Eris ducked behind a column. Carved in the stone was an alcove and she was just small enough to square her shoulders and lower her head and slot herself within its crease. She held her hands close to her chest, to her heart: there, clutched tightly, was half a loaf of bread. No treasure ever seemed more precious.

Boots splashed through puddles. Footsteps following, drawing nearer. A shadow passed her by. It was night. The concrete canyons of the city’s streets were always dark, especially in alleys like this. That was her only hope of escape. She had no friend, no ally, no tool except the absence of light.

The shadow stopped. She pressed her back harder against the column.

“Where are you this time, kitten?” he said. He turned slowly. “I saw you...”

She inched away, circumnavigating the column’s sides, leaving the alley, and found herself back out on the main road. There she waited only for a moment—and then she ran. Her bare foot landed in a pothole filled with water and her ankle twisted, but still she ran, through an arch between two highrises and an inert Lightning Gate, out into a crowd. She tripped and stumbled into an old man, but here, her eyes at the backs of so many others traversing Katharos’ roads, she felt complete anonymity. She was just another urchin.

She kept the bread against her chest as she limped casually to her home for the night. Anywhere the rats were calm would suffice. She hurried up a set of stairs, toward a raised alley, past a streetlamp. Already she could taste the sweet, sour dough on her tongue. The floured crust. The feeling of real—

Her hair caught. A tug on the back of her head. She fell backward, pulled over, before being yanked up into the air.

The guard looked down at her.

“Hide ‘n’ seek’s over,” he said. He grabbed her bread, wrapped his arms around her torso, heaved her upward, and dragged her back down into the street.

And there was nothing at all she could do to fight back. No amount of kicking, or biting; nothing would make a difference. How could a little girl fight back against a grown man? Her only recourse was to scream.

Eris ducked behind a tree. She was much too tall to stand without her knees bent, lest her head collided with a branch at eye level. She held her hands close to her chest, to her heart: there, clutched tightly, was a book. No treasure ever was so precious.

The cut on her wrist had closed and scarred. The air was cool but humid. All the woods were lush and alive. She had been busy.

Her right hand, wrapped tightly around the book’s cover, bristled with brown fur, as if a bear’s paw extended from her still-human wrist. Her Arcane Semblance still held. It was only an illusion. Other matters demanded more attention.

Roaring came from behind the tree. Two creatures engaged in conversation some way off. They did not sound pleased. That was not surprising. She fled from their village unseen; now she would learn whether the Arktids of Nanos could hunt by scent alone. It was no matter if they could.

She drew mana from the air. Focusing on the Aether around her. Preparing herself. With her eyes closed she heard the rustling through brush behind; birds in the trees; and the book throbbing against her chest. Yes, throbbing, oozing, leaking magic into her heart. Its presence was delicious, like a massage for her Essence. Intoxicating.

So intoxicating that she didn’t notice the bear’s snout as it rounded the tree, not at first, not until it noticed her. The Arktid was very much like a bear, except that it walked upright and carried a rock in a phalangealed hand. It roared in surprise at her appearance—she looked quite different when last they saw each other—and recoiled.

Eris was no longer the girl on the streets of Katharos. She did not need to run, nor hide in shadows. She let out a blast of energy that knocked the beast over; with that she was on her feet, out into the open. Hiding would clearly not deliver her from these creatures.

Another four Arktids awaited nearby. Many more were back in the village. They would be coming, no doubt.

“Stay back!” she called. “I will destroy you if you draw near!”

The Arktid hit with her spell used the tree to claw back to its feet. Its ursine snout opened again. Saliva caught on the waves of its voice. They were not much larger than humans, far smaller than actual bears, but their timbre could have deceived her. This most aggressive of its sloth stepped in her direction.

A demonstration was in order. Eris tucked the book under her left arm and extended her right toward the Arktid as it approached. Its courage inspired those behind, who approached soon after—yet not soon enough. A cone of cold shot from Eris’ fingers. Shards of frost rained down onto the creature’s fur, turning it from brown to white; its sprint turned to a walk, then a stumble, and then it fell to the ground in silence. Another Arktid, a svelte female, ran to its side.

Eris stepped backward. Her fingertips went numb, but she was not drained.

The female roared. Two more Arktids appeared, over the ridge from the village. These held spears.

Now they looked at her warily, but they didn’t route. They spoke to each other in their language, communicating some plan, and lurched forward—except for their frozen comrade and its caretaker.

“You will not be warned again!”

She pulled her backpack off her shoulder. The book slid inside with no room to spare. It was extraordinarily heavy, but it would do for now.

And now her hands were free for more complicated casting, and there were no pages in risk of immolation. She brought her palms together. The Arktids approached in unison—

Sparks of white fire crackled between her hands. The flame pushed her wrists apart, like charged magnets, the pressure building as luminescence grew. She channeled her Essence through her veins, into her arms, growing the burning, crackling thunderstorm slowly, a mixture of flame and lightning arcing between her palms as they spread ever more distantly apart.

She had been at practice over the winter. This time, her spell would have its intended effect.

The Arktids faltered when they saw the power of the sun in her grasp. But it was too late. The die was cast; their decision had been made. Soon her power reached its zenith, as much energy in her grasp as she could hold, blinding even to her own eyes; she split the storm in two, now one in each hand, and threw them like stones at her assailants.

White thunderbolts streaked through the air. The first hit the most aggressive Arktid, closest to her; the second she aimed far-off, at the distant spearmen, but she missed. When the first bolt landed the Arktid flashed as if struck by lightning, then burst into pure white flame: two smaller bolts arced from him, chaining to the nearest companions, electrocuting them and engulfing them in fire, then smaller bolts still arced off them, until all in the vicinity, all her assailants, immolated before her.

Toward the village, a large tree was engulfed in flame. The spearmen were caught in the backlash of an arc, but only partially consumed.

All the woods flickered in the light, as if half a dozen torches were lit on the forest floor. Shadows rocked everywhere against the trees. The sun was dim in comparison.

She felt her Essence draining as the fire was sustained.

It was like being sapped of energy, like the day was passing in the flash of an eye. Her eyelids grew heavier. She could not maintain the fire for long—but she did not need to. She counted to three. Then she snapped her fingers. The fires all went out.

Ash rained down from where once stood Arktids. Only the spearmen survived. They ran in terror.

Good. Survivors were always a positive. They could report her majesty to their people, and they would not pursue her farther.

She brushed the hair from her eyes. She was exhausted. There would be no more spells today, for risk of overcasting. But she smiled. Nothing felt better than power. Nothing paralleled the rush of victory, the exhilaration of destructive magic. That it came at the expense of others only made it sweeter.

And best of all? Now she had the book. It was an elephant on her back, but it was hers. She promised the Arktids as she left that she would make better use of it than they ever did—first, by reading it, and through reading it, finding the Archon’s Orb.

The book, which was truly a vast tome, was written in a script that could not be deciphered, with characters that changed every page. The words were meaningless to the naked eye. To any mundane scribe it seemed a litany of worthless scribbles, chicken scratch, a thousand pages of illustrated nothingness. Its only point of remark to such a man would be the runes of mana etched along its bindings, and the power which emanated from its pages.

The author used Manastone ink.

Yet although each word and symbol was, on its own, meaningless, the author’s intention was left burned into the book’s Essence, the spirit of his meaning scarred forever on the page. That meant its code could be cracked only with the Wisdom of the Sages. With that simple sophomoric spell any magician could read the secrets within. A brilliant trick—when the book was written, at a time when only an elite few had access to the secrets of mana. Yet not so useful in the modern day, when there were rogue wizards such as Eris keen to plunder arcane wisdom for their own advancement.

So plunder she did.

In Eris’ time the title ‘Archon’ was synonymous with the temporal ruler of the city-state of Katharos, her home and the grandest principality in the known world. Yet it was not always so. In the days of the Old Kingdom the Archontes reigned across the continent in the Regizar’s name. Their power was inherited, and so only very rarely did one who had survived the Manasearing find himself as such a monarch. The procedure was too prone to casualties for anyone important from birth to be subjected to it. Thus as mundane rulers they required the consent of their Magisters to control their empire’s territory—and thus were they often forged artifacts infused with mana with which to rule.

Each received an Orb of Power upon succession. A symbol of rank and office. A powerful artifact of the Manaforges.

That was all a very long time ago, but the tome spelled it out clearly enough. After the Old Kingdom’s fall this book had been written hastily by one of the Magisters of Nanos, describing where the reliquary of this land’s Archon had been stored following his death—and describing the treasures entombed within.

But most importantly it described how to open the reliquary’s sealed magical door. A special spell was required—imprinted within these pages. And now it was Eris’. Soon, so too would be whatever lied within.

What precisely the Archon’s Orb did, or what else she would find behind this door, she couldn’t be certain. But she intended to find out. Nothing would stop her now.

Their names were Robur, Vlodmir, and Kauom: a magician, a human, and a dwarf: ages fifteen, fourteen, and—well, Eris couldn’t say, but with her luck she doubted anything advanced enough to bring expertise to their party.

She found no one better. They would suffice. She did not intend on sharing what they found in any case. Casualties were inevitable—and where none occurred, they could always be arranged. So they were away. Eris led them from the walls of Swep-Nos and into the woods. She knew her destination, in the hills on approach to Kem-Karwene. Her tome laid out the path in clear detail.

It was an awkward journey, over a hundred miles through wilderness. They spoke together rarely, but on the third day she could no longer subdue her maliciousness.

“What is that on your hip?” she said, with derision, to Vlodmir.

He carried a metal stick, a bronze bar, in his belt. “My wepon,” he said. His accent was thick Veshod, though his voice that of a child.

“Your weapon.”

“Da.”

“Your weapon?!” interjected the dwarf. “This a Karwenean arbalest!” He hefted his crossbow in the air. It was an impressive device. “This is a weapon! That’s a pipe, not a weapon! You’re going to hurt yourself if you run at a goblin with that thing, kid.”

“Leona is only praising servant who fights in self-protect,” Vlodmir said. “I am not need of more for fighting.”

“You do not mean to say that the goddess of the lion disapproves of violence, do you?” Eris said. She was growing disinterested.

“Lev—lion, is animal of courages and strength, not just vilens. I know prayers!”

It seemed Vlod was a supplicant to powers greater than himself—a cleric to the Lioness. There was magic in this world beyond mana and the Aether, true enough, but she found herself doubting this child could demonstrate its mastery.

“Just pray we don’t get into any fights,” Kauom said. “Stonemother’s beard, that’ll be enough…”

“And you,” Eris said with a sigh to Robur, “I suppose you must be a powerful magician. No doubt you know the Destiny of Heroes and the Eagle’s Dance?”

He stared at her dumbly. “No,” he said, an expression of no mirth on his face. “Those are very difficult spells to master.”

She put a hand to her temple. She would have screamed, if not for fear of what might happen to morale. She spoke through clenched teeth:

“My mistake. How foolish of me.”

There was no Rook in this party. Kauom at least seemed scrappy. She tried as hard as possible thenceforth to avoid all conversation with her new companions.

The forests of Nanos were sanguine in spring. Every leaf on every tree was deep red. The land was otherwise hilly and depopulated; rocks jutted from the earth, towers of stone like ship’s masts rising from an ocean of wood. Navigating the terrain was exhausting, but not especially challenging—the Blood Forests grew sparsely and were easy enough to pass through on foot. All that remained was to ascend and descend whenever the earth demanded so. It was a beautiful, serene land, truly. Eris never knew calmer forests.

It was an illusion. More monsters than mere Arktids lurked in Nanos. They were lucky to remain unmolested on their journey.

…but not so lucky that they did not hear the distant signs of the forest’s life when they made camp at night. Cackling in the trees; crickets that scraped when they should have chirped; owls that boomed like bears some ways off. Without the sun’s rays on the red leaves the Blood Forest was not nearly so inviting. The light off their campfire gave the impression of being caught in the arteries of some giant man, surrounded by his veins and viscera, unable to break free—and the creatures of Nanos were as the unmistakable beating of his heart. A sound that could not be escaped.

Eris studied her tome every night.

“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” Kauom said.

She flipped a page with a gesture of her hand, not needing to make contact physically. The paper rustled loudly. She replied with disinterest. “If I were not sure, I would not have brought you here.”

"Someone can be sure and still wrong," Kauom said.

“We have been walking a long time,” Robur said.

“Would you like to me to transform myself to a drake, so that I might carry you the rest of the way?”

“Do you know such a spell?” he replied earnestly.

She slammed the tome shut. “I had forgotten until this very moment, but yes, I do! Shall we fly there tomorrow?”

“That would be much faster.”

“Bah!” Kauom said, “she’s just pulling your leg. It’s true enough that you’ve put this all together, but forgive me for being skeptical of your—your book. That thing looks damned old.”

“It is,” Eris said.

“And you’re using a map from it, is that right?”

“The author describes where the vault is located. A map is not necessary.”

“So—how do you know the description still holds? What if the tree he says to turn at isn’t there anymore?”

“Then I suppose we will all walk into the ocean and drown.”

“I cannot swem,” Vlodmir said.

“Me neither,” Kauom said seriously, stroking his beard, “so I suppose we would.”

“I would be able to get us back to shore, I know a cantrip of levitation on water,” Robur said.

“Good thinking! I knew these mages would come in handy for something. Now…”

Eris closed her eyes and held the tome against her head. She liked being in charge, and there was no doubt she had the most experience as an adventurer, but that night she found herself desperately longing for Rook’s company once again.

She stared at a collection of runes on the page. They were symbols that meant nothing when gazed upon, yet, to her Essence, possessed indentations that she could feel—and thus replicate in the world around her.

Her eyes tilted upward.

She stood before a cliff face three hundred feet high, a mighty and wide rock wall. Behind her stretched the ocean, the northern seas of Esenia—they had come all the way to the coast.

Careful consideration of the stone…

Back to the book.

“This isn’t a vault!” Kauom said. “This is a bunch of rocks!”

“Iz entrance beareed?” Vlodmir said.

“You promised treasures beyond comprehension, girlie. All I see are stones. I could get the same looks at my family reunion. Are you trying to pass off earth as treasure to a dwarf?"

“Would you please be quiet?” Eris said. She charged her hand with mana and ran it along the rock; her fingers vibrated at the touch. “There is more here than you can see. Allow me to work.”

“She is right,” Robur said, “I can detect the magic of this place. The enchantment on the rock is clearly held by—”

“I said be quiet!”

Silence fell. Merciful, sweet silence. She knew from reading the tome that these runes, arranged into sigils on this page, contained the key to opening the vault’s door, and she was certain this cliff face was the vault’s door from the directions—it was positioned perfectly, and while the forest may have changed, the stones of the mountain had not. What she did not know was precisely how that key worked.

She spent an hour in experimentation, alone. When she failed to find results she was too reticent to ask for help, so another hour passed—and only then did she find an idea.

She tapped the magic from the ink on the page. Her Essence absorbed and held the mana, only for a moment, like water in her mouth, before she touched her hand to the stone and regurgitated it.

The runes appeared on the rock. Like pictograms on a cave’s wall, but luminescent. There were four more sigils and she repeated the process, until soon the magic on the page was expended, but the cliff burned brightly.

They flashed once, then went dim—

The ground beneath them shook.

“Lyvitsa!” Vlodmir swore.

“What’d you do!?” Kauom yelled, but Eris stayed quiet, watching the cliff—

A line cracked down its center. Bright light, as if the sun were on the other side, exuded forth and then went dim, yet the crack kept expanding, slowly, until soon it was wide enough for a man to slip through sideways.

A tunnel had opened into the mountain.

“There,” Eris said, “is your vault.”

A moment of silence. “Well,” Kauom said. “There better be more than dirt inside. What are you waiting for? Light the torch and let’s go!”

“You could not command me to do anything I would sooner do myself,” Eris said. And so she lit a torch; and thus she stepped inside.