The transition from jungle hills to high badlands was gradual, and took place at a remove from the river Airaduinë. Along the banks, green grass was replaced by lower, woody underbrush, but the color of the land only radically changed a hundred yards or so from the water. There, dark, fertile soil was replaced by dry, dusty earth, almost sand-like in consistency.

There was more space between the brush, and the color of it faded from a bright, vibrant green to shades either more pale, or more dark. More and more, Liv saw bare exposed rock beneath the path of their flight as they continued southwest on the second day of their journey.

They traced the descent of the tributary in reverse, and so the land rose at every step over the way. There were stretches of white-water rushing over and past boulders, cascades where the water tumbled abruptly down from the rocky heights, and eventually stretches of red cliff that reared above one bank, casting the waters below into shadow.

Liv was a bit surprised at just how much of a gain in elevation there was; she’d pictured deserts as a lowland sort of terrain, though now that she thought more about it she couldn’t have said why. Perhaps because the idea of a desert just seemed so foreign and far away from Whitehill and the Aspen Valley, and since she’d been a child that had always meant ‘lowlands’ to her.

By the end of the second day, however, even the river valley had clearly passed from mere foothills into true mountain terrain. Wren found them a place to camp underneath the rocky outcropping of a great cliff, which stretched above and around their campfire almost like a sheltering hand. The dry sand at the foot of the cliff ran a short stretch over to a shallow stretch of the river, which rushed swiftly over a bed of pebbles and stones.

To her surprise, Liv came face to face with a small lizard, perhaps the size of her hand and frozen on the top of a rock, when she looked for a place to sit down. They stared at each other for a moment, the lizard’s tongue flicked out to taste the air, and then it scampered off into the shade of a nearby clump of brush.

“Blood and shadows it’s hot,” Rose complained. Her dark hair was plastered to her forehead, and she’d begun stripping her armor off the moment they’d landed for the evening. Once she struggled out of her thick gambeson, Liv could see that her linen shirt was soaked through and sticking to her back. She immediately walked down to the river and dunked her head into the cold water.

“Watch where you step,” Wren called, once Rose’s head was clear of the river. “I haven’t been this far before, personally, but from what I hear the snakes like to hide in the rocks and the dark places. If you hear a rattle, stop moving. It’s a warning.”

“Wonderful. I hate this place already,” Rose muttered.

“I think it’s beautiful,” Arjun said. The healer had climbed up onto one of the nearby boulders, in the full light of the early evening sunset, and was scanning the horizon with one hand over his brow and a smile on his lips.

Liv turned to follow his gaze, and had to admit that her friend was right. In the near distance, lumps and rises of swirling red, orange and brown stone looked like melted butter. Scattered clumps of greenery dotted the dry landscape, but there were no trees to speak of, only dry, low brush. In the distance, the mountains rose, hazy and dim in the heat.

“I can’t believe my father is marching troops through this,” Liv admitted.

“If he was smart - which, in my experience, he always is,” Keri said, “he’ll have taken warriors from House Bælris exclusively.”

“Why’s that?” Liv turned toward him.

“Savel is the word of sunlight,” Keri said, making a hand motion up to the sky. “It’s easier for us to deal with this sort of environment than the rest of you. A minor spell to deflect most of the light and heat, to protect the skin and the body.”

Rose had turned toward Keri now, and both Wren and Arjun as well. “Are you saying,” Rose interrupted, “that you have a spell to keep yourself from getting sunburned?”

Keri looked between the four of them. “I do, yes.”

“And overheated?” Rose took a step toward him.

“Somewhat. It would feel more like you were standing in the shade here - not cool, precisely, but not as hot as in the sun.”

“And you didn’t think to cast this on the rest of us?” Rose nearly screamed in frustration.

“I-” Keri blinked. “I usually save my mana for fighting. I don’t have the sort of reserves that Liv does,” he admitted.

Rose’s eyes were wider than Liv had ever seen before, and her cheek was twitching. It was funny and oddly cute to see, but Liv decided that she didn’t need to say that out loud - or to watch the girl give Keri a piece of her mind. “Tomorrow,” Liv declared, “I’m going to loan you the bracelet and set of rings I’m wearing on my left arm. It holds eight rings of mana. I suppose that will be enough to shield everyone with this spell?”

“It should be, yes,” Keri said.

“Then let’s get a bit of food together,” Liv suggested. Food was always a good distraction. They all retreated back into the shade of the cliff, where Ghveris had been crouched in the deepest, darkest piece of shadow throughout the entire conversation. Liv took one look at the steel plates that covered the Antrian’s entire form, and decided that she didn’t want to know how hot that metal had gotten over the course of their ride west.

☙

They caught up with Liv’s father and forty Elden warriors - yes, from the look of their bronzed skin and sun-kissed blonde hair, members of House Bælris - just past noon of the third day; Liv had been able to feel the higher mana density of the shoals for a quarter hour before their arrival.

As sticky, hot and terrible as the day had been, night in the high desert had been cool as any in the more familiar mountains around Whitehill, and they’d left early by common consent. Liv, who otherwise would have relished sharing a tent and a bit of privacy with Rose, was too overheated and sweaty at the beginning of the night to even think about physical contact, and rolled as far to one side of the tent as she could get. Halfway through the night, she’d woken up shivering and rolled back the other way, desperate for the warmth of someone else’s body. To make it worse, Liv seemed to be getting headaches more and more often since the expedition into the Tomb of Celris, and they made it difficult to get back to sleep.

She didn’t know how Arjun and Keri had gotten through the night in their own shared tent, but Wren had been leaning against a corner made between the cliff face and Ghveris’ metal armor when Liv had stumbled out just after dawn, wrapped in the fur of some sort of jungle predator. Rather than a bed of coals, there was a modest fire, which the Antrian must have tended throughout the night - which probably meant that the huntress had been the most comfortable one of all.

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Liv decided not to berate the enormous war-machine for sneaking a sleepless night past her, but resolved to make certain he did get some rest once they’d reached their destination. They toasted two loaves of bread over the fire in slices, with cuts from a wheel of cheese to melt on top of each and smoked sausages to go with it. By the time they were in the air again, the heat was already rising - though at least this time, Keri provided the benefit of his spell to all of them.

It did help; Liv was certain of it by the time their three mana-construct gyrfalcons spiralled down out of the sky to land off to one side of her father’s encampment. This far inland, Feic Seria had truly earned its name. Only the lowest stretches of the land, between the great rises of rock, still provided a home to any low shrubs; more common were clumps of strange needled green plants that hugged the dry ground.

But the rocks rose all around, and they were painted in bands of bright orange, yellow, pink and gold - all the shades of the sunset, and white as well. Above the rocks, an endless blue sky stretched, without a single visible cloud to shield them from the sun.

The home of Staivis, Vædic Lord of stone, had been shaped from the very rock. Rather than built up into some sort of palace that rose into the sky, like Celris, he had chosen to instead dig down into the earth. A great facade of graceful columns, as high as the keep of Castle Whitehill, had been shaped into the stone of a great cliff that rose above their heads. There were no windows, but a set of double doors, made of the same orange-brown rock as the rest of the facade, and each carved with images of desert animals, remained tightly closed.

Valtteri ka Auris’ troops, however, had not been idle.

The encampment was orderly, with tents arranged in rows in the shadow of the great rock face, with latrines dug into the dry earth not far away. They must have hidden their riverboats somewhere back near the Airaduinë; it would have been murderous work to carry the dug-outs this far. Posted sentries had spotted Liv and her friends as soon as they began their descent, and armed Elden warriors waited for them to land.

They’d clearly been fighting the local mana beasts for days, because an oversized desert rabbit was roasting over a cookfire, while two warriors were extracting venom from an enormous scorpion. The remains of other enormous animals, already harvested for meat or other useful parts, had been discarded off to one side, even beyond the latrines.

Liv’s father walked across the parched ground, waving one hand above his head as he came to join them. Liv found herself coughing from the cloud of dust kicked up by the landing, and understood immediately why her father had wrapped a cloth around his mouth and nose. A glance showed her that many of his soldiers had done the same. She allowed the three gyrfalcon constructs to dissipate into mere wisps of mana the moment all of her companions had their feet on the ground, and then used her authority to draw that ambient mana in.

She could easily have pulled a great deal more: they were at the very edge of the depths of the rift, and it would have been easy to drink in the turbulent mana, but there was no need at the moment. Before she could give it any further thought, Liv saw her father’s men raising weapons at the sight of the sixth member of her party.

“It’s alright!” Liv called out in Vakansa, raising her hands high with open palms. She moved toward Ghveris as quickly as she could, placing herself between the Antrian juggernaut and the Elden soldiers. “This is a friend. His name is Ghveris, and we met him at the Tomb of Celris. He used to be one of the Great Bats, a very long time ago. He was preserved in the cold.”

Valtteri raised his hand to signal his men and women to stand down. “Put away your weapons and return to your duties,” he commanded. “Anyone who comes with my daughter is an ally of ours.” Once the moment of tension had passed, he stepped forward and opened his arms.

“If you weren’t my father I wouldn’t touch you in this heat,” Liv joked, but she stepped forward even as she said it. After clasping each other briefly, she and Valtteri each stepped back again. It really was too hot for an embrace.

“Your journey into the Tomb of Celris was a success, then?” Valtteri asked.

Liv nodded. “Yes. I’ll tell you all about it - but how are things here? Have you secured the waystone?”

Valtteri shook his head. “Come deeper into the shade. There’s a crevice in the rocks where a sort of stunted tree grows, and it's as cool as we can get during the days.” He led Liv and her friends along what looked like a dry stream bed, which was just as cracked and dusty as any of the surrounding land. Still, there was a tree, with a trunk that looked like the bent arm of a gnarled old woman, and even a bit of green. More importantly, there was just enough room for all of them to sit down in the shade, though Ghveris’ broad, armored back remained jutting out into the sun.

“We recovered the key,” Liv explained. “There were a few tough spots along the way-”

Rose let out a sound somewhere between a cough and a laugh.

“-but we managed to get through it all,” Liv continued. “The Tomb is no longer a greater rift - my apologies for that, and I hope it doesn’t cause too many problems for Kelthelis. But we also brought back my aunt’s body, along with one of her party, for a funeral. And it turns out that she preserved Taavetti ka Eliel kæn Asuris in ice after he was wounded. We got some of the men you left at the dam to come through to Al’Fenthia and help us pull him out, with a little assistance from the troops my grandmother brought. He’s recovering with House Keria.”

The succession of emotions that passed her father’s face seemed, to Liv, to be complicated and messy. Relief, of course - he hadn’t wanted her to go to the Tomb in the first place. Grief, at mention of his sister - but also satisfaction at the idea she would get a proper funeral. Surprise, at word of a survivor, and then anger, quickly suppressed to give way to guilt.

Of course, Liv realized. If there was going to be a survivor, why couldn’t it have been his sister? It was a natural enough reaction, though she might not have been able to interpret it from his silence without all the time she’d spent training with Duchess Julianne. And of course, guilt would follow - for wishing a man dead so that his sister could have lived.

She reached out and took her father’s hand. “He said they were going to announce their marriage, once they’d returned from the Tomb,” Liv told him. “He’s lost a leg, and it’s all pretty fresh for him. Once we get the waystone here under control, we all thought you could go back for the funeral. And you might want to speak with Taavetti a bit.”

“I remember him well,” Valtteri said, turning his hand over to clasp Liv’s in his own fingers. “He had a twin sister that went with them, Vettia, and a younger sibling that stayed behind. The three of them were great friends, and sometimes I wondered -” He coughed, to clear his throat.

“Let us speak of the waystone then, and the rift,” her father said, switching from one topic to the next quickly. “As you can see, we’ve secured a camp in the shoals, but the gates remain closed. There are plenty of mana beasts about, but nothing we can’t handle. My scouts have even found places where erosion, rockfalls, and the wear of the centuries have opened up routes into the ruins, though we haven’t been able to get the doors open. The problem is what’s inside.”

“Silica,” Wren and Ghveris said, at the same time. The huntress and the war-machine seemed to take each other by surprise, and Liv saw them exchange a glance.

“Precisely,” Valtteri said. “I thought I’d seen wyrms before -” he turned to Keri. “But even the monster Calevis brought to the Hall of Ancestors is nothing compared to this. We attempted a single assault, but she’s mastered the word of stone. She can raise or lower walls inside the ruins to cut off any approach. We never got close enough to really make it a fight.”

“I’m surprised she didn’t press the assault,” Wren remarked with a frown. “If she could separate you with walls of stone, it should have been easy for a wyrm like that to pick you apart.”

“Defeat in detail,” Keri commented, supplying the term for such a tactic.

“We thought your friend Rose might be able to counter her,” Valtteri said, turning to the dark-haired young woman who sat at Liv’s side. “From what I understand, you buried the Foundry Rift in an avalanche, after all.”

Rose, however, was already shaking her head. “I can control soil, not stone,” she said. “Which means I can sometimes move stone by extension, when there’s enough earth around it. But if she can shape rock directly, there’s nothing I could do to stop that.” Liv thought she detected a note of longing in her lover’s voice at the thought.

“Take her while she sleeps,” Ghveris rumbled. “All living things must sleep.” Which includes you, Liv thought to herself, but she saved that particular argument for later.

Valtteri nodded. “She does - but fitfully. Which brings me to my other idea.” He turned to address Arjun, of all people. “We think that she is wounded. She thrashes about and roars in pain at all hours of the night. In fact, we think she may be dying.”