Unbound

A short time later, they were gone.

There was no fanfare, no waving widows or children, just silence as the gates of Fortress Fenwald sealed behind them and their army slipped into the swamp. Traveling under the cloak of night, they moved through the swamp and then the forested foothills of the Rimefangs with hurried steps, descending all the while toward the flat expanse of Pax’Vrell’s farmlands. For Felix, it was the easiest part of their journey, owing to the extensive hunting they had done in the area; there was little they didn’t know about the region directly around the fortress, and almost zero chance of encountering a Hierocratic patrol.

After two hours of steady marching, however, their army pressed into the farmlands of the Eastern Marches.

Here, Felix thought, is where things become difficult.

They walked through the night, muffling their armor with wads of cloth and moving with a steady and unrelenting gait across burnt farmlands. They avoided the ruined town at the edge of the border, opting to move through open fields until they could reach one of the main roads, and from there continued at a mile-eating gait.

The Daynes set a grueling pace, but Felix pressed them harder; he had no interest in wasting any more time. A quarter of the Dragoons and conscripts marched until they hit fifty percent Stamina, then they swapped out with those resting on Pit’s back. Thanks to Harn’s luck and ingenuity, Pit was now wearing a set of specialized barding, heavily modified to fit the Tyrant’s form. Apart from armored plates and padding, it featured multiple saddles and binding points that had, at one point, clearly been intended to allow a Dragon to carry squads of Dragoons upon its back.

The protection it offered was only Master Tier, same as his last set of barding, but it would do for now. Harn had set his enchanted stone into the helmet portion, ensuring that Pit could still activate his Mask at Will. Thankfully, the old Dragon armor had already been inscribed with enchantments that allowed it travel with a Companion when they Converged. Aside from a gaggle of soldiers, he was also carrying the entirety of their food, water, and spare equipment required by any army.

Do I really have to carry all this? Pit asked again. Look at all these tough spear-guys! They’re strong. They can carry stuff!

It’s your task, Pit, Felix reminded him, evenly. There are consequences to being as big as a bus.

Don’t forget how humble you are about it.

Yes, of course.

For his part, Felix marched at the front of the column at all times. He had no need to ride on Pit's back, though no one would have complained if he had. While his friends in the vanguard and rearguard were there to protect the army from any threats, his duties were different. Many of the Dragoons and a few of the conscripts had stealth Skills, they were individual and, at best, Journeyman Tier. To keep them hidden as they crossed the fields and sparse forests of the Eastern Reaches, Felix draped them all in Abyssal Skein, connecting them through his Will and intent until they all but faded into the landscape itself.

Abyssal Skein is level 94!

It was easier to do while marching now, especially since Stride of the King somehow used very little of his conscious mind to operate. Using that experience as a template, Felix found it remarkably simple to maintain the shroud of stealth on everyone while also keeping to their grueling pace. He was outstripped only by Vess and her family. Everyone was eager to end the threats to Pax Vrel, but none more so than the Daynes.

Honestly, Felix was proud of his team as they traveled through the night. They had all grown greatly since their fight in the Vault of Nine Kings. Since his talk with Beef, he’d sought out the others at one time or another.

Evie had pushed a few of her Skills to Master Tier during her fight with the Grim Nightshade, though the rest were far off. She hadn’t yet Tempered a full Aspect, but she was close with her Body.

Harn was also closing in on Master Tier, though it surprised no one so much as the warrior-smith himself. What’s more, he was advancing far more evenly than anyone else thanks to the effect his extensive smithing had on his general Skills, followed closely by his fight against the Rootclones. Based on their conversation, he was between ten and five levels away from full Master Tier.

Felix grinned as he jogged in the dark down rutted country roads, bathed in Void shadow and breathing easy while an army followed at his back. By the time they reached their destination, he was certain that nothing short of the Hierophant herself would be able to stop them from taking the capital back.

They took their first break as dawn split the skies across the Territory. Towns had started to dot the horizon, and now plumes of smoke trailed into the sky where the earliest risers had awakened. Most of those plumes were fresh from the tips of chimneys, but others were old and cold, a dirty smudge that indicated where the locals had chosen resistance over safety.

There was nothing left of those towns.

The ground wasn't all flat farmland and hills abounded throughout the Eastern Reaches, but they were fewer and fewer as they traveled inland toward the capital. The Daynes informed Felix that the way ahead would soon be riddled with towns and well-kept roads, and that the likelihood of encountering the Hierocracy would increase tenfold. Coupled with the soldier’s increasingly beleaguered Stamina, and a few hours of rest and recon would serve them well.

In a narrow valley between a series of forested hills, their army settled down. The closest town was two miles distant, and though it was mostly burned down they lit no fires. Trail rations were all they had to blunt the edge of their hunger, but Pit was packed to the brim with jerky and bread. Before the sun rose above the hills around them, everyone had bedded down quickly. They were planning to rest for no longer than absolutely required.

Felix didn’t really need rest, not from his efforts so far, and even continued to maintain Abyssal Skein. Instead, he had other responsibilities.

He found Archie sitting on a boulder, watching the charred town in the distance from behind the thick underbrush and heavy trees.

"I hear congratulations are in order," Felix said.

Archie didn't look at him. "Beef told you, I assume."

"He did.”

“Figures."

Felix frowned. Something was off about the man. Something about how he was sitting. Faintly, he could hear a harsh chord vibrating around the Delven, like a badly tuned guitar. "What happened?"

"Something stupid," Archie admitted. "I Tempered and evolved my Skill at the same time, but I left my Essence Draughts in my room, so I used one of yours."

Felix's eyebrows tried to climb into his hairline. "How'd that go for you?"

"Not well."

Felix sat down next to him on the boulder. "Want me to take a look?"

Archie rubbed at his chest and sighed. "At my core space, right?"

Felix nodded.

The man grunted. "If it fixes this god-awful heartburn, then yeah. Dive in."

Seconds later, Felix touched down within a vast, perhaps endless city. The skyline was filled with vague skyscrapers hidden by a thick veil of dark smoke and what he first thought was snow. He caught some in his hand and it crumbled into soot.

Ash.

From above, most of the city was undefined, as if Archie hadn’t put much thought into its construction other than general shape. Where Felix landed, however, was extremely detailed down to the mounds of ash that collected between the cobblestones on the road. Around him was wide open market square absolutely filled with people and stalls.

It reminded him of nothing so much as a giant tent city, the winter gray sky covered by expansive canvas awnings while the street was cluttered by countless, complicated wooden structures. Stalls and storefronts, built permanently into the square and fronted by merchants hawking their wares to countless faceless shoppers.

Oh, weird. Felix looked at the people around him. While there were perhaps hundreds if not thousands packed into the market, none of them were more than a set of generic clothes on vaguely humanoid bodies. They literally don’t have faces.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

The merchants, however, along with the stalls they manned were highly detailed. Those nearby had various things on display, all of them flashing with the occasional flare of powerful Mana. The faceless mob had money, and they bought items almost mechanically before moving onto the next stall.

"Neat set up,” he said.

Archie emerged from the crowd like a ghost. Felix could barely sense him at all. "Thanks, I guess."

"Why does it look like this, though?"

Archie frowned. "What do you mean?"

"If I were to describe a marketplace, even a farmers market or something, it wouldn't be this. There'd be Earth things. This looks like it is a place somewhere on the Continent."

"I don't know. Never really went to farmers markets back home. What, you want this to look like a Krogers?"

Felix snorted. "Alright, fine. Fantasy marketplace. So your Skills are the merchants and their stalls, and the flow of power is the money I see changing hands. Right?"

Archie blinked. "You figured all that out in the last two minutes?"

"Something like that," Felix said.

"Damn. Beef wasn't kidding. So what do you think about them?"

"About what?"

"My Skills. You saw the money. Did you see it moving through the crowds? How it flows?" Archie grinned as he walked next to one of the faceless shoppers and jerked a thumb at a bulging pouch at their waist. "They carry it around, spend it at the next stall, or the next, whatever I need."

"It's really interesting, I'll give you that. Unique even, and I've seen a lot of core spaces."

"Hah!" Archie grinned before cracking his knuckles. "That's nothing. Lemme show you how I activate my Skills."

Archie slipped through the crowds, a ghost among the crowd, and sidled up next to one of his stalls. The vendor, a hawk-eyed man with a lantern jaw and a crooked nose, shouted to everyone that came close, enticing them to buy the collection of magnifying glasses and eyewear on display. When one of the faceless crowd drew close, Archie moved, swiping several pairs of glasses from the racks and pocketing them with ease...which caused the entire stall to glow as if bathed in sudden sunlight. The ash and smog in the air faded, cut through as if by a spotlight or a break in the distant clouds, and the eyewear on the table gleamed.

It soon faded, just as Archie appeared next to Felix again. "So, what'd you think?"

Rolling the events over in his Mind, Felix pieced together the man's process. "You have to steal from your Skills in order to activate them?"

"Yup! Simple as swiping a bit off the rack, and everything flares up. The more I take, the more it pushes, though there's only so much to grab."

"And the money comes in, feeding it more...what happens if you take everything?"

"More stock shows up so long as the money keeps flowing." Archie shrugged. "It's not that literal, but it makes sense to me. If I want this to work, then I gotta make it work, you know? No one gets handed things, not without strings attached, so I take what I need."

Felix kept close guard of his Spirit. He knew Archie had unlocked his Affinity a while back, and the last thing Felix wanted to show was how worried that bit of mentality made him. "Interesting. That’s how it normally functions, right?"

"Since the early days, yeah."

"Then what's got you feeling out of whack?"

"Oh. It's the scars."

Felix had spotted those from up high, but hadn’t given them much thought. In various places among the market were fissures where it seemed reality itself had split. Here the cobblestones, there the front of a building. Cracks in the world as wide as several feet across and up to dozens of feet long. Most interestingly, each of them was filled with an opalescent stone, as if it had been patched over by a magical road crew. "I see them. They weren't there before?"

"No." Archie rubbed at his chest as he had before, like he had terrible heartburn. "They showed up after I Evolved and Tempered my Skill."

"I assume that's the new Skill?" Felix pointed down the street, where the crowd was far more active and, much like the briefly activated Skill from before, the gloom of the ashen sky was somehow pushed back. Where the other Skills around him were bustling market stalls with one or two vendors hawking their wares, this one had five different people holding up elaborate objects that rippled and glowed with light.

"Mhm. It got a lot bigger and more...elaborate, once it evolved."

"What's it called?"

"Primeval Drift." Archie pushed a window at Felix with its official description. "It's nice, right?"

"More than nice.” Felix had gotten a description from Beef but seeing it in front of him sent sparks through his Mind. “This is what I had hoped for from the start."

"You were right," Archie said, folding his arms.

"What?"

"Nothing. It's just annoying."

"That I'm right?"

"That you keep doing crazy stuff and it keeps working. Now I'm doing crazy stuff and it's working. I pulled hundreds of people through the walls to save them, you know? I did it fast too. I—I never thought I could." Archie's eyes went distant. "Imagine how fast I could've robbed some of those bastards in Birchstone."

Felix laughed. "That's one way to think of it. How much growth have you seen since the battle?"

"I gained three general levels, not counting all the Skill levels I earned. My Mind and Spirit are still lagging behind, but the Drift helped boost me considerably closer. It just—it feels wrong."

"Wrong how?"

"When I drank your Essence Draught it burned through me, worse than the gnarliest moonshine I've ever thrown back. Then…these cracks split through me when the Skill Evolved. I Tempered Primeval Drift to Adept Tier and the cracks got patched somehow, but since then it's all felt off. Like a piece of me is being pulled out of place."

Felix chewed his lip, thinking. I know that opalescent stone. It's the same stuff that makes up my Divine Tree...and my Void Sanctuary. It was sturdy and powerful, and at first he questioned why it was even in Archie's core space. It's only ever shown up when my Skills brush against the Divine. So why—

A faint pulse in the sky caught his attention. It was hard to see through the drifting ash and smoke, but opposite the dull glare of a winter's sun was another light. A pair of them, little more than pinpricks in the gloom, one red-gold and the other blue-white.

A Link's been established, Felix realized. Just like with Vess and the others.

Now that he had the scent, Felix could almost see the influx of his influence into Archie's core space. A weight of significance was leaking from the sky, falling just like the ash, only thoroughly invisible.

He backed up, looking at the opalescent cracks again. "Huh."

"What?"

"I think—" Felix interrupted himself by leaping into the air. His Will and Alacrity carried him aloft, as good as Ouranic Dominion for uninhibited flight. Once he'd spotted it, he flew back down.

"What was that for?"

"You know how to fly in your core space?" Felix asked.

"Uh, no? I can't fly."

"These places aren't like the real world. You can do just about anything if you've got the Will for it." Felix hovered just above the ground. "Try."

Archie furrowed his brow and stared at his feet. After a few agonizing seconds, he jolted upward six entire inches into the air. "Holy shitballs!"

Felix laughed. "Follow me, man."

He rose back into the sky and Archie followed with several jerky, incredibly awkward ascents, until he was roughly at Felix's same level.

The guy's forehead was streaked with sweat and ash, and he swallowed nervously without looking down. "Okay. Why am I up here?"

"Look back at your new Skill."

Archie did, peering through the fall of ash and smoke to do so. Much like flying, it took a second, but the moment he saw it the guy sucked in a sharp breath. "Goddamn. The cracks aren't random."

"Nope."

From a distance, the opalescent scars made a clear pattern. They formed a rough, nine-pointed star shape once viewed from a specific angle, centered across the much improved market space of Primeval Drift.

"What's the point? Why that shape?"

"Well, I think we're a bit closer now than we were before," Felix explained, briefly outlining the concept of Links. Felix had put a lot of thought into them, both in how they functioned and why they allowed his allies to grow stronger faster.

It was his significance. It flowed through them all, along with a measure of Mana and Essence, influencing them and pushing them beyond barriers they might not have surmounted alone, at least not so fast.

That did mean he was leaking power into his friends, which increased his need for consuming new sources of Mana and Essence. A problem for another day, he supposed.

"So you're boosting my power?" Archie asked at the end. They had both returned to the ground during their conversation. The Delven wasn't so used to it that he could hold a conversation in the sky. "I thought being an Unbound already did that?"

"Being an Unbound means we aren't as limited as natives of the Continent, and that can mean we earn more Skills and Titles faster. This is separate, far as I can tell. In fact, that along with you happening to evolve your Skill just as you were Tempering it allowed you to weather the storm of my Pure Essence Draught. The evolution required energy, and the draught had plenty to spare. Otherwise you would've had a lot more than a few cracks in your foundations."

Archie paled and he stroked his spade-like goatee. "Shit."

"That imbalance you feel is likely also because your Aspects are uneven. You need to push your Mind and Spirit to catch up with your Body."

Archie leaned against the rough, soot-streaked wall of a building. "Beef’s ahead of me now. I'll be honest, that's annoying enough as it is. He's fully Adept right?"

"He is."

"Bah. Guess I'll have to kick my ass into gear, then."

"Good. You remember the plan. We're going to be relying on you in the upcoming assault."

"I—yeah. I remember."

Felix caught a piece of ash from the air and rubbed it between his fingers. Was he imagining things, or did he see a bit of blue in its soot? He cleared his throat. "You down for this? It's not too late to back out and stay with the soldiers."

He didn't want to force things on Archie, but they needed him for their plan to work.

Archie scratched his goatee. "I don't give two shits about those Dragoons, but the conscripts didn't ask for this. I spent...a lot of time talking to them. Every single one lost someone during the attacks, and—" He cleared his throat. "I’m down. If I can help, I will."

"Good man."

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