There was a problem with meeting the Shaman, and it lay in the fact that I didn’t know where my dungeon was. Little inconveniences like this don’t trouble you in a world with GPS and Google Maps, but I don’t think I could have even explained how they worked, let alone duplicate them here.

I knew how to get to my dungeon… probably. Between memorising the landmarks and walking there a few times, I thought I could get there on my own. I hadn’t actually put that to the test, though. On every trip so far, I’d relied on Cloridan and Cutter, our most outdoorsy types, to take us on the roundabout route that led to the secret entrance.

That was one thing. Ask me to point to the spot on a map, however, and I’d be stuck pointing to some vague area covered in hills and trees, and saying, “Somewhere in there”. And that was supposing I managed to find a good map. Most of the maps of the northern forest were bad copies of Empire-era maps, with the increased extent of the forest added in green.

If I’d wanted to take the shaman to the dungeon, that wouldn’t have been a problem. I could have led him there, or, more likely Cloridan could have led us both there. Regardless, we would have found our way there. But I didn’t want to lead him to the dungeon. I wanted to meet him some distance, say a mile, from the dungeon and see if Rhis could suck in the mana river that he was leading closer.

A little-known fact is that in a world without GPS, you can’t just start at one place in a forest and ‘go north’. There are trees, hills and cliffs in the way. You get lost. You lose track of the sun because the trees are too thick. You have no idea of how far you’ve travelled, and since it wasn’t in anything like a straight line, even knowing it wouldn’t do you any good.

Fortunately, all of this was explained to me before I tried to do just that. I thought that maybe someone with a decent [Hunt] or [Gather] skill could do it, but apparently the expertise those skills granted told the user not to try something so stupid.

So we cheated, making use of two advantages that I did have. One was the use of a Griffin rider. The riders didn’t exactly answer to me as a Councillor, but I was on good terms with their captain. A quiet word, a little extra money, and I had access to a rider who could be discrete. I didn’t want to call it bribery, I felt that closer cooperation between the civil and military administrations was something to be encouraged. Hector could have learned from us, if we had been inclined to tell him.

The other advantage that I had was that I could see through my own illusions. This made it easy to identify my dungeon’s location from the air. Then all we had to do was fly a mile or two north and find an appropriate clearing to land it.

At this point, what would hopefully be the final flaw in my plan showed itself. There was no clearing. Fortunately, for some definition of that word, griffins didn’t need clearings to land in.

I screamed my lung out as the griffin folded its wings, plunging a short distance through the upper canopy. I hadn’t gotten to my second breath before it caught itself on a branch or the main trunk. I wasn’t sure which, at this point, I was hanging at a strange angle, clutching at my harness for dear life.

Whatever perch we were clinging to was not so firm that it didn’t sway as it absorbed our momentum. The sensation was sickening, but I quickly found myself missing it, as my ride reorientated itself and then jumped to a lower branch. The rest of our descent was… nerve-wracking to say the least. At least it was over quickly enough that I managed to not vomit.

“Are you sure I should just leave you, ma’am?” the rider asked, as I reacquainted myself with my best friend, the ground.

I ignored him for a moment. The forest floor wasn’t the most comfortable ground around. There were too many roots and not enough grass. Still, I took a moment, and then a moment more to appreciate its basic solidity before pulling myself together to answer the man.

“I should be fine,” I assured him. “They told me that the shaman would be able to find me, as long as I was in this general location. You can find this place again?”

“Aye,” he said. His voice was doubtful, but it wasn’t his own abilities that he was doubting. “Messie can smell out the tree she landed in, no problem. Even if it rains, if it’s just a day it’ll be fine.”

“Then I should be fine as well,” I told him. “The shaman probably heard me coming down and is on his way.”

“Might not be the only thing that heard you come down,” the man pointed out.

“I can hide from anything too big for me to kill,” I told him. I threw up a [Light] spell to make my point. It was the least of the spells I’d be casting here, but it was necessary. The canopy was thick around here, and while some light made it down, it wasn’t enough to read by.

“We’re not near any mana streams,” I said, glancing around with [Sense Mana] to make sure. I’d checked from above, but the forest was quite hard to see through. This area was quite low on mana, with a smooth flow that suggested where the nearest stream was. “There’s not likely to be any monsters around.”

He looked at me doubtfully but then shrugged.

“All right then. I’ll be back around this time tomorrow,” he said. He climbed back onto his saddle and started strapping himself back in.

“Are you going to…” I started, not willing to finish the question.

“Yep!” he said brightly. “This is what the straps are for, really. Not much call for flying upside down on a normal flight.”

I took a step backwards, as the griffin waggled its hips, and then jumped twenty feet straight up onto the trunk. It clawed its way up the tree, with its rider seemingly entirely unfazed by the ascent.

I’ll have to go through that tomorrow, I told myself and shuddered. To distract myself, I started setting up camp.

I travelled light— when travelling by griffin, there was no other way— but that didn’t mean I needed to camp without equipment. Not when I had [Phantasmal Object] at my disposal.

My first priority was a chair, based on any number of camping chairs that I’d seen. I could have just placed an Aaron chair down, but that seemed excessive. Next was a table to put my food and drinks on— I wasn’t a savage, to leave these things on the ground.

If I’d been planning to stay here longer, I would have made a tent and a bed and a sleeping bag, but those could wait for now. Instead, I thought about a fire. It was pretty cold. The forest canopy seemed to be keeping any snow away, or it was just a bit too warm for it. I didn’t know how it worked, I wasn’t a weather forecaster.

The ground… seemed a bit too dangerous for fire to me. It was pretty damp, but it was mostly wood, either roots or fallen branches. Maybe an English boy would have said, nah that’ll be fine, but my instincts were made in drier forests.

So, a brazier then. A heat enchantment would have been safer and more efficient, but I’m not made of money, and my enchantment budget was taken up with other things. Alchemy was cheaper.

First, the brazier itself, made with [Phantasmal Object]. Next, a cloth, treated with an alchemical substance that made it practically immune to heat. Draping that over the brazier would protect it from the fire that would otherwise keep chipping off its hit points until it vanished. Then I needed to gather some dry…ish branches, and then all I needed to do was light the fire.

I did manage to get badges in Girl Scouts, but we mostly used matches when we went camping. Flint and steel were all very well, for primitives, but alchemy came to my rescue again. A small vial of liquid, poured over the wood, quickly started to smoke and then burst into flame. And with that, I had a nice little campfire.

I couldn’t eat Phantasmal food, of course, but my ring could easily hold three days worth of cold rations and cordial. Wine had seemed ill-advised. This place wasn’t entirely safe.

I’d been entertaining myself for a couple of hours, practising my [Water Magic], when I heard the faint sounds of song. Looking around for the source of it, I noticed a bird that hadn’t been there before. That I hadn’t noticed arriving.

[Identification]: - Fell Raven - Threat: 12 - Properties: Flight, Shadow Aspect (Bonded)

Ah. I’ve been found. [Tame] wasn’t part of the official Shaman skill set, but Shaman tended to be a profession picked up late in life. They generally had other life skills.

As the singer grew closer, I realised that song might have been an overstatement. There was a tune, but the words were meaningless. Not just la-la-la, more of a lo-lie-de-dum. I might have assumed it to be in another language, but the fact that it didn’t get translated ruled that out.

I stayed seated since the incoming shaman seemed to know where he was going, and shortly thereafter, the man himself appeared. Not on the ground, like I expected, but perched on a tree branch. A grey-furred cat-kin, if I was any judge.

“Woot! They said she was a looker, but this is ridiculous,” he said as he looked down at me. “Makes me wish I was sixty again!”

I frowned. The language he was speaking wasn’t Latorran, and it didn’t sound like the common Tribal language. It must have been his tribe’s tongue, which he couldn’t have expected me to speak. Unless he knew—or suspected— that I was a Champion? More likely he was just being rude.

“I’m sorry, I assumed the shaman they sent would be able to speak the common tongue, at least,” I said.

He shrugged. “I speak Latorran,” he said in Tribal Common. “But you speak the common tongue pretty well, for a human. Let’s use that, Council-member Hammond.”

I smirked. I knew very well that I spoke his language perfectly. If I wasn’t focused on it, I spoke in exactly the accent he was used to.

“The common tongue is fine,” I said. “Now—”

“You must be pretty brave coming out into the forest alone,” he said, grinning down at me. “Or pretty stupid.”

He showed no sign of coming down to talk. Were we going to have some kind of face-off? I relaxed my suppression of my level six aura. I’d been practising it, not because I’d gotten it working, but because that was what you needed to do to get it to work.

He didn’t look impressed, which was no surprise. I’d probably gone from a 5.8 to a six… which was where he was as far as I could tell. Hopefully, he wasn’t suppressing his aura. I’d need to do something else to impress him.

“I can take care of myself,” I said, but I didn’t say it from where I was. Instead, I said it from above, my [Phantasmal Emissary] appearing silently and without any warning on the branch above. Thanks to [Conceal Mana] there was no sign of a spell to be seen with his [Sense Mana].

He jumped and looked up. I waved to him before cancelling the spell.

“So I see,” he said slowly. He looked back at me, trying to figure out what had happened. [Illusion Magic] wasn’t a common path in the tribes. There were too many people with high enough Perception to see through the illusions of a beginner [Illusionist]. Someone as young as me, with illusions that he couldn’t see through, wasn’t something he could come to terms with easily.

“Did you bring the mana?” I asked. I actually knew that he had. I could see it. The mana levels here hadn’t changed much, but I could sense how the flow of it had changed. It was all being sucked up into a wide pipe, the sides of which were out further than I could see.

“I did,” he said. Shaking off his thoughts, he jumped down to me. He was pretty spry for someone as old as him. Sure he groaned as he straightened up, but that jump had been twenty feet down. “I am known as Filnas. Did you bring my payment?”

“Right here,” I said and handed him a leather sack. My negotiations had been with the tribal Council and hadn’t been for anything as petty as gold, but the expectation that the man doing the work would need to be paid had been passed on.

“Dungeon gold,” he mused, pulling out one of the coins and looking at it. “These have become a lot more common since the trade started.”

“I was told gold would be preferred,” I said. “If you need beast-cores instead…”

“No, this is fine,” he said. “More common is good. More tribes are becoming familiar with it, more tribes are desiring it to trade with. Where shall I send this river?”

“Can you send it underground?” I asked, “I’d like for it to not be visible.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I can…” he said thoughtfully. “Mana goes easily through the ground. The beasts though, they cannot travel that way. With nowhere to go, they will break out of the confinement.”

“The beasts?” I said uneasily. I hadn’t been worried about them up until now, but I suddenly realised that I was in a mana river, the sort that monsters travelled through.

“None will arrive for some time yet,” he assured me. “But thinking ahead is required for shamans.”

“Right, right,” I said. “Can you make… an offshoot? That links back in? That way the monsters will just go around and around?”

He nodded. “Normally, that would cause a dangerous build-up… but you are planning to absorb most of the mana… I think that can work.”

“Then send the river into that ridge, and we’ll see if we can take hold of it from this distance.”

“As you say,” he said and started up his song again.

Moving mana like this, it felt like a breeze that didn’t touch anything physical. What it was touching, what I was feeling, I didn’t know. But I felt it.

“I feel it,” Filnas said, making me jump. “Something is taking it… it is gone.”

“Is that it?” I asked. “Are we done?”

Filnas laughed. “Oh no. I still have to do the loop, and I will need to mark the trees here to fix the stream. But you have your mana.”