Saia didn’t know what she expected the monastery to be like. While she and Serit approached the area that Caydras had pointed at on the map, she paid attention to the soil under her domain, in case the local monks lived underground. She couldn’t imagine them living anywhere else other than a system of tunnels and small rooms without any natural light.

And yet, when she saw the giant dome on top of a five-story palace sprawling on the plain like a flower with twelve petals, so close to a cliff that the tall waves sprayed the side of the building, she somehow knew she’d found them. After all, it was the closest thing to the mountain she’d seen during all of her permanence in the Golden Lands.

“Always living at the top of everything,” she commented.

Serit nodded, eyes lost on the horizon. They’d been distracted in the past few days of voyage, and Saia had learned to never ask them what was wrong if she didn’t want to spend the next hour listening to all the possible worries a human mind could produce.

She checked again that Mayvaru wasn’t recognizable, observing her from afar with her domain expanded. That morning, she had wrapped her up in Serit’s bedroll with pieces of ropes they’d found abandoned next to a field. She was completely covered, only the top of her head visible in a way that made her fur look like hair.

Saia had changed back into her neighbor. Staying in one place long enough to study a different person was too dangerous, and so few people had seen her clearly, far enough from there, that she didn’t think she was at risk of being recognized. She still remembered the faces of the four monks who had visited the outpost and was prepared to avoid them.

“She’s too powerful,” Serit said.

Saia had thought the conversation about Mayvaru’s powers had been over that morning, when they had stopped at an inn to get them something to eat. The lands closer to Aressea hadn’t been punished by the local soldiers, so the food was abundant after the harvest.

“What?” she asked.

“Her range is even bigger than yours. Twenty times bigger at the very least. But she’s not a sphere, she doesn’t have viss floating around. She doesn’t have a domain.”

“So?”

“So she has to connect with all her animals in another way. It’s not the link I… Vanan has discovered. It’s not permanent, for one, and she can create it with multiple animals and let them go when she doesn’t need them anymore. That’s not how it works.”

“Why do you even bother thinking about it? We defeated her. Now we have other problems.”

“If the Iraspes are capable of creating creatures like her, we should know how they work. And if I discovered how to replicate the same kind of connection she does, Vanan’s research would be irrelevant.”

Saia smiled.

“What?” Serit asked, piqued.

“I should have imagined you were thinking about how to use it to your own benefit.”

Serit stopped. Saia kept smiling, but she saw in their viss she had pushed them too far.

“You don’t understand. If I could find a different way to reach the same results, better results, and Vanan doesn’t, then…”

They trailed off.

“What?” Saia asked. “Then you can prove you’re better than him or something?”

They shook their head and resumed walking, their expression devoid of the indignation that had flooded it one second before.

“No, not that. But I can offer something at the representatives, and maybe it will be enough to silence whatever Enanit will have convinced everyone I had done.”

Saia knew they weren’t saying everything going on inside their mind. She reached them in two viss-powered steps, despite their attempts of putting distance between them.

“What about focusing on something else? You’re not just a part of Vanan. There are other things you could do that would be useful to fight Beramas.”

Serit didn’t answer, so Saia didn’t insist. The plain of grass was so empty on all sides that the monks had probably already seen them, even if she couldn’t detect any movement on top of or around the building, except for small silhouettes walking around its perimeter every few instants.

“Did you think about what to write?” she asked Serit.

“Yes. I still think it’s a terrible idea.”

Saia didn’t rise to the bait. She accelerated, making her statue shine as if there was a layer of sweat on her skin. She approached the main door of the building, while Serit struggled to keep up with her. She banged the door frantically, her stone knuckles transforming her blows into thunders.

“Help!” she yelled, doing her best to appear agitated. Serit’s nervousness contributed to making the scene convincing to anyone who might have been watching from the windows.

A side door slowly opened, revealing the dark eye of a lanky monk.

“Who are you?”

“We need to see the abbot. Now,” Saia added, since the monk’s answer was just a confused blink.

“She’s obviously very busy. What happened?”

“There’s no time to waste.”

“I’m sure we can help you without bothering the abbot, if you only would tell me your problem.”

Saia had anticipated some resistance. She unknotted the ropes tying the bedroll and placed it on the ground. She lowered the border with the tip of a finger, and the monk wrinkled his nose as if he expected a foul smell. His eyes slowly widened when he saw Mayvaru’s unconscious face.

“We were in the area when she was attacked,” Saia said, keeping her voice low but perfectly clear to the monk’s ears. “She’s not dead, but she doesn’t wake up. We’re foreigners, we don’t know what to do. We need the abbot’s guidance.”

The monk licked his dry lips.

“One moment,” he said, and retracted inside.

Saia followed him with her domain, expanding it as slowly as she could. Despite Mayvaru and Beramas having no idea about what she was capable of, not entirely at least, she still expected the monks to at least know about the spheres. So she examined the rooms and even the walls of the monastery, looking for traces of another domain. She perceived a few rats sucking away her viss, but they ran away immediately, as if perceiving her attention on them. Their normal behavior, when they weren’t being controlled.

The monk took the stairs up until he was at the edge of her domain, then turned along a corridor to reach the biggest room in the area, an office with a giant table and a chimney. Compared to the rest of the palace, it was fairly modest.

The abbot, a woman of about sixty years with a braid abandoned over one shoulder, thick and gray as her tunic, exchanged a few words with the monk. They both left, heading back down the stairs and toward the entrance. Saia admired the corridors full of paintings and the shiny marble floor of the monastery while she waited for them to open the door.

“If this is ‘disgrace’, I don’t want to know how rich they were before,” she commented.

Serit sighed.

“Please don’t mention it with them.”

“I know, I know.”

Finally, the door opened on the abbot’s scowl.

“Why do you have Mayvaru?”

She was speaking with Saia, but staring at the bedroll at her feet.

“We were in the area. Please, let us in: we’ve been followed by the attackers and we don’t know how far they are from here.”

The abbot raised her eyes, her lips a line over her brown face, as if it was just one of the many wrinkles that crossed her cheeks.

“You can leave her here. We’ll give you a carriage to go back to Aressea.”

“We’re not from Aressea,” Saia said, and the abbot’s slow nod confirmed she was aware of that. “But the attackers are. This is the only place in towerlengths where we can be safe.”

Saia realized too late Arissians didn’t use that word. The abbot didn’t seem to give it any weight.

“Serit,” she said in their ears.

“Sure,” they answered, so full of tension that they didn’t notice they were speaking out loud. “We need to send a message to Aressea to explain the situation.”

That sentence and, Saia suspected, their evident fear, mellowed out the abbot a little.

“A message to whom?”

“The sculptors,” Saia said.

“I will read it first.”

“Of course.”

The abbot turned around and gestured for them to follow her.

They didn’t have to go far, which disappointed Saia because there were portions of the monastery she couldn’t fully reach with her domain. The abbot led them to a side room with tall glass windows on three sides. The sea couldn’t be seen if not leaning out from one specific spot, but the rhythmic crash of the waves was so loud it enveloped her every thought. Maybe for that reason, the abbot let them in even if there were three monks sitting at the long tables scattered around the room, each bent in front of a piece of parchment. Tools for writing were scattered all over the available surfaces. A few tomes were open on bookrests, all of them positioned amid the chaos but somehow still far enough from every bottle of ink.

The abbot pointed at Serit, then a bench. She nudged ink and quill close to them, then looked around for the paper. Saia had already seen a full stack of it laying at one extremity of the table, but still let her search for it on her own.

“Are you sure you can write in Arissian?” she asked in Serit’s ears.

“Yes,” they said. They looked up at her. “But in case you see a dictionary laying around, can you check it for me?”

Saia didn’t answer.

The abbot was already coming back with the paper, when the floor slightly quivered. Saia looked at Serit and the other monks, but they all continued staring in front of them without a reaction. She was about to conclude she had imagined it, when she noticed that the surface of the less dense inks was trembling a bit.

“Do you have earthquakes here?” she asked the abbot.

“No, not in this area. Why this question?”

“I felt something.”

The abbot’s face managed not to let anything through, but her viss trembled with a plethora of different reactions. Worry and irritation resurfaced above them all.

“Sometimes the waves are stronger than usual. Nothing to worry about.”

Saia just nodded and didn’t press the issue, despite the lie being extremely obvious. At least she had confirmation that there was something going on in that monastery, even if she still didn’t know what it was.

The abbot positioned herself behind Serit, where she could see every word they were tracing. Their hands trembled, so Saia had to calm them down with her viss. Their nervousness was her fault too, after all.

As soon as Serit set the quill aside at the end of the letter, the abbot snatched it and started to read. Serit’s sentences were concise, and it unnerved Saia not to know how correct they were. But the abbot’s viss wasn’t giving signs of suspicions, not more than usual at least.

“In summary, we saved Mayvaru, but she’s unconscious for unknown reasons. We and Mayvaru might be still in danger. Please send us reinforcements,” she read. “Tell them the soldiers will have to bring their own provisions.”

Serit nodded, taking the letter back. They quickly added a sentence in the end, the abbot still looking over their shoulder, then slid the sheet into an envelope.

“I’ll add my seal,” the abbot offered.

Saia let her work. Their ask for help and the detailed description of what had happened seemed to have convinced the woman of their sincerity. No enemy of Aressea would write directly to the city asking for more soldiers.

“I’ll have a carriage prepared,” the abbot said, taking the letter in her own clutch. Her trust only extended so far.

“That would only put the rider in danger,” Saia said. “You should use a bird.”

The abbot’s eyebrows raised, and for a moment Saia expected a scolding for questioning her.

“Mayvaru was almost killed by these people,” she added. “Are your monks better than her?”

“Very well. I’ll send a bird, but we’ll prepare another letter, to make sure at least one of them will arrive.”

The abbot headed toward the door. She tapped on the shoulder of one of the monks on the way out, a man squinting so hard that he might as well be asleep.

“Find them a room,” Saia heard, her domain expanded. “Then go back to yours and get some sleep.”

He jumped to his feet. Saia and Serit followed him out of the room, while the abbot headed in the opposite direction. Saia kept following her with her powers, using more of her focus than necessary. Suddenly walking through the corridors after a monk toward the room she'd have to share with her only ally in a village of strangers brought her back to when she'd arrived at the monks' village with Aili. She knew it wasn’t exactly a happy memory, but couldn’t help looking back at it with fondness. Now so many things had changed that neither of them needed a room to sleep in anymore.

The abbot entered one of the branches of the monastery and crossed it to reach an internal yard. Saia saw stables with horses, a field that hosted goats and donkeys as well, and monks bustling all around them. A big cage to the side, next to the chicken’s coop, was occupied by pigeons and doves. The abbot gave the letter to a monk, the monk chose a bird, and a moment later it was flying over the dome, headlong toward Aressea and the end of Saia's domain. She created a wind to make it slow down and shred the letter to pieces.

Meanwhile, their sleepy guide had turned into a corridor and stopped. There were two monks with a stretcher waiting in front of a door.

“The abbot sent us to get…” one of them began.

They looked at each other. Saia perceived nervousness coming from one and disbelief from the other. She didn't have time for either. She tore off the bedroll and dropped it on top of the stretcher, knotted ropes and everything. They flinched and retracted, causing Mayvaru’s hidden shape to dangerously tilt to one side. Serit gestured for something that might have been the word for 'medicine'.

“I know,” Saia told them.

She pushed her viss into Mayvaru until the sedative was gone from her body, being careful to keep her viss asleep. Since she didn't know what these monks were capable of, she didn't want them to find out that Mayvaru had been sedated and come to the conclusion they were being deceived. She hoped they would place her close enough to her room she could keep her inside her domain at all times. She could still control her with the fur, if everything else failed.

The monk opened the door and stood there, clearly confused about what to say and why he was there in the first place.

“You can stay here. If you hear the bells it means it’s time to eat. You can find the dining hall at the end of the third branch. Questions?” he asked.

Saia had already seen the rooms in that area of the building from above, and yet observing one up close was a punch to the stomach. There were two beds, a window, enough space for a tank of sea snakes.

“Yes,” she said. “Are you a scholar?”

It was the only question that had come to her mind, besides: ‘Are you monks just like the ones on the other side of the sea?’.

“Scholar? Yes. I mean... We're all a bit scholars, right? Erudition is necessary to know how to please the gods. We study a lot of subjects.”

“Yes, but do you have people specialized in different things? Medicine, consciousness, viss?”

The monk's eyes widened a bit, as if he'd just found a raft to grab onto in the midst of his confusion.

“Oh, of course. We have two doctors and three nurses. We all study viss a bit. The families don’t allow us to use magic or make artifacts, but we don't really need them.”

“And what about helpers? Or whatever you call them,” Saia added in seeing that moment of lucidity fade a bit behind the man's expression. “People who do practical things? Cook, take care of the animals, teach your kids?”

He blinked.

“Kids? We’re not allowed to have them. And we all do these things you mentioned. I don't understand,” he looked from Saia to Serit and back. “Is it common to be divided like that where you come from?”

Saia shook her head.

“No,” she said, “I must have read it somewhere.”

She entered the room and dropped onto the bed. It arched, perhaps more than what was normal for her frame, but her statue wasn't as heavy as it used to be.

“Can I go now?” the monk asked.

“Yes.”

Saia only realized she should have thanked him once he was gone. Serit carefully closed the door and let out a deep sigh. Still, whatever worry they had was replaced by relief once they laid down. Saia remembered Aili sitting in front of her and moved her focus elsewhere.

“How long are we staying?” Serit asked.

She expanded her domain until she saw what she needed: the library, five branches of the monastery away from her room, but still mostly inside her domain. Counting all of the books was impossible, but she had the focus of a god at her disposal.

“One night at the very least. I have a lot to read.”