Tyron grit his teeth as he fought off another wave of exhaustion. His eyes felt raw, as if scrubbed with sand, and every part of him ached. In particular, his fingers had suffered the most. Every joint pained him as he flexed his hands, a stabbing sensation that emanated outward from within. Rubbing at the digits almost made it worse, as there was no way for him to reach inside his flesh to fix what was wrong.

It had taken him ten hours of constant work, but his skeletal force was as ready as it could be. Cracked bones had been repaired, bone threads rewoven and quivers of moulded bone arrows restocked. He’d even gone to the trouble of selecting and moulding bones to create a custom set of bone armour.

As prepared as he could make himself, he was ready to tackle the rift.

Yor had vanished after pulling his backside out of the fire the previous night. With the early morning sun creeping over the horizon, he wouldn’t see her again until the day was done.

What she’d done with the Marshals, he didn’t know and couldn’t bring himself to care. Trying to minimise the harm he caused only seemed to invite more down on his head, and at this point, he didn’t have the energy to spare worrying about others. Approach the rift, examine it, then give his friend the final rest. That was what he needed to get done.

“Looks like you’ve finally got your shit together,” Dove remarked.

Tyron looked at the scattered supplies across the floor of the cave. Discarded bones that had been too damaged for him to repair, half-moulded efforts he’d tossed aside as failures and a few pages torn from his notebook and crumpled in disgust.

“If anything, it looks like I’m in the middle of a breakdown,” he croaked.

Holy shit, I need a drink.

A swig of water from his waterskin burned down his cracked throat. Too much spellwork, not enough rest for his voice. An amateur mistake his mother would frown on.

A Mage's most important tool is their voice, Tyron. Not the staff, not even the hands, not even the mind. If you cannot give voice to the words of power, the sharpest brain in the realm is completely worthless. Train it, take care of it, preserve it. If a Mage cannot speak, they are as helpless as a babe.

Beory had undertaken a great deal of work to improve her vocal endurance and lung capacity. She’d even taken up singing at one point, though she’d been absolutely terrible. Neither Tyron nor his father, Magnin, had the courage to point that out. The strongest battle mage in the province could certainly hold a note, just never the right one.

“That’s not what I mean, kid. You look like you’ve got a little steel in your eye. Seems like getting your arse saved has caused you to take a good drink of Harden the Fuck Up.”

“Is that a real drink?”

“My most famous cocktail.”

Tyron considered the skull for a moment, thoughts and emotions whirling in his head. Finally, he shrugged and gave a wry smile.

“I think I’m just way too tired to care anymore.”

“Great. Good spot to be in. It’s not the journey that matters after all, but the destination! Now let’s saddle up and take a peek at this rift. Should be an interesting sight. Then I can finally die, and you can get on with not being harassed by a spirit in a skull.”

Despite the joking tone, Dove’s words almost caused the young Mage to tear up. His friend deserved to rest, that was certainly true. In doing what he’d done, Tyron had inflicted a cruel injustice on his friend, and it was well past time to right the wrong.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever thanked you properly. You’ve done so much for me, even before you died, and I’ve been selfish to force you to stick around for this long afterwards. Thank you, Dove. Thanks for everything.”

The purple light that glowed within the sockets of the skull flickered.

“Don’t get sappy on me now, Tyron. I was never good with that stuff. I was happy to help you out. What happened to you, with your Awakening and all, that was unfair bullshit and you deserved a hell of a lot better. Keeping me trapped inside my own skull, for months, is a little less forgivable, but I understand why you did it. I even forgive you. A bit. Now no more of this bullshit, we’re Slayers, damnit, only happy when killing shit from another realm. Let’s get cracking.”

Tyron nodded and rubbed at his throat before taking another sip of water. A few hours and he’d be able to get his voice back to normal, but they could start out before then.

If nothing else, he could fling out magick bolts without speaking.

Dove was collected from his rock and tied onto Tyron’s belt, followed by the sword his father had given him. Not quite in the same mint condition it had been in before. The weapon had actually seen use over the last few months.

Lastly, he fastened his pack to his back. All his most critical supplies were kept inside and he wouldn’t allow himself to be separated from them again. The Mage candy he’d taken the previous night had in fact been his last, but his food, notes and water were all things he simply couldn’t afford to lose.

When he stepped from the cave, he was immediately surrounded by his skeletons. From within that protective shell of bones and shields, he scanned the surroundings.

The temperature continued to drop and frost now tipped the rock and scraps of grass that dotted the slope. The trees that still clung to the stone, roots stabbing deep into the mountain, might not survive this new cold, which would make the slope even more bare.

The peak was still far, far overhead, a place ruled by ice and snow, overlooked by impossibly high stone cliffs that seemed to scrape at the sky itself.

Thankfully, the rift wasn’t up there. If his estimate was correct, the rift itself had formed roughly three kilometres from where he had made camp. It was a hard trek, with no path cut into the slope, but it wouldn’t be overly difficult were it not for the steady flow of rift-kin.

As he’d recovered his energy and repaired his minions, all of his undead had been withdrawn to the mouth of the cave. Doubtless this meant a number of monsters had made their way down the slope to the village, but it had been a necessary step. After defeating one strong wave, another shouldn’t have come during the night. If it did, he wouldn’t have been in good enough condition to fight it anyway.

He stamped his feet in his boots to settle them, checked his buckles and straps one more time, then inspected his bone armour.

Too many times, he’d been caught without it. In truth, he didn’t much like the spell. Covering himself with the bones of deceased humans wasn’t pleasant, and projected an image that he had desperately wanted to avoid, one of a heartless killer, but he needed the protection, now more than ever.

The modifications he’d made helped a little. The bones didn’t jut quite so far out, the moulding he’d done allowed them to curve around his frame. It wasn’t quite as easy to tell what the armour was made from, the more obvious bone shapes flattened and widened to create more coverage.

Fully equipped, he began his trek up the mountain.

He encountered the first rift-kin almost immediately. Swiftly dispatched by a volley of arrows, the boar-like kin slumped to the ground and Tyron didn’t bother to collect the core. His pack contained a cloth bag that bulged with the things already. Any more would just be adding to the weight of his pack for no real gain.

Up the slope he went, the bitter cold wind sweeping down from the peak and into his eyes. The only sound he could hear was the wind, along with the crunch of the ground beneath his feet.

Formations in the stone caused the wind to whistle, a high pitched whine that only grew louder the higher he went. An hour after they’d started, flecks of ice began to drift on the wind, stinging his face. He raised a hand to protect his eyes and kept moving forward.

The surge of kin came suddenly, monsters ran down the hill in a pack, burning with rage. As soon as they saw him, they charged, eager to devour and destroy.

Tyron flung magick bolts forward as his skeletons moved into position. If he let his minions receive this assault head on, his undead would need to draw deep on his magick to stand their ground, so he shifted tactics.

The shield line angled itself to deflect the monsters rather than fight them head on as his archers picked off the front runners. The boars were powerful bundles of muscle, though still small by kin standards, and just as stupid as all the weaker rift-kin. Those struck by arrows stumbled on the slope, crashing snout first to the ground before tumbling end over end. Monsters immediately behind the leaders tripped over them, adding to the mess. When they finally crashed into his shield wall, the beasts had lost most of their momentum and were easily pushed to the side.

To end the battle as quickly as possible, he allowed his revenants to wade into the fight.

Illuminated from within by the ghastly purple light, the four undead stepped forward with purpose. Although three had been little better than bandits in their previous life, they were still stronger than his regular skeletons.

The former Slayer was the real prize. Powerful slashes cut through the weak kin as if they weren’t even there. He paid dearly in magick, but that was fine, the rest of his small horde was preserved, and he could recover the energy before the next fight.

Monsters dispatched, they moved forward again.

When he crossed the threshold, he almost forgot what had happened. An immediate shift in perception, the real becoming blurred, reality twisting at the edges. It was the coiling sensation in his gut that twigged his memory, as if a snake were uncoiling in his belly.

“This is…”

“Abso-fucking-lutely. The broken lands. We got a right and proper rift forming nearby, no question about it. Keep your wits about you, don’t forget how badly your perception can turn to shit.”

This close to a rift, time and space would stretch and compress. The sensation was unsettling, to say the least. Before him, the slope became even more barren than before. Precious few trees and little scrub remained, and the wind bit even deeper than before.

Crack.

A distinctive sound, like ice crackling underfoot, drifted from behind and Tyron whirled to see one of the humanoid kin stalk out from behind a rock.

His hands snapped into motion, words flowing in an instant as he formed the sigils necessary to shape his magick. Arrows flew through the air and slammed into the monster, followed by a wave of death magick as Tyron unleashed Death’s Grasp.

The kin was set upon a moment later, skeletons driving home their weapons to finish it off, only for another to show its face a moment later.

“It’s going to get wild up here, kid. The flow of monsters through the rift never ends, don’t forget that. We smash and grab. Power your way forward, we take a gander, then we get the fuck out. Got it?”

“Got it.”

That ice monster was dispatched with brutal force as Tyron no longer sought to conserve his energy, as was the next. Somehow, he still felt as if the number of kin should slow as he fought them, but he knew it wasn’t the case. After each victory, he pushed forward as quickly as he could, trying to gain ground.

So focused on the fight, on managing his minions and being restrained with his magick, Tyron didn’t notice what he could see at first, not until Dove yelled at him.

“Look up, dickhead!”

Tyron flung his eyes up the slope, and there it was… the rift.

Along with a frost covered mammoth, tusks formed of pure ice jutting from its face.