. He felt … better. He’d recovered most of the pieces of himself that were missing, and the pain was now only a nagging ache that seemed to be diminishing instead of growing. The confusion was gone, though he felt very tired.

He wasn’t going to travel back to Echo’s underground. He checked the GPS coordinates and saved them as a pin, then started jogging towards the settlement.

It wasn’t a straight line; he’d probably reach the settlement in half an hour or less.

Of course, that was partly because he could simply run at a sprint the entire way. He planned to do just that.

He wanted nothing more to do with this day.