Niko felt his consciousness slowly snap back to reality, a slurry of images, scenes, words and voices rattling around just out of touch from his awareness. On reflex, he reached out to those rapidly vanishing things, feeling as though they were important. Yet, no matter how hard he tried, they trickled through his claws like sand.

Instead of moving immediately, Niko only lay there, feeling a gnawing sense of foreboding in his gut. Slowly, he panned his gaze around the inside of the dimly lit cavern, the many lights had been covered as Charlotte went into torpor, and both he and Skye slept. Skye was still asleep, partly on his flank and breathing so lightly that he’d been worried for the split second it took to notice she was in fact still alive.

Nothing seemed out of place around them, but in spite of that fact, he couldn’t shake that there was something off.

It took him only a few seconds longer, weighing the merit of waking the others up thanks to his gut feeling, or just letting them rest. Niko ruffled his feathers, giving a soft but insistent cooing sound. Skye’s eyes fluttered open almost at once, a light startle to her breathing before she realized where she was.

“Mm, I’m awake,” Skye half-mumbled, half-groused. Niko kept the noise up, dialing the sound up and in a moment of inspiration, added his Clarion Call to the mix. His essence drifted through the air gently with the tone, and he noticed Skye beside him perk up like a switch had been flipped. Charlotte, who hadn’t even budged to that point, moved immediately, a light awareness coming to her eyes as her limbs stretched out. She positively vibrated with the flexion of her limbs, before hopping up with vigor, just short of crying out, ‘I liiiiive!’

Then again, given her short declaration of noises, maybe she did say that, and Niko didn’t comprehend it.

“Sorry to wake you both, but… well, we should get on our way.” Niko sat up then, Skye moving as he did to not fall backwards.

“Is something wrong?” Skye asked, frowning as she picked up on his nervous tone.

“I don’t know for sure, maybe.” He trilled, “Call it a gut reaction.”

Skye nodded at that, already well experienced in the merit of listening to one's instincts. Charlotte, for her part, didn’t seem bothered, and in fact gave out a little cheery ‘scree’ and gathered her already webbed-up belongings. She strung them across her back, along with what looked to be a woven tarp of leaves, vines, and even bioluminescent plants that she’d demonstrated the night before could be reinvigorated with the application of essence from her body. Even without a stealth pattern, he figured that Charlotte likely had a natural gift for it, and even more so, the know-how to make it work regardless.

They pulled out a light snack for breakfast, just jerky and dried fruit for Niko and Skye, whereas Charlotte chomped into an especially large fruit once more. They moved to the exit, where the many limbed spider unscrewed the opening, before allowing them to go ahead of her.

Niko paused at the opening, looking around with his Aether Sight for what felt like the twentieth time since waking up, and once more found nothing of concern. He dropped down, with Skye following shortly after and landing directly on his back. After having done it for the better part of a day and a half, Niko was coming around to having a mounted rider. It wasn’t as if Skye was particularly heavy, and he did have to admit it gave them some advantages he didn’t have when gallivanting about on his own.

The Phorus turned around, looking up at the hole to see Charlotte hesitate at the edge. She glanced at the opening to her home with what Niko felt was wistfulness. ‘How long has she lived here? Did she carve the whole thing out herself?’ Niko wondered, knowing that his own nest had seen many renovations before he’d eventually left in the Evergreen. It was always an eventuality that his essence needs would overtake what he could get there, even if he’d been born simply as a Phorus with no tasks. Even so, leaving his first home had been both saddening and, in a way, exciting. All the events around that had certainly left their mark, but overall, he viewed it as a good thing in hindsight.

“You can always return later, you know?” Niko chirped softly, catching Charlotte’s attention.

The spider looked to him, pedipalps rubbing against each other in what seemed a nervous tic. Finally, the spider seemed to resolve herself, plucking the stone with her many limbs and attaching nearly invisible strands of web to them. Like they were alive, the strands disconnected from her, before attaching up to the ceiling instead, connected to the stone slab. She stepped back and gestured, an essence pattern very subtly active in her body. The seal of earth rose on strands of web as fine as human hair, before it finally closed atop. Charlotte reached up, twisting the lid into place, and then once more Niko knew that he’d only found this place because he knew it was there. A near invisible seam, an incredibly impressive construction by a spider that he found himself more and more impressed by as time went on.

She turned to him, as if to say, ‘I’m ready’ and Niko nodded. “Let’s get going. Skye, which way?”

“Right there, it’s not far from here.” Skye gestured around the corner of the stone outcropping. “If we didn’t need to be rested, we could have just gone straight there.”

Charlotte chattered something at that, and Skye gave her a chuckle, “Don’t worry, Charlotte, we'd have stopped in either way."

The spider paused at that, before moving its legs in a little shuffle that Niko found oddly adorable. He turned his mind to Skye “Are you learning her language better than me?”

“Maybe it’s the type,” Skye snorted with amusement, “She reminds me of Stella when she was younger and less obsessed with her craft.”

“There was a time like that?” Niko teased.

Skye chuckled, “Only less obsessed. She’s always been a little… like that.”

The trio set off with that, Niko doing his best to keep moving at a pace that Charlotte could match without making too much noise. As they went, he entertained the idea of somehow getting Charlotte on his back too, but that seemed ill advised. That, and he wasn’t sure how much his stealth pattern could take before it was simply too strained to mask their passage.

Luckily, Charlotte left barely any trace to Niko’s eyes. Perhaps an experienced tracker could follow it, but he doubted that they would bother going after something that was clearly a denizen of the forest.

Just as Skye had said, their destination was not far. There was a cluster of trees unusually far apart from each other. Above them, the fog was darker, with the lack of many bioluminescent plants to illuminate the haze. He gulped hard at the sight of it, wondering what might be waiting in the dark at the tree tops.

Charlotte chittered nervously beside him, only for Skye to say, “This is the place. We’ll take it slow. Niko, do you need me off of your back?”

He considered the point for a few seconds, before shaking his head, “No, I should be able to anchor myself just fine, and I’d like someone focused on just checking our surroundings. Do you have enough arrows?”

Skye patted her side, audible to Niko with her on his back. “I’ve got two full quivers worth.”

‘Hopefully enough, then,’ Niko nodded, both of them knew that there were times when you just didn’t have enough ammo. Charlotte came up beside them, chittering as she wove a quick, thick strand of web and attached her sling of packs to Niko’s pack, giving them an additional lifeline. Then the spider made a second web-strand and severed it before giving it to Skye, who in turn gave her an appreciative smile and went to work tying herself in amongst the packs on Niko’s back.

“Alright, here goes. Brace yourself, I’m going to go hard for this first part to get some elevation.” Niko warned, and after Skye grunted her acknowledgement, Niko flared his Wyldstrider pattern to the maximum. With a burst of power, Niko practically threw himself at the tree, before diverting his momentum upwards. His talons snapped into the bark, driving deep before he kicked and brought himself upwards. Behind him, Charlotte scurried up, easily using the holes he was creating to anchor herself. When his momentum was about to die off, Niko struck the bark with his beak, burning enough essence to get his Sharp Strike pattern enough potency that he anchored himself cleanly.

A good thing, since he didn’t quite get good talon holds just then. He took the time to make sure he was settled into place before pulling his beak out of the bark. Niko then took a deep breath and glanced downwards, against most advice he’d ever give.

“Alright, pretty good… progress.” Niko swallowed and tried to not think about how clucking tall these trees were. They’d cleared thirty meters fairly easily, but now it would be slow and steady. Still, the fog would obscure them soon enough, and hopefully that would just increase their safety.

“Slow and steady, Niko, don’t miss any footholds.” Skye spoke softly, bow in hands and resting on her lap. Niko nodded to that, before beginning his ascent. He had to urge his Wyldstrider pattern to muffle the noise of his climb, as well as to give him the power to chop into the bark, but it was simple. Mind-numbing, even, since he was making sure he wasn’t going to miss a strike or slip. He was under no illusion that if he fell, he would be severely injured. Even without all of his gear, Niko was a very heavy bird. He wasn’t intended to fly, and even his ability to glide had been hampered as he grew to his full, adult form. It was a trade off for the sheer power and tankiness that he now possessed, and Niko had found that he preferred what he had now. Still, he would be lying if he said he didn’t wish that he were a few all-you-can-eat buffets lighter right then.

The hardest part of the climb wasn’t just the physical exertion that built in his muscles, nor was it the presence of mind that was needed to ensure that he never allowed for a shallow foothold. No, the hardest thing was the fact that even without his pattern, it was so pecking quiet up here. Just to see, Niko intentionally made noise, scraping against the bark. The sound barely seemed to move, dampened by the fog.

Just when Niko was tempted to save on his essence expenditures and deactivate the stealth portion of his Wyldstrider pattern, he felt the fog move, just out of range. Yet, to Niko’s vision, he saw nothing in the fog, but the three of them froze together, a sense that there was something that had taken notice – or perhaps offense – at the sound he’d made now just out of their awareness. For several minutes, none of them dared to move, even when his logical mind told him that nothing would bother hanging around for so long when no sign of their presence remained.

Ten minutes later, the fog shifted again, and vanished farther away into the trees. Niko felt his mouth go dry at that, detecting only the vaguest hint of a form even while he was looking straight at it, with his Aether Sight on beyond what he’d ever run it before. No amount of essence revealed a hint of whatever it had been. Whatever it was, it gave the first found example to Niko that there were things that seemed to be able to avoid all of his senses. If it weren’t for the fog, he wouldn’t have even known it was there. Then again, perhaps it was there because of the haze, rather than merely using it. Still, they waited for several more minutes before continuing on, leaving Niko wondering vaguely if they were upset at him for what had just nearly found them. They didn’t speak, though, and Niko was in no hurry to break that silence, given what had just happened.

Only several minutes later did he even feel comfortable enough to speak to Skye mentally, “Sorry, that was dumb of me.”

“What? Oh, no,” Skye was genuinely confused, before realizing what he was referring to, “That was shortsighted to do without telling us first, but now we know. I’m just afraid that it might still be stalking us, so I’ve been listening for that sound again.”

Niko blinked at that, “What sound?” He asked, knowing that Skye’s sense of hearing was far more keen than his own.

“Hard to describe,” She started, “Kind of like a groaning, but more like… maybe stretching?”

That much didn’t give Niko a good idea of whatever had hovered over them, but he supposed even having a sound to go off of was good enough. Skye would at least be able to give them a heads up the next time she noticed it was in the area.

After another hour of climbing, Niko noticed the essence in the air grow heavier and more potent, crossing the line between tier four and tier five essence. Every breath was rich with it, but he felt almost like his body was overfull. It was hard to describe, but he felt a sense of wariness at the sensation.

“We should try to pick up the pace,” Skye’s voice echoed in his head, “I feel like I’m going to get essence sickness if we take too long here.”

Niko answered by speeding up, doing his best to keep the higher tier essence from polluting his own pool too much. He could probably absorb it, thanks to his combined blessings from Alterra and Venris, but he didn’t want to risk that at the moment. For most people, absorbing essence two tiers above your own was the limit, outside of specific rituals and circumstances. It was the reason why people couldn’t simply move to a much higher essence tier area, and why low tier zones were still valuable to various nations of the world. If you put a tier one person in a tier five zone, they’d experience essence sickness within hours.

The details of what that exactly did to someone weren’t very available, but the aftereffects were. Permanent pseudo-body damage could occur, as well as deviations in existing patterns in one’s body. Longer exposure could begin to harm the actual flesh and blood of a person, though by then, their mind would have begun to experience hallucinations and more. There was a veritable laundry list of issues that could arise from overexposure to essence of too high a tier, and more than one less-than-humanitarian faction had been responsible for trying to figure out a way around the tier-threshold requirement. If any had succeeded, Niko didn’t know, but any that were discovered were generally hunted down, due to the cruel and often extreme mortality of even the most basic of their projects.

All that amounted to Niko pushing forwards faster, pausing only the bare minimum he needed to occasionally rest his limbs. The fog grew thicker as they moved, and Niko began noting the lack of anything living in this area. He’d expected to see the larger Thimurge, at least, especially as dense branches began to grow from the trunks of the titanwoods. Still, nothing was visible to Niko as they clambered over branches, and he was beginning to fear that it wasn’t that there weren’t things around them, but rather that he couldn’t see them.

Finally, just as the ambient essence crested to the highest point yet, the fog began to thin. Niko refrained from breathing a sigh of relief, pushing onwards as his body struggled to process the mid-tier five essence. Trickles of it sank into the depths of his body even in spite of his attempts to keep it out, but luckily it seemed that his blessings were able to absorb it. Niko did notice that it took longer to process, though, making him reconsider his plan to simply start absorbing the essence wholesale. Still, he didn’t discount the possibility, and climbed onwards.

Unsurprisingly, the branches became more plentiful as they ascended. The light sources from what few plants still grew here were gradually dwindling, replaced by the dim light of whatever managed to filter down through the branches overhead. Niko felt hopeful at that, ‘Maybe we’re getting closer to the sunlit canopy?’

The thought urged him on, renewing his fatigued body as he strove upwards towards the light. He clawed himself up the trunk, the repetitive pattern of strike, steady, push, strike continuing until he reached a thicker interwoven area of branches.

“Hey, Niko, do you see anything nearby?” Skye asked, confused, “I’m hearing a dull grinding sound, but I can’t pinpoint where.”

Niko paused just before his claws reached up to start working through the barrier. “I haven’t seen anything, no. Let me check again, though.”

She nodded, frowning as her head tilted back and forth. Charlotte below them, too, seemed perplexed, the hairs on her legs twitching slightly, as though she was detecting movement.

Briefly, he was afraid that their previously unseen predator had come back, but he didn’t have the sensation of warning that he’d had then. ‘Something else, then,’ He nodded internally, eyes scouring their surroundings, ‘But what? I don’t see anything… Again.’

There was a tremendous amount of essence above them, but it was seemingly all environmental. Niko peered through the essence everywhere he could, unwilling to leave any potential hiding spot unchecked. It took him almost ten minutes of staring and eye-strain, before he had to admit that if there was something, it was beyond his ability to sense.

“I don’t see it, but that doesn’t mean it's not there. Keep on guard,” Niko whispered aloud, making sure that Charlotte heard him as well. Both she and Skye acknowledged him quietly, and Niko began to push through the layer of branches.

It was dense, so much so that he couldn’t help but to wonder if the entire sunlit canopy area was this thick. If it was, then there was no small wonder that most things didn’t bother going between the two zones. Niko finally had to begin hacking away at growth, trying to push his way through freshly growing, smaller branches as he did so. Finally, with his beak sore from the repeated strikes through the hard titanwood bark and branches, he broke through, just enough to squeeze into the bright light of the canopy line. Niko sighed in relief, fatigue grabbing at his limbs and threatening to lay him down like a sack of bricks right then and there.

“Niko.” Skye’s tone immediately set his feathers on end, a mixture of terror and urge. Behind him, Charlotte’s ascent had frozen, her body in a rictus between fight or flight, where the body selected option number three.

As Niko looked up at what they were seeing, he also selected option number three, freeze in place.

Suspended in the huge space between branchless trees was something that looked like an odd blend between organic and stone. Ivory white stone flowed from the trees, flooded with environmental essence and appeared no differently than branches might. Niko hadn’t noticed it, because there was no distinction between whatever this massive, forty meter wide object and the rest of the forest in terms of essence. It was as invisible to his Aether Sight as it was visible to his naked eye.

And on that subject of eyes, the spherical form that hung in the middle possessed several small ones, each looking like amber. One massive eye dominated it, though, and it was currently staring straight at them, the amber color deepening in the middle, looking somewhat like molten honey that glowed with an inner light. It was then that Niko realized that he’d mistaken sunlight for what came from this thing, the many long, stone-like supports that led to the trees set with stones that glowed. They reminded him of the shining leaves that were set high overhead above Riizen and the rest of the forest.

Niko peered straight at it, still sensing nothing different about it than he would from open air. And then, the ten meter wide eye shifted ever so slightly, seeming to look straight at him. Niko felt his throat tighten at its awareness, and struggled to think of anything that he could even do at that moment.

Then, all of a sudden, his eyes were able to perceive something else there. In the core of the thing, a powerful essence, tier six, and Niko felt that it was simply objectively different from anything he’d ever seen before. Even seeing it, he could tell that there was something qualitatively different from tier five to tier six. The essence there had meaning attached to it, more so than just the aura attached to people like Anya or Orson. It was as though it dictated the space around it, and Niko felt something like a watchfulness from it, a kind of innocuous voyeur.

Something about it settled him, in spite of the sheer power behind it. As though it were opening up to show him it meant him no harm. Even as Niko felt the sense that it was staring down into his soul, he didn’t feel at risk. Oddly enough, he didn’t even feel violated by the invasion of his privacy like he thought he should, it was as though it were just that impartial, that he could have been the most heinous thing and it wouldn’t have minded either way.

Its gaze grew slightly sharper as it found the twin blessings deep in his soul, and the mark that encased the outer boundary of his sense of self, compliments of Bant’s appropriated curse. Niko winced as he felt like something in him was growing indistinct, somehow separate.

Then the eye retracted its attention to something more surface level, and Niko felt the discomfort vanish.

“We’re alive still.” Skye started, “So… what now?”

Niko’s feathers were standing on end, in spite of knowing that it probably meant them no harm. He figured it was the same sense that a nuclear bomb didn’t actively mean him harm, but was nevertheless potentially very clucking dangerous.

“Can we… uhh… just head on up?” Niko asked, not really sure he needed to introduce himself after all of what it’d just done. If anything, he should have asked for dinner, though he was far away from wanting to joke at it.

The air vibrated gently for a second, and a strange pulse of essence rolled out from the eye. Niko blinked, feeling a strange familiarity with the essence it sent to him.

‘It’s my essence,’ Niko felt his confusion rise, ‘Why is it my essence?’

An image flashed in the eye for a second, and Niko felt his jaw drop as he saw an image of him, as though from afar, feeding essence into a massive, lumbering thing that seemed more an elemental than flesh and blood creature. The Moxxa – twenty limbed things that often gave transport atop their backs in return for essence around Riizen – that Niko had overcharged with frankly too much essence now seemed to be different in the image. It was a distant connection, one that was attached to the powerful thing before them.

“Peck me… Are the Moxxa all attached to this thing?” Niko croaked out as the image vanished, only a brief pulse of amusement flowing from the Great Eye before its attention turned elsewhere. Stone flowed like water, and the eye directed its attention to another part of the forest, no longer concerned with the three visitors to its domain.

Only Skye putting a hand against Niko’s neck stirred him from his dumbfoundedness, though seeing that she wasn’t much better. In fact, he was fairly certain that she’d just been shown something similar to what he’d seen, if her wide-eyed wonder had anything to say about it. Beside them, Niko startled to realize that one of the stone limbs had moved, a flat platform forming in front of them so quickly and soundlessly that none of them had even noticed.

“Right… I guess we get on.” Niko stated, more than anything else, before walking atop it. Charlotte followed, tentatively putting her weight on the stone as though she expected it to fall through. It was nearly paper thin, after all, but Niko felt like he was standing on solid steel.

“I guess that answers why we saw no Thimurge in the area…” Skye’s eyes still followed the many eyes gazes, only some of the smaller ones glancing at them from time to time.

“Yeah, makes sense, considering Thimurge go after Moxxa a lot. The Great Eye probably doesn’t like that.” Niko chortled tiredly, feeling his limbs weak beneath him.

“The Great Eye, huh?... Yeah, sounds right.” Skye said, as the limb slowly lifted them, the stone flexing as easily as any flesh and blood limb. It didn’t seem to be in any hurry, and they had quite the climb yet, so Niko simply lay down. Partly from the image it’d shown them, Niko pushed a tithe of his essence out and into the platform below them. He doubted his piddling amount of essence would mean much to it, but he felt like it would be rude not to.

Only a ripple of what might have been thanks breathed through the air, and Niko felt happy enough at that.

“The world’s really too big of a place, isn’t it, Skye?” He said, feeling rather overwhelmed once more.

"Yeah... But, when we get stronger, we’ll be able to see more of it. Right?” Skye said, settling in for the long climb, “It’s not a bad thing.”

“No. I guess it isn’t, is it?” Niko trilled out, before settling in beside Charlotte. As real light grew nearer in the distance, Niko wondered what else might exist in the hidden corners of the Alterra…