In a sundering voice that would have burst the young mage"s eardrums if not for the protective enchantments on his hooded robe, the antler helmeted man said, "Proud son of heaven!? You? There is only one law that determines such a thing and you are inferior to me in every way save in your lunacy."

Orison shrugged, "How could anyone expect their inferiors to understand loftier sentiment. If you can survive the light brush of my weakest sprightly summoning then I"ll bow to your law and call you lord before I submit to rending."

Herne"s narrowed in cruel mockery. "And there it is. A worm whining for the chance to earn his consolation prize, the so called partic.i.p.ation award."

Orison spit to the side in disgust. "Look me in the eyes, inferior, and see if I care for that trash or if I don"t mean to end you today."

Herne did so with a scathing intensity.

The giant huntsman tilted his head back and roared in mocking laughter. "Then let me be the elixir for your fevered mind. I relish what is to come after your delusions of grandeur crumble, madman."

Struggling with barely perceived concepts, Orison pieced together a sprite with the grace and power of a drunken firefly, nearly imperceptible set against the cold moon radiance of the huntsman"s majesty. The only thing staying Herne"s hand from ending the farce before humiliating and murdering Orison was the deep malevolence pulsing out from the young mage"s eyes. More than the disbelief of sudden death, the huntsman wanted to see the breaking and debas.e.m.e.nt of the creature that had so thoroughly slandered his honor.

When the sprite was mere inches away from Herne"s face, Orison said, "Do you know why nature makes the most dangerous of things beautiful, fragile or both?"

Herne frowned and said "Sto-"

As soon as the giant opened his mouth, Orison had the sprite dart in with all it had, using his s.p.a.ce"s connection with his summon models to load it with the remaining condensed illegal sparks after he had destabilized them.

Orison hit the ground and covered his head as he thought, "I hope it"s because nature is innately balanced."

His world was swallowed in white.

***

Dazed and disoriented, the young man looked around at odd structures he didn"t recognize, at a ghostly boy whom he felt an affinity with but didn"t truly understand why. Like a colossal jigsaw puzzle with countless pieces, all that made the young man slowly started clicking into place far too slowly to be satisfying.

The boy said, "Quite a high risk gamble. Only time will tell if the potential gains will outweigh the losses... and we have lost a lot... A third of our soul is a minor thing really. That might be a blessing in disguise because it allowed us the opportunity to remove some fairly insidious remnants of things we want no dealings with and trim the fat a little.

"We kept the majority of our acquired concepts... That mustard seed bracelet clung to us with a ferocious intensity. It even kept a cupful of that five colored soil and a few blades of spirit gra.s.s from getting taken... Maybe it was due to the spark being there but our formation was left alone. All else is gone.

"I"m pulling for all we"re worth but what we gain from the death of Herne is something the controlling personality will have to investigate after we"re awake again... Oh, good news. The spirit essence we"re siphoning from Herne is almost completely compatible. It"s not on the same level of useful as the miasma but doesn"t carry nearly any hidden dangers like that stuff did. It"s a lot easier to digest and claim too.

"The power of existence we lost is probably the most harmful but we didn"t really have much acc.u.mulation of that to begin with. We don"t have those book or circlet granted blessings anymore but considering what wasn"t absorbed into our concepts was pretty redundant or currently useless anyway, that"s probably for the best. They took up some of the room in our potential growth."

The young man pa.s.sively took in what the ghost boy was saying as he processed his ident.i.ty and realized what had happened to him. "I died. Wow, that sucks. No deus ex machina for me, huh?"

The ghostly child said, "Not this time, at any rate. Not unless you want to count the well known properties and consequences of Osomo"s resp.a.w.n mechanic."

Orison said, "I"m a bit confused about that. Why was I so messed up and in here talking with you instead of reappearing at the nearest major transporter platform?"

See-through boy Orison replied, "Part us, part Osomo"s merciless confiscation procedure. Making sure that we didn"t lose anything we really want to keep and getting rid of harmful parts meant a little deconstruction/reconstruction. Of all the things that we lost, it was the most inherently good thing that did happen. Without that insanely powerful device pulling us loose and fluffy for a bit, we"d never have been able to excise those alien remnants.

"Alright. As soon as you"re awake, release the beacon model in your s.p.a.ce... and pay for a transport back into the jungle hub. We need to contact and get an invite from Gan as soon as possible or he might do something dumb. That will coincidentally also help you get away from the Sek authority that"s taking your down time as an opportunity to put you into a lock-down."

Orison nodded absentmindedly.

"Raise our vigilance! We might have a lot of time in here before it happens but out there it"ll be less than three seconds," the ghost boy warned.

***

Orison came to with a gasp that startled the man trying to put an enchantment etched manacle on the young mage. With the speed of thought, he released the beacon model and used the transporter before the curtain of light had even cleared. Appearing in the little border town they had been at two days and what seemed like a lifetime ago, Orison sent a message to the scout, requesting a party invite.

In an uncomfortable amount of delay, Orsion was about to pay for another transport to escape the full contingent of eight Sek uniformed men when Gan"s acceptance came in. Three transporter movements in a row made the recovering mage suffer a bout of nausea inducing vertigo as he cast a sub-mind a.s.sisted exercise of concepts to produce his elven horse.

Letting the horse"s environment response compensation keep them from crashing into a ditch, Orison used spirit sight to act as an early warning to avoid the creatures awakening in the predawn hours. By the time his Sek pursuers had oriented themselves, the young mage was no longer in sight. And by the time they were on his trail, creatures that had been stirred by his pa.s.sing became extra obstacles for them to deal with, allowing the young mage to pull too far ahead for them to reasonably follow any longer.

Realizing that his equipment might look fine in appearance but was actually barely better than tatters, Orison switched out for the set of leathers that his sub-mind had managed to pull from Herne"s drop inventory. There were quite a bit of odd things in that ma.s.s drop but one that caught his attention was a figurine of the horse that Herne rode. Once it was identified as some kind of mount summoning artifact, he fed it to his s.p.a.ce. Within a few minutes, Enbarr felt a bit more stable and agile but that was about all he"d get for the moment.

As Gan and Danny came into view, Orison noticed that Duran wasn"t with them. Checking his party listing, the boy"s name was grayed out but the log of activities didn"t show that Duran had died, much less resp.a.w.ned. Worried, Orison picked up the pace to catch up as they slowed down to let him. Pulling up beside them, Orison was about to ask about Duran when Gan all but yanked him off his horse into a bear hug.

In a wavering voice, Gan said, "Don"t do that to me."

From there, Gan"s words were more garbled nonsense than coherent speech. The gist of the scout"s dissatisfaction over being chosen to survive when his friends stayed to essentially sacrifice themselves wasn"t hard to pick up on. What was made a little clearer as the scout"s emotional outburst simmered down a bit was how the situation had opened up some old wounds.

The leader of Gan"s first band and that leader"s shield maiden best friend were the ones that had taken the scout under their wings and had granted him the nickname that Orison used. Like the young mage, they had also given him a mission that took him out of harm"s way while they stayed to die. Gan had been lost for some time after that and was still on the road to recovery when Orison had met him.

Relaxing his stiff disposition some, Orison gave the scout a few returned back pats and said, "It really wasn"t like that, buddy. Don"t make me out to be some kind of saint. I might start getting a big head about it!"

Gan put the young mage in a head-lock and gave him a good knuckle rap to the skull before pushing them apart so they wouldn"t both fall off their mounts as soon as he let go. "I don"t even have words for how bad that felt. I get why you did it but..."

Danny nearly falling off Gan"s horse shaped conduit broke the overly emotional moment for Gan long enough for Orison to ask, "What happened to Duran?"

Dany said, "There was a second, narrow beam of light not too long after the bright flash. I can"t be sure but I think he might have transcended the limit."

Orison looked confused, "He climbed? How does that... No, I get it now."

The young mage had long a.s.sociated Duran"s key to a black hole. With how much it had been taking in, the life and death stimulus had let the boy take one large step all at once. A violent discharge of potential might not be the safest way to climb but it was incredibly suited to escaping situations like the one they were in. The drawbacks of such a method were just as apparent. Wherever Duran would be traveling next, the boy would be going at it by himself.

"Except that he won"t," Orison thought. "He"s got Wick and possibly who or whatever that spirit body was."

Taking a moment to do a well wish sending off for the youngest member of their crew, they continued on to their planned destination. For nostalgia or maybe just for emotional rea.s.surance, Gan climbed on with Orison, letting Danny take the reigns of the conduit. If there was a little shakiness or a little too much strength in the scout"s grip, Orison saw no need to comment on it. After all, his friend didn"t have a touch of soul fading to numb the emotion and mental stress of their previous night"s trials.

After a round of joking and "horseplay" under the emerald tinted golden light of day to bring everyone back into balance, Danny interrupted to ask, "How bad is it? You"re pretty new so I doubt you have much to spare."

Orison didn"t need to struggle to understand what Danny was referring to. "One third. I have the same "three time"s a charm" privilege as royals. I know it"s pretty hard to gauge if you lost something important because you wouldn"t know even if you did. I can say with a strong a.s.surance that it was more blessing than bane, though. I had a few, um, bad parts in there I didn"t mind losing so much."

Taking a quick once over, Orison noticed that Ivan"s spiritual mark was still on the "rind" of his soul. Orison didn"t have any difficulty accepting that. Whether for Ivan"s sake or the usefulness it represented, having a tether to an ally was a good trump card to keep. Through studying it, Orison might even find a way to revive the withered connections between his original three members once he understood enough of his own concepts for such a connection to not be harmful.

The veteran guardian offered, "I don"t have much of my climber memory restored but I can tell you from experience on this world that expanding and enriching your life experiences will help you to recover more quickly. The average Chosen takes a couple of years to recover from their first resp.a.w.n but I"ve seen one or two do it much faster."

Seeing that Gan was working himself up again, Orison said, "Don"t stress it. Out of everything, it"s my least concern. A group of Sek nut sacks might even solve the problem for me outright if they don"t learn to leave me the f*** alone."

Conversation became subdued and superficial as they entered Clay Barrows. There was a sense of oppressiveness to the sprawling riverside city that no other place that Orison"s group had been.

While the young mage and scout were trying to figure out why that was, Danny whispered, "There are a few places Osomo leaves to its own devices. This is one of those places. Transporters don"t work and the ambient essence in the air remains thin here when there"s no real reason why it should be... We should probably leave as soon as we"ve gotten some rest. This isn"t a place Chosen tend to linger, for many reasons."

Something tickled the back of Orison"s mind but with so much else occupying his attention, it didn"t seem important enough to follow up on. One of those things was the inhospitable mood of the city"s residents. Paying 100 gold for a dilapidated room that only boasted decent defensive capability, Orison noted the distinct lack of convenience magic devices that were so common elsewhere.

Determined not to give in to a downward spiral of paranoia that wouldn"t serve anyone well, the group decided to take a small risk and just sleep. It was the middle of the day and Orison would be good to go in a couple of hours before night fall anyway. Without further comment or concern, all three of them crashed without so much as removing boots.

Orison awoke to the sound of a m.u.f.fled screech. The bit of dirty twilight filtering through the room"s only shoe box window did little to illuminate the situation. Fighting against the aches and grogginess of over resting, Orison cast a light to see a horrifying tableau. He, Gan and Danny had dark splotches with thin, starfish-like tentacles clinging to them. The screech that had awoken him was caused by Gan rolling over onto one.

With the most aggressive use of "degree shift" he had ever cast, Orison dislodged the ones that were on himself before dispatching them with a couple of firefly sprites that could crisp the alien vermin with zaps of electricity. He quickly repeated the process for Gan and Danny as he decided not to wake them up. Disturbing as they were, the creatures weren"t overly dangerous aside from their ability to keep their targets asleep to feel longer.

Had there been around three times as many there might have been a chance for anemia but Orison just chalked it up to this place"s scary version of bed bugs and let it go. Like many who had came to Clay Barrows before him, it wasn"t going to make his list of favorites. Unlike those who had came before, he swept his surroundings with spirit sight to see much larger versions of the things in their room, floating like ugly balloons in the darker recesses around the inn they were staying at.

Close to the eight hour mark of their stay, a light set of footsteps stopped close to their door and made some clicking noises. The sole pest survivor that Orison had been studying, started struggling more frantically. Since he was done with it anyway, he let it go to see it scramble through a hole in a dark corner of the room.

Orison said in a low voice on the other side of the door, "I let one live. I doubt I"ll be back this way again but if I am, keep them out of my room. I don"t give a d.a.m.n otherwise."

From the hallway, the tired voice of the middle aged innkeeper said, "You don"t plan on giving me grief about it?"

Orison sighed, "Life is hard out here. Why should I care about a relatively harmless way for you to raise some personal security. I imagine the poor guests that get fleeced by you don"t even realize how much safer they are here than anywhere else in this city... had I figured it out sooner, I wouldn"t have done such a thorough job on working out my irritation."

The innkeeper said, "That"s... fair. There"s some folks being a nuisance trying to find you. If you"ll leave without a fuss, I"ll pack up a meal for the three of you to take."

The young mage chuckled in spite of himself. "If you hold the spit and poison you have a deal. We"ll be ready in five."

Shaking his companions awake, Orison had them pull themselves together quietly. On the agreed time, they met the innkeeper downstairs and picked up their wrapped dinner, still warm from cooking. It smelled oddly tasty. Whatever he was expecting, the young mage didn"t antic.i.p.ate that the surly man was a decent grill master.

Forewarned and ready, it was relatively easy for the trio to skirt around the Sek group and stay away from the darkest shadows of the deserted streets. For a moment, Orison toyed with the idea of thinning their pursuers" numbers but thought better of it. With a sigh of regret, Orison let the annoying pests live to draw breath another day as he and his companions slunk out into the night. As angry and hungry for spiritual compensation as he was, he didn"t want to add anymore variables until they had reached their goal.