Leal benefit a great deal from the enhancement provided by the chthonics. While not comparable to many other creatures I’ve consumed or given to my team, the trio of major chthonics and their numerous smaller counterparts apply an immense improvement to someone that has relied mostly on natural growth and skill.

A mage will never have the true control over an element that only those with high binding can achieve. I learnt that when I met that fire mage. He might have reached temperatures hotter than myself, but the moment our flames touched, all that heat became mine.

What a mage can improve with enhancement is their internal capacity and the maximum amount they can control. Strangely enough, mages, when taking on the same amount of energy from the inheritance ritual as a physical fighter, never receive even close to the same body enhancement. It’s almost like an instinct guides the energy through the body to where it is most useful. For mages, that is the pool of hyle they can pull from to power their markings.

It also means that should that mage lose those markings, they have no way to use the well of hyle within themselves.

Without needing to share the chthonic corpses, Leal has nearly tripled her capacity in one afternoon. As we fly north, Leal flows hyle through her markings in wonder. I know exactly what she’s feeling, and I’m sure it is overwhelming. Massive jumps like that are intoxicating. She may feel somewhat bloated, but I’m sure it feels great. Well, assuming she feels the same way I do after taking in a lot of energy.

We fly north again. With some food stored away for each of us, there shouldn’t be any more issues simply flying until we find the Agglomerate. I don’t really have any leads to find the city of áed other than to follow the moon, but with how expansive the wasteland is, simply travelling north-west is unlikely to lead us to it.

My plan falls back on the greatest advantage we have: flight. We can scour the desert until we find either the agglomerate or a tribe that can direct us. The latter will be far more likely as we move further north west.

We’ve already flown deep within the endless desert, almost as far as our tribe’s first interaction with the Henosis water mages. At this pace, our trip will take no time at all.

“I think we might have a problem,” Leal says, tapping the water hyle storage disc she carries over her chest. She opens one of the few canteens filled with water, tipping it upside down, only to reveal none of the water that should remain within.

I probably should have noticed earlier, but Leal’s lips are chapped and her mouth is dry. Grímr doesn’t show any of the same signs, but his slight panting and open mouth reveal the thirst he’s feeling. It’s not something I often think about because it isn’t a problem I’ve ever needed to face, but both my friends must be struggling with how dry the air is.

“I don’t know how, but water is draining from each storage. Even in my body, water hyle is drying up and I can’t stop it.”

“What do you mean?” I ask. “Where is it going?”

“That’s just the thing; I don’t know. It’s simply disappearing.”

It’s not so hot that water should vaporise instantly, so I doubt it’s because of the heat. Not to mention that steam couldn’t escape the containers it’s held within. I have no ideas of what this might be, but if their water continues to disappear, it will be impossible for them to join me in my travel.

“Can we land? I want to try something.”

Grímr agrees without a word, bringing us down to the warm sands below.

As Leal steps across the dry earth, she grimaces. Is the drain worse down here? Water hyle glows as it passes through her markings and soon she creates a ball of water in the air before her. I keep my distance, but it is unnecessary; the orb of water rapidly shrinks until nothing remains.

“Well, this is interesting… and concerning.” Leal stares down at the space where her water shrunk into nothing after only a dozen seconds. Snapping from her thoughts, she dives on Grímr’s back and we’re quickly high in the air.

“What is it?” Grímr asks.

“Well, it makes more sense than ever why áed rarely leave the wasteland,” she says, to my confusion. “The land itself refuses the existence of water. I have no idea how it works, and I would love to spend hours investigating, but right now, it looks like the sand somehow counters the hyle of water regardless of barrier in its way.”

“So it’s not just because the air is dry?” I ask.

“No. This is an interaction I’ve never heard of before. But, surely other mages have noticed this effect before me. Am I misunderstanding something?” While Leal ponders those thoughts, Grímr keeps us on our path north. “Wait, we can’t continue, not like this. The draining is only getting worse. Just… give me some time to think of a solution.”

Doing as she asks, we turn around. In the meantime, she opens her suitcase full of tools and materials I’m sure are important for a mage. In a notebook already dense with scribbles, she draws along what little white space she has.

Leal’s head snaps my way mid drawing. “Hey, Solvei, you said that inscription was for tracking hyle signatures, right? Can I see it again?”

In no time, she’s taking notes while inspecting the floating inscription before her face. I use a small amount of her water as the target, which gives me a bright flame pointing right at Leal. I haven’t a clue what she’s trying to do, and each time I peer over her shoulder to see, I find her handwriting indecipherable. Eventually, she finishes.

“This probably has no chance of working, because I’ve made a lot of assumptions with how that inscription works, but essentially, I want to remove what I think is the section that targets an individual’s unique hyle signature, and replaced it with an incredibly basic one that simply targets a specific type of hyle.”

I look at the drawing she’s made, and well, she’s removed half the complex inscription and replaced it with a relatively simple array. It makes the design look incredibly lopsided.

“What’s this supposed to do?” I mean, I can kinda see she’s made it to track more of whatever hyle we put in. So if I put rock as the target, it’ll point down. If we put water in, it’ll point to more water… maybe.

“It’ll let us find more sources of water so we can continue. Well, unless there’s absolutely no water to be found across the wasteland, it should guide us along the areas that don’t drain our water supply too intensely.”

Before I impulsively try to create the inscription just like that, I remember Solon’s warning about creating inscriptions incorrectly. Instead, I move my flame a good dozen metres behind us before it forms into the inscription of Leal’s design.

Thankfully, it doesn’t explode.

Ever so slowly, I bring it back so Leal can deposit some water for the inscription to track. It feels clunky, and the inscription wavers a few times, but it actually works. I can feel a definite pull toward the south, from the ocean. The makeshift inscription is hardly anything incredible, but that Leal could create it with only a limited understanding of what it does is amazing.

The guiding flame doesn’t appear though, which would likely be an issue if not for my very being running through the inscription. I don’t need to see where it’s pointing to know where to look. If I suppress the pull of the ocean, there is an ever so slight lead to the west. The feeling sways and becomes unclear, only pointing out the general direction and never with accuracy.

As great as it is that Leal created this, not everything is perfect. The energy consumption is magnitudes greater than the one I used to track Kalma. It is a greedy, bottomless pit. Especially after I discovered how important it is to preserve energy out in the wasteland, I’ll have to activate this sparingly.

Deep within the wasteland as we are, there shouldn’t be water at all, so what exactly does this lead toward? I haven’t a clue.

As we angle our flight toward the strange tug of water, I have to admit how odd it is for me to so willingly head toward what is naturally deadly to me. If there is some source of water in the middle of the desert, there’s no chance any other áed will be within a hundred kilometres of it. It will slow our search for the Agglomerate, but taking a detour to make sure the others are safe and not dying from dehydration is important.

Leal spends the entire flight buried in her book, scribbling away more lines and markings I can’t make sense of. After a while of drawing on the very edges of her page, stealing what little space she can, she finally decides she can’t fit anymore and pulls out another. A notebook entirely free of scribbles and drawings. Why did she bother writing over other notes if she had an empty book?

I reactivate the inscription with Leal’s water every so often to correct our path, and soon the strength of the signal overcomes that of the ocean. It won’t be long.

Even from as high as we are, there is only sand as far as the eye can see. Neither rock-lands nor landmark. The pure lack of any resource sites for such an immense distance would likely prevent any tribe from travelling out this way, and considering I still can’t see where the water is despite knowing just how close it is, might very well mean no áed has ever found it.

It is water we’re looking for, and yet I find myself excited at the idea of discovering something nobody else has. In all likelihood, it is simply a lake that prevailed in a cavern under the sand… or something of the sort.

“I’m running out of water. How much farther, Solvei? I don’t know if my supply will last longer than an hour at this rate.”

Leal has been keeping both herself and Grímr hydrated for our entire journey through the desert. The wasteland must affect them; each has increased their water intake to a full canteen every thirty minutes. If Leal hadn’t joined us and sated Grímr’s thirst with the water hyle stored within her, it might not have been possible for him to join me. Actually, unless we can find a solution to this now, the constant drain on our water supply will still prevent us moving forward.

“It should be somewhere up ahead.” I look forward, but I can see nothing but the rising and falling of sand dunes.

Far ahead, there appears to be a significant dip in the sand, but there is yet any sign of water. We crest a tall dune, and the sand falls away below us. It takes a moment to realise that same dip I’d seen so far in the distance, is the same as we just flew into. All around us, the sand falls inward at a slope.

But it isn’t the strange downward conical form of the sand that leaves me gaping. No, it’s the city-sized metal tower with unimaginable amounts of water gushing from its top and sides, enshrouding it in immense waterfalls that disperse as they fall into a covering mist.

A drowning city on a cloud, in a pit, in the middle of nowhere.