If I were able to spill my guts, the void would probably be a good place to start. I’m only level 7—now 8, I guess. He’s 31. If the predator got out again, could he stop it?

It might have its own level, and if it does, I have no idea what that number might be. I’d never considered this before, and given how overpowering it had been during our last encounter, the thought isn’t comforting.

Zyneth sighs, touching his arm, then bringing his hand away to examine a smudge of blood. “All things considered, it looks like we both made it through mostly unscathed.” He nods to my broken leg. “Mostly.”

Yeah. Shit. That’s another thing I might have to spend mana on. Unless I can figure out how to walk with three legs.

Zyneth rolls his shoulder, scanning the surrounding debris field. There’s nightbane bodies everywhere, claw marks torn through the ground, bark stripped from my tree—not to mention my spell book, spilled open beneath me. Zyneth notices this as well.

“Yours?” he asks with a weak chuckle. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by anything with you now.” He pushes off the tree, grunting as he leans down to pick up the book, and carefully shuffles the loose pages back in place before closing it. Hey, he’s a magic user, right? Maybe he can do some of the spells that are in there.

He flips it over to read the cover and blinks. “Gods’ grace. Even I’m not versed enough in planar magic to understand half of what must be in here.”

Welp. There goes that hope.

“But I think I have learned my lesson about underestimating you,” Zyneth continues. He tucks the book under an arm, then heads over to me and offers up a hand. “Need help? I assume you would have moved down by now if you could.”

You would assume correctly. I gesture him closer with my broken stub, and he puts both hands beneath me. Taking a leap of faith, I loosen one of my limbs from the tree—and my other legs promptly lose their grip as I faceplant into his hands. Good thing I hadn’t attempted any more climbing, I guess.

I don’t feel so embarrassed to be carried this time. I’m just tired. Sullen. And frustrated, dammit! Why did I do that? Why did I help him? Why did I use the Lightbeam knowing it would just feed the Void? I should have thought of some other way. I should have… have…

But no matter how much I think about it, I can’t figure out what I could have done differently. Without the spell, that nightbane would have killed me, or the other one would have killed Zyneth, leaving me stranded in the woods without enough time to get help. Either way, it would have doomed Noli, too. But using magic, accessing my inventory, it just feels like I’m delaying the inevitable. Each time I do something to protect myself, I put one more foot in the grave—or the void, as the case may be.

So I did the right thing. I didn’t have any other choice.

That does nothing to make me feel any better.

Zyneth sets me on the ground. I take a wobbling step forward, trying to balance on my tripod legs, and end up tipping back onto my broken stump. Perfect.

I reach for the fragments of glass that used to be my back leg, and am mildly surprised to find them within range. I guess my range got bigger again now that I leveled up. I call them back to me, and a dozen tiny shards float over. Zyneth sits heavily against the tree, setting my spell book aside and making no attempt to hide the fact that he’s watching me. Whatever. It’s not like I need to hide anything.

Echo, can these pieces be repaired with Sculpt? I ask.

[Affirmative.]

How much mana would that take? I tense with trepidation.

[2 mana,] she replies.

Oh. I thought it would be more. But I guess that’s all it took to Sculpt them in the first place, and I’m not adding anything extra.

Alright, I say, weary. In for a penny, in for a pound. I activate Sculpt.

It only takes a minute to stick all the pieces back together and reshape my leg. I don’t know which pieces fit where, so I just squish them all together and then smooth out the end result. I have to roll on my side to stick it back on my broken stump, but once that’s done, I’m as good as new.

And up another 2% Void.

Zyneth finally stirs, but instead of making any comment about my magic, he reaches over to his pack, where he roots around in his bag before pulling out a bandage. Wordlessly, he begins to clean a slash mark on his shoulder.

I guess that’s it then, huh? Kill a bunch of animals, then tend to our wounds. Go us. What a team. I stalk back over to the fire pit, where my cheat sheet largely survived the battle. Black singes pockmark the page, and a partial paw print has crinkled and obscured the lower left-hand corner, but otherwise it’s still usable. I grab it and drag it back over to Zyneth.

I drop it in front of him and circle Harrowood.

Zyneth cinches the tie on his bandage. “You want to go to the city. I believe we’ve already established this.”

I flip the page over to circle a different word. “URGENT.”

Zyneth quirks an eyebrow. “Moreso now than before?”

“YES.”

“Why?”

I don’t have an answer for that. But I’m already over halfway to summoning the predator again. I can’t afford to risk anything else happening before I have a way to save Noli.

When all I can do is shrug, Zyneth sighs. “While I am sure your mission is of the utmost importance, I’m afraid I’m not in any state to continue our journey tonight. I’ve used a lot of magic—and most of my energy—dealing with those fiends. I need to rest, or travel tomorrow will be equally hampered.”

I know that he’s right, and I know he doesn’t owe me anything, but his words are disheartening nevertheless. I just want all of this to be over already.

A faint smile ghosts Zyneth’s face. “Come, don’t look so dejected. We will work on puzzling together your story more in the morning, hm? If anything else happens—though given this graveyard we’ve created, I doubt anything will—feel free to wake me, as you did before. Now, I shall get some rest.”

Zyneth slowly lowers himself to his bedroll with a groan, then reaches a hand to the fire, and the flames die down to embers. He heaves a sigh as he closes his eyes, and in moments, he’s breathing deeply. He must be feeling it more than he looks it. I scan him with a quick Check.

[Name: Zyneth]

[Species: Cambion]

[Class: Rogue Artificer]

[Level: 31]

[HP: 130/150]

[Mana: 45/580]

For the first time since the fight, I feel a pang of emotion. He’s hurt and on the last leg of his magic. No wonder he practically passed out. Was all that to help me? Or would he have been in this situation even if I hadn’t been with him? The nightbanes are attracted to magic, Echo said, and Zyneth certainly has plenty of it. But despite that, a nightbane was still able to pick me out of the noise. What does that say about me—or the predator?

I sag, weary. I guess it doesn’t matter if it was my fault or his—if he fought for the both of us or just himself. I shouldn’t have pushed him to keep going. I need to stop just thinking about myself. Even if he could be used to stop me—stop the predator—he doesn’t owe it to me to try. He’s got his own life to go live. And if I—if the predator took his life, too, I don’t know how I could live with it.

I head over to my spell book, tapping it with a piece of glass. I guess this needs to go back into my inventory. Can’t expect Zyneth to carry it for me. Although…

There’s still several hours left in the night. Several more hours of just waiting for time to pass. I don’t want to do anything but sleep. Barring that, just lying on the ground staring at dirt sounds nice. But now that the book is out of my inventory, and now that I have the time, I feel a certain responsibility to read it. It would be a waste of my Void stat if I didn’t at least try to make some use of it.

I check which book it was I had summoned: This one’s Planar Theories. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, and frankly I’ve never made an effort to because it sounds dry as fuck. But the other book had taught me a couple of hopefully not useless spells, so I guess it’s worth a shot seeing what this one’s got for me as well.

I open to the front page: Planar Theories, it reads, with the subtitle As Relevant to Arcana Sources and the Great Ruins. Oh boy. This should be something.

The preface waffles on for a long while about the author’s personal travels and pursuit of knowledge, managing to be even more self-indulgent than Vessel Construction’s Loquacious Skyheart. Yes, magic is wonderful. Yes, the Ruins inspire such awe and spirituality.

I skip to the table of contents. The chapters seem to be titled after locations, of which I surprisingly recognize a couple. The Black Spire is the first one to stick out; Echo had mentioned it before when talking about the bonefangs and nightbanes. They were created through necrotic magic or something, right? Seemed like the Black Spire was the source of that. More surprisingly, I notice the Petrified Groves is on the list. I’m pretty sure I heard that one from Zyneth. I pause to go check my cheat sheet, and sure enough, he’d written it down along with the other list of city names. Or maybe this list wasn’t all cities after all, but… significant locations. Hadn’t Zyneth said the Groves was where he was headed? Interesting.

Returning to my book, I find the last location I recognize from something I’d read in the other spell book: The Drowned City of Emrox. What was that one again? Something to do with the chalk I needed for the spell circle.

Echo. What do I need from Emrox?

[For the spell Core Bond, which is used to bind a magic source to a vessel, the spell circle must be drawn with chalk infused with null arcanum-enriched salt from the undersea ruins of Emrox.]

Which is the spell we need refreshed if we don’t want to end up back Between. Well, that seems as good a place to start reading as any. I spend a few minutes flipping the couple hundred pages needed to get to the proper section.

Famous within summoning communities, the book says, Emrox may be simultaneously one of the most well-known and least traveled of the Ruins. While its location at the bottom of the Emerald Sea makes accessibility difficult, a handful of adventurers over the years have scouted its depths enough to create preliminary maps of its layout.

A sketch of a city is included beneath this, full of layered and broken disk-like structures, overgrown by sealife.

It is speculated that its strange gravity-defying architecture may have been sustained by the very magic that still leaks into the surrounding waters, infusing the salt therein with null arcanum.

Unlike common elemental arcana, the plane from which Emrox derives its energies remains mysterious. Many a wizard has been born with an affinity for null arcanum—indeed, harnessing its magics is a commonplace occurrence within summoning fields and the growing use of telepads—though attempts to attune the power directly and travel to the Between oft result in the deaths of such intrepid wizards. While it is possible to visit the planar dimension of Harena, for instance, and walk through the eternal flames, returning with an arsenal of fire to wield at the user’s disposal, accounts of wizards who have sought travel Between to harness the void are questionable in nature. When such null wizards do return—if they return at all—they are often missing limbs, or have experienced a rearranging of their biology. As a result, true attunement of the void appears perilous at best; luckily for the reader, the oceans around Emrox provide a solution to this volatile magic, allowing us to harness a fraction of its power in the form of refined null-enriched salt.

Perhaps the uses of these arcana provide some clues of this null dimension which remains frustratingly out of reach. Certainly, it’s spatial in nature. Used to link points in space, such as two telepad locations, it equally strengthens spells used to bind any two objects to one other, and acts as the glue for certain spells where a bond would otherwise be impossible.

As a result of the geometries of the Emrox architecture, there is also speculation that harnessing this “Spatial magic” might hold the key to tinkering with the laws of the universe itself, such as defying gravity, accessing other dimensions, or even the manipulation of time—

Hold on a sec. I scan backward a few sentences. It can act as the glue for spells where a bond would otherwise be impossible. Is that why this null arcanum stuff is needed for the Core Bond spell? Because otherwise binding a soul to something else would be too hard? Maybe. But Trenevalt had done it—twice. On accident. Had he been using null arcanum-enriched chalk for that spell, too?

Crap. Does that mean he could have had the chalk we needed back at his house this whole time? Good god. I hope we didn’t head all this way for nothing.

Well, it’s too late now. It would take too long to get back there on my own, and Zyneth’s heading the opposite way. Not to mention, even if I could convince someone else to take me, I’d have a whole murder scene to explain. I’ll have to hope I can find some in Harrowood—or, even better, hope the wizard I find there already has a supply.

Before reading on, I make a detour to my cheat sheet and pull it over next to my book. I might not be able to write in their language, but I should be able to copy what the letters look like. I stare hard at the words Echo is translating as “Null arcanum-enriched chalk.” It’s a bit of a mouthful. But I have paper, and I have time.

I send some of my signing glass over to the firepit to mix around the ashes. Bringing them back, I swipe an experimental stroke down a corner of the page. A smudge of black is left in its place, but that hair’s width of a line has stripped all the soot off that part of my glass. I send it back to the fireplace while I bring a second piece forward. Painstakingly, I begin to copy the words over, one laborious stroke at a time.