I got up to the tree house. It was time to move. We had been here for a couple of days, and the direction that I needed to go to find Lannah had changed again. Just slightly, she had moved more eastward. There was a chance that she was out of Cloudia by now; I just didn’t have any way to tell.

I went over and woke Kasidy up. The girl slept like a rock. It was one of the things that bugged me most about her was that she just didn’t get up. I had already been up and down the stairs a few times, and the trapdoor wasn’t quiet, but she didn’t wake up. Perhaps she just felt that safe. However, my money was on. She just didn’t know how to wake up.

I shook her shoulder again. “Kasidy get up. We are going to grab breakfast in the safe room and then we head out.”

I went over to where Blink was asleep. Sometime during the night, she had turned back into a lizard. So when I got close to the fire, Blink vanished. I chuckled and still found her so I could wake up as she hadn’t moved.

Once we were all up, we headed in for breakfast. Dave dropped a whole slab of meat for Blink, who happily chowed down. It would last her a little as she was now about 10 feet long as a lizard. She wasn’t a tiny creature anymore in her natural form. She was still impossibly stealthy, but she was also scary.

As we were finishing up eating, I pulled out the belt. “Kasidy, I have something for you that should help keep you safe. This belt will give you a 50 point stone air shield around you if attacked. It can last for up to 10 minutes. While not as good as my standard it should help keep you safe.”

Kasidy, who had been strangely quiet this morning, started to cry. “Thank you! I was worried that you wouldn’t want me with you anymore. That you would trap me in a dungeon and leave me there.”

My mind started to race. I hadn’t thought about taking her to a deeper level and leaving her in the dungeon. The monsters would keep her trapped, and then I wouldn’t have to worry about her. That said, she would age 24 times faster in a safe room. It would be the same as killing her in just a few years.

I shook my head. “No I am going to work on getting to know you and take a chance that I can trust you with what you know about the dungeons. Don’t make me regret it.”

Then I sent to Blink. “I got you one too when you turn back into lizard girl. Your’s is better.”

Blink took a moment to look up from the half-a-cow she was working on. She gave me a big toothy grin and then went back to eating. As a ropola, she never seemed to care about messes or noise when eating. When she was one of her other forms, she got more refined. It was just an odd thing I thought of as she broke a bone with her mouth.

I patted my legs. “Welp. Time for us to be leaving we have a lot of ground to cover.”

I swung my pack onto my back and got everything in place for traveling. Blink huffed and started to the door. Kasidy stood up quickly and put the belt on. Then she grabbed her bag, and we all left.

The hike was quick and easy. We didn’t encounter anything worse than a basher that bounced off of Kasidy as she knelt by a stream. We still weren’t able to go north as the vertical wall kept us from making any distance that way. While I could likely climb the thirty feet or so to the first landing, I wasn’t sure about bringing Kasidy up. I also wasn’t sure what that would help us with.

When night dusk came, we settled into a new thicket. The day was almost too easy, which had me worrying. My past seemed to tell me that I should be expecting a fight if I was moving. Sure around the waterfall, it wasn’t daily, but on my trip south, it almost was.

We kept on that way for the rest of the week. It was kind of funny that I had wanted to head east, and now my marker for Lannah was showing northwest. Yet we kept moving. It was four days after we started east that things changed. The whole time we moved, Kasidy was asking me questions, and I was answering them based off of my dreams.

The cliff face we had been following stopped but so did all the land. In front of us was a drop of over three hundred feet and then a vast sea where I couldn’t see the other shore. One moment we had been in a forest, and the next, the coast.

I stood about ten feet from the edge. “Well that kind of ends our hike this way. We could try to go up but I’m not sure how well that would work. Or other option is to head south and see if there is a place that goes down.”

Kasidy walked up beside me and looked out. “The Sea of Orin. We must be on the Cliffs of the Hated. These cliffs are seen from the sea but there are no beaches. Many ships have been broken on them if they get too close. There’s no way around them here.”

I sighed. “So is this ridge known?”

Kasidy smiled. “Yes this ridge is The Tail. It runs from The sea of Orin in several hundred miles and then it curls. With where we are we would be on the side that curls. It is south of Cloudia but I didn’t think we were that far south. I have no idea how I got down The Tail. Where I had been traveling we were north of the tail by at least a day.”

“So you think we should go back? I can put a dungeon here and then we can jump back to where we turned east down the rocks.”

Kasidy looked up at the rocks of The Tail. “If we could go up and over here we would get to a road that took us to a town. If we go back we have to go south as well and far west to get around the curve of The Tail.”

I backed up as far as I could to get a better look at the cliff. It wasn’t perfectly smooth, but it was a pretty smooth cliff. Worse than that, it was several hundred feet tall at this point.

I took a deep breath and slowly let it out while staring up. “Okay so at least four days to get around the other end of The Tail. Also if we go that way we deal with more goblins. So we can go up and just have to beat 4 days of work.”

Kasidy nodded. “Yeah four days or so. Do you have a plan?”

I smiled. “Yeah. Its time to build some stairs.”

I dropped out a thicket and got that started. As it was going, I looked at the wall. I had at least 300 feet that I needed to go up. To do that, I was going to need better equipment than what I had. Which was fine. Most of what I needed to do this was back at the waterfall, which we could go to.

I started to think about how to go about getting over this cliff face. I didn’t want to wait for a dungeon to grow up the cliff. I couldn’t just climb to the top myself and plant a dungeon and transport Kasidy and Blink up. Well, I could. It just would mess up with my direction to make a way for the faithful.

If I wasn’t tunneling but cutting out rough steps, things would go faster. The problem, of course, was that faster was still slow. Cutting the steps would be something that I would do on the face and would just be a narrow path. Which, for my Earth tastes, meant that I was looking at making some kind of dangerous steps.

I laid down on my back and looked up at the cliff. I could hear my thicket forming, but my mind just needed to figure this out. What I needed was a way to go straight up safely. Steps would be hard for me to carve but more manageable than a tunnel. A ladder would be a mess, but I might could do that. It would need to be bolted onto the rocks. Which was something I just didn’t know if I could do.

I jumped up and headed into the thicket. It was done enough that we could get into the tree house. As I walked in, I was whistling. It had been a while since I had been this happy. One of the things that I loved about this world was magic and making magical things happen.

Kasidy saw me smiling and said. “You seem happy.”

I just grinned back. “I am. We get to build a free standing elevator!”

* * *