Time Elapsed: 1 Month, 1 week.

“Are you sure we’re in the right place?” said Kaya, panting.

“Not at all,” said Dorian. He smiled at her. “Not this time, nor the last hundred times you asked.”

Kaya huffed, collapsing to the sands. She was drenched in sweat. “That’s enough for a day,” she gasped.

“Really?” Dorian smirked. “We’ve only been running half a day. Are you sure you’ve crossed mid-Vigor?”

She gave him a nonplussed look. “When’d you get so mouthy?” She wiped her face with a sleeve, sloughing off a curtain of sweat. “I miss the days when I could smack you around.”

She fell back, spread-eagled. “Urgh.” A pause. Her eyes scrunched shut. “I miss a lot of things…”

It’d been two weeks since she’d woken up to find her home and all its people gone. It was rough for her the first week—she’d been strangely cut-up about seeing Hento torn apart in front of her—but now she’d settled into a sort of quiet calm. Dorian still caught her staring up at the stars for hours on end, looking melancholy. Lost. These days, she was more likely to talk in grunts and head-jerks than in her usual light-hearted ribs. Dorian understood. If her life were a ship, she’d been sailing full-speed, gung-ho, masts billowing, for the best of nineteen years. Now a hurricane had torn off the masts and driven the vessel into rocky shallows. That was the word for her, the more he looked at her face, her body: sinking. Some hull of confidence had been badly punctured.

Maybe the monotony was getting to her. Stuck in a desert for two weeks with no concrete direction, following Dorian’s vague inklings of the stars. If he remembered right, each Oasis was wrapped in strong artifact-generated illusions; mirages to confuse and ward off all but the strongest Spirit Beasts. It’d fend off humans, too, unless they knew what to look for.

The trouble was, Dorian didn’t. All he had was a hazy guesstimate. Hardly reassuring.

“If we’re getting close, shouldn’t there be people?” sniffled Kaya. “Caravans. Routes. Lines waiting to get in! I don’t know.”

“There are no active trade routes,” said Dorian gently. “All shipping between Oases is done by stealthy peak-Profound experts carrying multiple Interspatial Rings. And these are much bigger than the ones we have; these ones are high-grade. They can fit small mountains of goods. Out here, active routes are too risky.”

He waited for her to ask how he knew all that. Instead she let out a “Hmph!” and turned on her side. To him, it was cute.

There wasn’t much room for sentiment in a run like this, but he cracked a smile regardless. In the past few weeks, he’d managed, through a strange mental alchemy, to transmute the original Io’s feelings of familial love and kinship into something more acceptable—more like the love an owner has for a pet, an affection of a more disposable sort. It was adorable to see her brood. Mortals and their little problems.

As Kaya lay there, wrapping herself into a small pouty ball, Dorian set up camp. In a jiffy he’d sprung up the tent, set up some coals, and started roasting meat for the day. Apparently Wyrm-meat had a very long expiration period, and he’d collected enough before he left the Festival bloodbath to last several months.

The trouble was, the Tournament was in less than a week. By Dorian’s estimations they should’ve arrived already.

It’s there that he suspected Nijo would contact him—if at all. In the weeks since his departure from the Festival, he’d heard nothing…

Half an hour later Dorian finished up dinner and handed her a bowl of lightly seasoned meat stew. She snatched it, mumbled a small “thanks,” and nibbled in silence.

He cultivated the rest of the night. In these two weeks he’d made heaps of progress; he’d refined the inner organs and all his muscles in that time. As he rose up the ranks, his speeds slowed drastically; it was natural. Now he neared the peak of Vigor. Another day and he’d be ready to tackle the bottleneck between the Vigor and the Profound Realms. It was the cutoff which halted most fighters; even with his bloodline boost he’d need to approach with caution.

***

The next day, they set off before the sun had risen. Four hours in—with Kaya panting heavily at his side—Dorian stopped. “Do you smell that?”

“Huh?”

“The air. It’s different.”

She sniffed. “Sure smells the same to me. Maybe a lil’ more humid.”

“That’s precisely it.” He frowned. Then he streaked toward the clouds in three Cloud-Treading Steps and took in a snapshot of their surroundings. He fell, landing in a crouch and a cloud of dust.

“There’s no Sinkholes nearby,” he said. “Where’s it coming from? It’s almost like a sea breeze.”

Following his nose and his touch, he went toward the source of the breeze. “The Oases are all planted around a massive Sinkhole. Their illusions cloak may cloak sight, but not this. We’re close.”

“You’d better be right this time,” said Kaya, gasping. “If you’ve got my hopes up for nothing, I’ll… I’ll....” Her nose wrinkled and she let out a sigh. “I miss the days when I could threaten you and mean it.”

“Think of the icicle treats,” laughed Dorian, breaking into a light sprint. “Soon you’ll have all you could want!”

There! The first indication of the mirage was a shimmer in the air, so faint it could’ve been a heat wave. It ran a vertical line like a seam in the fabric of the world.

They skated along the surface of the sands, nearing the light. Then it shimmered, as though on the cusp of fading out; the closer they got the less tangible it seemed. Twenty paces away and it seemed a trick of the light. Ten paces away and Dorian could convince himself it’d been a figment of a desert-fevered imagination. Five and it seemed incorporeal; three and it was no longer there. A mirage?

“Well?” said Kaya, arms crossed.

“Hold on.” Dorian stopped, frowning, and paid attention. He felt the heat on his fingers, up his arm in a warm lather; he felt sweat on his thighs and his temple and his cheeks, trickling down in drip-drips. He felt the sensations of weight in his feet and in his body; he felt the lazy coziness of the air as it brushed over, felt each twitch of every fiber of his hand, felt stray itches running up his back. All of the small sensations prickling at the back of his consciousness were brought out into the light.

Only now did he feel it. A vague conviction, a feeling. Not here, it said. Turn back. It was the suggestion at the base of a thought, which spun into the base of a belief—unquestioned but strangely solid.

What fun! These savages have discovered mind-magics. He closed his eyes, grasping for that thread of feeling.

Somehow, without looking, he could feel Kaya opening her mouth. He could feel her raising a quizzical brow. He held up a hand. “Wait!” he said, and almost snickered when she choked on her words in surprise. “Let me listen.”

Purely by feeling, he started to move. His criterion was very simple. The stronger that conviction felt—the more he felt like turning away from a direction—he went toward it. They kept up like that for minutes under the hot, brow-beating sun. Kaya followed along without a word; maybe she was too tired to argue. The only thing she did out of the ordinary was to pull him out of the path of a cactus. Quietly they pattered along.

Then, “Are you—“ Kaya stifled the question. “No, you aren’t sure. Of course you aren’t, yea, yea. Bleh. I only mean—“ She paused. “Doesn’t it feel like the wrong way?”

Dorian grinned. “Why?”

He felt her frown at his back. “I… dunno.”

“Maybe it’s by design. Spirit Beasts would feel like it’s the wrong way too,” he said, and kept walking.

After a hundred steps—or it could’ve been two hundred, or five—the faintest hint of sound shimmered in Dorian’s ear. A hustle-and-bustle, almost like a lively town square. It was quickly silenced, blunted to nothing. He grinned. The voice in his head was now insisting with stern firmness that he turn back; it was at the highest volume it could be before it’d surface as conscious thought.

Kaya’s breath caught. She stopped. He opened his eyes.

There it was again—that seam in the fabric of the world. Brighter this time, more corporeal, flickering at the edges like translucent fire; dark colors drifted over its surface. There was no sound. It was eerily quiet. Now, at the true doorstep, that voice went silent.

“Well?” said Dorian with a gesture and a playful smile. “You’ve been banging on about it all week. You first.”

“I’ll be bled,” whispered Kaya. Her eyes popped as she pattered up. She poked at a seam; a finger slipped through and vanished to nowhere, swallowed up by the flames. “Ee!” She yanked it back out, then wiggled it around to make sure it still worked.

“Relax, sis,” snorted Dorian. “It’s a doorway. It can’t hurt you.”

“Oh, off with you! I’m not scared,” she said. But she still stood at the entrance, hesitant. She reached out as though to prod it a second time. “It’s not like any door I’ve seen, is all. I won’t speak for you, dear brother, but I don’t go sticking my bits into holes I don’t—EE!”

She let out that last bit as Dorian’s foot connected with her back and she was sent sprawling headfirst through the doorway. Dorian went up to the entrance, pressed his ear to the seam, and listened for confirmation.

“Bastard!” came Kaya’s furious yell. Muffled, warbled, but clearly there. And alive, too! A nice bonus.

Smiling, he stepped through.

To his surprise, Kaya didn’t try to strangle him the second he came. She was too busy gawping.

The stench was the first thing that struck him: a rancid wave, like rotting eggs and waste, which loitered over everything. A wall of noise: shouts, cries, hoarse yells; a steady drum-beat of clanging metal. The first things Dorian saw ran utterly against his mental image of the oasis. This… what’s this? A huge mass of worn-down tents of all sizes, some tall and pointy, others fat and squat, dressed all sorts of faded colors and fanning out as far as the eye could see. Some of these were in even worse condition than the Tribes! Little flags flew from the tops of each one, adorned with black symbols—one to his left was two massive ratlike teeth crossed against each other; another bore a cartoonish devil-face. Some were defaced with black ink.

Between this giant swathe of sad tents ran streets beaten flat into the sands; they were choked with people who all looked like they’d climbed out of the world’s dirtiest sewer. Their hair was disheveled and greasy, their teeth yellowed and half-rotted, their eyes bloodshot. They were clothed only in torn rags, ripped tunics, leathery cloaks with holes nibbled through them. They moved fast, shiftily, head down; a pervasive stench of shame rose up from them, mingling with the other odors to make a uniquely dastardly brew. There must’ve been thousands here, and there wasn’t a washed man or woman among them.

Oh, and the grime! There wasn’t a tent-side that wasn’t streaked with some kind of purple or dark-green muck. The streets were a minefield of wastewater, trash, and feces. Most people stepped right atop them—barefoot. In the middle of the street was a curious attraction: Dorian saw a woman missing half her teeth wrestling a sack of bread from a boy missing half his arm. Then a burly oaf of a man stepped between them, snarling; they scampered off, squealing, and the big man snatched up his prize.

But just as Dorian’s doubts started to settle in, his eyes trailed up. Beyond this waste-land. Rising as the backdrop to it all, some hundreds upon hundreds of feet away, was a wall of a silver-gold so luscious it seemed mythical. It was a glory of engineering, the lines between the bricks almost imperceptible; their presence was only betrayed by the searing-white sunlight glinting across them. Tiny dots, soldiers, milled across the parapets, keeping watch.

Beyond that, looming beyond the wall, was a city. Gleaming. Stark-white stones made buildings which thrust proudly at the sky; towers, houses, shingles stretching on and on, a constellation of windows. Windows! Glass! It was the first he’d seen of such a luxury in this plane. Blue domes jutted out above the mass. Te buildings seemed to keep on coming, one after the next; they were built atop a hill, it seemed—they filled up half his sight.

What most struck his eye was the density of artifacts swarming the city; windmill-like constructs antlered up from the homes; qi-lanterns hung suspended between vast cables. Some seemed to siphon qi out of the air. Others studded rooftops like nodes. These and a thousand other odd manufactures poked out of every building, flashing and whirring, shrouding the city in a mist of silver and yellow. Truly it seemed like a hive of mechanized bees.

The most peculiar part of all was the massive network of marble tubes ringing the city, stretching in and out of it. Each segment must’ve weighed half a flood-dragon. They shifted of their own accord, disconnecting and re-connecting, driven by unseen hordes of Spirit Stones. With each slow, powerful shift came a sloshing sound, audible from even this distance. Water. These were aqueducts. They must’ve drawn from the major Sinkhole at the heart of this Oasis. They even crawled out to places outside the walls—the one point of connection between the outside and the inside.

They called the Azcan Oasis the city of Artifice. Its calling-card was its unmatched expertise in qi-machinery. Dorian already had designs on that part of the city, but its offerings stretched far wider than that. Oh, there was much here to be done—it made Rust Tribe seem a ditch in the ground by contrast.

Dorian spread his arms wide. His teeth glinted in the sunlight and a familiar eagerness bubbled up in him, spreading down his arms, tingling his fingers.

“Welcome, dear sister, to the Oasis!”